Seeking Asylum in the U.S.
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Your donation today supports transparent, fair, and in-depth reporting. Join us on the Plus side today at plus.npr.org. Thank you. The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame with conquering limbs astride from land to land. Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch.

This poem, written in 1883, is etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. He says he's planning to swim across the Rio Grande and ask for asylum.

You want to secure the border, there's three things you need to do. Number one, you need to change the asylum laws. Mayor Adams says supporting asylum seekers is putting New York City into a financial crisis. This issue will destroy New York City. They're welcome if they come legally. They're not welcome if they're illegal. Earlier today, President Biden signed an executive order that shuts down asylum claims once they reach a certain level.

Our country is full. And when he's back in the White House, President-elect Trump has promised to immediately crack down. Can't take you anymore. I'm sorry. Can't happen. So turn around. In 2023, 1.6 million immigrants arrived in the U.S. That same year, more than 450,000 people filed for asylum, the highest number on record.

Put very simply, and we'll get into this more later, asylum seekers are fleeing persecution in their home countries and asking to be allowed to stay in the U.S.,

To request asylum, you first have to be inside the U.S. And many of the people seeking asylum now cross into the U.S. via the border with Mexico, which is part of what puts asylum at the center of immigration policy debates. While Americans don't all agree on what the solutions are to immigration, the majority say that the number of people seeking to enter at the southern border is a problem and that the government is doing a bad job of addressing it.

But it is legal to seek asylum. And the U.S. has long professed that it's a country where people can come to do that. That's the promise etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. It's an idea that remains at the heart of many of the debates about immigration today. Debates that are and have long been ultimately about when, why, and to whom we open our doors.

It was a heartbreaking thing to see those refugees when they came into West Germany. He tried to come to this country in the hope of a better future. I left Vietnam on May 12, 1979 on a very small boat. And they didn't have anything to eat. They were sick. We got nothing left except the clothes we were wearing on our body.

God willing, the judge gives us the opportunity on that day to obtain asylum in this great country.

I'm Randa Abdelfattah. And I'm Ramteen Arablui. Coming up, the story of how the U.S. asylum system was forged in response to moments of crisis and where it left gaps, from Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust to Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers during the Cold War to the precarious system of today. Hi, this is Emil Hartz from Denver, and you're listening to ThruLight from NPR.

I wanted to also generally thank you. You have changed my life for the better. Before we get into the history of the asylum system, we first need to understand more about what asylum is and how it's different from other immigration pathways to the U.S. Bear with us as we go through this. It's all going to pay off later.

So first things first, what defines an asylum seeker? A well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. These criteria come from the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention,

And like the name suggests, refugees and asylum seekers have to meet the same standards. While the definition is the same, I would argue it's harder to meet the definition of an asylee than meet the definition of a refugee. So, refugees and asylum seekers, same criteria, but two parallel tracks in our immigration system.

Refugees start their process outside the U.S., maybe at a U.S. embassy or a refugee camp. And they stay outside the U.S. until they're approved for resettlement. This is the path my family took to come to the U.S. from Iran.

For asylum seekers, the process looks different. Their journey through the system begins after they've already arrived in the U.S., or at what's called a port of entry. It could be an airport like JFK or Dulles. This is Maria Cristina Garcia. She's a professor of history at Cornell University who studies immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. ♪

or it could be another port of entry like the U.S.-Mexico border or the U.S.-Canada border. Under a temporary Biden administration regulation, asylum seekers have to enter the U.S. lawfully to be eligible for asylum. One of the only ways you can do that today is by scheduling an appointment at a port of entry through an app called CBP1. That's an important point because appointments are very limited.

On any given day, tens of thousands of people try for around 1,500 spots. Once the asylum seeker manages to get an appointment, an official at the port of entry will interview them to determine if they have a credible fear of persecution if they were returned to their home country. And the burden of proof for this is on the asylum seeker.

Which isn't always easy. Oftentimes, when you're fleeing for your life, you don't have time to pick up the supporting documentation that you need that might help to make a successful case for asylum. Oftentimes, you don't even have proof of identity. And that kind of thing can count against you. There's a belief that the person who is requesting asylum intends to deceive and will say just about anything in order to enter the United States.

