To meet the nexus requirement, the persecutor’s motivation need not be solely based on a protected ground, recognizing that the persecutor may have various or “mixed” motives. With respect to asylum applications filed before 11 May 2005, the applicant must make a reasonable showing that the persecutor’s action was motivated, at least in part, by a protected ground in order to be eligible for asylum. For applications filed on or after 11 May 2005, § 101(a)(3) of the REAL ID Act provides that an applicant must establish that “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant.”87 The persecutor’s motivation may be established by direct or circumstantial evidence.88 The following section discusses various types of evidence that may emerge in the context of a statelessness-based asylum claim to demonstrate persecutorial motive. 1. Direct Evidence Direct evidence of a persecutor’s motivation may be testimony as to statements made by the persecutor to the victim or by the victim to persecutor.89 Direct evidence may also include statutory wording or legislative history or even the wording of a judicial judgment. In a claim turning on statelessness, a nationality law (or interpretation thereof) that is facially discriminatory based on a protected ground may be sufficient to demonstrate the nexus. 2. Circumstantial Evidence In the absence of direct evidence of a persecutor’s motivation, circumstantial evidence can also prove motivation.90 Circumstantial evidence is particularly important given that persecutors do not always announce or clearly articulate their motivations in harming applicants. Examples of circumstantial evidence include country of origin information; severe or disproportionate punishment for violations of laws, or other evidence that the persecutor generally regards those who resist as political enemies;91 or closeness in time between a specific event and the persecutory act.92 Circumstantial evidence can be critical to proving asylum cases involving statelessness where the decision to deny nationality to certain populations, or to denationalize them, may be facially neutral, but in practice apply only to specific populations based on personal attributes or imputed political opinions. This may be particularly true absent officials’ direct statements to this issue. For example, the Bihari were a stateless minority in Bangladesh denied citizenship upon independence of the nation in 1971 for the perceived support of West Pakistan during the war for independence. After a nationwide movement led by the Bihari and their allies, in 2008, the Bangladeshi election commission began to register the Bihari as citizens.93 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i) (emphasis added); see also Parussimova v. Mukasey, 555 F.3d 734, 741 (9th Cir. 2009) (“[A] motive is a ‘central reason’ if the persecutor would not have harmed the applicant if such motive did not exist. Likewise, a motive is a ‘central reason’ if that motive, standing alone, would have led the persecutor to harm the applicant. … [P]ersecution may be caused by more than one central reason, and an asylum applicant need not prove which reason was dominant. Nevertheless, to demonstrate that a protected ground was ‘at least one central reason’ for persecution, an applicant must prove that such ground was a cause of the persecutors’ acts.”). 88 See INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 483 (1992). 89 See, e.g., Kebede v. Ashcroft, 366 F.3d 808, 812 (9th Cir. 2004). 90 Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. at 483. 91 See, e.g., Rodriguez-Roman v. INS, 98 F.3d 416 (9th Cir. 1996) (severe punishment for illegal departure). 92 See, e.g., Boer-Sedano v. Gonzales, 418 F.3d 1082, 1089 (9th Cir. 2005). 93 See Khalid Hussain, The End of Bihari Statelessness, 32 FORCED MIGRATION REV. 30 (Apr. 2009), available at www.fmreview.org/statelessness. 87 19