Refugees and Asylum

The United Nations has declared asylum to be an inalienable human right, and most countries offer it. The principle is that nations should safeguard people who face persecution or danger when their own countries can’t or won’t protect them. There have long been debates over who deserves sanctuary, but today the discord goes deeper. In the wake of violence in the Middle East and Afghanistan and parts of Africa and Central America, the number of people seeking asylum has risen to record levels. While the bulk of them are hosted by neighboring countries, a crackdown on refugees in the U.S. and Europe is raising questions about whether support for the concept of asylum can survive.

The number of total refugees has steadily increased since 2012, to 19.9 million by mid-2018, fueling antipathy toward outsiders in some host countries. Of the 1.9 million new applicants for refugee status in 2017, the U.S. had the largest number — 332,000, with 43 percent coming from Central America, where gang violence has become widespread. U.S. President Donald Trump has coupled his bid to clamp down on immigration with an effort to fundamentally reshape the nation’s asylum system. He barred entry to the citizens of six countries, five of which are mostly Muslim, and slashed the number of refugees that can be admitted to the U.S. to 30,000, an historic low. His administration ruled out asylum for people fleeing domestic and gang violence. It also excluded those who illegally crossed the U.S. frontier with Mexico, although a federal judge Nov. 29 temporarily halted enforcement of that policy. Under Trump, the U.S. began detaining everyone caught unlawfully crossing the border, including those seeking refugee status. Parents were separated from their children, prompting a public outcry that led Trump to backtrack. In October, Trump threatened to cut off foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in retaliation for a so-called caravan of migrants traveling through Mexico toward the U.S. In the European Union, resentment over the influx of refugees led leaders to consider creating holding centers, probably in Africa, to handle asylum seekers. Officials discouraged groups from rescuing such people in the Mediterranean Sea. Hungary, led by populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, made it a crime to help migrants seek asylum.