Uyghurs face long wait to become U.S. citizens

Despite vocal U.S. government support for the oppressed Uyghur people of Northwest China, Washington is dragging its heels when it comes to asylum seekers asking for a permanent home, a report from the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) published in April shows.

There are up to 1,000 Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking minorities from China currently in the U.S. seeking asylum, according to UHRP Director of Research Henryk Szadziewski. His report, “No Time to Lose, Uyghurs Stuck in the United States Asylum System,” details distress and trauma experienced by many Uyghurs fleeing well-documented atrocities in their homeland as they await word on whether they can stay in America.

The UHRP report recommends Congress act to expedite and finance the asylum-seeking process for people who are victims and survivors of genocide. The report calls for U.S. government departments, particularly the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), to be adequately funded, and recommends that the U.S. Task Force on Atrocity Prevention, created under the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, focus on clearing the backlog of asylum cases.

The UHRP is a private advocacy organization founded in 2004 with a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, which, in turn, was founded in 1983 with a grant from the U.S. Congress. UHRP continues to raise money from private donors.

Speaking to The China Project, Szadziewski complained that despite two successive U.S. administrations acknowledging the severity of the atrocities committed against the Uyghur people, “there are still obstacles hindering the process of granting asylum to all Uyghurs residing in the country.”

Bipartisan draft legislation called the Uyghur Human Rights Protection Act, written by senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Chris Coon (D-DE), is wending its way through Congress, but, if passed, would have no bearing on Uyghurs who have already made it into the U.S. Were it to become law, it would only help those in third countries waiting to come to America.

“Uyghur asylum-seekers in the U.S. would be best served by U.S. legislators and the White House acting on the genocide designation,” Szadziewski said. “To let 1,000 Uyghur asylum seekers expedite their cases is a small and doable ask for these entities. However, the impact on those Uyghurs’ lives would be huge. It becomes a matter of following up words with concrete actions.”

U.S. policy on the Uyghurs already in America is fraught with contradiction, UHRP Director Omer Kanat told The China Project, explaining that while Washington was the first government to declare that China was committing genocide against their people, U.S. lawmakers and bureaucracy then offered only a lukewarm reception to those fleeing that very crisis.

Despite stern warnings to Beijing from the dedicated, bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China and a host of welcome U.S. government measures drawing attention to the Uyghur crisis — the declaration of genocide, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, the Uyghur Human Rights Sanctions Review Act, and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, to name a few — Kanat said many Uyghur asylum seekers are still waiting up to nine years for an interview.

Uyghurs are trapped in America, not willing or able to go back to their homeland but, lacking official U.S. immigration status, are unable to get on with their lives in exile, Kanat said. One year, renewable work permits limit their choice of employment, and they are not eligible for federal benefits until they are granted asylum. Beijing’s relentless pursuit of Uyghurs wherever they are in the world compounds the stress of a people already traumatized by reports of the grim situation their families face back home.

Since 2013, China has conducted a repressive crackdown in resource-rich Xinjiang, turning the traditional home of the world’s roughly 14 million Uyghurs, an area the size of Texas, into what some observers liken to an open-air prison or martial law, replete with round-the-clock surveillance, the separation of families, the destruction of mosques, and the introduction of massive detention centers where forced labor often is performed.

“Even if they make it [to the U.S.], they cannot see an end to their waiting and are terrified China will catch up with them and send them back,” said Kanat, whose best efforts to raise the urgent plight of his people to U.S. officials have so far fallen on deaf ears. The six-month wait for an asylum interview promised under a 2022 Biden administration reform to speed up the process has been thwarted by backlogs.

“The number of Uyghur asylum seekers in the United States is not so large. A quick resolution of these cases is within reach,” Kanat said. “They seem in no hurry to expedite the process for these vulnerable people.”

