Replication data for: Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication [Immigration Court Data Crosstabulations and Regression Results]

Addressing consistency in the application of the law, former Attorney General Robert Jackson told Congress in 1940: "It is obviously repugnant to one's sense of justice that the judgment meted out . . . should depend in large part on a purely fortuitous circumstance; namely the personality of the particular judge before whom the case happens to come for disposition." Yet in asylum cases, which can spell the difference between life and death, the outcome apparently depends in large measure on which government official decides the claim. In many cases, the most important moment in an asylum case is the instant in which a clerk randomly assigns an application to a particular asylum officer or immigration judge. This study analyzes databases of decisions from all four levels of the asylum adjudication process: 133,000 decisions involving nationals from eleven key countries rendered by 884 asylum officers over a seven-year period; 140,000 decisions of 225 immigration judges over a four-and-a-half-year period; 126,000 decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals over a six-year period; and 4215 decisions of the U.S. courts of appeals during 2004 and 2005. The analysis reveals amazing disparities in grant rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country. For example, in one regional asylum office, 60% of the officers decided in favor of Chinese applicants at rates that deviated by more than 50% from that region's mean grant rate for Chinese applicants, with some officers granting asylum to no Chinese nationals, while other officers granted asylum in as many as 68% of their cases. Similarly, Colomb ian asylum applicants whose cases were adjudicated in the federal immigration court in Miami had a 5% chance of prevailing with one of that court's judges and an 88% chance of prevailing before another judge in the same building. Half of the Miami judges deviated by more than 50% from the court's mean grant rate for Colombian cases. Using cross-tabulations based on public biographies, the paper also explores correlations between sociological characteristics of individual immigration judges and their grant rates. The cross-tabulations show that the chance of winning asylum was strongly affected not only by the random assignment of a case to a particular immigration judge, but also in very large measure by the quality of an applicant's legal representation, by the gender of the immigration judge, and by the immigrati on judge's work experience prior to appointment. In their conclusion, the authors do not recommend enforced quota systems for asylum adjudicators, but they do make recommendations for more comprehensive training, more effective and independent appellate review, and other reforms that would further professionalize the adjudication system.

针对法律适用的一致性问题，前美国司法部长罗伯特·杰克逊（Robert Jackson）于1940年对国会表示：“判决结果在很大程度上取决于纯粹的偶然因素——即案件恰好由某位特定法官审理，这显然违背了人们的正义感。”然而在关乎生死的庇护案件中，裁决结果显然在很大程度上取决于审理该案的政府官员身份。在诸多案件中，庇护申请流程中最关键的节点，往往是办事员随机将申请分配给某位庇护官员或移民法官的那一刻。本研究分析了庇护裁决全四级流程的决策数据库：涵盖7年间884名庇护官员针对11个主要国家国民作出的13.3万份裁决；4.5年间225名移民法官作出的14万份裁决；6年间移民上诉委员会（Board of Immigration Appeals）作出的12.6万份裁决；以及2004至2005年间美国上诉法院作出的4215份裁决。分析结果显示，即便同一办公室内的不同裁决者均审理了大量来自同一国家的国民的申请，庇护获批率仍存在惊人的差异。例如，在某地区庇护办公室中，60%的官员针对中国申请人的裁决获批率与该地区中国申请人的平均获批率偏差超过50%：部分官员从未批准过中国申请人的庇护申请，而另一些官员的获批比例高达68%。同样，在迈阿密联邦移民法院审理的哥伦比亚庇护申请人中，若案件由该法院的某位法官审理，胜诉率仅为5%；而若由同一大楼内的另一位法官审理，胜诉率则高达88%。迈阿密法院有一半的法官，针对哥伦比亚案件的获批率与法院平均获批率的偏差超过50%。本研究还基于公开履历构建交叉表分析，探讨了移民法官个体的社会学特征与其获批率之间的相关性。交叉表分析结果显示，庇护申请的胜诉概率不仅受到案件随机分配给特定移民法官这一因素的强烈影响，还在很大程度上取决于申请人的法律代理质量、移民法官的性别，以及该法官上任前的工作经历。在结论部分，研究者并未建议对庇护裁决者实施强制配额制度，但他们提出了多项改革建议：包括开展更全面的培训、建立更高效且独立的上诉审查机制，以及其他能够进一步推动裁决体系专业化的改革措施。