Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Appeals are clogging the courts
"Why are so many people challenging Board of Immigration appeals decisions in Federal Court?" John R.B. Palmer, Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, and Elizabeth Cronin. Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Fall, 2005,
Summary: Authors looked at the Board of Immigration backlog of appeals which in March 2002 was 56,000 cases and then surged. Not only has the volume of BIA decisions increased, but also the rate at which they are appealed through petitions for review. People are now challenging a higher proportion of BIA decisions than they did before March 2002. Exactly why is the point of this article. Some think they are making more errors because of the work load; others believe it's a change in tactics.
The authors seemed flummoxed if my non-legal analysis means anything. Interesting figures for the 2nd and 9th courts. "In our defense, we are lawyers. The linear world of legal reasoning makes it easy to forget the complexity of real life social phenomena. After a year of collecting and analyzing gigabytes worth of data, we realize that the explanation for the immigration surge is at once far more complicated and far simpler than we imagined. We did not detect a higher appeal rate in the latter half of 2004 for either summary decisions or prompt decisions, but we cannot rule out the possibility that such a higher rate existed in the past, or that either of those variables are potential causes of the surge. We identified a number of other variables that may have contributed to the surge, including BIA errors, substantive issues on which BIA decisions hinge, aliens' "expulsion costs," and the amount of delay that can be achieved in the courts of appeals. However, we are unable to confirm or discard any of these variables."
Can you imagine the delaying tactics of appeals if the new Senate bill were to become the law? Every lawyer in the country will have to be drafted into immigration law!
Summary: Authors looked at the Board of Immigration backlog of appeals which in March 2002 was 56,000 cases and then surged. Not only has the volume of BIA decisions increased, but also the rate at which they are appealed through petitions for review. People are now challenging a higher proportion of BIA decisions than they did before March 2002. Exactly why is the point of this article. Some think they are making more errors because of the work load; others believe it's a change in tactics.
The authors seemed flummoxed if my non-legal analysis means anything. Interesting figures for the 2nd and 9th courts. "In our defense, we are lawyers. The linear world of legal reasoning makes it easy to forget the complexity of real life social phenomena. After a year of collecting and analyzing gigabytes worth of data, we realize that the explanation for the immigration surge is at once far more complicated and far simpler than we imagined. We did not detect a higher appeal rate in the latter half of 2004 for either summary decisions or prompt decisions, but we cannot rule out the possibility that such a higher rate existed in the past, or that either of those variables are potential causes of the surge. We identified a number of other variables that may have contributed to the surge, including BIA errors, substantive issues on which BIA decisions hinge, aliens' "expulsion costs," and the amount of delay that can be achieved in the courts of appeals. However, we are unable to confirm or discard any of these variables."
Can you imagine the delaying tactics of appeals if the new Senate bill were to become the law? Every lawyer in the country will have to be drafted into immigration law!
# posted by Norma : 5/30/2006 01:44:00 PM
