The Wedge of the Refugee as Worker

Abstract

This chapter analyzes federal court cases from the 1970s through the current day about the right of asylum seekers from Haiti and Central America to work in the United States. These cases address fundamental issues at the heart of debates over asylum in the United States: how to assess whether an asylum claim is a “frivolous” attempt to gain the ability to work after entering without authorization; if asylum seekers are not permitted to work while awaiting adjudication of their claims—a process that can take years and during which time they are ineligible for any federal benefits or aid—how can anybody but the wealthy apply for asylum? This chapter shows that lawyers for asylum seekers such as Ira Gollobin and Robert Rubin argued that work authorization was necessary to ensure a true right to seek asylum and, in doing so, challenged a dichotomy between labor migrant and refugee that has underlain policy since the mid-twentieth century. The chapter also explores how lawyers arguing these cases gained support from labor unions and local officials such that the cause of asylum seeker work authorization helped link and strengthen advocacy for labor rights and immigrant rights in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.