Court Opinion

ID: 9497435
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:51:23.853574+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:11.787213
License: Public Domain

EVANS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part, dissenting in part.
The majority opinion is beautifully written and quite persuasive. Yet, despite the fact that it concludes by saying we are “not holding here that every woman of childbearing age in China will automatically be entitled to asylum in this country, because they are all potentially subject to the coercive family planning policies,” I think, as a practical matter, we are either doing, or coming close to doing, just that. How is Lin’s case going to be different from that of any other Chinese woman who takes issue with China’s policy and arrives here saying she does not want to submit to its population control policy?
No doubt, Lin’s story (if true) is quite compelling. Who would want the state to force a woman to have an abortion? On the other hand, China has a huge population problem, and there are people who applaud efforts to fix it. But when Congress, in 1996, amended the law to add forced abortion as a ground for granting refugee status, it made a value judgment about China’s population control policy. That is interesting because it looks a bit like the congressional antiabortion faction outmaneuvered its anti-immigration faction — which itself is ironic, given that most members of Congress who belong to one of the factions belong to the other as well.
Given the present state of law, it seems that every Chinese woman of childbearing age who says, to quote the words of the statute, that she is in a state of “resistance to a coercive population control program,” can only be denied asylum in America if her story is incredible. As a practical matter, that’s pretty hard to establish. So, given the present state of the law, the floodgates are probably open.
Finally, although I join Judge Wood’s opinion, I do disagree on one point — I do not join the suggestion that the BIA should, upon remand, assign this case to a different immigration judge. We should not be making gratuitous suggestions of that sort.