Why do decision-makers in similar liberal democracies interpret the same legal definition in very different ways? International law provides states with a common definition of a "refugee" as well as guidelines outlining how asylum claims should be decided. Yet, the processes by which countries
determine who should be granted refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with many political, cultural, geographical, and institutional commonalities. This book compares the refugee status determination (RSD) regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations - the United
States, Canada, and Australia. Despite similarly high levels of political resistance to accepting asylum seekers across these three states, once asylum seekers cross their borders, they access three very different systems. These differences are significant both in terms of asylum seekers' experience
of the process and in terms of their likelihood of being found to be a refugee.
The book moves beyond the claim by some scholars that asylum seeker destinations are uniformly becoming more exclusionary, and the contrary assertions of other scholars that the same destinations are
converging on a new inclusive internationalism leading to the decline of state sovereignty. Instead, Hamlin finds these states to be running on three distinct trajectories, none of which are totally restrictive or expansive. Based on a multi-method analysis of all three countries, including a year
of fieldwork with in-depth interviews of policy-makers and asylum-seeker advocates, observations of refugee status determination hearings, and a large-scale case analysis, Hamlin finds that cross-national differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy
than with the level of insulation the administrative decision-making agency enjoys from either political interference or judicial review. Administrative justice is conceptualized and organized differently in every state, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and non-refugee.
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Part One
1. Let Me Be a Refugee
2. Building a Cross-National Comparison of RSD Regimes
3. 'Illegal Refugees' and the Rise of Restrictive Asylum Politics
Part Two
4. Courting Asylum: The Judicialization of Refugee
Status Determination in the United States
5. The 'Cadillac' Bureaucracy: Refugee Status Determination in Canada
6. The Battle of the 'Bouncing Ball': Refugee Status Determination in Australia
Part Three
7. Asylum for Women: Reading Gender into the Refugee Definition
8.
Escaping the People's Republic: Chinese Asylum Claims in Three RSD Regimes
9. Complementary Protection in a Complicated World
Part Four
10. Asylum Seeker Blues and the Globalization of Law
Appendix: List of Interviews
Bibliography
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Rebecca Hamlin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Grinnell College, USA.
Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
Refugees in International Relations - Edited by Alexander Betts and Dr. Gil Loescher
The Making of the Modern Refugee - Peter Gatrell
