Central African Refugee Story-Shaping

By Anonymous Attorney on October 3, 2011 at 5:39pm

Walter Olson at Overlawyered picks up on a recent New Yorker piece about about asylum-seekers—mostly Africans—simply lying to get in.Olson writes

 

"A New Yorker writer sympathetically if uneasily profiles one of the many who choose to pursue legal immigrant status (with lawyers’ help) by petitioning for asylum on the basis of made-up atrocity stories. “‘I have never been raped,’ she admitted, giggling with embarrassment… ‘Telling that story makes me sad, because I know it’s true for someone.’” But not necessarily true for most of those in her position: “There’s one [a story] for each country,” explains a lawyer. “There’s the Colombian rape story — they all say they were raped by the FARC. There’s the Rwandan rape story, the Tibetan refugee story. The details for each are the same.” [Suketu Mehta, "The Asylum Seeker: For a chance at a better life, it helps to make your bad story worse," New Yorker]"

 

Really, how hard could it be? And once the strategy gets around, it's pretty hard to stop. Everyone's been raped—or so they say...

One might suggest tightening up the standards by, say, requiring some kind of police report. But from an African country? Sorry, ain't gonna happen.

You're then back to a xenophobic and sexist position of doubting the whole thing outright, and we all know that won't fly.

I suggest nixing asylum altogether, but you'd be defenseless in the face of breathless media accounts of tragic would-be asylum seekers.

Note the one successful asylum seeker's use of a friend's Social Security number. Has anyone checked into how worthless the possession of a Social Security number is for assurances of anyone's legality?