Norms and Interests in US Asylum Enforcement

Abstract

What happens when the normative goal of granting asylum to applicants in need conflicts with US strategic interests? Asylum represents a critical case for the norms-versus-interests debate, because the protection of vulnerable individuals is a quintessential humanitarian project, but may entail strategic costs. In this article, a general theoretical framework for weighing the importance of norms and interests is developed and tested in the case of US asylum enforcement with respect to 42 countries of origin during and after the Cold War. Both norms and interests influence asylum decisions, and when they prescribe similar actions in regard to asylum cases, state agents face no difficulty in making choices. When human rights norms and state interests prescribe contradictory actions, however, analysts know little about the relative importance of each factor. The findings in this article suggest that the ways in which norms and interests affect asylum enforcement have changed over time. Normative admissions were primarily a function of procedural democracy during the 1980s, and substantive human rights have been increasingly influential since then. Second, enforcement reflected security and diplomatic considerations during the 1980s, but these concerns gave way during the 1990s to goals of maintaining good relations with trade partners and preventing undocumented migration. Finally, there is no evidence that the importance of norms relative to interests has increased over time, contrary to the predictions of some constructivists.

Does the Fear of Terrorists Trump the Fear of Persecution in Asylum Outcomes in the Post–September 11 Era?

“…in the model factors that have been demonstrated to influence the judges' decisions or the overall grant rates for particular countries of origin (Rosenblum and Salehyan 2004;Rottman, Fariss, and Poe 2009;Keith and Holmes 2009). Consistent with our previous work, we see that the largest factor influencing an outcome is whether the applicant is represented by legal counsel; if the applicant has legal representation, the probability of a grant increases by 33%.…”

International Relations, Domestic Politics, and Asylum Admissions in the United States

“…9 Other independent variables were also lagged one period on the assumption that there is a delay between changes in the policy environment and actual enforcement outcomes. 10 Our model includes three sets of variables, including those found to be important in earlier empirical work (Rosenblum and Salehyan 2004). First, to operationalize human rights conditions in sending states, we include Mark Gibney's (2005) Political Terror Scales (PTS) index as well as the Polity score from the Polity IV data set (Marshall and Jaggers 2005).…”

“…Rosenblum and Salehyan (2004) found that human rights conditions in countries of origin have an important impact on asylum approval rates. Yet even when controlling for human rights, nonnormative factors such as military, economic, and diplomatic relations with sending countries influence approval rates.…”

Understanding European asylum cooperation under the Schengen/Dublin system: a public goods framework

“…However, there can be little doubt that the receiving states do benefit from a collective approach to forced migration as it reduces the instability and risks associated with large-scale movements of forced migrants to whom EU Member States, as signatories of the Geneva Convention, have international legal obligations (Suhrke 1998). Moreover, the use of refugee protection as a foreign policy tool (Rosenblum and Salehyan 2004) and the reputation and prestige gains that states can sometimes reap from their commitments in this field are indeed private benefits that can also help explain variations in state contributions at times. These motivations can be linked to the role of norm based-and ideologically driven action that will be discussed below.…”