Asylum-Seeking and Discrimination: Analyzing Race as a Factor of Denial Within Latinos’ Asylum Case Decisions in the United States, Luis Xavier Guaman, UG '26 (96905DAF)
This project is trying to find out if an Latin American individual's race has some effect on their chances of being denied asylum status in the Unite States. To do this, I created my own data sets using TRAK Immigration's data sets on total asylum case decisions across one country and Vanderbilt University's Latin America Barometer to note the self-reported racial make-ups of the same Latin American country, repeating this process to have a sample of 12 countries across the Caribbean, Central, and South america. I created a "denial rate" for each country by dividing total cases denied from individuals from their country and the total cases received from individuals from the same country. I then graphed this variable with the black, mestizo, and white population percentages from each country and tabulated the R-values for each correlation. What I found was that there was a strong-negative correlation between a country's white population and their denial rate, implying that the large percentage of white citizens a country had, the lower their denial rate would be. To look into other potential variables that could explain this, I took a sample of 10 states across the United States and found that 'red states' such as Florida or Texas had 10-15% higher denial rates than 'blue-states' such as California or New York. With these correlations, I hope to find out why there are differences in denial rates for the same populations across states and why the correlation values for white populations and denial rate is so strong.