Particular Social Groups: Vague Definitions and an Indeterminate Future for Asylum Seekers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Victims fleeing their native countries to escape violence, discrimination, or persecution are provided a limited number of mechanisms under current immigration law to gain refuge in the United States. Under the controlling law, aliens entering the United States are eligible for asylum if they qualify under one of five protected grounds, including race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. But the complete lack of statutory guidance surrounding what constitutes a “particular social group” is incredibly controversial and confusing. The immigration statutes provide no language defining this protected ground. Thus, the guiding framework and eligibility criteria establishing membership in a particular social group has come from U.S. case law. In 2014, however, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) decided two cases simultaneously that set the new standard for what constitutes membership in a particular social group. In Matter of W-G-R- and Matter of M-E-V-G-, the BIA created a three-element test that must be satisfied to establish eligibility in this protected group. With the adoption of this new standard, courts have struggled in applying all three elements. The purpose of this note is to review the foundation for the BIA’s three-part test, provide an analysis of the test’s impact on certain types of asylum claims, and, finally, to propose that a new definition of “particular social group” taken from Canadian case law be added to the Immigration & Nationality Act.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.076 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".