Redefining refugees: Interpretive control and the bordering work of legal categorization in U.S. asylum law

Abstract

States engage in a variety of border enforcement practices to reassert control over migration and territory in spite of international human rights obligations. State responses to asylum seeking are illustrative of the subsequent movement and proliferation of borders far from the territorial borderline. While the refugee category delineates to whom states have obligations to protect, less research has examined the bordering work achieved through legal interpretations of the refugee category. Based on an analysis of asylum case law, specifically two foundational cases involving Salvadoran asylum seekers to the U.S. in the 1980s, Matter of Acosta (1985) and Sanchez-Trujillo vs. INS (1986), this paper argues that legal interpretations of the refugee definition are acts of interpretive control, or discursive tactics designed to contain human mobility and circumscribe the human rights of those with access to U.S. territory. The case studies illustrate how defining and redefining the refugee category was critical to constructing Central American “feet people” as illegally present in the U.S. and thus legitimate targets of spatialized tactics of exclusion including deportation and detention. Through analysis of these cases, the paper illustrates that legal definitions are not a static backdrop against which other forms of bordering work occurs, but dynamic sites in which legal discourse both responds to and produces socio-spatial relations, delineating the threshold of humanitarian categories and thus the meaning and consequences of cross border movement for specific groups of people.