Immigration Judges and US Asylum Policy

Abstract

In 2011, Ramji-Nogales, Schoenholtz, and Schrag published Refugee Roulette,1 a book that changed the academic conversation about refugee status determination (RSD) in the United States (US). Building on a previous law review article with the same name, the book amassed an extraordinary amount of data on asylum adjudications at every level of the American RSD regime, and demonstrated empirically what everyone familiar with the system had already sensed: that the particular decision maker to whom an asylum seeker is assigned is the single biggest determinant of whether they will be granted refugee status. Even when the applicant’s country of origin was held constant, the study revealed that some decision makers rejected almost every claim, while colleagues in the same office accepted the vast majority of claims they heard. After Refugee Roulette, a new wave of scholarly inquiry emerged, which focused on using quantitative analytical methods to provide further insights into the complex world of American asylum adjudication. Immigration Judges and US Asylum Policy represents the latest of these studies, the largest, and the most methodologically rigorous to date. The authors analyse all protection applications decided by immigration judges (IJs) on the merits between 1990 and 2010, a whopping 589,629 cases. IJs are not the only, or the first, adjudicators of asylum applications in the US, but the authors make the case that they are the ‘lynchpin’ of US asylum policy, because they form the middle layer of a larger system, one that decides the most cases, and many of the hardest legal cases (p 1).

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