Refugees

Historical and Legal Perspectives

Although the United States has a long history of immigration—U.S. President John F. Kennedy famously called it “a nation of immigrants”—the U.S. Congress did not recognize refugees as a distinct group of immigrants, whose situation demanded special attention, until 1965. The need for this special consideration first arose during World War I but grew more urgent during World War II and its aftermath, as millions of people were forced to flee their countries [Page 1133]of origin. In response to this crisis, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established in December 1950 by the UN General Assembly, with the mandate to “coordinate international action to protect refugees.” UNHCR held its first convention in 1951 to determine who would be considered a refugee. The charter stated, “The Convention is to be applied without discrimination as to race, religion, or country of origin…. No Contracting State shall expel or return a refugee, against his or her will,… to a territory where he or she fears persecution.”

In practice, however, the determination of an individual's “well-founded fear” of persecution and the attendant protections afforded refugees have remained largely at the discretion of receiving countries. Although the United States was a signatory to the 1951 convention, and to its subsequent amendment in 1967, well into the 1980s, the United States continued to enforce measures that contradicted the substance of the universal UNHCR agreement. The disparate treatment of Cuban and Haitian refugees by the United States since the 1970s is perhaps the most glaring example of double-standards used in evaluating asylum claims.

According to Article 33 of the amended 1967 UNHCR Convention, a refugee is any person who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” The United States did not formally recognize the status of some immigrants as refugees until 1965, although the government had taken ad hoc measures as early as 1938 to shelter European refugees fleeing the impending World War. Other cursory legislation in which the United States recognized its moral obligation to help victims of war and unrest, included the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, the Hungarian Refugee Act of 1958, and the Fair Share Refugee Act of 1960. Collectively, these provisions allowed more than 400,000 Eastern European refugees into the United States. Although the provisions were subject to strict country quotas, special parole powers allowed the attorney general to disregard refugee quotas for certain countries if doing so was deemed to be in U.S. interests. These measures, which underscored the increasing politicization of immigration policy, included the Cuban Refugee Program beginning in 1960, the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, the Indochinese Refugee Act of 1977, and the Refugee-Parolee Act of 1978.

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