This article appears in the April 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Two things about our immigration debate are both true. One, America is in danger of turning its back on the global order set by the Refugee Convention—the commitment by the nations of the world, in the wake of the Holocaust, to welcome victims of persecution. Two, America still loves a refugee.
A single individual is a protagonist, whose story of the horrors they fled back home, and fear of what they might experience in the future, inspire sympathy and identification. A large group of people traveling together? That’s an invasion. When a picture of a single asylum seeker goes viral, it’s from immigration doves horrified at the costs of hawkish policies. Images of “migrant caravans” form the backdrop for Republican campaign ads aimed at skittish swing voters.
But the world doesn’t produce refugees on a bespoke basis. It produces them at industrial scale, as collateral damage from global upheavals. Each individual leaves for their own reasons, but the aggregate masses denote crisis, in both the countries they leave and the countries they flee to. And today, global displacement has reached all-time highs, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.
So here we are, facing a presidential election, with a significant fraction of Americans—predominantly Republicans—citing immigration as the most important issue facing the country, and the administration of President Joe Biden anxious to do something it can point to as “shutting down” the U.S.-Mexico border.
While asylum remains under constant threat, humanitarian immigration has rebounded from its Trump-era trough.
U.S. asylum processing does face a very real collapse, forcing hundreds of thousands of people a month to wait years for a hearing before an immigration judge. That collapse is itself the result of a decade of choices to try to stop people from accessing the asylum system, rather than investing in its survival. Some presidents (generally Democrats) claim to be restricting access to asylum to protect the system’s integrity, while others (generally Republicans) have moved toward a general skepticism of humanitarian protection itself. But both this president and his predecessor not-so-secretly yearn for a return to the policy known as Title 42, in place from March 2020 to May 2023, which used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to keep people on U.S. soil from exercising their right to seek asylum.
While asylum remains under constant threat, humanitarian immigration has rebounded from its Trump-era trough. The Biden administration claims it’s on track to meet its ambitious goal of resettling 125,000 refugees from abroad by the end of fiscal year 2024, bringing refugee resettlement back from the brink of extinction and taking in meaningful numbers from our own hemisphere for arguably the first time. Large numbers of displaced Afghans and Ukrainians have been welcomed into communities around the country and granted temporary protection. As of November 2023, nearly 375,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela had been granted two-year grants to live in the U.S. and work legally, part of Biden’s “humanitarian parole” program that attracted 1.5 million applications in its first six months.
Conventional wisdom is that immigration is a losing issue for politicians; the Democratic mayor of New York declares his city full. But it turns out that America, as a whole, is still pretty good at welcoming newcomers. Some are parolees, some refugees, and some are asylum seekers who still lack formal legal status. All fall under the umbrella of humanitarian migration. Taken together, they’re a sizable force, broadly distributed throughout the country, demonized by Trump and his allies as invaders. But when they’re being welcomed, they’re welcomed as individuals, and that makes all the difference.
To square this circle, it’s important to understand that there are two different policy questions when it comes to humanitarian migration: how to select people to settle in the U.S., and how to support them.
The question of selection—who qualifies for protections and how they demonstrate it—is what politicians tend to debate. It implies a clear distinction between refugees screened before they arrive on U.S. soil, and asylum seekers whose presence on U.S. soil gives them a right to seek protection. And it turns on the sympathetic stories of the individuals, via a process that requires asylum seekers to articulate why they fear persecution if returned to their home countries. The system rests on the premise that the government can and will distinguish the truly sympathetic from the rest. Right now, with a swamped and underresourced bureaucracy, it simply can’t.
BORIS ROESSLER/PICTURE-ALLIANCE DPA/AP IMAGES
Afghan refugees arrive at a U.S. air base in Germany in 2021.
The second question is one of support: what obligations the U.S. has to take care of these people. Unlike other immigrants, people coming here for humanitarian reasons don’t have to have family ties, an existing or promised job, or a certain level of education. They are often starting from a baseline of zero, dropped into a strange community without housing, employment prospects, or language skills. Refugees are given an on-ramp: 90 days of federal support, routed through a local nonprofit that places new arrivals into communities and helps them find jobs, schools, and housing. The Biden administration has expanded the role of Americans in sponsoring refugees, piloting a version of Canada’s “private sponsorship” program that allows individuals and universities to participate.
