'Who Gets Believed': Stories of Asylum-Seekers and Others

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Few of us have had the experience of sitting across from a police interrogator or asylum officers, but I imagine those of you listening who have had those experiences can identify with the frustration of having your honesty met with skepticism or outright disbelief. In those rooms, in those contexts, there are power imbalances. Interrogators and asylum officers are evaluating the way you perform. This is true even in everyday life at work or at home. Dina Nayeri has interrogated this culture of belief in a new book called Who Gets Believed writing from her own experience as a refugee as well as combing through police transcripts and stories from asylum seekers in the United States and Europe. Nayeri reflects on how easy it is to dismiss honesty and what it means when the truth alone isn't sufficient. Dina Nayeri joins us now. She was on for her previous book, The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina, welcome back to WNYC.

Dina Nayeri: Thank you, Brian. It's nice to talk to you again.

Brian Lehrer: Would you start by parsing what it means to believe, or for that matter, to disbelieve at least in the context of what you're trying to do in this book?

Dina Nayeri: Well, I think, what it means to believe or disbelieve, I guess there's a variety of things, but I think what I'm trying to say in this book is that we believe very differently from how we think we believe. We think that we're very critical. We think that we use evidence and weigh it carefully, use our judgment and logic. In fact, actually, we're looking for familiar stories. We're looking for familiar characters, familiar performances of the truth. What it means to believe is really to be taken in by a particular performance or to relate to it.

Brian Lehrer: There's also the question of just what's true, right,-

Dina Nayeri: Well, of course.

Brian Lehrer: - and asking questions to ascertain what's true when anybody in any situation is making a claim? Yes?

Dina Nayeri: Well, yes, to decide, I guess, what's true in a situation for which you weren't present and you weren't any primary figure. It really also has to do with point of view and lens. When you are asking a person to tell a story, a traumatic story from their past, what is true that we don't have video, there's no absolute perfect truth, there's only the truth of that person's memory and whoever else was there at the time. What you're asking them really is to call up pieces of the truth. Then, you as an outsider, I guess, judge that, whether or not that is the whole picture, whether or not that is the right parts of the picture, and whether or not that's even the thing that happened at all.

Brian Lehrer: How much of the context of this for you, as a refugee yourself to this country once upon a time, is from what's going on at the border now and the number of asylum seekers to this country? For all the focus on the border, what doesn't get reported quite as much I think is that the large majority of people who are seeking asylum in the United States, once those cases actually get to an official asylum proceeding, most of those claims get denied.

Dina Nayeri: Yes. I think for me, that's really appalling to see in the US and across Europe. It is something that's happening a lot now, attention is on it now as it was a couple of years ago when we spoke. For me, this is a lifelong obsession because I was a refugee when I was eight years old. That was 30 years ago. It was a long time ago, more than 30 years ago. For me, I guess what I'm noticing in a less recent context, just the last few years, is that asylum officers across Europe and in the US just no longer understand their humanitarian duty. They don't ask questions the way they did when we were asylum seekers. They don't listen the way that they did then with a view toward saving people, that this is part of the mission of the United States, part of who we are, that we take refugees, that we rescue people who are on the edge of the grave, that this is part of our values and what we've promised to do in the Refugee Convention. Now, it's much, much different.

You talk about people who get denied at the border so often.

Part of the reason is that the people who first encounter them are now incentivized just to turn them away, just to look for any kind of inconsistency, any reason to disbelieve, any reason that their story, even if they are believed, doesn't fit with the perfect definition of a refugee, which is a very specific definition based on five factors. That's a really different way to listen, isn't it? If you're looking at a tick box and looking for an inconsistency than if you are listening to someone and trying to understand what happened to them, whether or not you can save them or you can invite them in. I think it matters how we listen to those stories.

Now, the cases that I've seen for writing this book have just been stunning because, for example, there's a case in the book of a man called KV who came into the UK in 2011 from Sri Lanka. His back was just covered with scars, with torture scars. At the time, it was known that Sri Lanka was torturing people in detention using hot soldering irons. Human rights organizations and NGOs and governments knew that this was the standard way that torture was done there. Many, many people were pouring into these countries with the same story and the same scars. They were suspected of being Tamil Tigers or helping the Tamil Tigers. Here was their back and here was their arms, and here were the pictures and the story. I guess over time, these asylum officers who, again, are incentivized based on turning people away and looking for inconsistencies, these asylum officers started to get desensitized to this particular story. They started looking for any reason to turn them away. They created this bucket of disbelief called self-infliction by proxy.

