Prerequisite for Asylum from Religious Persecution: Know Your Religion

The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting post about how asylum claims based on religious persecution are handled in the United States, particularly Christian converts in China, where the government is less than friendly to most organized religion.

As a result, some Chinese Christians seek asylum in the United States and other nations with more religious freedom than their homeland. While there are almost certainly a large number of people who have valid claims for asylum, this fact has been used by some people to give an air of plausibility to fraudulent asylum claims. My sympathies are with anyone who would want to come to the U.S. (or any other country) seeking greater freedom and economic opportunity, and my personal belief is that it should generally be easier to come to this country legally than it currently is.

However, the importance of maintaining integrity of our asylum system cannot be overstated – the U.S. admits a fixed number of asylum-seekers each year, so it is essential to ensure that as many asylum claims as possible are genuine.

As a result, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trial attorneys often ask people seeking asylum for religious reasons a few basic questions about the religion they claim to practice. In the case of Christians, they will be questions such as “Who is Jesus Christ?”, “What is your favorite story in the Bible?”, “What is your favorite Prayer?” and so on. One would assume that people who made a conscious choice to convert to a particular religion would learn a little bit about that religion’s teachings and theology.

Apparently, a surprising number of individuals cannot answer these questions, or their answers are extremely superficial, and they cannot go into any detail when pressed, indicating that they were coached. Indeed, there are some extremely sketchy “immigration consultation” businesses in the U.S. and elsewhere that will coach people on matters such as this. Because they don’t really care for their “clients” (“victims” might be more accurate) once they’ve taken their money, these businesses often instruct them to give the exact same canned responses every time, which are easy to spot by a trial attorney or Immigration Judge who has heard them before.

This raises an important problem, however: many people who are persecuted because of their religion do not know much about their religion, through no fault of their own. For example, Nazi Germany probably didn’t care how devout or observant the Jews they persecuted were.

Furthermore, many people are persecuted around the world because of their membership by birth in particular religious communities. Children, for example, can be persecuted for belonging to the “wrong” religious sect, even if they have no understanding of their religion beyond the fact that it’s what their parents believe.

Furthermore, people may be persecuted based on their perceived religion. Whether they belong to that religion or not doesn’t change the fact that they’re being persecuted based on religion. If someone is being persecuted because someone else thinks they belong to a religion which they don’t, it’s not reasonable to expect them to know much about that religion.

According to LegalMatch statistics, over half of the clients who sought asylum lawyers in the past year claimed fear of persecution based on their religion or political views. Persecution based on either of these does allow one to seek asylum, and rightly so. On the other hand, it is very easy for someone to claim that they hold certain religious or political beliefs, and very difficult to prove or disprove the sincerity of those beliefs, at least until we get that whole mind-reading thing down.

What, then, is to be done about this? Personally, I think we should err on the side of giving asylum-seekers the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, the U.S. accepts a limited number of asylum-seekers each year, and every effort should be made to ensure that the available slots go to people who are truly being persecuted, or truly fear persecution.

In the end, asking someone (especially a purported recent convert) to give a very basic explanation of their religious beliefs is probably helpful in determining if those beliefs are sincere. However, for the reasons discussed above, relying entirely on one’s knowledge of their own religion to determine if they’re actually being persecuted is a very bad idea, an could result in legitimate claims being denied, and fraudulent claims, made by people who took the time to study the tenets of a particular religion in more detail, being granted.