Osmani v. I.N.S.
| Decision Date | 10 January 1994 |
| Docket Number | No. 93-1538,93-1538 |
| Citation | 14 F.3d 13 |
| Parties | Asan OSMANI, Petitioner, v. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE, Respondent. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
Richard H. Trais, Chicago, IL, for petitioner.
Fred Foreman, U.S. Atty., Office of the U.S. Atty., Crim. Div., Chicago, IL, Robert Kendall, Jr., Karen Fletcher Torstenson, Dept. of Justice, Office of Immigration Litigation, Washington, DC, and A.D. Moyer, I.N.S., Chicago, IL, for respondent.
Before POSNER, Chief Judge, and RIPPLE and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.
A man who claims to be a Yugoslavian citizen of Albanian ethnicity and the Muslim religion has petitioned us to review the decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals not to reopen his application for asylum. He claims to have a well-founded fear of persecution should he return to Yugoslavia. Immigration and Nationality Act Secs. 101(a)(42)(A), 208(a), 8 U.S.C. Secs. 1101(a)(42)(A), 1158(a). The case has a curious history and its handling by the immigration authorities leaves a great deal to be desired.
Osmani lived in the part of what was then Yugoslavia that was known as Macedonia. He came to the United States in 1984 and requested asylum on the basis of ethnic strife between ethnic Albanians and (other) Macedonians, called "Masadonians" by the immigration judge assigned to his case. The immigration judge denied his application and ordered him deported to Yugoslavia if he would not leave the United States voluntarily. That was in 1985. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the immigration judge's order in 1989; the principal component of this four-year delay was an unexplained two-and-one-half-year delay in the filing of Osmani's appeal brief. In 1992 Osmani moved under 8 C.F.R. Secs. 3.2, 3.8(a) to reopen the proceeding on the basis of new evidence; we do not know why Osmani was still in the country in 1992--so far as appears, the conditional deportation order issued in 1985 has never been stayed. The Board denied the motion in January 1993 in a brief order the meat of which is that the evidence submitted with the motion--newspaper articles that in the Board's words chronicled an "escalation" of the "recognized enmity" among "the various ethnic groups in Yugoslavia"--was insufficient to warrant reopening the proceeding because "general complaints about the treatment of Albanians in Yugoslavia do not constitute specific events which resulted in singling out the alien for persecution." It is from the denial of the motion to reopen that Osmani appeals to us.
What is remarkable about the Board's order denying that motion is not the decision itself, but the Board's insularity. As we have noted elsewhere, Osaghae v. INS, 942 F.2d 1160, 1163 (7th Cir.1991); Bastanipour v. INS, 980 F.2d 1129 (7th Cir.1992), the Board seems unaware of the elementary facts of contemporary history, even those that bear vitally on its mission. Cf. Balazoski v. INS, 932 F.2d 638, 642-43 (7th Cir.1991). When the immigration judge denied Osmani's application for asylum in 1985 and when the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed that decision in 1989, there was a Yugoslavia, and Macedonia was a part of it; and while there was ethnic unrest in Yugoslavia there was not, so far as we are aware, systematic persecution of ethnic Albanians, who composed (as they do today) a majority of the population of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the largest state of Yugoslavia. By the time Osmani filed his motion to reopen his deportation proceeding, Yugoslavia had broken apart. It continued to exist, at least nominally, as a union of two states, Serbia (including Kosovo) and Montenegro, but Macedonia had become an independent nation and a three-cornered civil war was raging among Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the latter two being, like Macedonia, former but not present Yugoslav states. And in Kosovo there was great tension between Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
None of this mosaic, complicated perhaps but familiar to many newspaper readers, is reflected in the Board's opinion refusing to reopen Osmani's deportation. The opinion reads as if the only change from Yugoslavia in 1985 to Yugoslavia in 1993 had been a gradual increase in "enmity" among the various ethnic groups, rather than a splitting apart of the nation amidst civil war. We can disregard the immigration judge's reference to "Masadonians," for his opinion was oral, and the error may be that of the court reporter. But we cannot disregard the remarkable statement in the Board's 1989 opinion that a majority of Yugoslavs are (or rather were then, when Macedonia was still a part of Yugoslavia) Macedonians. The largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia has always been the Serbians.
Surely the Board can do better. Refugees from the Yugoslav civil war are clamoring for asylum in the United States. Is it not time that the members of the Board informed themselves about the world events that precipitate applications for asylum in the United States?
And if the Board had done so...
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