Those who aren't granted asylum after their interview might be scheduled to have a hearing in immigration court, where they can further plead their case. But getting in front of a judge is easier said than done. There's a huge backlog. It can be as long as three years before you have your first hearing. Currently, the backlog in U.S. immigration courts is over 3.7 million cases, 1.6 million of which are pending asylum cases.

And there are only around 800 immigration judges in the U.S. handling the massive backlog. Refugees and asylees and border security, they're all interlocking. This is Ruth Wassam. She spent nearly three decades working at the Congressional Research Service, researching immigration policy. And that complexity is very difficult to maneuver if you're a potential immigrant or a potential refugee.

And if you're a policymaker, trying to come up with reasonable policies to deal with the 21st century. While asylum seekers wait, they're in legal limbo. Some are held in detention as they wait for their case to be decided, but most are released into the U.S. If they don't get a decision on their case in 150 days, which is basically impossible given the backlog, they become eligible for work authorization.

But until their case is decided, they're generally not eligible for federal benefits. If this all seems super complicated, it's because it is. Our entire immigration system is based on laws second only to the tax code in the volume of law, the complexity of which gets down to the very detailed particulars of who's eligible and who isn't.

Refugees and asylees were always an afterthought in that system. So why do we have this system? Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. We're back at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, before any sort of asylum system even existed.

It was a period of massive immigration. People from China, Germany, Ireland, and England who were leaving behind famines and job shortages. People fleeing the Balkan Wars, Russians fleeing the Russian Revolution, and Jewish people fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms.

Today, we might call some of these people asylum seekers or refugees. But back then, the U.S. didn't have those legal categories. Many of these immigrants came through Ellis Island in New York City or Angel Island off San Francisco. They often settled nearby, creating new ethnic enclaves and immigrant neighborhoods. And Congress took notice.

Congress began to pass ever more draconian laws to restrict immigration from different parts of the world. And the laws reflected who they were most concerned about at a particular moment in time.

They reflected growing nativist sentiments in the U.S. So with every passing decade, different populations were targeted for control. So first it was the Chinese, but then it was other Asian populations. Political radicals, Southern and Eastern Europeans, Mormons and homosexuals. Until it all culminated in one bill, the Johnson-Reed Act, also known as the Immigration Act of 1924.

The bill would limit immigration by setting strict quotas for each country.

They went back to the census data and they allocated annual admissions of immigrants based on the percent of the U.S. population in 1890 that was living here. So that we didn't get so many Italians, didn't get so many Serbians, didn't get so many people from Russia. People who, some of whom today would be considered white American, but at that time... They weren't then.

This bill has already done more than anything I know of to bring about discord among our resident aliens. Emmanuel Seller was one of the few people in Congress to speak out against this bill. The Italian is told he's not wanted. The polls confronted with the stigma of inferiority. Fortunate is the one whose cradle was rocked in Germany or England.

It was his first year as a representative from New York. And I'm not one to talk about great men in terms of his history as being explained by great men. But I am someone to talk about perseverance and people that do seize the moment.

Emmanuel Sellers was one of that. Emmanuel Sellers was the grandson of immigrants. He was a German Jew, started out as a young lawyer. He had built a law practice around helping immigrants who had broken the law and were under the threat of deportation. He thought the bill would create resentment towards the United States and other parts of the world because of how restrictive it was towards people from Asia or Eastern Europe.

Thanks to the ill-considered and improvident Johnson Bill. And so race is set against race, class against class. Despite Emanuel Seller's protests, the 1924 Immigration Act passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming majorities. It was signed into law in May 1924. And for the next several decades, it would limit immigration by imposing strict quotas,

The highest quota was the 65,000 spots given to Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But more than three dozen countries, from Ethiopia to Iraq, were given just 100 spots each. And immigration from Asia was effectively banned. What would you say is the driving kind of social force that...

culminates in such a, as you say, draconian measure against immigration. Well, there was a concern that the numbers were just too large, you know, that millions of people were coming in during a very short period of time

And they wondered what the influx of so many people in a short period of time would mean for democratic institutions, would mean for the cultural makeup of the United States, what it would mean for the prosperity of the country. So it's economic concerns, but it's also cultural and political concerns that are driving the passage of these draconian immigration laws in the first decades of the 20th century.

