U.S.-REFUGEES: Have Fake Documents, Can’t Enter U.S.

By Haider Rizvi Reprint | | Print |

Haider Rizvi

WASHINGTON, Nov 19 1996 (IPS) - The rules governing political asylum in the United States have toughened since Grandville Desousa, a photographer, arrived in the country with a fake visa in 1993.

He told U.S. immigration authorities he had been arrested and then tortured for more than a year in the West African nation of Togo for photographing a 1992 attack by soldiers on a Togolese opposition leader. He escaped from jail and fled to Benin in August 1993.

Afraid he would be still within the reach of Togo’s authorities, he went to Germany to seek asylum but was turned back at the border. Polish authorities also rejected his application for asylum.

Desousa later obtained a fake U.S. visa and arrived in the United States in December 1993. He was detained for about 18 months and interrogated frequently about his false travel documents before a U.S. judge granted him political asylum.

U.S. human rights activists say the story would have had a different ending today in light of last month’s passage of a new law on immigration that now make it difficult for refugees to seek asylum in the United States.

According to the 1996 Immigration Act which President Bill Clinton signed into law Sep. 30, no refugee will be granted asylum if the applicant arrives in the United States without valid travel documents.

“It’s a bad piece of legislation,” says Patricia Rengel, a Washington-based researcher for Amnesty International. “We’ll continue our efforts to protect refugees’ rights to seek asylum.”

The Act empowers Immigration officials to immediately deport refugees who arrive in the United States without valid documents and fail to demonstrate “credible fear” of persecution. Refugees may, however, be allowed to file an appeal before an immigration judge who has to review cases within a week while the applicants remain under detention.

Activists argue that the majority of the people who flee their home countries because of war or political persecution cannot obtain valid passports, visas, and documents that offer evidence of torture or victimisation.

“This (Act) shows nothing but lack of understanding and appreciation of refugee reality,” says Bill Frelick of the Washington-based U.S. Committee for Refugees. “They don’t understand that refugees don’t have the luxury of getting documents. It’s perverse.”

Others suggest the new law may even amount to a violation of the United Nations Convention on Refugees, which says that “no country can punish a refugee for not having documents.”

The Immigration Act, a brainchild of Republican Senator Alan Simpson, also includes a number of other provisions that activists describe as an attack on human rights and refugee rights. One of these provisions requires asylum seekers who enter the United States with valid travel documents to file their asylum applications within a year.

While authors of the law say the “one-year deadline” will help reduce the backlog of cases and discourage fraudulent applications, rights advocates fear the provision would discourage a large number of people with genuine claims.

“Many deserving applicants who come to this country do not speak English,” says Elisa Massimino of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York. “They don’t know much about our legal system,” she adds. “It’s especially hard for torture victims to recover from trauma.”

Activists say the deadline condition would particularly affect women refugees who, in cases of rape, tend to be reluctant to discuss the reasons for fleeing their countries.

“It frequently requires many months of counseling and support before many torture victims feel able to discuss their conditions with outsiders,” says John Salzberg of the Centre for Victims of Torture, a rehabilitation centre for refugees tortured in their home countries.

“It’s a great tragedy,”he says, “and a serious violation of our government’s commitments under international law, for torture victims to be sent back to suffer additional persecution by those who traumatised them in the past.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Carole Floreman told IPS that the Clinton Administration was not “absolutely satisfied” with these provisions of the Immigration Act.

“It was a kind of compromise,” she said. “We hope to change these laws when the next Congress comes in.”

The 1996 Immigration Act also limits to 1,000 the number of refugees who can be granted asylum as a result of “coercive population control” programmes in their home countries. Activists say most of the victims of forced abortion or involuntary sterlisation happen to be women and that the new legislation will adversely affect their right to seek asylum.

“Imagine, if a victim of this kind of torture comes to this country and requests asylum, and you say, well you have a genuine case, but, sorry, we can’t grant you asylum because you are No. 1001,” says Frelick. “This is absurd.”