The ongoing battle over asylum in America

The U. S. has long professed to be a country where people can seek refuge. That's the promise etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. But it's never been that clear-cut. And in June, the Supreme Court passed two rulings that could make seeking safe haven in the U. S. even more difficult. Today on the show, 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. This episode originally aired in December 2024. Guests: Maria Cristina Garcia, Professor of History at Cornell University, studying immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers Ruth Wasem, former Immigration Policy Specialist at the U. S. Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service and author of the forthcoming book, The Struggle for Fairness: Forging the Immigration Act of 1965 Support shows like Throughline with NPR+. Sign up today atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hey, it's Run. Since we first ran this episode in 2024, the process of seeking asylum in this country has only become more fraught and more politically charged. And in June of this year, the Supreme Court passed two rulings that could make seeking safe haven in this country even more difficult. So we're bringing you this episode on how we got the asylum system we have with a few updates about these new rulings and what it means for the future of asylum in the U.S.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  "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."

• 1:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  This poem, written in 1883, is etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

• 1:36Speaker 03

  He says he's planning to swim across the Rio Grande and ask for asylum.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  You want to secure the border, there's three things you need to do. Number one, you need to change the asylum laws.

• 1:50Speaker 05

  Mayor Adams says supporting asylum seekers is putting New York City into a financial crisis.

• 1:56Speaker 06

  This issue will destroy New York City. They're welcome if they come legally. They're not welcome if they're illegal.

• 2:03Speaker 05

  Earlier today, President Biden signed an executive order that shuts down asylum claims once they reach a certain level. Our country is full.

• 2:12Speaker 07

  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.

• 2:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 2023, 1.6 million immigrants arrived in the US. That same year, more than 450,000 people filed for asylum, the highest number on record.

• 2:38Speaker 07

  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 US.

• 2:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  To request asylum, you first have to be inside the US. And many of the people seeking asylum now cross into the US 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.

• 3:18Speaker 07

  But it is legal to seek asylum, and the US 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.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  They tried to come to this country in a 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 weaved on our body.

• 4:06Speaker 02

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

• 4:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 4:18Speaker 07

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. Coming up, the story of how the US 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.

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• 6:20Speaker 07

  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 US. 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.

• 7:05Speaker 07

  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 US, maybe at a US embassy or a refugee camp, and they stay outside the US until they're approved for resettlement. This is the path my family took to come to the US from Iran.

• 7:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  For asylum seekers, the process looks different. Their journey through the system begins after they've already arrived in the US, or at what's called a port of entry.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  It could be an airport like JFK or Dulles.

• 7:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Maria Cristina Garcia. She's a professor of history at Cornell University who studies immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  Or it could be another port of entry, like the US-Mexico border or the US-Canada border.

• 8:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  For those arriving at a port of entry at the border, most are put into expedited removal proceedings, which can mean deportation within days. To stop this, they then have to express a fear of returning to their home country to an official at the border.

• 8:20Speaker 07

  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.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  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.

• 8:48Speaker 07

  And that kind of thing can count against you.

• 8:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  A quick side note here. The June 2026 ruling from the Supreme Court has to do specifically with those coming through the southern border and the definition of being in the US. The ruling gives the Trump administration the power to turn people away from the US border before they even get the chance to speak to an official and do that credible fear interview. It's a policy started under the Obama administration and expanded under Trump. It's meant to stem the flow of people attempting to apply for asylum.

• 9:22Speaker 05

  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.

• 9:34Speaker 07

  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.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  There's a huge backlog. It can be as long as three years before you have your first hearing.

• 9:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Currently, the backlog in US immigration courts is over 3.2 million cases, 2.3 million of which are pending asylum cases. There are only around 700 immigration judges in the US handling the massive backlog.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  Refugees and asylees and border security, they're all interlocking.

• 10:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Ruth Wasem. She spent nearly three decades working at the Congressional Research Service, researching immigration policy.

• 10:20Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 US. 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.

• 11:04Speaker 07

  If this all seems super complicated, it's because it is.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  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.

• 11:33Speaker 07

  So why do we have this system?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Send these, the homeless, Tempest tossed to me.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

• 11:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 antisemitic pogroms.

• 12:25Speaker 07

  Today, we might call some of these people asylum seekers or refugees, but back then, the US didn't have those legal categories.

• 12:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  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.

• 13:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  They reflected growing nativist sentiments in the US.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  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.

• 13:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Until it all culminated in one bill.

• 13:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Johnson-Reed Act, also known as the Immigration Act of 1924. The bill would limit immigration by setting strict quotas for each country.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  They went back to the census data, and they allocated annual admissions of immigrants based on the percent of the US 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.

