The Religion Clauses and Political Asylum: Religious Persecution Claims and the Religious Membership-Conversion Imposter Problem
![handle is hein.journals/glj88 and id is 2233 raw text is: The Religion Clauses and Political Asylum:
Religious Persecution Claims and the Religious
Membership-Conversion Imposter Problem
TUAN N. SAMAHON*
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has long been acquainted
with the problem of marriage fraud where an applicant enters into a sham
marriage in order to remain within the United States. A more recent phenom-
enon is the problem of religious conversion fraud. Recently, the INS has seen an
increase in asylum claims for persecution or a well-founded fear of persecu-
tion on account of ... religion' following an asylum applicant's claim of
religious conversion. Typically, the conversion is from Islam to Christianity.
Some Islamic regimes, including those of Sudan and Iran, have retained the
premodern Shari'a rule that conversion to Christianity is apostasy, punishable
by death or imprisonment . Other Islamic countries, while declining to adopt de
jure apostasy rules, prosecute and execute converts to other faiths, usually .under
the pretext that the converts are spies.3
Although these Islamic regimes' use of apostasy laws is theologically inter-
nally dubious,4 the persecution of Christian converts is a real phenomenon that
poses several difficult problems for the INS. Certainly some asylum applicants
are opportunistic imposters. Many applicants, however, have been exposed to a
variety of Christian denominations while in the United States. Enjoying the
newfound freedom to convert, some asylum applicants sincerely embrace new
faiths. Therefore, an adjudicator faces the dilemma of determining whether a
* J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, May 2000. I would like to thank Professors Steven
Goldberg, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Richard Epstein, Viet Dinh, Nicole Garnett, Eugene Volokh, David
Cole, the participants of the February 2000 IHS Liberty & Law conference, and the editors of The
Georgetown Law Journal for their helpful commentary and invaluable exchanges. I am especially
grateful to my wife Lindsey and my stepfather Robert H. Berry for their patience, support, and faith
during my writing of this piece.
1. 8 U.S.C. § I101(a)(42)(A) (1994).
2. See ANN E. MAYER, ISLAM AND HUMAN RiGHTS: TRADITION AND POLITICS 141 (2d ed. 1995)
(female apostates are imprisoned until they return to Islam); JOSEPH ScHcHT, AN INTRODUCrION TO
ISLAMIc LAW 187 (1964) (noting that male apostates are given three days to renounce their apostasy and
return to Islam or be put to death). An apostate is one who rejects or denies his or her faith.
3. See MAYER, supra note 2, at 143 (noting that the ban on conversion also affects unorthodox
practitioners of Islam, such as the Ahmadi minority in Pakistan who retain a belief in prophets after
Mohammed).
4. See id. at 146 (noting no verse in the Qur'an... stipulates any earthly penalty for apostasy and
that premodern jurists extrapolated apostate punishment from incidents during and after Mohammed's
life that leave the subject open to alternative interpretation). The Qur'an itself explicitly exhorts
religious tolerance and declines earthly punishment of those who deny Islam for another faith: Say: '0
you who deny the truth! I do not worship that which you worship, and neither do you worship that
which I worship. And I will not worship that which you have [ever] worshipped, and neither will you
[ever] worship that which I worship. Unto you, your moral law, and unto me, mine!' THE MESSAGE OF
THE QUR'AN 109:1-6 (Muhammad Asad trans.. 1984).
2211](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/glj88&div=58&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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