Regulating organizational ambiguity: unsettled screening categories and the making of US asylum policy

This article examines the development and application of the inherently ambiguous screening category–membership in a particular social group - in US asylum law after the Cold War. I draw on interviews with frontline asylum officers, high-level policy officials and immigration lawyers, as well as unpublished administrative data on asylum applications filed between 1995 and 2015. I find that pressures toward standardisation and against use of overly broad asylum categories, led the asylum agency to impose considerable constraints on applications of the ambiguous screening category ‘particular social group’ category. At the same time, agency attempts to regulate and standardise the use of the category are never fully successful: since 1995 there has been a consistent increase in the number of asylum claims categorised under this category. These findings advance current studies of contemporary US asylum policy on the extent to which an ideologically neutral refugee definition is a concept with integrity or rather the product of the exclusionary policies of the institutions in which it is applied.