Criminalizing Asylum
In addition, immigration officials have approached asylum-seekers with skepticism since the 1980s, when large numbers of Cuban and Haitian migrants arrived on Florida’s shores. The refugee resettlement and asylum system have long been charged with geopolitical bias (Cianciarulo 2007), and in the 1990s, immigration officials began to view asylum as an immigration strategy abused by “bogus” claimants (see also Mountz 2010).
Following the 1996 immigration reforms, asylum-seekers faced indefinite detention while their claims were processed. Current immigration policy categorizes asylum-seekers declaring themselves at ports of entry as “arriving aliens” until their claims are deemed credible by immigration officials. In other words, asylum-seekers are classified as undocumented immigrants and thereby subject to mandatory detention.Once detained, “arriving aliens” are not eligible for release on bond, unlike undocumented migrants apprehended inside the United States. The position of asylum-seekers is particularly difficult because they cannot claim asylum until they are physically in US territory and often cannot obtain valid travel documents from the countries they are fleeing. Part of a global trend preventing and/or preempting asylum claims (Hyndman and Mountz 2008), classifying asylum-seekers as aliens suspends international protections afforded them and criminalizes the act of claiming asylum. In this context, categorizing noncitizens has embodied material effects on noncitizens’ pathways into and out of the US detention system (Mountz 2010).
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More on the topic Criminalizing Asylum:
- Criminalizing Asylum
- Contents
- Families as Geopolitical Vulnerabilities
- Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p., 2017
- References