Immigration Law—Withholding Automatic Asylum for Spouses or Partners of Victims of China’s Coercive Family-Planning Policies—Shi Liang Lin v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 494 F.3d 296 (2d Cir. 2007)

Section 601(a) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) amended the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) definition of “refugee” to include victims of coercive family-planning policies.  In the 1997 decision In re C-Y-Z-, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) interpreted section 601(a) to extend protection to the victim’s spouse, offering automatic refugee status to both individuals.  Since then, circuit courts have disagreed over whether C-Y-Z-’s holding also extends automatic asylum to the victim’s common-law spouse, unmarried partner, or fiancé.  In Shi Liang Lin v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals considered whether section 601(a) confers automatic refugee status on a victim’s unmarried partner.  The Second Circuit not only declined to impute automatic refugee status to a victim’s unmarried partner, but also abrogated C-Y-Z- as applied to a victim’s legal spouse.  The court held that neither the victim’s spouse nor unmarried partner are per se refugees, and that to obtain asylum, such applicants must demonstrate their own persecution under China’s coercive policies. . . .