The ongoing battle over asylum in America

26:55Thank you.

27:24Back in the city, normal patterns of behavior broke down. In a climate of every man for himself, American homes... 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.

28:13We had thousands of people coming. Ruth Wasson, former researcher at the Congressional Research Office. The American airlift only took a fraction of those who wanted to leave. And for hours after the last departure, scores of people... Separated and crying out for help. Pleading not to be left behind. Clutching at the last straw of hope.

28:42And these were wars we were the lead player in. 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 percent of Americans favored allowing Vietnamese refugees to rebuild their lives here. 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 of displaced persons, maybe a third of the country supported that. And immigration has always been the politics of numbers. Thresholds are important.

29:29People are generous literally to a point. Like if it feels like there's a literal wave? Yes. That's where it gets dodgy because a lot of times when there's mass asylum or refugee crisis, it's a wave. Yeah. These don't happen in a trickle unless it's something like people fleeing the former Soviet Union where you couldn't get out. 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 U.S. Creating a refugee category was extremely important. There was a window and a crying need to have this.

30:16Now 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 U.S. for work or to reunite with family members. It's pretty hard when you have a political consensus for limiting the numbers to then start to have fights over refugees versus family. That's why they wanted to create a separate track.

30:59They wanted a totally separate track. 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. They said Congress will do a consultation with the president every year to set the numbers. Because of the president's foreign policy role. 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 U.S. afterwards. A president never wanted Congress to be able to control refugees because diplomacy is so important.

31:39Congress didn't want to cede power because they had control over immigration. They write the laws. They control it. And so that was the compromise. The 1980 Refugee Act passed 85-0. Wow. Overwhelmingly packed. It was legislative drafting and negotiations at its finest. President Carter signed it into law in March of that year. 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.

32:26And it's said that the federal government would supply resources and funding to offset any burden to the states where refugees were resettled. And the euphoria of finally, after all these years, passing the Refugee Act, and the ink was hardly dry, and we had the Mario boat lift.

32:50By 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. 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...

33:41Fidel 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 U.S. 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. In a Coast Guard official sphere, there may be dozens, perhaps even hundreds of boats adrift in the Florida Straits without radios, unable to contact rescuers.

34:28I asked several people how many refugees they thought would come here eventually. One man sitting on a bench gave a typical answer. 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. Over the next couple of months, the Mariel boatlift, as it came to be known, brings in about 126 ,000 people from Cuba. City officials and local volunteer organizations are working round the clock to try to get food, clothing, and shelter for the Cubans. So at the same time that Congress is passing this Refugee Act, we're dealing with this humanitarian crisis with Cuba.

35:11and the Carta administration is trying to impose order. It was a true crisis of mass asylum. I'm sure people drowned at sea. It was a humanitarian crisis. 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. 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 what was originally intended to be three years of transitional assistance in social services until they were well-established in the community.

36:03And suddenly you have an influx of people. How do you even process it? We hardly had any asylum officers. Right. Like, I mean, the act had just passed. Really, it's the first time, right, that like asylum, as we know it, is being tested, that people are going to land, you know, in the U.S. and request to stay. 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.

36:56Those high-profile individuals received a lot of attention because of their defection. The Mariette Boat lift in 1980 really put asylum on the national consciousness, right? And people weren't necessarily happy to throw open America's doors.

37:16Good evening. Politicians from several states tonight are sharply criticizing President Carter's handling of the Cuban refugee problem. I believe that Americans should not take so many people in that they can't take care of their own people. I don't think it's right. And then we're, I mean, all right, the government supports it, but we pay the tax. Dehumanizing language was common. 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.

37:51The 1980 Refugee Act was supposed to take care of problems like these, but it hasn't.

38:01You can imagine that many Americans of this time period felt that this other country, Cuba, was dictating U.S. immigration policy. And they demanded that something be done about it. Unfortunately for Jimmy Carter, this was all unfolding during an election year, where he's running against Ronald Reagan. I don't think it was the issue that defeated Carter for re-election, but it certainly didn't help him. 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 boatlift to be processed and obtain legal residency status.