• 13:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  People who, some of whom today would be considered white, American, but at that time...

• 14:03Speaker 05

  They weren't then.

• 14:09Speaker 05

  This bill has already done more than anything I know of to bring about discord among our resident aliens.

• 14:17Speaker 07

  Emmanuel Sellar was one of the few people in Congress to speak out against this bill.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  The Italian is told he's not wanted. The poll's confronted with the stigma of inferiority. Fortunate is the one whose cradle was rocked in Germany or England.

• 14:32Speaker 07

  It was his first year as a representative from New York.

• 14:35Speaker 05

  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 Sellar's was one of that.

• 14:52Speaker 07

  Emmanuel Sellar was the grandson of immigrants.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  He was a German Jew, started out as a young lawyer.

• 15:01Speaker 07

  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.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  Thanks to the ill-considered and improvident Johnson bill, and so race is set against race, class against class.

• 15:27Speaker 07

  Despite Emmanuel Sellar'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.

• 16:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  What would you say is the driving kind of social force that culminates in such a, as you say, draconian measure against immigration?

• 16:15Speaker 07

  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--

• 16:26Speaker 05

  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.

• 16:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 US?

• 17:22Speaker 05

  As war expands across Europe in the 1930s and before the US 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 US policy.

• 18:07Speaker 07

  People at the highest levels of government, including President Franklin Roosevelt, supported extra scrutiny and restrictions on refugees from World War II, particularly Jewish refugees.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  Others have made a convincing argument that it's really antisemitism that is shaping who we allow in and in what numbers.

• 18:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  I mean, the Nazis were making their intentions clear throughout the 30s, but once the war breaks out, I mean, now it was, they were implementing these policies explicitly. And you had Roosevelt in office in the US, someone who was arguably maybe the most progressive president of the 20th century.

• 18:50Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right, and he fails to exercise any political

• 18:55Speaker 05

  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.

• 19:45Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 20:02Speaker 05

  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, this law only focuses on Europe. There is no attempt to even recognize

• 20:44Speaker 05

  that there are people in need in Asia. So the Displaced Persons Act focuses largely on accommodating displaced Europeans and accommodating ethnic Germans in particular. In fact, the number of Jewish refugees who are accommodated initially through the Displaced Persons Act is quite small.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  If the Congress were still in session, I would return this bill without my approval and urge-

• 21:10Speaker 07

  That a fairer, more humane bill be passed.

• 21:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is the statement that President Harry S. Truman put out after he signed the 1948 Displaced Persons Act into law.

• 21:22Speaker 05

  He signs it reluctantly, but he feels that it's a law that does not exemplify American values.

• 21:30Speaker 07

  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.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  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 an attempt to respond to the crisis in Europe.

• 21:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Right, right.

• 21:54Speaker 05

  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.

• 22:15Speaker 07

  This was passed in the wake of World War II, and other laws followed, specific to other groups.

• 22:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  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, OK, we need to make space for, you know, war brides, as you said. We need to make space for European Jews, you know? 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.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  You're right. It's not really until the 1965 Hart-Seller Act that these--

• 23:06Speaker 07

  Quotas are completely overhauled. And we get a very, very different immigration system.

• 23:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  The 1965 Hart-Seller Act. If something about that name sounds familiar, that's because it is.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  Throughout all these years, as a member of Congress, I fought for change. I do not want to wait another 40 years.

• 23:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  Emmanuel Sellar, who spoke out in 1924 against immigration quotas, is still in Congress. And he's still mad about those quotas.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  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.

• 23:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 24:09Speaker 06

  I respectfully submit that the fears and phobias of four decades ago have no place in our society in 1964.

• 24:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is an excerpt of the speech Sellar gave to Congress nearly 40 years later to the day after his very first speech on the House floor.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  He was a seasoned person by this point. He was negotiating, and he wanted to get this across the finish line.

• 24:34Speaker 06

  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.

• 24:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Hart-Seller 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 US citizens or permanent residents.

• 25:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 25:27Speaker 05

  Manuel 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.

• 25:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  This is Austin from Charlotte calling again three years later. And you're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 26:10Speaker 06

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• 26:45Speaker 00

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• 27:53Speaker 03

  Back in the city, normal patterns of behavior broke down. In a climate of every man for himself, American homes, officers...

• 28:01Speaker 07

  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.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  We had thousands of people coming...

• 28:45Speaker 07

  Ruth Wasson, former researcher at the Congressional Research Office.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  The American airlift only took a fraction of those who wanted to leave. And for hours after the last departure, scores of people stood... ...separated and crying out for help, pleading not to be left behind, clutching at the last straw of hope.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  And these were wars we were the lead player in.

