Abstract
Using as a backdrop selective news reports that hint at or highlight the horrors of the U.S. asylum system process—including devastating separation policies, children in cages, violence, deportation, and the like—Sarah Bishop’s A Story to Save Your Life: Communication and Culture in Migrants’ Search for Asylum reveals these horrors to be systematic and normalized with little ground for hope. This book places asylum-seekers’ experiences at the center, demonstrating their humanity, desperation, and resilience, while government agents respond with skepticism, violence, inhumanity, and denial. In rendering these uncomfortable truths, Bishop finds that “the idea of the U.S. immigration system as ‘broken’ . . . obscures the reality that the system is in fact working as designed” (p. 159). At minimum, this book is an essential read; and Bishop further confronts readers with a call to ally with asylum seekers and stand against the human-rights violations within the system.
A Story to Save Your Life delves into the hidden U.S. asylum system from the standpoints of hard-to-reach populations of asylum-seekers, immigrant lawyers, immigrant judges, border protection agents, and advocates. Bishop conducted qualitative research in the form of 58 oral histories, participant activism as an expert witness in immigration hearings, critical narrative analyses, and personal experience as a volunteer at an asylum clinic, member of the board of directors for an immigrant organization, volunteer coordinator for immigrant family support, and pen pal with asylum-seekers in immigrant detention centers. Weaving together these sources of data led Bishop to argue that “culturally bound storytelling norms negatively and unevenly affect case outcomes” (p. 11). Throughout this research, Bishop reveals that there is little chance for asylum-seekers to receive asylee status. In asylum-seekers’ accounts, the system is designed to undermine them at every stage, and especially in the application and interview process. From the standpoint of asylum-seekers, they are told that telling their story truthfully and having a valid claim of victimization ensures them a good chance at reaching asylee status. However, Bishop demonstrates that having a legitimate claim to asylum does not matter because, within the current political landscape, government agents are gatekeepers of the border and subscribe to practices of denial and subsequent deportation.
Each chapter directly reveals the stories of asylum-seekers, border agents, attorneys, trainers, judges, and psychologists. Chapter One features the story of Valeria, who escaped Cuba with her husband and ill child to enter the United States to claim asylum. Despite having confidence in a strong case and believing in the possibility of reaching asylee status, insurmountable obstacles surfaced, which included a designation of a defensive application, temporary detainment, and removal to Mexico during the legal process.
Chapters Two, Three, and Four examine the barriers asylum-seekers encounter as they are expected to share private details of victimization, manage the emotional labor and the double bind in navigating cultural assumptions of how much emotion to show or control, and overcome cultural differences in how to display nonverbal demeanor. Chapter Five explores national and international campaigns designed to deter asylum-seekers and the hardships and insecurities then faced by asylum-seekers. Chapter Six exposes the deportation process and the return to one’s country of origin despite having fled due to persecution, enticed by the prospect that with a valid claim non-refoulement would be protected. Bishop concludes the book with a chapter calling on readers to engage in allyship with immigrants and a chapter illustrating the study’s methodology.
Through this research, Bishop finds a legal context rampant with cultural miscommunication, stereotypes, cultural bias, and strict judgments, where agents and judges admit to pride in tracking and dehumanizing asylum-seekers and denying their applications. Throughout many accounts, asylum-seekers shoulder the burden of presenting their lived experiences, navigating differences in cultural norms, managing their emotions, and attempting to tell painful, private details of persecution, knowing that a clearly told story is the only way to receive asylum. But as they do so, asylum-seekers experience immigration judges who are dismissive, cold, and biased, demonstrated through their lack of eye contact, uncaring and impatient attitudes, and interruptions. Bishop finds that there are judges who have rejection rates of 95 percent and even 100 percent. This shocking statistic further reveals the unfolding tragedy as asylum-seekers are striving to present their case and overcome their trauma, knowing their survival from persecution and violence both in their country of origin and as a migrant is dependent on it.
This book features the personal accounts of all actors involved in the asylum system. It is an accessible book that is hard to stop reading even though you also feel compelled to stop reading in order to process the dire information. The book’s accessibility also means that the literature review is not presented at the beginning of the book as a framework, and the methodology is introduced at the end. There are findings and data presented that require the reader to figure out why the system happens this way—for example, how do immigrant judges perpetuate a high rate of denied cases, or why are certain cases seen before a judge faster than other cases?
Some of the chapters are purposefully organized under the theme of “in their own words” and fall in between the chapters featuring asylum-seekers. These shortened segments that focus on the accounts of people employed in the asylum system (agents, judges, psychologists) feel at times abrupt in the way they are introduced and concluded. Yet these accounts of government workers are critical in highlighting the misuse of power in how inhumane policies are carried out using violence. Aside from these limitations, this book encompasses the standpoint of asylum-seekers and provides new information on the beliefs and practices of government agents who perpetuate an uncompassionate, trauma-inducing, and restrictive asylum system. This book is highly recommended to sociologists for their own knowledge, research, and activism, and it also would be a useful book to teach to students in order to increase their awareness and cultivate their intellectual curiosity and activism.