Identities on Trial in the United States: Asylum Seekers from Asia

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ChorSwang Ngin radically shifts the asylum seeking narrative by focusing on rarely heard stories of persecution and escape from China and Southeast Asia. Identities on Trial in the United States weaves together the cases of a tortured student from a Myanmar prison, an apostate from Islam, several victims of ethnic and sexual violence from Indonesia, and men and women escaping Chinas draconian One-Child Policy and prohibition of Falun Gong practice, among others. Joann Yeh, an immigration attorney, co-authored three chapters to examine asylum seeking in a Mandarin-speaking Californian community and discuss the failure of the United States quasi-judicial immigration system, highlighting the asylum lawfare in courtroom drama, and to argue for an anthropological advantage in asylum preparation. This book is essential text for policy makers, students, lawyers, activists, and those engaged with migration studies seeking a more just asylum outcome.

Reviews

Identities on Trial in the United States: Asylum Seekers from Asia unravels the tormented stories that lie behind asylum claims in the United States. This fieldwork based book offers a fascinating range of cases that illustrates the dilemmas, conflicts and contradictions of cultural expertise. It poignantly argues against the narrow use of culture for a fair adjudication and makes a convincing case of the involvement of anthropologists in court. -- Livia Holden, University of Oxford
Immigration today is so misrepresented, and the political asylum process so daunting, that a book as readable and scholarly as Identities on Trial in the United States is most welcome. Particularly invaluable are presentations of cases that involve each of the grounds for granting asylum claims race, nationality, religion, political opinion, and social group membership for which cultural analyses emerge as crucial for verifying conditions of persecution and credibility of accounts. This promises to be a significant resource for students and professionals involved in human rights, anthropology, migration, current Asian affairs, and law. -- James Loucky, Western Washington University

Author Bio

ChorSwang Ngin is professor of anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles.