For women from Central America and Mexico who suffer violence at the hands of a domestic partner or gang member, internal relocation to escape gang or domestic violence usually isn’t an option because of law enforcement corruption and ineffectiveness, as well as the widespread belief—often borne out of experience—that internal relocation won’t provide safety.
An application for asylum in the United States offers hope for survival and a future. Yet while a cliché dubbing the United States a “nation of immigrants” persists, most asylum seekers face a path fraught with legal obstacles.
Over the course of this century, research has probed how laws force migrants into spaces of limited rights and numerous social harms. As a result, there exists an extensive corpus of scholarship delineating how shifting statuses constrict life for those who do not have fully legal status.
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Undocumented immigrants […] exist outside the law while at the same time occupying a hyper-legalized space—one in which laws constrict and limit their life options as they enjoy minimal legal protections but abundant restrictions. Efforts to conform and abide by the law, including completing tax forms or obtaining a child’s birth certificate, expose people with tenuous legal status to risk and immigration enforcement, causing suffering and limiting opportunity.
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Winning asylum is a fraught process, and women who seek asylum occupy a space of legal ambiguity and public opposition—a space we call compounded marginalization—as they await asylum hearings. For years, their lives are defined by uncertainty.
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Women are subject to the choices of individual immigration judges, changing interpretations of the law, and decisions made by politicians more focused on appealing to their constituencies and winning elections rather than humane and effective policymaking. Critically […] asylum globally exists not to protect large numbers of people from the Global South who need protection in Western nations. Instead, the asylum system seeks to sort a limited population that must run a legal gauntlet—if they can cross the border or survive a perilous marine crossing—to prove they are worthy of protection.