Not for the faint of heart

Many Uyghurs now in the U.S. are filled with survivor’s guilt. By speaking out and drawing global public attention to their plight, some may inadvertently have caused their relatives back in China to be sent into captivity. Asylum seekers in the U.S. are often depressed, sleepless, forgetful, and financially strapped by fees to treat their health and fees to pay their immigration lawyers.

A U.S. policy revamp in 2018 increased stress for many Uyghurs by dealing first with those asylum seekers who arrived last, relegating Uyghurs already waiting several years to the back of the line.

The Uyghur refugees in the U.S. are not looking for handouts, the UHRP report said, noting that most tend to have completed a higher education and were professionals in their former lives in China. Under the Trump administration, Uyghurs were forbidden to work in the U.S. for one year after arrival. Biden reversed this work ban, but expensive and often-delayed work permits can mean Uyghur job losses, precarious living conditions, and even homelessness.

Despite paying their U.S. state and federal taxes, the UHRP report shows that Uyghurs seeking further education in America are denied student loans and the benefit of paying domestic tuition rates for university until they are bona fide U.S. citizens.

The UHRP report notes that leaving China was not an easy choice and each Uyghur who did it had something to lose, “whether it was family members, professional employment, or financial assets.”

The Uyghurs’ departure was fraught with subterfuge and risk. Many abandoned partners, children, and parents, hoping to bring them out later. Some fled beginning in 2014, knowing the police were targeting them for detention. Passports that were readily available to Uyghurs in 2015 were recalled in 2016. In the scramble to leave, those Uyghurs who failed to make it out had little option but to risk traveling without papers, often at the mercy of human traffickers, overland through China’s interior to Southeast Asia. Many never made it out, arriving at the Vietnamese border only to be shot on sight. Those who did spent months under the radar in unfriendly territories waiting for forged documents to carry them to freedom.

“These are not people who have taken this journey lightly,” Kanat said. “They need to know they are welcomed and safe in the U.S.”

People seeking asylum in the U.S. are assigned a priority designation by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. However, USCIS frequently lumps all Chinese citizens together, not allowing for the difficulties Uyghurs face when asked to support their case for asylum with evidence that is nearly impossible to gather from inside a heavily surveilled homeland under a near-total information lockdown.

Alimjan, a Uyghur asylum seeker in his fifth year of waiting in the U.S. at the time of the UHRP report, described the U.S. system as “broken.”

“We deserve to get on with our lives,” he told Szadziewski.

Aynur, who fled Ürümchi in 2014, arrived in the U.S. and immediately applied for asylum. In 2018, she was interviewed for asylum then given a date in 2021 on which to appear at the immigration court in Arlington, Virginia—a date which was then delayed, without explanation, until 2023. With no means to pay for a lawyer, she had no way to expedite her case.

Those few Uyghurs who exercise their right to free speech in the U.S. and attend public rallies to draw attention to the sluggish U.S. asylum process risk attracting unwanted attention from Chinese officials who either also work in the U.S. or who are tracking the Uyghurs’ social media accounts. Uyghurs who protest in the U.S. often are baited by Chinese officials with thinly veiled threats against their families back home in an effort to silence the outspoken exiles or lure them back to China.

For many Uyghurs seeking asylum in the U.S., waiting is punctuated by sporadic, scary, and often unverifiable news from western China. Family members are sentenced to lengthy prison terms, relatives and friends die, children disappear into the care of the state.

While not a cure-all for the pain they have endured, legal residence in the U.S. would give Uyghurs here, and their families, a future that is safe from the reach of the Chinese Communist Party and the possibility of training for skilled employment, securing funding for university education, and the hope of family reunification one day.

Adil said that if he were granted asylum in the U.S., he would have a new sense of pride.

“Everything would change,” he said. “I have no big dreams, maybe to buy a house, and just live a normal life.”

Abdullah’s dream was to complete a Ph.D. Another Uyghur, Ehmet, said, “Just give us Uyghurs an opportunity to start a new life. We are so eager! We contribute to the U.S. in so many ways already, there are lots of positives, but we want to be able to contribute in all ways. Our community doesn’t want handouts.”