In 1991, there were 56,000 recently filed asylum applications; understaffed INS offices completed 16,000 of them. In 1992, there were 103,000 additional applications, only 21,000 of which were completed. “By the 1990s,” one historian later wrote of the Guatemalans, “the earlier stream of ‘war refugees’ gave way to a chain of migration of ‘economic refugees’ drawing on family and village ties.”
