"Immigration law is extremely complicated. The two most complicated areas of federal law are immigration law and habeas corpus law, even though the representation of individuals caught up in these systems of law is very inadequate," Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said.

"There are not enough immigration judges to handle the huge number of immigration cases. They have crushing case loads and inadequate staff."

During a speech at the Chicago Bar Association on June 7, Posner criticized the lack of resources and training for immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals.

The video of Posner's speech is now available on C-SPAN (RealPlayer required).

Here are some excerpts from Posner's speech:

On the need for better training for immigration judges:

The selection and training of immigration judges is inadequate. Opinions of the immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals often don't seem knowledgeable about foreign countries. Of course there are 193 countries in the world, and most of them are very obscure to Americans. But you would think that an immigration judge or member the Board of Immigration Appeals would be someone who was given a training in the understanding of foreign countries and in particular the foreign countries in which there are persecution problems, because those are the ones that generate most of the asylum applicants.

 

Who would know coming into this field that that there is a problem in Eritrea of discrimination against Jehovah's Witnesses? Who would dream of such a thing? Who would know of all the minority Islamic sects in Pakistan whose members are persecuted because they are considered to be heretics, not legitimate Muslims? Who among us, without training, without special background, can really understand the problems that people from these disordered countries have in documenting their claims and getting their friends and relatives to testify? There is a problem of the immigration judges having the knowledge they need to make credible determinations.

On the lack of resources at the Board of Immigration Appeals

Another serious problem is that the Board of Immigration Appeals, to which the immigration judges' opinions are appealed, is too small ... Attorney General Ashcroft reduced the size of the board from 23 to 11 and as a result the board simply does not have the resources to give more than a perfunctory review to most of the appeals. So they have delegated appellate authority in most cases to a single member of the board. Instead of a panel of board members, it's just one board member. Of course that's contrary to our notions of appropriate appellate review.

 

....

 

What could be done to improve the situation? The easiest step, and I don't under why it hasn't been taken, would be to restore the Board of Immigration Appeals to its former size. They undoubtedly, with more personnel, would weed out more of the weak denials, and it would not only lighten the case load of the Court of Appeals, which I don't consider to be that significant of a consideration, but it also would present us with more a carefully filtered set of cases to respond to. My impression is that Attorney General Ashcroft, when he reduced the size of the board, just fired or transferred some of the members. I don't think he went to Congress, so I don't know why the Board of Immigration Appeals couldn't just be restored to its former size by executive action, without legislative action. But somehow that hasn't happened.