Giving immigrants the ability to work legally in the U.S. soon after arrival, housing and language access if needed, and sponsors who can serve as both safety net and mentor is the difference between the major-city failures we see in national media and the successes, in communities from Maine to Iowa, that we don’t. The problem, of course, is that when only the failures are visible, the political backlash—led most recently by Donald Trump, who did more than any other president to dismantle the support system that’s accounted for the successes—threatens to destroy the whole thing.
IN LATE 2023, DURING ILL-FATED SENATE NEGOTIATIONS over a bill that would create a new expulsion authority in exchange for supplying military aid to Ukraine, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) remarked that “50 years from now, no one is going to remember whether we changed asylum policy. They will remember whether we let Putin take another country by force in a ground war in Europe.” Schatz didn’t notice the irony: Part of the postwar international order that made ground wars in Europe unthinkable was the right to asylum, as enshrined in the Refugee Convention, first written in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust.
In 1968, the United States signed on to the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, committing to the principle of “non-refoulement”: that no one should be returned to a country in which they would be persecuted. It took until the Refugee Act of 1980 to formalize the processes by which the U.S. would adhere to that commitment, both for resettling refugees in the United States and for processing asylum claims made by people who’d already arrived.
An asylum claim could take the form of a written application filed within a year of arrival in the U.S., or a claim made before an immigration judge in deportation proceedings. Like refugees, would-be asylees had to demonstrate persecution on behalf of their race, nationality, religion, political opinion, or membership in a “particular social group”; like refugees, they are eligible to apply for green cards (and, subsequently, citizenship) a year after their asylum application is approved.
Over time, laws and regulations barred people from getting asylum for various reasons, such as having committed particular crimes in the U.S. Importantly, though, entering the U.S. illegally did not disqualify someone from an asylum claim. The Immigration and Nationality Act makes it clear that asylum is open to anyone who arrives in the U.S., “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.” The 1996 immigration law signed by Bill Clinton created an “expedited removal” process for people caught entering the U.S. without legal status, which added an additional step for asylum seekers: They now had to pass a screening interview to demonstrate they had a “credible fear” of persecution before being allowed to make a case before an immigration judge. But once they cleared that hurdle, asylum was still available.
When the 1996 bill was debated, the stereotypical asylum seeker politicians envisioned was someone coming into JFK with a plane ticket but no visa. It wasn’t a border issue. Most people, including most politicians, assume that anyone crossing into the U.S. from Mexico without papers is an economic migrant rather than a refugee. In other words, only people coming from outside the Western Hemisphere are truly victims of persecution; people coming northward by land, instead of westward by air, are mere opportunists.
Collectively labeling regions’ worth of people as economic migrants, of course, is ostensibly what the asylum process, with its individual adjudication, is supposed to prevent. But it’s been an uphill battle. The international commitment to non-refoulement may have its roots in the reaction to the Holocaust, but U.S. refugee and asylum policy was shaped just as much by the pressures and prejudices of the Cold War.
Border enforcement and infrastructure wasn’t built to accommodate people seeking humanitarian protection, much less to adjudicate their claims.
The original definition of a refugee under U.S. law, in the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, was a victim of persecution who came either from the Middle East or from “any Communist or Communist-dominated country or area.” Victims of repressive right-wing governments backed by the U.S. in the name of anti-Communism need not apply.
The Refugee Act was supposed to fix that, by enshrining the Refugee Convention’s grounds of persecution—including persecution based on “political opinion”—regardless of the government doing the persecuting. But implementation of the 1980 law was left to the Reagan administration, which was hardly inclined to look favorably on people who claimed they’d been persecuted by America’s allies. Even after the end of the Cold War, presidents’ annual refugee resettlement targets all but overlooked Central and South America and the Caribbean in favor of the Eastern Hemisphere. And when people took it on themselves to seek shelter in the United States, the U.S. was prone to send them back.
