1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol define a refugee as “a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him- or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.”1 In other words, you must be part of a group specifically targeted for persecution. Wars or disasters that affect the whole population don’t count. Under regional conventions in Africa and Latin America, the definition of a refugee has been expanded to cover migrants fleeing foreign aggression, occupation, internal conflicts, foreign domination, massive human rights violations, or events seriously disturbing public order. However, these broader criteria have not been adopted by the United Nations.2
Refugees are people whose claim to refugee status has been established; you are considered an asylum seeker if your claim hasn’t been evaluated yet.3 The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) includes refugees and asylum seekers in a broader category of forcibly displaced people, along with internally displaced people (sometimes referred to as IDPs), who flee their homes due to violence or persecution but do not cross an international border.
At the end of 2015, the UNHCR counted 65.3 million people as forcibly displaced worldwide, the highest level since 1989, when the agency began tracking this data. Included were 40.8 million internally displaced people and 3.2 million asylum seekers; the other 21.3 million were refugees, or people in what the UNHCR calls “refugeelike situations.” Some 16.1 million of these refugees were under the UNHCR’s mandate, more than half of them from Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Another 5.2 million were Palestinians under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The proportion of forcibly displaced people among the world’s population remained relatively stable at between 0.6 and 0.7 percent from 1996 until 2011, when Syria’s civil war began, triggering what the UNHCR calls “one of the largest displacement crises in recent history.” Since then, this figure has increased rapidly and steadily, reaching 0.9 percent in 2015.4
What’s the difference between a refugee and an immigrant?
Refugees have special rights to protection under national and international law, compared to people who are seen as migrating for economic or other reasons. Some people use terms like “survival migrants,” “forced migrants,” “people in distress,” or “vulnerable irregular migrants” to describe migrants who don’t necessarily fit the strict definition of a refugee but who didn’t voluntarily leave their countries.5
For most refugees and other migrants, there are complex political, economic, social, structural, and personal factors that determine why, when, and how they leave, and where they end up. Each time a humanitarian crisis erupts somewhere in the world, or a particular group is subjected to persecution, some people feel they have no choice but to flee—sometimes abandoning homes, land, livelihood, possessions, family, and community—while others make an equally difficult decision to remain, in the hopes of surviving and, in some cases, of taking action from within to effect social change. Many who seek safety as refugees also get involved in efforts to influence political and social conditions in their home countries. Some people stay behind not by choice, but because they lack the minimum resources or conditions needed to migrate.6
How do we decide who the “real” refugees are?
In the United States until 1980, a patchwork of laws and provisions allowed for the entry of individual refugees and groups of refugees based on ethnicity, nationality, and specific geographic or political circumstances. Several of these laws, starting with the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, provided quotas or access to a certain number of nonquota visas for refugees and other displaced persons. Refugees were generally still required to fulfill the standard immigration criteria of the time: they had to have job offers, a place to live, and proof that they would not become a “public charge.”7
Throughout the Cold War period, the U.S. government’s active opposition to communism guided refugee and asylum policy; U.S. law generally defined refugees as people fleeing a “Communist or Communist-dominated country.” Accepting and even encouraging refugees and asylum seekers from such countries served to discredit their governments as oppressive regimes, recruit away their educated elites in what’s referred to as “brain drain,” and bolster exile-led opposition movements to attack them. Not until the Refugee Act of 1980 did the U.S. government finally adopt the politically neutral definition of a refugee established by the 1951 UN Convention and its 1967 Protocol, and lay out procedures for the processing of refugees and asylum seekers.8
But foreign policy still plays a role in asylum policy: “Immigration judges are required to consult and incorporate in their decisions the official country report published by the United States Department of State in any asylum case,” Dana Leigh Marks, an immigration judge in California and the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told a reporter in 2011. “Obviously our foreign relations position with regard to a country from which the asylum seeker comes is an important factor in the judge’s decision.”9
FLEEING THE NAZIS
As people persecuted on the basis of their religion and their perceived ethnic characteristics, the Jews fleeing the German Nazi regime in Europe from the 1930s to 1945 clearly fit today’s definition of refugees. Unfortunately, most were not able to reach safety, as worldwide anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant sentiment led many countries to close their doors.
In the 1930s, the United States was facing the widespread unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, polls showed the U.S. public firmly opposed to accepting more refugees from Europe or elsewhere; polls also reflected strong anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States during this period.10
The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 had imposed strict nationality caps and economic requirements on people seeking to come here. There was no exception for people fleeing persecution. Many European Jews had family and friends in the United States who tried to help them escape, as well as the support of a large and active Jewish community here. Some U.S. citizens made extraordinary efforts to save the refugees by providing information—sometimes falsified—about family relationships, financial support and job offers for U.S. visa applications.11 U.S. diplomatic officials rejected the vast majority of visa applicants, claiming they were “likely to become a public charge.”12
In May 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg to Havana with 937 passengers, nearly all of them Jews seeking asylum from the Nazis. The Nazi government backed the voyage as part of its efforts to encourage Jews to leave Germany voluntarily.13
The Nazis also hoped the voyage would justify its anti-Semitic policies by highlighting the world’s rejection of Jews. This rejection was already apparent in July 1938, when delegates from thirty-two countries, including the United States, met at the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains to discuss the European refugee crisis. Only one country at the Évian conference agreed to accept Jewish refugees: the Dominican Republic, whose brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo believed European immigration could “whiten” his country’s largely African-descended population. The other countries declined to increase their limited quotas or to take any action to save Jews or others fleeing persecution.14
The majority of the St. Louis passengers hoped to wait in Cuba while the U.S. government processed their visa applications. But the Cuban government, then a close U.S. ally, allowed only twenty-eight passengers to disembark—four Spanish citizens, two Cubans,