They said, "You know what? I don't want to believe you. I don't think this has happened. There's too many people coming with the exact same scars and the same testimonials. We're going to say, what if you did this to yourself? What if you self-inflicted these scars just for UK asylum? You did it by proxy," as in, you hired a doctor to put those scars on your back, which is absurd. Human rights organizations were up in arms. Doctors and psychologists and things were saying, "Well, this is not how human nature works. We don't do this to ourselves for something like asylum. It's unheard of. Whereas torture in Sri Lanka in this way is very much heard of.

Brian Lehrer: That disbelief, that assumption that somebody would've had these scars, these wounds inflicted on themselves on purpose, that became the default position and the asylum seekers had to prove otherwise?

Dina Nayeri: Kind of. It became a catch-all other bucket. Imagine if you have a bunch of buckets of choices and every single one of them has a burden of proof attached to it, except for this one. If this one can just catch everyone else who doesn't meet the burden of proof on all of the other boxes, there is no burden of proof on this box. It's just a big what if. Well, we can't prove A, B, C, or D, so we'll just put you in bucket E, which is that maybe you did it yourself. There's a huge logical flaw there. Of course, KV's case went all the way to the Supreme Court precisely because of that. The Supreme Court said, "You can't do this. This is absolutely irrational. You can't have no burden of proof attached to this one bucket."

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who has a story from any point of view, from your point of view as a refugee, from your point of view as anybody who's ever been interrogated by the police, the exonerated five, you're welcome to call in. Anyone else, 212-433-WNYC, or anybody who's been in that position, a police interrogator, an asylum judge, 212-433-9692. Dina Nayeri, author of Who Gets Believed, 212-433-WNYC, or tweet @Brian Lehrer. This meditation on denial and persuasion and performance that is your book is also one in which you weave parts of your own story. Early on you write that there are many people on the autism spectrum in your own family and that your mom says you are the "biggest undiagnosed case" in the family, and you suggest that you believe she's right, or at least that you experience the world very differently from most neurotypical people.

Do you want to say more about that and how it influences whether people are more or less likely to believe or disbelieve you?

Dina Nayeri: Sure. In my own case, my mother's a doctor. She said this about me, and I usually fight her on everything she says about me. I believe this because I do a lot of things that now in adulthood I realize are not normal. The intense checking of things, OCD about a lot of different things, the way, when I'm speaking, I often find myself losing track of other people, going on on my own track. Then, everything I've experienced is very similar to others that I've known. I think, for me, I have learned certain techniques and strategies for I guess following Western Codes because at the time we moved to the US, I was struggling both with my own strangeness, which I guess people called then, and then also with the fact that we were Iranians in America and didn't know how to behave. It was all just a lot of-- I did not have the handbook to get along with these people in a lot of ways.

Now, going back, it's very hard to parse how much of that was cultural and how much of that had to do with me as an individual and the way I relate to others. It was a long exercise in learning the performances, what people wanted, how I was to behave I guess to be a good American and to be a successful American. I think that's how it is for a lot of immigrants. People that I've talked to, this is what they say. It's like how do you learn how to be, I guess. When I was in college, I spent a lot of time, I was only eight years into this country, and I was already off on my own in university, and I spent a lot of time with other people who had come from other countries as children who felt the same way. At some point, I dated my ex-husband who's also from lots of different places. We did something strange, which we didn't realize was strange back then. That was after every social interaction with Americans, we would look at each other after we walked away from that group, and the first thing we would ask each other was, did I behave well?

For us, it was completely normal, but I think it was this habit that we had formed as foreigners, foreign kids who just didn't know if that was okay, what we had done was okay, what we had said was okay. This is a calculus that all American newcomers, European newcomers, newcomers to any nation go through.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here is Dennis in Newfoundland. That's Newfoundland, New Jersey, of course. Dennis, you're on WNYC with Dina Nayeri. Hi.

Dina Nayeri: Hey, Dennis.

Dennis: Hi, Brian. How are you doing? Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hello.

Dennis: I spoke to you last year, and that was in relation to what I was going to do in the past year. [unintelligible 00:12:16] enough, I'm in psychology class, and I had to write an essay on basically what happened to me. I'm not sure how many details I can give, but I guess Florida is where it happened where I was pretty much framed for murder. Pretty sure they didn't believe the story of the so-called witness, but they still had to take me downtown and interrogate me. It was a male and a female detective. My story was a little hard to believe, even to myself. Of course, I knew I was innocent, but [chuckles] there was the possibility that they suggested that I could have done it in my sleep. The murder happened on the property where I was staying.