The result is vividly chronicled in New Yorker writer Jonathan Blitzer’s new book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, which is in large part a history of the relationship between the United States, El Salvador, and the immigrants caught in between. Throughout the 1980s, Salvadoran asylum seekers fleeing the U.S.-backed junta were awarded asylum at the astoundingly low rate of 3 percent. Guatemalans fleeing ethnic cleansing and slaughter had a 1 percent success rate. (Plenty of people fled Communist Cuba for the U.S., too, but the U.S. gave them a separate preferential path to green cards rather than forcing them to seek asylum.)
The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, which eventually brought religious border activists in the Southwestern U.S. under federal prosecution, was in Blitzer’s telling a response to the impossible situation faced by Salvadoran dissidents in the U.S. They knew death faced them if they were deported, but they knew deportation would be the result of filing for asylum. Activists counseled Salvadorans to remain in the shadows rather than bringing themselves to the attention of the authorities. The Sanctuary Movement, meanwhile, knew that Immigration and Naturalization Service agents wouldn’t invade churches, and sheltered vulnerable Salvadorans there.
Salvadorans had a choice about whether to apply for asylum because most unauthorized border-crossers were able to enter the U.S. without being caught by the Border Patrol. In 1984, 2,000 Border Patrol agents were responsible for patrolling the entire 3,000-plus miles of land and river between the U.S. and Mexico. Border enforcement was stepped up by Presidents George H.W. Bush (under Attorney General William Barr) and Bill Clinton, leading to more than 9,000 Border Patrol agents by 2001.When the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11, border enforcement was split from the rest of the immigration bureaucracy, eventually becoming a separate agency (Customs and Border Protection) whose budget Congress was happy to increase. By 2013, the Border Patrol workforce grew to over 20,000, and the likelihood of apprehension grew with it.
IT’S TEMPTING TO SAY THAT ASYLUM HAS BEEN SWALLOWED by the U.S.-Mexico border. It may be true that record numbers of crossings, with most of those apprehended released with far-off court dates, have triggered Americans’ fears and made them less likely to see the issue as one of a fundamental humanitarian commitment. But it’s arguably truer the other way around: Asylum swallowed border enforcement and infrastructure, which wasn’t built to accommodate people seeking humanitarian protection, much less to adjudicate their claims.
Unauthorized migration from Mexico collapsed during the Great Recession, and never recovered. In its place, starting during Barack Obama’s second term, was unauthorized migration from the three “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. They couldn’t simply be bused back to Mexico once caught by Border Patrol, because they weren’t Mexican. Court rulings and space constraints made it impossible to keep more than a few families in immigration detention. And many of them couldn’t be quickly deported, because they were asking for asylum. Border infrastructure, which had been built for swift and certain returns, was incapable of handling these new people and their new needs.
“Swift and certain” is difficult enough in asylum proceedings, which are immensely dependent on each individual case. Because few migrants understand asylum, sifting out persecution from other horrible things a person has experienced requires extensive preparation and careful questioning (which is one reason why judges prefer that asylum seekers have lawyers to help them present their cases). Many Northern Triangle asylum seekers had fled gang violence in their home countries, forcing adjudicators to consider whether they were being persecuted based on a Refugee Convention–protected identity, and whether their governments were unwilling or unable to protect them. Swift and certain outcomes to these questions would require massive investment from the federal government: places to house and care for asylees, asylum officers to screen their cases, and immigration judges to hear the final claims.
DENNIS COOK/AP PHOTO
Ronald Reagan implemented the Refugee Act of 1980 in a way shaped by the pressures and prejudices of the Cold War.
Instead, over and over again for a decade, the federal government attempted to stop the growth of the asylum backlog by trying to deter people from coming at all. Much-hyped crackdowns were put in place that subjected asylum seekers to extra screenings, worse conditions, or faster deportations. But since these required resources, the crackdowns only ever applied to some of the people coming in. Border numbers would drop for a few months as people waited to see how the new policies would shake out. Then, as some people succeeded in getting through and sent back word, numbers rose again.