So these laws pass, and then the 1924 Act, you know, really takes it to an even more severe level. One of the targets in this early 20th century period is specifically Eastern European Jews. And as we move into the post-World War I period and the pre-World War II period, can you describe—

What is happening around that community in particular when it comes to the attempted immigration to the U.S.? As war expands across Europe in the 1930s and before the U.S. enters the Second World War, there are many opportunities to accommodate Jewish refugees who are fleeing Europe.

Within the law, even though the quotas are quite small, there are still opportunities, and we forfeit that opportunity.

During the 1930s and into the 1940s, the quotas from Europe remain unfilled. Some immigration historians have posited that, you know, there's a concern with sponsoring spies and saboteurs that might hurt the United States. And it's those national security concerns that are dictating U.S. policy. People at the highest levels of government, including President Franklin Roosevelt, say

supported extra scrutiny and restrictions on refugees from World War II, particularly Jewish refugees. Others have made a convincing argument that it's really anti-Semitism that is shaping who we allow in and in what numbers. I mean, the Nazis were making their intentions clear throughout the 30s. But once the war breaks out, I mean, now they were implementing these policies explicitly,

And you had Roosevelt in office in the U.S., someone who was arguably maybe the most progressive president of the 20th century. You're absolutely right. And he fails to exercise any political will.

When you look at the arc of refugee history in the United States, you see that at distinct moments, there are either presidents or members of Congress who feel that we have a humanitarian obligation to assist a particular population. And they...

use all the methods at their disposal. They exercise political will to make it happen. Even though the public opinion polls are telling them that Americans are ambivalent or outright opposed to the admission of more people, they still find a way to make it happen because they think it's the right thing to do. But clearly at this moment, there is no political will.

After World War II ends and the, you know, and the horrors of the Holocaust become plain for everyone to see, how does that impact what happens to the refugee system in the U.S.?

You would think that as Americans become more and more aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, that there would have been overwhelming support to bend, if not break, immigration laws to accommodate the survivors of the Holocaust and survivors of the European conflict and the conflict in Asia. But there really isn't. The first piece of legislation to pass to accommodate displaced persons passes in 1948.

It takes three years for Congress to pass any legislation to accommodate displaced people from the European conflict. And even then, you know, this law only focuses on Europe. There is no attempt to even recognize that there are people in need in Asia. So the Displaced Persons Act focuses largely on accommodating displaced Europeans and

and accommodating ethnic Germans in particular. In fact, the number of Jewish refugees who were accommodated initially through the Displaced Persons Act is quite small. If the Congress were still in session, I would return this bill without my approval and urge that a fairer, more humane bill be passed. This is the statement that President Harry S. Truman put out after he signed the 1948 Displaced Persons Act into law.

He signs it reluctantly, but he feels that it's a law that does not exemplify American values. The bill discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith. This brutal fact cannot be obscured by the maze of technicalities in the bill. What we see happening are different laws that are passed on an ad hoc basis to deal with particular emergencies. So the Displaced Persons Act is

is an attempt to respond to the crisis in Europe. But then other laws are passed to accommodate particular groups of people. So there's the War Brides Act, for example, to bring in the European and Asian spouses and family members of American service personnel because we want to make sure that they're happy. We want to recognize their service and we want to make sure that their families remain intact. This was passed in the wake of World War II.

and other laws followed specific to other groups. So you're basically getting the beginnings of a refugee system that's kind of a hodgepodge of loopholes, is what it sounds like, right? It's like, oh, okay, we need to make space for war brides, as you said. We need to make space for European Jews. So we're making these sort of accommodations, but it doesn't seem like at this point there's a sort of...

philosophy around refugees really being articulated through the system. It seems like it's sort of a, let's react to the latest sort of crisis that's arisen. You're right. It's not really until the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that these quotas are completely overhauled and we get a very, very different immigration system. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act.

If something about that name sounds familiar, that's because it is. Throughout all these years as a member of Congress, I fought for change. I do not want to wait another 40 years. Emmanuel Seller, who spoke out in 1924 against immigration quotas, is still in Congress. And he's still mad about those quotas.

Almost every Congress that he served in, in addition to introducing legislation to get rid of the quota laws, he also had civil rights and voting rights bills. So he spent his entire legislative career on these issues. And at the height of the civil rights movement, he saw that he finally had the political momentum to finish this career-long battle, to get rid of the quota laws once and for all.

