Part 4: The crisis at the southern border reflects a global crisis of how to implement a convention created in 1951.

The UN Convention on Refugees, established in 1951, sets international standards for protecting individuals fleeing persecution. It defines a refugee as a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, is unable or unwilling to return home. The Convention outlines refugees’ rights, including access to asylum, education, and employment, and prohibits forcible return.

A key provision in the Convention, and since 1980 in American law, is that countries must in good faith respond to requests for asylum by anyone standing on their soil. This, of course, creates an enormous incentive to cross borders, even multiple borders, to reach target countries such as the United States. Many who cross a border to claim asylum have a mix of persecution, economic distress, climate distress, and societal collapse issues, which asylum officers and courts must sort out. Huge case backlogs exist,

These standards have not been rewritten in over seven decades, which have seen the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–1989, 6 million refugees), the breakup of Yugoslavia (1991–1999, 4 million), the Rwandan Genocide (1994, 2 million), the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (4 million), the Ukraine War (8 million), and extreme discord within countries including Myanmar, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and South Sudan (perhaps 25 million). Receiving countries have used complicated protocols to accept, at least temporarily, and resolve inflows.

Countries have been trying to impose greater controls over the volume of inflows and to change how they handle those who gain entry. The bipartisan Senate bill of early 2024, which Trump shot down, modestly embraced the following strategies for asylum control. Trump II has been far more aggressive:

• Shut down most or all asylum programs, notwithstanding commitments made to United Nations conventions and their own laws.
• Fast-track reviews, which for the United States involves adjudications immune from judicial review, plus vastly increasing the capacity of immigration courts. The executive branch and Congress have significantly failed to increase immigration court capacity as asylum applications have risen over the past decade.
• Push asylum reviews away from borders and into remote locations. The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party sought to fly asylum applicants to Rwanda. The Trump administration is trying to reintroduce Stay in Mexico.
• Deportation to cooperating countries—the administration has worked out agreements with several Latin American countries to receive non-nationals.

It is noteworthy that neither the European Union nor the United States has made any overt move to withdraw from the UN Convention or rewrite its standards. The Trump administration may do so.