The US non-intersectional asylum policies are outdated

Introduction

In frigid temperatures, at the Federal Plaza in New York City, families with small children, couples, men, and women spend nights on bare asphalt to queue for check-in at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices (Feldman, 2022). ICE is inundated. Newcomers follow instructions and are scared to miss their appointments. They are objectified and referred to by many labels according to media reporters’ beliefs, government shorthand for migrant categories, and public stereotypes and misconceptions about refugee and asylum policies.

Slotting human beings, ignoring intersectionality

This categorization of migration types is often oversimplified, sometimes contradictory, and at times offensive. It evaluates a person’s ‘worthiness’ depending on protection needs, employability, income, gender, and race (FitzGerald and Arar, 2018; Morris, 2002). The multitude of largely abstract and simplified categories of human beings, most of them are social constructs, do not reflect complex life situations and the everyday identities of diverse people, in other words, they spur any intersectionality. Intersectionality includes the structural societal forces that shape individuals’ identities, social positions, and circumstances. For immigration legislation and proceedings, it is easier to strip people’s identities of any complexity. Simplifying people’s intersectional lives helps slot, divide, and contain people on the move (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018). For instance, a domestic violence survivor can be labeled a ‘survivor of crime’ but not a ‘survivor of torture’ (Immigrants Rising, 2022). A survivor of female genital mutilation who also underwent human trafficking, domestic abuse, sexual violence, and societal persecution for protecting her daughter must fit into one category (e.g., U visa, T visa, asylum, or VAWA) when in fact she fits all of them. These labels change depending on the gender, race, ethnicity, country of origin, age, and disability status of a person seeking protection. To be recognized as a ‘refugee’, a person must stick to one line of a narrative and leave out ‘complicating’ details related to childhood traumas, gender violence, disability-based discrimination, and other social determinants of health.

Contradictions between current immigration proceedings and historic definitions

Besides the very restrictive definition of a refugee, many policies that shape asylum seekers’ statuses fall under immigration officers’ and judges’ discretion and attitudes (Ramji-Nogales et al., 2011; Schoenholtz et al., 2014). For instance, in the cases of LGBTQ+ refugee claims, gender, sex, ethnicity, and class interplay so that certain migrants become invisible and ‘incredible’ to the immigration authorities (Lewis, 2014).

The terms used to describe displaced and migrant populations differ in legal, social, and medical fields. The term ‘refugee’ arose from the Western new legal order after two post-WWII treaties: the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol (UN General Assembly, 1967). The Convention and its Protocol also apply to ‘asylum’ in Western countries and put forth very rigid eligibility criteria. Those guidelines stem from the Western political responses to crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during WWII (Hathaway, 1990). The Convention fails to reflect the complexity of forced migration post-WWII due to emerging situations such as gender-based violence, new wars, and climate change (Hathaway, 1990; Krause, 2021). The governments continue to use the Convention’s definition in the modern situations of displacement and to the claims of protections not codified in these laws. For instance, the U.S. refugee Act of 1980 uses the same definition the UN proposed in 1951 (US Congress, 1980).

Implications for social work: A window of opportunity to integrate asylum policy advocacy

Historically, social workers in the United States have barely engaged with asylum seekers because of the absence of federal funding for services for this population. Asylum seekers receive some services under other blanket programs, and some local organizations offer legal support, while the majority cannot access any services.

In contrast, in the European Union countries, unlike in the United States, social workers regularly interact with asylum applicants in the context of providing public services, such as guaranteed housing, food, medical care, and education, albeit subject to the draconian Dublin III procedures and other regulations (Boccagni and Righard, 2020). The current humanitarian crisis in the United States gives social workers an opportunity to learn more about the issues and, most importantly, start advocating for more intersectional approaches, using their trauma-informed and ecological perspectives. For instance, social workers in Europe began working outside the system to take matters into their own hands and advocate for improved asylum systems (Social Workers Without Borders, 2023).

Knowledge about immigration and asylum law, economic, and welfare policies at federal and local levels, and macro interventions such as community organizing and empowerment, advocacy, participatory methods are already part of the social work curricula across the United States. Social workers have to switch from clinical orientation to more integrated social work and return to social work’s social justice roots. At the same time, social workers are often complicit in their maintaining the existing systems and laws, violating their ethical obligations (O’Leary and Tsui, 2023).

Requesting protection through asylum is a very complicated and drawn-out procedure. In the United States, asylum seekers have to wait their turn up to 10 years to get an asylum interview or a court hearing (Human Rights First, 2021). In the meantime, they have been separated from their families, left behind abroad, and experience poverty due to the total absence of any social support (Łukasiewicz et al., 2023; Oren, 2023; Smith, 2021). This unstable, purposefully snarled up and protracted situation undermines asylum seekers’ health and overall well-being (Grace et al., 2018; Haas, 2021). The local safety net of social services, including healthcare, are not accessible to those who are in asylum limbo in the United States. The availability of services and their quality are highly uneven, even in the more hospitable to migrants’ places like New York City (Łukasiewicz et al., 2023).

Thus, current non-intersectional refugee and asylum laws and the welfare system known for its unevenness, decentralization, and meagerness fail people in need and violate the human rights of those displaced by conflicts and economic, civic, and historical injustices. It is time to update refugee and asylum laws. Including all people in need of protection in the legal definition of a refugee is one step in the right direction. This inclusion would cover large-scale conflicts, wars, natural and man-made disasters, and other cataclysms. The second step would be to provide displaced persons in provisional status and waiting, such as asylum seekers, with dedicated services that cover their basic human rights. Social workers have a unique position where they address micro, meso, and macro environments of the people they help. Merging these approaches in an integrative social work practice with a strong intersectionality foreground help social workers empower themselves and their clients.