I respectfully submit that the fears and phobias of four decades ago have no place in our society in 1964. This is an excerpt of the speech Seller gave to Congress nearly 40 years later to the day after his very first speech on the House floor.

He was a seasoned person by this point. He was negotiating and he wanted to get this across the finish line. I want to make it clear, since every discussion surrounding immigration changes is obscured by arguments about our unemployment, our lack of classrooms, our housing, we're not talking about increased immigration. We're talking about equality of opportunity for all peoples to reach this promised land.

The Hart-Celler Act passed, and with it came a new system. Instead of quotas that were different for each country, the act created a system based primarily on immigrants' family relationships with U.S. citizens or permanent residents. There were still caps on the number of people who would be let in legally, but they were broader and didn't prioritize any one country.

These changes opened the golden door to people who had been restricted for decades. "Manual sellers, however, in order to pass the '65 Act, you know what he had to drop out? The refugee provisions. He had to drop out the refugee provisions. It was part of the negotiations." In the end, the law made space for 6% of visas to be given out to refugees. It was the first time Congress had permanently authorized such a thing.

But it soon turned out it wasn't enough. That's coming up. Hi, this is Austin from Charlotte calling again three years later. And you're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

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Back in the city, normal patterns of behavior broke down. In a climate of every man for himself, American homes... April 1975. Saigon was in chaos as the North Vietnamese army drew closer to the city, the capital of South Vietnam.

U.S. forces were rushing to get both American and South Vietnamese people out. A North Vietnamese tank broke the gate at the President's Palace in Saigon. A communist soldier ran the revolution's flag across the empty lawn. On April 30th, the North Vietnamese army finally captured the capital, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City and marking the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of a refugee crisis.

We had thousands of people coming. Ruth Wasson, former researcher at the Congressional Research Office. The American airlift only took a fraction of those who wanted to leave. And for hours after the last departure, scores of people... Separated and crying out for help. Pleading not to be left behind. Clutching the last straw boat. And these were wars we were the lead player in.

U.S. actions had contributed to the crisis, but the idea of welcoming refugees from the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos was not too popular in the U.S. A 1975 Gallup poll found that only 36% of Americans favored allowing Vietnamese refugees to rebuild their lives here. The public opinion had never been supportive of refugees in the United States, unless it was a small number.

If it was going to be 100,000 people, displaced persons, maybe a third of the country supported that. And immigration has always been the politics of numbers. Thresholds are important. People are generous literally to a point.

Like if it feels like there's a literal wave? Yes. That's where it gets dodgy because a lot of times when there's mass asylum or refugee crisis, it's a wave. These don't happen in a trickle unless it's something like people fleeing the former Soviet Union where you couldn't get out. On top of the public disapproval, the immigration system was also struggling to handle the influx of people.

The 1965 Hart-Celler Act had not set up a system for resettlement in the U.S. Creating a refugee category was extremely important. There was a window and a crying need to have this. Now it was up to Congress to write some legislation, which quickly became a mess. There were legislators who wanted to make refugees part of the pre-existing immigration system.

which meant they'd be subject to the same numerical limits as other immigration pathways.

Other legislators said, wait a minute, that's not going to work. Because then refugees would be competing for spots with immigrants coming to the U.S. for work or to reunite with family members. It's pretty hard when you have a political consensus for limiting the numbers to then start to have fights over refugees versus family. That's why they wanted to create a separate track. They wanted a totally separate track.

But nobody could come up with a way to impose limits on the new system that everyone could agree on. So they landed on a compromise. They said Congress will do a consultation with the president every year to set the numbers. Because of the president's foreign policy role,

Like in the case of Vietnamese refugees, President Jimmy Carter, who'd taken office in 1977, wanted to make sure that people who'd helped Americans in the war were able to resettle in the U.S. afterwards. A president never wanted Congress to be able to control refugees because diplomacy is so important.

Congress didn't want to cede power because they had control over immigration. They write the laws, they control it. And so that was the compromise. The 1980 Refugee Act passed 85-0. Wow. Overwhelmingly passed. It was legislative drafting and negotiations at its finest. President Carter signed it into law in March of that year.

This law created the Office of Refugee Resettlement that we still have today. It created a process for refugees to be admitted and a pathway to permanent residency. It laid out all kinds of federally funded resources that should be available to refugees, like job training and English language classes.