Brian Lehrer: Like [unintelligible 00:13:20] sleep walking or something like that?

Dennis: Yes. I was about to walk out of the whole situation anyway. I was due to leave Florida as soon as I woke up, which was at 5:00 in the morning, but I woke up to police tape around the property, and the female interrogator detective came at me and said, "Would it surprise you to know that a witness saw you arguing with the deceased?" That wasn't exactly true. I did have a problem that really wasn't on the top of my list of things to argue about.

Brian Lehrer: Dennis, let me get you to the point of what the interrogation experience was like, and if you have any observations about who gets believed, to relate it to the title of the book.

Dennis: The course material that I just read, which was all about how interrogators should be well trained and be able to spot lying, even though the stories might be hard to believe. An innocent person has certain mannerisms, and a guilty person has certain mannerisms. These are all things that went through my mind. How should I act or should I act at all? [chuckles] It's a mind bender. Especially when the male interrogator is like, "I don't like your story, it just doesn't make sense." I have to say, it doesn't make sense to me. I had motive, I had opportunity, I had time, I had everything. No alibi. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: But you didn't do it, and eventually, you got cleared, so that's good. Dennis, thank you for sharing that shocking story. At least one part of that, Dina, goes to something in the book, which is when you write about how, to some degree, our believability comes down to the way we perform if or when we happen to be seated across from an interrogator, right?

Dina Nayeri: Yes. I think the most interesting part of that for me is when Dennis was talking about trying to behave innocent or guilty because they have these ideas of what is innocent behavior or guilty behavior, but those ideas are all completely flawed. People behave differently based on their fears, their traumas, their shame, the culture they're from. There's no innocent behavior and guilty behavior, but there's this technique that police especially use. One of the things that they do is, first, they form a theory, which seems to have happened in Dennis' case. They decide what has happened. Here's someone who was in the house, here's someone who has no motive, means, and opportunity, and no alibi, so this is a really good theory. What they do then is selectively try to find evidence in order to prove that in order to make that theory stick. They go chasing that theory.

They don't go looking across the board at all the possible things that might have happened, investigate them equally, unbiasly. They want to prove the thing that they already believe. This is confirmation bias and collecting data. Then, what they do in order to get the story they want or the confession they want or the information they want is they use this thing called the Reid Technique, which is the interrogations we've seen on television where they tell you they already know you did it, and they're allowed to lie to you in this process. Who knows if the person had actually heard Dennis arguing with the victim, but they can say, "We have this evidence or that evidence, things are very, very bad for you. We know you did it. That's a foregone conclusion. There's no getting away from that, but we can make things easier for you. We are here to help you." You have this one way out to make things better than they might be in this worst case scenario.

Then, they give you the way out, which is to confess. Then, they use that confession later in a way that the Reid Technique was not designed to have you do, which is they use the confession as the piece of evidence. When really, the Reid Technique is supposed to be used to get information to go and find the weapon, to go and find actual proof that this person knew something or this person did it. Instead they use it to extract a confession that comes out of fear, and then make that the evidence that they try to convict you on. It's scary for someone with autism issues. Exactly like you were talking about before.

Can you imagine withstanding that? Sitting in that chair when you believe that everyone is always telling the truth and exactly what they're thinking or being literal or can read your mind, no matter what you say, they know if you're lying.

If you have someone who naturally believes those things, you can't withstand two seasoned police officers who are playing this game that they know so very, very well.

Brian Lehrer: Because you observe people from the Innocence Project, which of course works to win exoneration for people who are actually innocent of crimes they've been convicted of, I'm curious if you found different techniques for ascertaining the truth on the part of people who've got that as their mission because they don't want to support people who are actually guilty. They want to find the people who are actually innocent and get them exonerated. That's their mission, is to free people who are wrongfully imprisoned. Do they approach ascertaining the truth differently from police interrogators or asylum interrogators who are more probably focused on trying to make sure they catch people who are guilty?

Dina Nayeri: I don't think they're looking to catch people who are guilty. I think they're looking to confirm their first suspicion or their first theory. Whereas the Innocence Project, these are lawyers who go looking for evidence of many different possibilities. I think you asked me about if there's another kind of technique police use to interrogate if they're looking for something else.

