The Asylum's seeker's process

In The United States there’s always been a huge population of people that live inside of the country and that number is still rising to this day. There has also been a huge increase in the amount of people who are trying to immigrate to the United States from other countries. Because of this the government has decided to give these people different titles in order to see how and why they need to come to the U.S. There are three titles these people are usually given: refugee, asylum seeker, and migrant. In this paper, I will be looking at the population of immigrants that involves the most amount of people, the asylum seekers.


An asylum seeker is someone who is looking for refuge from an outside country because they might be in fear of being killed, or because their country is uninhabitable. The difference between being an asylum seeker and a refugee is that when you're a refugee, you can no longer return to your country and are seeking protection from the government for safety and seeking access to food, health care, and shelter. As an asylum seeker you're not really given any of those things because you haven’t been approved by the government. One important point is that all refugees begin as asylum seekers and have to go through the process of becoming refugees. You could also just say that a refugee is an approved asylum seeker.


Now let’s look at two steps that an asylum seeker must go through in order to become an approved refugee. One step I believe works and the other I believe needs to be improved. The step that I do like in this process is the interview portion where an officer comes to interview an asylum seeker. In the case of the asylum seeker they might feel worryful about this interview because they might not even know English and might not be sure how to answer some of the questions that the officer might bring to the interview. In a lot of cases, the asylum seeker can feel detained and at that point should begin to worry about being sent back to their country. After the interview two things can happen to the asylum seeker at this point. One being that their story gets heard by the officer and they get approved, or they could be seen as illegal and must be sent back to the country they came from. I do like this part about the asylum seeker process because it gives a person the opportunity to learn this person or group of people’s stories about why they came to the us. I also like it because compared to the I - 589 file it only takes half a year at most compared to the many years it can take someone to get back the 1 - 589 file.


The part that I don’t like about this process is the I - 589 file. If you don’t know what the I - 589 file because of how difficult it can be for asylum seekers to fill it out. The entire document is 16 pages long and it doesn’t help that the entire document is in english as well. Since this is the case this makes it extremely difficult for asylum seekers since most of them would not understand English at all. On top of that if they do have children they must be 21 or under to add their children into the document as well.


Now with these two steps I do feel like there are ways that both of these steps can be improved. With the first step being that it can take over 45 days to set up the initial interview. With that in mind, if the wait time for getting an interview would be reduced, that would help the asylum process a lot more because they wouldn’t have to wait for an officer to interview them. For the I - 589 file I feel like there are many different ways to improve the process for incoming asylum seekers. One of those being making the document again but in different languages making it easier for the asylum process because the asylum seekers would actually be able to understand the information on the document and be able to fill it out in the best possible way. In closing I do believe that the asylum process is the hardest process to get through for upcoming migrants.