And it said that the federal government would supply resources and funding to offset any burden to the states where refugees were resettled. And the euphoria of finally, after all these years passing the Refugee Act, and the ink was hardly dry, and we had the Mariel boat lift. By 1980, Fidel Castro had ruled over Cuba for over two decades.

Castro's regime was politically repressive. He dismantled the free press, executed political enemies, and threw dissidents in jail. Cuba was a communist country 90 miles away from the United States. It was in the middle of the Cold War. Over the next few decades, hundreds of thousands of Cubans migrated to the United States as refugees of Castro's regime.

Off and on, Castro would close the island nation's borders and prevent Cuban citizens from leaving. But in April 1980...

Fidel Castro announces that he is opening up the Port of Mariel. This is Maria Cristina Garcia, professor of history at Cornell University. And he invites Cuban-Americans living in South Florida and other parts of the U.S. to sail into the Port of Mariel and pick up their relatives.

Castro's announcement meant that any Cuban citizen who wanted to leave could get on a boat and head for the United States to seek asylum.

And the federal government felt an obligation to accept these people who were fleeing a communist regime in the height of the Cold War. Coast Guard officials fear there may be dozens, perhaps even hundreds of boats adrift in the Florida Straits without radios, unable to contact rescuers. I asked several people how many refugees they thought would come here eventually. One man sitting on a bench gave a typical answer. Everybody, because the whole world wants to come.

If they let them out, then Fidel will stay there in Cuba by himself. Everybody wants to come. Only Fidel will stay behind. Over the next couple of months, the Mariel Boatlift, as it came to be known, brings in about 126,000 people from Cuba. City officials and local volunteer organizations are working round the clock to try to get food, clothing, and shelter for the Cubans.

So at the same time that Congress is passing this Refugee Act, we're dealing with this humanitarian crisis with Cuba. And the Carter administration is trying to impose order. It was a true crisis of mass asylum. I'm sure people drowned at sea. It was a humanitarian crisis.

To make matters worse, on top of the Cubans arriving at this time, 25,000 more people were showing up in Florida from Haiti, where they were fleeing dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Lots of federal money had to go down to protect them, feed and clothe them. Local communities didn't have the capacity. They had set up these refugee resettlement programs. That was a main feature of the Refugee Act of 1980, was that it wouldn't be a burden on communities to have people come in because they'd set up, you know, what was originally intended to be three years of transitional assistance in social services until they were as well established in the community.

And suddenly you have this, an influx of people. How do you even process it? We hardly had any asylum officers. Right. Like, I mean, the act had just passed. Really, it's the first time, right, that like asylum as we know it is being tested, that people are going to land, you know, in the U.S. and request to stay. And the 1980s become a key decade for the asylum system. The 1980 Refugee Act happened.

provides a mechanism for granting asylum. And that too is new.

But, you know, prior to the 1980s, most Americans didn't really think about asylum seekers. If they heard about asylum seekers, it was usually high-profile individuals who defected from a communist country, say a Russian ballet dancer or a Chinese physicist. Those high-profile individuals received a lot of attention because of their defection. The Mariette Boatlift in 1980 really put asylum seekers

on the national consciousness, right? And people weren't necessarily happy to throw open America's doors.

Good evening. Politicians from several states tonight are sharply criticizing President Carter's handling of the Cuban refugee problem. I believe that Americans should not take so many people in that they can't take care of their own people. I don't think it's right. And then, I mean, all right, the government is supportive, but we pay the tax. Dehumanizing language was common. And other refugee groups are now asking for the same special treatment afforded the Cubans.

such as the Haitian boat people who staged a protest and hunger strike in front of the White House today. The 1980 Refugee Act was supposed to take care of problems like these, but it hasn't.

You can imagine that many Americans of this time period felt that this other country, Cuba, was dictating U.S. immigration policy. And they demanded that something be done about it. Unfortunately for Jimmy Carter, this was all unfolding during an election year where he's running against Ronald Reagan. I don't think it was the issue that defeated Carter for re-election, but it certainly didn't help him.

Ronald Reagan won in a landslide victory, where Carter only carried six states. Over the next few years, Reagan would allow Cubans who had come during the boat lift to be processed and obtain legal residency status. But when it came to Haitians, one of Reagan's early acts in office was to change the way the U.S. approached Haitian immigrants coming by sea. He signed an interdiction agreement with the dictator of Haiti.