I don't know because the Innocence Project cases are ones where the ones that were passed to me are the ones that the Innocence Project was fairly certain that these people were innocent. So often the Reid Technique was used. It was used in exactly the way that I described. There wasn't really an honest effort to try to find all the different possibilities. It was data gathering, evidence gathering for that theory. This is one of the biggest issues with how they investigate that the Innocence Project talks about. They say, "Well, this isn't a logical way-- It's not good evidence gathering. It's not how lawyers would do it."

Brian Lehrer: There's a bit of a news hook here today, as it turns out, with the Biden administration reportedly considering reinstating the practice of detaining migrant families who cross the southern border. This is a policy many migrant advocates say leads to family separation because it encourages people to send their children to the United States without them. Based on all the reporting you did for your book, and you probably saw this breaking news in the last 12, 14 hours, do you think such restrictive practices leave migrants virtually little chance of proving themselves to be believable simply because of the power imbalance?

Dina Nayeri: Yes. There's so many different reasons for this. First of all, you're caught in a vulnerable position, separated from your family, not making rational choices, often you don't know when you're going to be faced with that first interrogator, that first person who will take your story, and a lot of times it's a border guard. You might say something that will damn you.

You might say something that will later be used to prove that your story is wrong, maybe something a little bit inconsistent, or maybe you'll say something that's-- Let's say you give a story about escaping some kind of persecution that really does fit within the definition of refugee but you also accidentally mention how poor you were at home. Well, this is a problem because then they'll just slap you with the label of economic migrant and say, "No, you're here to work, you're here for money, so we'll turn you away."

Then, there's all the language issues, the stresses, the pressures, and things that go into being unprepared, not having access to representation, and then having to say why you're here in an unexpected moment, and just not really knowing enough. One of the lawyers I talked to said the biggest indicator of whether someone gets their case accepted or not is whether they have representation early on so that they know what the right thing is to say. Imagine if you are detained in such a way separated from your family, confused, traumatized, wondering where your children are, or children even questioned separately, et cetera. So little chance. There's so little chance. This is why a lot of people who get through the refugee system, I suppose, who get asylum, often have resources. They come in ways where they can use their resources and they can have representation and come in other ways, which is terribly unfair. Again, it goes against our humanitarian duty as a country, what we agreed to in the Refugee Convention.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Speaking of wondering where your children are, another kind of that I think from Basil, or is it Basil, in Williamsburg, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Basil: Hi. It's Basil in Williamsburg. I want to quickly relate a story of when I was a manny, a male nanny, for a kid who's at a prep school. I went to pick him up with his autistic brother and he wasn't there. Within a half an hour, I was freaking out completely. Ran back to their apartment, started calling people. Finally, within a half an hour, I just call the police. I just called the police. I brought down a picture, which was actually a picture that I had ripped off a wall that was huge of the kid.

Within a minute, I was surrounded by four cops who rapid-fire asked me all these questions. Within five minutes, I honestly thought, did I have some-- I was so confused that I-- I just knew that, in hindsight, I would never withstand an hour of questioning, 6 hours of questioning, 12 hours of questioning, 24 hours. It was so obvious that there was a template that they have in place to ask these questions that easily ensnares you.

Thank God the kid, I won't mention his name, appeared. He had left from the front of the school to go play basketball in the park, which was what he wasn't supposed to do, but it's 15 years later and I'm still shaken by that [unintelligible 00:24:29], and [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: You saying the process of interrogation almost convinced you that you did something wrong that you didn't do?

Basil: Oh, absolutely. The worst part was that the brother, who is a neurotypical, ran off the elevator and the police immediately asked, "Is Basil a good nanny?" He said, "Mmh, sometimes," because he couldn't read the seriousness of the situation, and it just made everything so much worse. At any rate, I understand I just had to call, and I love your show. Bye.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Basil. Wow, Dina, that story exemplifies so many aspects of what you wrote about, right?

Dina Nayeri: Yes. The fact that he was convinced in such a short time that maybe he might have done it really gets right at one of the biggest flaws of their techniques, this rapid-fire questioning. Sometimes people think, "Maybe I did it." I definitely read cases in which people thought after many, many hours of questioning, they thought, "Well, you know what? First of all, I have no choice. Second of all, maybe they're right." It's human nature. I don't think I could withstand that kind of questioning. I think there's a lot of times where I have doubted myself when someone has been very, very aggressive with the thing they want me to believe, and this is the flaw.

Brian Lehrer: Dina Nayeri's new book is called Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough. Thanks so much for talking about it with us.

Dina Nayeri: Thank you, Brian.

 

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