Disparities in Asylum Decisions

I just finished reading a fascinating book called Asylum Denied: A Refugee's Struggle for Safety in America. It's written by David Ngaruri Kenney and Philip G. Schrag, and published by UC Press. Here's the blurb from the publisher:

Asylum Denied is the gripping story of political refugee David Ngaruri Kenney's harrowing odyssey through the world of immigration processing in the United States. Kenney, while living in his native Kenya, led a boycott to protest his government's treatment of his fellow farmers. He was subsequently arrested and taken into the forest to be executed. This book, told by Kenney and his lawyer Philip G. Schrag from Kenney's own perspective, tells of his near-murder, imprisonment, and torture in Kenya; his remarkable escape to the United States; and the obstacle course of ordeals and proceedings he faced as U.S. government agencies sought to deport him to Kenya. A story of courage, love, perseverance, and legal strategy, Asylum Denied brings to life the human costs associated with our immigration laws and suggests reforms that are desperately needed to help other victims of human rights violations.

You can read the first chapter online, read a transcript of an interview with the authors, and/or watch a YouTube video/listen to a podcast of a panel discussion about the book.

One outcome of Philip Schrag's work on David Ngaruri Kenney's case was a study of inconsistencies in asylum decisions issued at all four levels of the asylum adjudication process: asylum officers, immigration judges, Board of Immigration Appeals, and U.S. Courts of Appeal. The article, "Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication," is available through SSRN.com.

As "Seeking Asylum..." reports, two of the study's authors - Philip Schrag and Andrew Schoenholtz - are now in the process of compiling a book on how asylum cases are dealt with in the U.S.

Other studies of the asylum process and decisions have been produced since then, including:
- "Refugee Roulette in an Administrative Law Context: The Deja Vu of Decisional Disparities in Agency Adjudication," Stanford Law Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (2007) [text]
- "A Well-Founded Fear of Having My Sexual Orientation Asylum Claim Heard in the Wrong Court," New York Law School Law Review, vol. 52 (2007/2008) [text]
- "A Review of the 2006 Measures of Improvement to the Immigration Courts and Board of Immigration Appeals," Refugee Law Paper (posted Feb. 2009) [text]
- "The Path to Asylum in the US and the Determinants for Who Gets In and Why," International Migration Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (March 2009) [abstract]

A recent study looked at Canadian asylum adjudication rates; see "Troubling Patterns in Canadian Refugee Adjudication," Ottawa Law Review, vol. 39 (2008), as well as the author's data sets for 2006-2008.

Studies in other countries that examine fairness in the asylum process include:
- Irish Asylum Decisions made at First Instance lack Consistency and Sustainability in Law (Irish Refugee Council, 2000) [text]
- Watching the Watchmen: Reviewing the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal in the UK (Law and Society Association, 2008) [access]
- Reasons for Refusal: an audit of 200 refusals of Ethiopian asylum-seekers in England, conference paper (2009) [access; scroll down to title]

Tagged Publications.