38:43But when it came to Haitians, one of Reagan's early acts in office was to change the way the U.S. approached Haitian immigrants coming by sea. He signed an interdiction agreement with the dictator of Haiti. Interdiction basically meant that when a U.S. Coast Guard vessel came across Haitian boats, they would intercept them before they could even reach U.S. soil, before people on board had a chance to make an asylum claim. So for many, many years, Haitians were interdicted on the high seas by the U.S. Coast Guard and sent back to Haiti. The United States had backed the Duvalier dictatorships for years, hoping to keep communism from spreading from Cuba to Haiti.

39:26The U.S. had opened its doors to Cubans as a statement against communism. And it closed them to Haitians who were fleeing a regime the U.S. 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 U.S. to pursue asylum claims. 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. Cubans already had a diaspora that was politically powerful and politically sophisticated.

40:05Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 Duvalier was open for business.

40:31How much do you see the refugee sort of calculus as a political calculus? And how much is it a humanitarian one in this period? 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. I would argue the ghost of Mario kind of haunted people trying to deal with asylum ever since. That's coming up.

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42:50There is a great deal of mixed emotion in this nation today about the refugees which are teeming to our shores from Cuba. In 1980, Bill Clinton was a strapping young governor with a soft twang. He was in the midst of his re-election campaign when the fallout from the Marielle boat lift 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. 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.

43:36At 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. The claim is it. He's dropping the people of the area. I should be in the court. You should be right. Stand back. To where? To where that game? Ow, ow.

44:17His 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. In the election that fall, Clinton was ousted. It was the only time he'd failed to win re-election. Over a decade later, as president, Clinton had learned from the political pitfalls of Marielle. 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.

45:00When a bill landed on his desk in 1996, a bill that was— It was a crackdown. It was a big enforcement bill. He signed it. And it's a mammoth piece of legislation. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, also known as IR-IRA. A mouthful, I know. This bill is important, though. It represented a turning point in the U.S.'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 U.S., and expanded the scope of mandatory detention.

45:49And caught up within this immigration policy 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? Asylum reforms a lot of them, like not automatically getting a work authorization and things that were aimed at not making it too attractive. Again, this is Ruth Wassum. She's a former researcher with the Congressional Research Service. They criminalized a lot more things. And that was the intention. 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.

46:36And 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. 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.

47:17If 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. 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. I see. Okay. 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?

48:08This 1996 law is an example of how in an attempt to address unauthorized migration, a lot of populations fall victim to that oversight. It was a 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. 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.

48:51And 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. I want to understand how Aira Aira 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? 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.

49:39And so what do we end up with? Huge bottlenecks. And when you don't have equilibrium in these things, that's what you get. In the years since IARA, 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.

50:31TPS allowed vetted migrants to live and work in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 the story. 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.

51:23I'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? If somebody was being well-paid, they wouldn't resent that the person working alongside him was 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.

52:06But by playing this divisive rhetoric, instead of actually helping the public understand and contemplate, well, how do we want to fix this? What do we think are good ideas? It's blaming people rather than institutions. Yes, and policymakers. 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 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.

53:10We think about these things as just immigration. And it's all interconnected.

53:22From the 1980s on, it's concern with unauthorized migration that seems to most dictate our immigration policies. And this gets to what the issue is today, from my perspective. immigration is not a problem to be solved it's a phenomena to be managed so whenever there is a perception or a reality that we have lost control people are upset 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. It's all about what system we have overall.

54:24What are our priorities? What are our top concerns? What should our immigration pathways be? 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 absorb people, and what the process should be.

55:32That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Adelfetta, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me, Ramtin Adablui, and... Laurence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Sarah Wyman. Irene Noguchi. Thanks to Jaya Ramji Nogales, Kathleen Arnold, Jasmine Romero, Liana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Johannes Dergi, Nadia Lancey, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Voice-over work in this episode was done by Kesey Minor, Devin Katayama, and Ellis Oriola. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon.

56:16Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

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