This pattern repeated itself, under three presidents, right up to the 2023 end of Title 42. Biden administration officials publicized harsher penalties for deportation under immigration law compared to expulsion under Title 42, and unveiled a new regulation that theoretically subjects most border-crossers to the higher screening standard applied to “withholding of removal” cases in order to qualify for asylum. Nearly everyone had assumed there would be a surge of pent-up demand after Title 42 ended, but due to the policy change, fewer people crossed into the U.S. than expected at first. However, the surge was merely delayed until it was clear that over half of asylees passed the higher screening standard—and because the government didn’t have nearly enough asylum officers to conduct more intensive screenings, most people were being given court dates without being screened at all.
The end of Title 42 also made clear that the population of border-crossers had transformed yet again. They weren’t just coming from one country, or even three. They were coming from Venezuela and Haiti, but also India and China and Cameroon. They didn’t necessarily know anyone in the U.S. who could house or support them until they could work legally. For most, that couldn’t happen until at least six months after filing an asylum application, which given the court backlog and the scarcity of lawyers was a time-consuming endeavor. They didn’t always have a U.S. destination in mind; when asked for an address to send court notices to, some migrants provided a social services office in New York City.
Given the housing crunch in many American cities, and the efforts of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to bus people to “sanctuary cities” after federal agents released them from custody, the ensuing crisis, with its overloaded shelters and mayoral panics, might seem inevitable.
It wasn’t.
ABBOTT’S STUNTS HAVE CREATED A FALSE IMPRESSION that everyone agrees that new arrivals are a burden. But the reality has always been that what local governments are really afraid of is having too many people come in without the resources to support them, and help them support themselves. When that gap is closed, surprising champions step up.
As the first Abbott bus pulled into Philadelphia in December 2022, volunteers were ready to meet new arrivals at the drop-off point, with clothes, information about shelters and legal services, and even bus passes. California cities have taken in large numbers of new arrivals without high-profile complaint; Denver has started to buckle under the strain, but only after months of state and local efforts to provide people with shelter and help them find places to settle.
All of that happened with no federal coordination and little financial support. The Biden administration has pioneered the use of FEMA grants to places experiencing an influx of asylum seekers, but most local and state governments are struggling to apply for aid and get timely reimbursements. Yet volunteers and their cities and states stepped into the breach, all while many of these same cities were already taking in temporary parolees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, and refugees from around the world.
The ten national nonprofit agencies with which the feds partner for refugee resettlement all have their roots in church outreach, immigrant mutual aid, or in the case of HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, both. In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union began to collapse, enormous numbers of Soviet Jews were finally able to leave the country, creating a refugee crisis in Eastern Europe just as Holocaust survivors had 40 years before. Many wished to go to the United States, but major U.S. cities were seriously concerned about their ability to accommodate so many poor Jews. The government asked HIAS, which had gotten its start helping the Jewish refugees of the early 20th century, to identify people and congregations outside the obvious hubs that might be willing to take in some refugees.
In February 1990, a HIAS representative visited a congregation in West Lafayette, Indiana, to enlist them in the effort. Lev Golinkin, whose memoir A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka recounts his family’s flight from the Soviet Union and their resettlement in West Lafayette, calls Linda Forman, an architect who stepped in to coordinate the effort, his “American mother.” In the Golinkins’ first year, Forman spent more time with her refugee charges than her own family, and took care of everything from introducing them to American holidays to teaching Lev’s father and older sister to drive.
Golinkin’s memoir, a warts-and-all reflection on the Soviet Jewish refugee crisis, makes clear that resettlement is often hard, both for refugees and for those welcoming them, but that it’s an American tradition for a reason. The U.S. has a long tradition of the descendants of past refugees—who, like most descendants of immigrants, have fully assimilated to the U.S. for better or worse—helping their more-recently-arrived peers. Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky analyzed millions of records from the early-20th-century era of mass migration for their book Streets of Gold. They found that people fleeing war and oppression were more likely than other immigrants to learn English, perhaps because they came to the U.S. with the intention of putting down roots instead of returning home once they’d earned enough money.
