Waiting in “The House of Life”: Experiences of Seeking Asylum in the United States while Living in Buffalo, New York
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I am interested in the experiences of individuals in Upstate New York throughout the process of seeking asylum. I want to know asylum law influences the daily lives of individuals in relation to their cases and other emotions and activities. To address this, I traveled to Vive, Inc. in Buffalo, a shelter for individuals seeking asylum in either the U.S. or Canada, and conducted nine interviews. I interviewed people seeking asylum, one woman who already obtained asylum in the United States, and the two staff members. Based on my interviews, I argue that seeking asylum in the United States is a complex political, legal, and social process. Specifically, I argue that conceptions of work that asylum seekers hold are more varied than current scholarship recognizes based on the types of work asylum seekers engage in and the difficulty an asylum seeker has finding employment. I also suggest that there is a range of experiences of asylum seekers with the branches of government depending on their personal journeys to Vive and how far into the legal process they are. I also discuss the ways in which objectification occurs throughout the process based on conversations with the asylum seekers and my observations. Additionally, the amount of knowledge an individual has about the process and their case significantly impacts their outlook on the process, based on people’s varied understandings of asylum and opinions about it. Finally, I argue that there may be some disconnect between critiques that asylum seekers make and those voiced by service providers based on different problems and solutions offered by my interviewees. In conclusion, it is important that particular attention is paid to the perspectives that individuals seeking asylum have to offer and view them not exclusively through this term, but as people with extremely complex lives. Utilizing these perspectives can help humanize the asylum process in the United States and help organizations better assist individuals throughout.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".