• 29:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  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.

• 30:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Like there's a literal wave.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  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 Peoplefling, the former Soviet Union, where you couldn't get out.

• 30:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  On top of the public disapproval, the immigration system was also struggling to handle the influx of people. The 1965 Hart-Seller Act had not set up a system for resettlement in the US.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  Creating a refugee category was extremely important. There was a window and a crying need to have this.

• 30:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 US for work or to reunite with family members.

• 31:14Speaker 05

  It's pretty hard when you have a political consensus for limiting the numbers to then start to have fights over refugees versus family.

• 31:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's why they wanted to create a separate track.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  They wanted a totally separate track.

• 31:30Speaker 07

  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.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  They said Congress will do a consultation with the president every year to set the numbers because of the president's foreign policy role.

• 31:47Speaker 07

  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 US afterwards.

• 32:00Speaker 05

  A president never wanted Congress to be able to control refugees because it's a diplomacy is so important.

• 32:08Speaker 05

  Congress didn't want to cede power because they had control over immigration. They write the laws. They control it. And so that's, that was the compromise.

• 32:17Speaker 07

  The 1980 Refugee Act passed 85-0.

• 32:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wow, overwhelmingly passed.

• 32:25Speaker 05

  It was legislative drafting and negotiations at its finest.

• 32:30Speaker 07

  President Carter signed it into law in March of that year.

• 32:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 33:03Speaker 05

  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 left.

• 33:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 33:39Speaker 07

  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.

• 34:10Speaker 07

  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 US 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.

• 34:47Speaker 05

  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.

• 35:00Speaker 07

  One man sitting on a bench gave a typical answer.

• 35:05Speaker 07

  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.

• 35:14Speaker 07

  Over the next couple of months, the Mariel Boat Lift, as it came to be known, brings in about 126,000 people from Cuba.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  City officials and local volunteer organizations are working round the clock to try to get food, clothing, and shelter for the Cubans.

• 35:32Speaker 07

  So at the same time that Congress is passing this Refugee Act, we're dealing with this humanitarian crisis with Cuba. And the card administration is trying to impose order.

• 35:43Speaker 05

  It was a true crisis of mass asylum. I'm sure people drowned at sea. It was a humanitarian crisis.

• 35:53Speaker 07

  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.

• 36:05Speaker 05

  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 in 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 influx of people. How do you even process it? We hardly had any asylum officers.

• 36:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Right, like, I mean, the act had just passed. Really, it's the first time, right? That asylum as we know it is being tested, that people are going to land in the US and request to stay.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  And the 1980s become a key decade for the asylum system. The 1980 Refugee Act 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 Mariupol lift in 1980 really put asylum

• 37:34Speaker 05

  on the national consciousness, right?

• 37:37Speaker 07

  And people weren't necessarily happy to throw open America's doors.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  Good evening. Politicians from several states tonight are sharply criticizing President Carter's handling of the Cuban refugee problem.

• 37:52Speaker 07

  I believe that Americans should not take so many people in that they can't take care of their own people.

• 37:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 38:05Speaker 07

  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.

• 38:20Speaker 07

  The 1980 Refugee Act was supposed to take care of problems like these, but it hasn't.

• 38:29Speaker 07

  You can imagine that many Americans of this time period felt that this other country, Cuba, was dictating US immigration policy, and they demanded that something be done about it.

• 38:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Unfortunately for Jimmy Carter, this was all unfolding during an election year, where he's running against Ronald Reagan.

• 38:50Speaker 05

  I don't think it was the issue that defeated Carter for reelection, but it certainly didn't help him.

• 38:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 39:12Speaker 07

  But when it came to Haitians, one of Reagan's early acts in office was to change the way the US approached Haitian immigrants coming by sea.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  He signed an interdiction agreement with the dictator of Haiti.

• 39:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Interdiction basically meant that when a US Coast Guard vessel came across Haitian boats, they would intercept them before they could even reach US soil, before people on board had a chance to make an asylum claim.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  So for many, many years, Haitians were interdicted on the high seas by the US Coast Guard and sent back to Haiti.

• 39:46Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 40:17Speaker 07

  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.

• 40:28Speaker 05

  Cubans already had a diaspora that was politically powerful and politically sophisticated.

• 40:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 05

  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 de Valier was open for business.

• 41:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  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?

• 41:12Speaker 07

  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.

• 41:31Speaker 05

  I would argue the ghost of Mariel kind of haunted people trying to deal with asylum ever since.

• 41:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's coming up.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  You're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 41:51Speaker 00

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• 43:15Speaker 05

  There is a great deal of mixed emotion in this nation today about the refugees which are teeming to our shores from Cuba.