The U.S. has never resettled more than 7,500 refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean in a fiscal year; it’s on pace to hit that mark in March.
Welcoming refugees has become in some places a gateway to economic revitalization. Congressional Budget Office forecasts from February 2024 attribute the faster-than-expected recovery of the U.S. economy since the COVID-19 pandemic to the rebound in immigration levels over the past couple of years, much of it under the auspices of humanitarian immigration, including refugees. Around the same time as the CBO report, the Department of Health and Human Services finally released a report on the net fiscal impact of refugees and asylees, after a failed attempt by the Trump administration to quash evidence of benefits and count only costs. The report revealed that refugees and asylees contributed more to government coffers than they took out, with state and local governments reaping the biggest benefit. As an example, Buffalo, New York, reversed decades of population decline in part by becoming a refugee hub.
Elsewhere, welcoming has become a matter of local culture, with the best example the now deep-red state of Iowa. When the U.S. stepped up resettlement of Southeast Asian “boat people” fleeing the Vietnam War—part of its ad hoc Cold War approach to refugee resettlement—President Gerald Ford offered governors $500 a head to take in refugees. Iowa’s Republican governor, Robert Ray, committed to take in thousands; “I didn’t think we could just sit here idly and say, ‘Let those people die,’” Ray later said.
At the time, Cold War hawks were some of the biggest supporters of refugee resettlement. When all refugees were anti-Communists, anti-Communists had plenty of reasons to be pro-refugee. But the use of federal dollars for resettlement, enshrined with the creation of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the 1980 Refugee Act, gave some Republicans in Congress pause. Ray, and other Republican state and local politicians, put his conservative opposition to government redistribution aside and accepted the federal aid, and Iowa became a pro-refugee state. In 1996, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) joined with Ted Kennedy to prevent Congress from capping the number of refugees the president could resettle in a given year at 50,000.
The politics of the issue were scrambled: Bill Clinton lost re-election as governor of Arkansas in part due to a backlash against Cuban refugees, and carried that memory into a hawkish presidency. It took until the Obama administration for immigration to become straightforwardly partisan, with hawks winning the day in the Republican Party and doves winning among Democrats. After 9/11, the Cold War mentality that led to dissidents from enemy regimes being celebrated as heroes gave way to the “clash of civilizations” mentality of the war on terror and the Trump era, in which coming from a “s***hole country,” as Donald Trump infamously put it, makes someone more suspect rather than less.
The new politics crystallized during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. The United States resettled 100,000 refugees in fiscal year 2016, in part because of Syrians. As this ramped up, then-candidate Donald Trump made a point of arguing for all of them to be rejected, leading red-state governors (led by Indiana’s chief executive and eventual vice president Mike Pence) to try to shut Syrians out of their states.
Trump’s rhetoric has always implied that migrants are “sent” by their governments deliberately, exporting undesirables to America. In the case of Syrians, he raised the specter of a “Trojan horse” attack, a line of reasoning his son Don Jr. extended in 2016 in a tweet comparing terrorist refugees to one poisoned Skittle in a handful of candy. Trump was especially concerned about “young, strong men” fleeing Syria instead of staying to “fight their own war”—implying that refugees were either cowards or covert government agents.
That logic, which Trump expanded to refugees around the world as president, is a rejection of the Refugee Convention itself, which at its heart acknowledges that some people are choosing not between fight and flight but between life and death. Long before Trump turned his efforts toward restrictive border policies, his administration was slashing refugee admissions and the budgets of nonprofits contracted to resettle refugees. By the end of Trump’s term, refugee resettlement in the U.S. had been almost fully dismantled.
