The long journey to asylum
One afternoon in late July, a 39-year-old African man we will call Jean-Paul took the elevator to the third floor of Harvard Law School’s (HLS) Wasserstein Hall. He walked into the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic and was greeted like a hero. By one definition, Jean-Paul qualifies as such. He’s an African Odysseus whose long journey and personal trials include a family massacre, days of torture, months of fearful hiding, and a thriller-like escape from his native Burundi. In the classics, a hero also returns home, but for Jean-Paul — now employed at a Boston parking garage — there is no going back. The United States is now his home. When he arrived in Washington, D.C., as an exile in 2006, he had a visa, two changes of clothes, and $5. Jean-Paul’s next test of strength started a month later, with his legal appeal for asylum. This legal status guarantees aliens some “protection...