Suchergebnisse

Whether political activism, religious affiliations, age, and gender affects judges' attitude toward religious freedom; with discussion of other factors affecting judicial decisions. Based on analysis of seventy-six First Amendment Supreme Court cases.

One of the objectives of the Refugee Act of 1980 was to eliminate a bias that existed in U.S. refugee admissions in favorof aliens from hostile countries of origin (countries with communist, socialist, and leftist forms of government). This analysis finds that the hostile country bias in refugee admissions was perpetuated (and even, in the case of the State Department, intensified) through policy implementation by agencies within the immigration bureaucracy since passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. Specifically, the INS and the State Department, in their post-1980 decision making on asylum and refugee applications, continue to favor aliens from hostile countries.

This analysis examines the extent to which the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), from 1980 to 1987, complied with a new policy of Congress, set forth in the Refugee Act of 1980, which called for an elimination of bias in favor of aliens from hostile countries. Statistical analysis reveals that the BIA did not enforce the Refugee Act of 1980. I argue that Congress never intended to eliminate this bias since doing so would bring it into conflict with actors within the executive branch (including the President and the State Department) that have traditionally dominated policy‐making relating to refugees and asylees. Instead, in the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress allowed these actors to retain control through a broad definition of "refugee" and by failing to clearly specify standards for political asylum and withholding of deportation. Simultaneously, Congress temporarily placated private and public "refugee rights" interest groups with statutory provisions that (presumably) eliminated the hostile country bias in U.S. refugee and asylum admis‐ sions, and granted increased federal aid to private organizations and units of state and local governments.