GREGORY BULL/AP PHOTO
A crudely fashioned migrant shelter near the Arizona border
PRESIDENT BIDEN HASN’T BEEN AS AGGRESSIVE in rebuilding the refugee program as his campaign suggested he would be; it was never realistic to go from admitting 12,000 people in 2020 to 100,000 in 2021. But the administration claims that it will, in fact, resettle 125,000 refugees by the end of September 2024. As of the end of February, over 40,000 refugees had arrived in the United States; since refugee admissions usually accelerate over the course of the fiscal year (in fiscal year 2023, 80 percent of refugees arrived after February), it’s not out of the question.
Biden’s team worked to rebuild infrastructure and bolster the national organizations with private sponsorship, tapping into Americans’ long-standing interest in welcoming refugees. When Texas and other Republican-led states sued to stop one humanitarian parole program, American sponsors (and would-be sponsors) intervened to defend it. Some were relatives or in-laws of their parolees, but others were simply committed volunteers who wanted to make America welcoming again.
If the refugee goal is reached, it will be in large part because of Latin American refugees, whom the administration is finally turning its attention to. The U.S. has never resettled more than 7,500 refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean in a fiscal year; it’s on pace to hit that mark in March. The U.S. is finally seeing refugees in this hemisphere because it’s finally looking for them. The Biden administration has opened a handful of Safe Mobility Offices throughout the hemisphere, at which people can find out whether they’re eligible for immigration status in the U.S.; so far, it’s been working mostly to identify and screen refugees. The fact that so many bona fide refugees are being identified in this hemisphere is powerful evidence that the asylum seekers can’t all be written off as “economic migrants.”
Even more significant, quantitatively, are the people to whom this administration has given “humanitarian parole,” which is only valid for a certain amount of time, but can be reauthorized. These programs aren’t designed for refugees, per se—you don’t have to show evidence of persecution to qualify—but the overwhelming majority of Biden’s parolees are war refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, and the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans from the CHNV program, all of whom come from failed and/or repressive states. Because parole doesn’t itself give you access to permanent status, applying for asylum once here, or hoping for another form of temporary protection, is the most likely way for any of these people to stay.
The parolees, too, are settling largely without incident, and with support. Congress authorized Afghan and Ukrainian evacuees to receive refugee benefits for their first year in the U.S. Through the Uniting for Ukraine and CHNV programs, American sponsors have to promise to support the parolees if they can’t find work in the United States.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has acknowledged that the 30,000 Ukrainians his city has welcomed haven’t put meaningful strain on local government—“No one has even noticed,” he told The Atlantic—and he attributed this to the presence of support. Even Afghan refugees, who as non-European Muslims could face “Trojan horse” paranoia, have received support from local churches and veterans’ groups.
It’s not perfect. Iowa, in particular, struggled with Afghan resettlement in 2021, with families complaining of subpar housing and caseworkers they couldn’t reach in emergencies. But instead of rejecting future refugees, the state committed to take on Ukrainians as well. In Maine, a housing crunch in Portland has led refugees to settle in smaller towns in the center of the state; but instead of complaining of limited capacity, Maine is set to take in twice as many refugees in 2024 as it did last year.
You can tell a story about this that is reassuring: Politicians’ hyperventilation hasn’t gotten in the way of American welcoming. But unfortunately, this welcoming doesn’t come close to meeting the scope of the problem. Resettlement is resource-intensive, especially when asylum seekers, who choose where they want to live, go to places with high housing costs. And as the last eight years have proven, it’s much easier to shut down than to build up again. More importantly, if the United States isn’t forcefully arguing for humanitarian migration, it can’t discourage other countries from shutting their own borders, and turning their backs on refugees and asylum seekers alike.
The global displacement crisis is likely to get worse. The future portends more “climate migration,” a term that makes less sense as a discrete phenomenon than as a way to underscore that climate change will continue to force ever more people to flee or die. Not everyone displaced by climate change will fit existing refugee definitions, but some of them truly will. Which is to say that existing laws won’t solve the problem on their own, but prevent the U.S. or any other country from preemptively declaring itself full.
The U.S. isn’t full. Its people are demonstrating every day that they can make more room; that they can support newcomers and therefore lead them to better support themselves. America still loves a refugee. It’s just not clear whether the American government is up to the task.
