The New York Times ran a front page story yesterday based on the findings of a recent study that found an extremely high level of bias in the way that asylum cases are decided. The paper, titled Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication, will be in the Stanford Law Review's next issue and can be read on-line here.
The study found that disparities in the way ayslum cases are adjudicated were based on the location of the court, the professional background of the judges, and even a clear gender disparity - with female judges being far more likely than male judges to approve asylum. All of which suggests the lack of a clear legal standard -paving the way for individual prejudices and local politics to play a larger role than they othewise would. The authors also explored variations by the country of origin. While there is not a great deal of emphasis on Haiti in the study - the survey of asylum claims (140,00+ cases were reviewed) found that asylum seekers from Haiti have the lowest average approval rate - at just 16%. The study did find that there was a signifant disparity between dispensation of asylum claims for Haitians in New York (which was had the highest approval rate for Haitians at 27%) and Miami (which had the lowest at 15%). Even in New York, however, the disparity for Haitians was high. The New York immigration grant was overall 30% higher than the national average in cases involving asymulm seekers from "Asylum Producing Countries" - a category constructed by the authors for countries with a high number of ayslum cases. Compared to the New York court's overall approval rating of 52% - the 27% for asylum seekers for Haiti seems quite low.
This is not a bias explored in this particular study - but among factors that would contribute to the lower figures for Haiti is the highly discriminatory practice of incarcerating Haitian refugees - effectively denying them routine access to representation. The presence of an immigration lawyer greatly increases the liklihood of approval!
Posted by Tom Ricker in tomr's blog