Immigration – Asylum – China — one-child policy

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Immigration – Asylum – China — one-child policy

A Chinese woman who has given birth to more than one child in the United States is not automatically entitled to asylum.

“We need evidence-based law, just as we need evidence-based medicine. United States v. Garthus, 652 F.3d 715, 720 (7th Cir. 2011); Zenith Electronics Corp. v. WH-TV Broadcasting Corp., 395 F.3d 416, 419 (7th Cir. 2005); see also Wells v. SmithKline Beecham Corp., 601 F.3d 375, 380 (5th Cir. 2010). Zheng has no feasible way of determining how likely it is that she’ll be persecuted if she is returned to Fujian Province. One would like the Department of Justice, of which the Immigration Court and the Board of Immigration Appeals are subordinate bodies, to assemble and collate the existing bodies of data and offer an expert opinion on the likelihood of persecution of Chinese women returned to Fujian Province having fled the country because of opposition to Chinese family planning policy or an altercation with family planning officials and having given birth to more than one child in the United States. The analytical effort might fail because of the fog that surrounds conditions in Fujian Province—a province with a population of more than 35 million. But it should be attempted, as it has not been. We suggested in Banks v. Gonzales, 453 F.3d 449, 453-55 (7th Cir. 2006), and repeat, that the Board of Immigration Appeals (or perhaps the Department of Homeland Security, which handles asylum cases until an immigration judge gets involved, and presents the evidence to that judge) adopt in asylum cases the equivalent of the vocational experts used by the Social Security Administration in disability cases and maybe even the ‘Grid’ that the Administration uses to expedite and systematize administration, so that recurrent issues, such as requests for asylum or withholding of removal by aliens claiming to face persecution for violating Chinese family planning laws, can be handled uniformly. On the basis of the skimpy record, supplemented by our own research, we cannot fault the immigration judge or the Board for concluding that Zheng has not proved that it is more likely than not that she will be persecuted if she returns to China.”

Petition Denied.

11-2322 Zheng v. Holder

Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals, Posner, J.