Immigration and Naturalization Service V. Cardoza-Fonseca - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

A person is eligible for the discretionary relief of asylum if they are a refugee; that is, "unable or unwilling to return to, and is unwilling or unable to avail themselves of the protection of, country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." By contrast, a person is eligible for the mandatory relief of withholding deportation if they demonstrate a "clear probability of persecution" if they return to their country. Because statutes governing these different forms of relief describe the showing the alien must make in different terms, the Court reasoned those showings were different. Furthermore, a "well-founded fear" is different, and can be lower than, a "clear probability" of persecution.

Three aspects of the legislative history of Congress's definition of asylum bolstered the Court's conclusion. First, before 1980 Congress added the words "well-founded" to the definition of "asylum" to conform the American definition to the United Nations Protocol regarding refugees. Second, the 1980 Refugee Act pushed the goal of conforming U.S. law with the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Indeed, the Refugee Act's definition of "refugee" was virtually identical to that of the Protocol's. The Protocol required contracting nations to establish a category of immigrants for whom discretionary grants of asylum were available, and the 1980 act did precisely that. Third, Congress expressly rejected a proposal by the Senate to make the standards for eligibility for asylum and withholding of deportation the same.

The INS argued it would be anomalous to have a lower standard for asylum that afforded greater benefits to an alien than withholding deportation. (Asylum allows a person to become a lawful permanent resident of the United States; while withholding deportation is subject to quotas from certain countries and conditional on deportation to a hospitable third country not being available.) This argument overlooked the fact that asylum is discretionary on the part of the Attorney General, while withholding of deportation is mandatory. Second, the INS asked the Court to make the standards the same because the BIA had interpreted them to be the same, and the Court's precedent in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), required it to defer to an agency's own interpretation of a pertinent statute. The question of whether Congress intended the standards to be the same is one for the courts, even under Chevron. The Court was not deciding what a "well-founded fear" would mean, simply that it was a lower standard than a "clear probability" of persecution.

Justice Blackmun commended the Courts of Appeals for their diligent work in recognizing the distinction between the two standards. "The efforts of these courts stand in stark contrast to—but, it is sad to say, alone cannot make up for—the years of seemingly purposeful blindness by the INS, which only now begins its task of developing the standard entrusted to its care."

Justice Scalia stressed he was merely concurring in the judgment of the Court because he believed that it reached the right result. He chastised the Court for examining legislative history. "Judges interpret laws rather than reconstruct legislators' intentions. Where the language of those laws is clear, we are not free to replace it with an unenacted legislative intent." He also questioned whether the Court's discussion of Chevron deference was correct or appropriate.