Interdiction basically meant that when a U.S. Coast Guard vessel came across Haitian boats, they would intercept them before they could even reach U.S. soil, before people on board had a chance to make an asylum claim. So for many, many years, Haitians were interdicted on the high seas by the U.S. Coast Guard and sent back to Haiti.

The United States had backed the Duvalier dictatorships for years, hoping to keep communism from spreading from Cuba to Haiti. The U.S. had opened its doors to Cubans as a statement against communism, and it closed them to Haitians who were fleeing a regime the U.S. supported.

For the first decade of this policy, over 25,000 Haitian immigrants were intercepted by the Coast Guard, and only 28 were allowed to enter the U.S. to pursue asylum claims. So if you were coming without authorization from Cuba during the Cold War, and even in the post-Cold War period, you were allowed to stay.

But if you were coming from Haiti, you were not. Cubans already had a diaspora that was politically powerful and politically sophisticated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had well-established, prominent, vocal Cuban-American community in a position to advocate for them. And Haitians did not.

And also, an administration wasn't going to negotiate a deal like that with Castro, whereas Duvalier was open for business.

How much do you see the refugee sort of calculus as a political calculus? And how much is it a humanitarian one in this period? It's both. You know, I think there is genuine humanitarian concern that has dictated and shaped our refugee policy. But refugee policy has also served foreign policy interests.

And it's oftentimes very hard to separate the two. I would argue the ghost of Mariel kind of haunted people trying to deal with asylum ever since. That's coming up. My name is Ina Blanco. I'm residing on Coast New Walk, Cachaya and Southern Pomo lands of Sonoma County, California. You're listening to ThruLine.

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This message comes from Bluehost. Make your ideas real with a website. Bluehost builds you a WordPress site in minutes with AI and optimizes growth with built-in tools. So start building now at Bluehost.com. There is a great deal of mixed emotion in this nation today about the refugees which are teeming to our shores from Cuba. In 1980, Bill Clinton was a strapping young governor with a soft twang.

He was in the midst of his re-election campaign when the fallout from the Marielle boatlift seeped its way into his state of Arkansas. President Carter ordered 20,000 Cuban refugees to be housed temporarily at Fort Chaffee in northwest Arkansas. But there is one thing that I think we should remember overriding all the problems they present. And that is that after all of our faults and our failures, there are still tens of thousands of people

who believe we are a beacon of freedom and hope. At first, Clinton was publicly supportive of President Carter. But soon, tensions inside and outside the fort's walls reached a breaking point as the population of the camp swelled. In that incident at Fort Chaffee, several hundred Cuban refugees burned buildings and fought with troops. 45 people were injured. Politically, it wasn't a good look for Governor Clinton.

And it was an election year, so he was scrambling to contain the situation. The paper says, disrupting the people of the area, and they should be deported.

Should we what? Stand by. The word. The word I gave you? His opponent in the governor's race, a man named Frank D. White, used this moment against him. He campaigned on the slogan, Cubans and car tax, two issues that he advertised as Clinton's failures for the people of Arkansas. In the election that fall, Clinton was ousted. It was the only time he'd failed to win re-election.

Over a decade later, as president, Clinton had learned from the political pitfalls of Marielle. All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. When a bill landed on his desk in 1996, a bill that was... It was a crackdown. It was a big enforcement bill. He signed it. And it's a mammoth piece of legislation.

the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, also known as IR-IRA. A mouthful, I know. This bill is important, though. It represented a turning point in the U.S.'s immigration policy.

It was the beginning of a shift in focus towards cracking down on unauthorized migration. The law ramped up funding for the Border Patrol, expanded the list of offenses that could lead to deportation, created bans on reentry for people who overstayed their visas in the U.S., and expanded the scope of mandatory detention.

And caught up within this immigration policy are the asylum seekers. If a newspaper had been publishing, like, the 96th Act has been passed, what would the sort of top bullet points be of what it did? Asylum reforms, a lot of them, like not automatically getting a work authorization and things that were aimed at not making it too attractive.

