CARRY A BIG STICK: UTILIZING FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT IN ASYLUM FRAUD DETERRENCE

The United States Asylum Program of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under the Department of Homeland Security offers protection to some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. However, the program faces exploitation due to fraud. The government has yet to meaningfully incorporate federal law enforcement into asylum fraud deterrence because the government has not addressed disincentives for prosecutions and investigations. This thesis seeks to address how federal law enforcement can be better incentivized to prosecute asylum fraud. A case comparison method of international and domestic benefit-fraud prosecution initiatives against current asylum fraud-deterrence practices is utilized to understand how federal law enforcement can be better incorporated into asylum fraud-deterrence plans. The case comparison reveals several structural and resource issues currently disincentivizing asylum fraud prosecutions. This thesis recommends the establishment of a criminal immigration fraud section within the Department of Justice as well as the reprioritization of fraud in immigration law enforcement priorities to address those concerns. This research helps to address and highlight the lack of literature on asylum fraud and contributes to the consideration of a more comprehensive strategic asylum fraud deterrence plan.Civilian, Department of Homeland SecurityApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method

Abstract In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature