American politicians of all political stripes lament their country's broken asylum system, but at the identical time they resort to short-sighted, reactive solutions that don’t address the basis problem: an outdated and outdated definition of refugees that fails to bear in mind the actual threats refugees face within the twenty first century.
With the variety of asylum seekers soaring, politicians' first instinct is to limit who and what number of can receive asylum. President Joe Biden recently followed this pattern when he imposed unprecedented restrictions on the best to asylum, including arbitrarily setting caps on the variety of “encounters” on the border that resulted in an entire shutdown of the asylum system. Yet he continues to face criticism for not creating even higher hurdles to dam access and limit eligibility.
What the United States must do is nearly the other. As surprising as it could sound, expanding the definition of who’s a refugee could be a recipe for less chaos, illegality and injustice at our borders and fewer paralysis in our immigration courts.
While this may not reduce the number of individuals looking for refuge here, it might help clear the backlog of asylum cases – there are currently greater than 1.5 million cases pending before immigration judges and U.S. immigration officials – and it might allow U.S. authorities to make a decision way more quickly which latest arrivals need protection.
A comprehensive process
In 1980, the United States adopted the refugee definition from the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. It rightly recognizes that individuals who’ve a “well-founded fear of persecution” mustn’t be returned to places where they might be harmed due to their identity or beliefs. But assessing asylum claims against this standard is commonly an exhaustive, slow, and painstaking process that requires determining the persecutor's intent, verifying the beliefs or identity of the applicant that underlie the persecution, and so forth.
At the identical time, the 1951 Standard doesn’t explicitly recognize as refugees people fleeing war and other clear threats to their lives and physical integrity.
In 2015, Germany faced a mass influx of around 890,000 asylum seekers. Germany also used the definition of the 1951 Refugee Convention as its predominant protection criterion. However, by extending the usual to incorporate individuals who had been subjected to “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and “indiscriminate violence in situations of international or internal armed conflict”, Germany was in a position to clear its backlog and keep pace with latest applications by September 2017.
The expanded definition led to quick and fair decisions. The recognition rate for around 725,000 asylum seekers from Eritrea, Iran, Iraq and Syria was over 50 percent. Meanwhile, 99 percent of the greater than 275,000 nationals of the Western Balkan countries – where a lot of probably the most serious human rights violations have decreased – were rejected. In Germany, fewer than 1 / 4 of 1,000,000 cases are currently pending.
A greater answer
Forty years ago, Latin American governments agreed on the Cartagena Declaration, a regional instrument within the Americas that also removes limitations of the Refugee Convention and extends it to “persons who have fled their country because their life, safety or freedom are threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflict, massive violations of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.”
The provisions of the Cartagena Agreement – combined with the definition of the Refugee Convention, the granting of temporary protection status and other visa facilitations – have enabled Latin American countries to grant residency permits and other legal statuses relatively quickly and flexibly to a lot of the 6.8 million people displaced by the violence and unrest in Venezuela, without the large period of time and resources that the United States spends on determining asylum seekers' eligibility for defense alone.
An expanded refugee definition shouldn’t be the identical as an open invitation to migrate. It would require applicants to prove that they’re liable to inhuman and degrading treatment or serious threats to their life or physical integrity on account of an actual threat of violence or on account of exceptional circumstances corresponding to natural or man-made disasters for which there isn’t a adequate treatment in their very own country. These criteria are easier to evaluate than a “well-founded fear of persecution”. Applicants whose asylum claim is predicated on economic grounds would even be easier to discover, reject more quickly and subject to deportation.
The United States should do what Germany, the 26 other EU member states, and 16 Latin American countries have done: adapt its understanding of who deserves refugee protection to the forces uprooting people today. By expanding its arbitrary definition of “refugee,” the United States could higher manage the influx of individuals looking for protection on the border and make its broader asylum system more efficient and humane.
Bill Frelick is refugee and migrant rights director at Human Rights Watch. ©2024 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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