• 43:24Speaker 07

  In 1980, Bill Clinton was a strapping young governor with a soft twang. He was in the midst of his reelection campaign when the fallout from the Mariel 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.

• 43:46Speaker 05

  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.

• 44:01Speaker 07

  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. Forty-five 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.

• 44:37Speaker 07

  Should we run? Stand by. The word? The word again?

• 44:42Speaker 07

  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 tags", two issues that he advertised as Clinton's failures for the people of Arkansas.

• 44:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the election that fall, Clinton was ousted. It was the only time he'd failed to win reelection. Over a decade later, as president, Clinton had learned from the political pitfalls of Mariel.

• 45:14Speaker 06

  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.

• 45:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  When a bill landed on his desk in 1996, a bill that was-

• 45:29Speaker 05

  It was a crackdown. It was a big enforcement bill.

• 45:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  He signed it. And it's a mammoth piece of legislation. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, also known as I.R.I.R.A. A mouthful, I know. This bill is important, though. It represented a turning point in the US'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 US, and expanded the scope of mandatory detention. And caught up within this immigration policy

• 46:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  are the asylum seekers. If a newspaper had been publishing, like, "The 96 Act has been passed", what would the sort of top bullet points be of what it did?

• 46:30Speaker 05

  Asylum reforms, a lot of them, like not automatically getting a work authorization and things that were aimed at not making it too attractive.

• 46:42Speaker 07

  Again, this is Ruth Wasem. She's a former researcher with the Congressional Research Service.

• 46:47Speaker 05

  They criminalized a lot more things. And that- That was the intention.

• 46:51Speaker 07

  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.

• 47:32Speaker 05

  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.

• 47:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay.

• 47:51Speaker 05

  And so that was a key difference. The 96 Act increased the power of an immigration inspector to make decisions about inadmissibility that had previously only been made by the courts.

• 48:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  I see, okay.

• 48:06Speaker 07

  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

• 48:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  A lot of populations fall victim to that oversight. It was the 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.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  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.

• 49:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  I want to understand how I.R. Ira 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?

• 49:49Speaker 05

  There wasn't comparable funding 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.

• 50:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the years since I.R. Ira, there have been huge increases in funding. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, was created in 2003. Until recently, it operated on a $10 billion a year budget. 2025's One Big Beautiful Bill Act provided the agency with a historic $75 billion budget increase, but funding for other parts of the immigration system have not been comparably increased. And one last update here. In June of 2026, the Supreme Court also ruled that the Trump administration could end temporary protected status, or TPS, a policy in effect since 1990.

• 50:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  TPS allowed vetted migrants to live and work in the US legally if they could not return to their home country because of natural disasters, armed conflicts, or other extraordinary conditions. The ruling allows the Trump administration to begin mass deportations and affects about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians who were living in the US under TPS. 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.

• 51:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 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?

• 52:12Speaker 02

  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, things that need to be addressed, but by playing this divisive rhetoric, instead of actually...

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Actually, helping the public understand and contemplate, well, how do we want to fix this? What do we think are good ideas?

• 52:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's blaming people rather than institutions.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Yes, and policymakers.

• 52:53Speaker 07

  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 is never a recognition of how a particular economic or military policy might contribute to displacement.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  We think about these things as just immigration.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  And it's all interconnected.

• 53:48Speaker 07

  From the 1980s on, it's concern with unauthorized migration that seems to most dictate our immigration policies.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  And this gets to what the issue is today, from my perspective. Immigration is not a problem to be solved. It's a phenomenon to be managed. So whenever there is a perception or a reality that we have lost control, people are upset.

• 54:24Speaker 07

  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.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  It's all about what system we have overall. What are our priorities? What are our top concerns? What should our immigration pathways be?

• 54:58Speaker 02

  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? 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

• 55:40Speaker 02

  absorb people, and what the process should be.

• 55:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Adifeta, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. This episode was produced by me, Ramtin Arablouei, and

• 56:07Speaker 07

  Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor.

• 56:12Speaker 07

  Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Sarah Wyman.

• 56:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. Thanks to Jaya Ramji Nogales, Kathleen Arnold, Jasmine Romero, Leana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Johannes Dergi, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Voiceover work in this episode was done by Casey Minor, Devin Katayama, and Ellis Oriola. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Gilli Moon. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And we would love to hear from you. Send us a voicemail to 872-588-8805 and leave your name, where you're from, and say

• 56:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  the line, "You're listening to Throughline from NPR." And tell us what you think of the show and if you have any questions that you'd love us to answer. We might even feature your voicemail in a future episode. That number again is 872-588-8805. Thanks for listening.

• 57:26Speaker 00

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