Again, this is Ruth Wassam. She's a former researcher with the Congressional Research Service. They criminalized a lot more things. And that was the intention. So it's this law that creates the policy known as expedited removal. And Maria Cristina Garcia. She's a professor of history at Cornell University. And the law gives an immigration officer at a port of entry enormous authority without oversight to make a decision on the spot,

whether to admit a person into the United States to make a case for asylum. And if the individual fails to pass that credible fear test, if they fail to prove they have a credible fear of persecution if they were returned to their home country, then the person is removed from the United States as quickly as possible. Before this law, if you didn't have proper documents, you would show up, you would request asylum, and you would get a court date.

And you'd usually be released in the country. If they were suspicious of you, they certainly had the authority to detain you. But the guy that made the decision was the judge in the immigration courts. And so that was a key difference. The 96th Act increased the power of an immigration inspector.

to make decisions about inadmissibility that had previously only been made by the courts. I see. Okay. It's a policy that many immigration advocates feel needs to be reformed.

That in order to make the system fairer and more humane, you really need to have multiple levels of oversight to make sure that bona fide asylum seekers are not penalized, are not subject to prejudice and removed from the United States to face persecution and possible death. Right.

This 1996 law is an example of how in an attempt to address unauthorized migration, a lot of populations fall victim to that oversight. It was a policy shift that leaned heavily towards law enforcement and crackdowns, in a time when concerns over unauthorized immigration were growing. And while funding for U.S. Customs and Border Protection has increased over the years,

Other parts of the immigration system have been stretched thin. And so these are very real tensions in terms of what are the legal protections we provide asylum seekers. And under international law, we're supposed to do these things. And so are other countries. But we get very economical when we have a large number of people.

And trying to come up with more efficient ways to do things often comes at the price of someone's human rights. I want to understand how Aira Aira sets us up for the modern era. How would you say it shapes the future of asylum leading us up to the present? And also since that time, what would you say has changed? There wasn't comparable funding anywhere.

that would have to deal with what would be the outcomes of increased enforcement, the outcomes of better screening at the border and all these technologies. We didn't do it. And so what do we end up with? Huge bottlenecks. And when you don't have equilibrium in these things, that's what you get. One thing that throughout this conversation you've really highlighted is that

On the one hand, there are these forces of xenophobia, of racism that are driving...

a lot of this story. On the other hand, there are very real concerns over the system being at capacity, over a fear of not being in control of people coming into the country. I'm curious, beyond sort of the top line explanations that I think we sometimes get, that this is just bigotry, this is racism, what do you see as the

as the explanation in terms of things like economic fears, job loss, community security, that may be motivating the present moment of anti-immigrant sentiment and perhaps these other moments that we've seen in the country's history. If somebody was being well-paid, they wouldn't resent that the person working alongside him is a foreign national that had just arrived here. And I see this a lot in these things. We have real policy issues here.

Things that need to be addressed, but by playing this divisive rhetoric instead of actually helping the public understand and contemplate, well, how do we want to fix this? What do we think are good ideas? It's blaming people rather than institutions. Yes, and policymakers. Historically.

We have tended to villainize immigrants, but we don't always recognize the way that we have contributed to their displacement and the ways that we profit from their migration. I do a lot of research in presidential libraries, and it has always struck me that

You know, when I look at these memos that are sent from one office to the next and they're discussing immigration issues or they're discussing foreign policy, there's never a recognition of how a particular economic or military policy might contribute to displacement. We think about these things as just immigration and it's all interconnected.

From the 1980s on, it's concern with unauthorized migration that seems to most dictate our immigration policies. And this gets to what the issue is today, from my perspective. Immigration is not a problem to be solved. It's a phenomena to be managed.

So whenever there is a perception or a reality that we have lost control, people are upset. I think moving forward as we continue worldwide to see more displacement and especially displacement caused by climate change, I think the nations, certainly in this region, need to work together to address why people are moving.

It's all about what system we have overall. What are our priorities? What are our top concerns? What should our immigration pathways be? Is it just our national interest, our self-interest of like workers with needed skills and our relatives that are abroad? Do we want to have a track for climate change because we feel a moral responsibility to

Do we feel that refugees are another important track and we need to have pathways for them? And then if we're going to do this, how many are we talking about each year? How much give and take? I don't think we can answer these questions about refugees and asylees and forced migrants in a vacuum without looking holistically at our immigration system, our capacity to absorb people,

and what the process should be. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This episode was produced by me. And me and... Voice-over work in this episode was done by...

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. The episode was mixed by Gilly Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

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