President Donald Trump seeks to fundamentally alter how the United States approaches immigration. Less than a month into office, the White House has effectively shut the border to asylum-seekers—including by cancelling CBPOne appointments for migrants who were supposed to present themselves at ports of entry on Inauguration Day. The Trump administration has announced an end to Temporary Protected Status and parole programs for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Central American, and Caribbean migrants, and shuttered the refugee program.
After promising throughout his campaign to run the biggest deportation machine in U.S. history, the Trump regime has also flown Venezuelan migrants to Guantánamo Bay. (His administration alleges those flown to Gitmo are members of the Tren de Aragua organized crime syndicate, but the family of at least one of the imprisoned Venezuelans has publicly contested this.)
South Africa-born oligarch and presidential consigliere Elon Musk has also posted on X suggesting that DOGE will cancel scheduled federal government payments to a Lutheran nonprofit that aids migrants. Although the door to the United States is mostly shut, the president did open it to one new group: Last week, Trump signed an executive order instructing his government to prioritize the resettlement of “Afrikaner refugees”—white, European-descended citizens of South Africa.
Yael Schacher is a director at Refugees International and a historian of U.S. immigration policy. The Texas Observer spoke with her about asylum, border policing, and the parallels between the country’s past and present.
TO: What are the religious and legal origins of asylum?
There’s a medieval history where people took sanctuary in churches. But, to be honest with you, I don’t really think there’s much institutional connection to that older history. I don’t think the modern history of asylum can be separated from the advent of restrictive immigration laws.
You don’t really need to carve out an exception for people to be able to seek asylum in a country unless you have rules—very strict rules—about who can and cannot enter. If people were just allowed to enter the United States relatively freely without many restrictions, why would you need to have asylum? The reason you have asylum is you have a restrictive immigration code that basically says only a certain number of people can come in, and certain types of people are barred, but we’re going to create an exception for people who are fleeing certain types of persecution. And those people are going to be allowed to come in, and we’re also not going to send them back to their home countries if they’re here already.
Asylum has always been through exception to a restrictionary mode.
To add one thing: When people think of asylum, they might think of the sanctuary movement [of the 1980s]. It had religious roots: the idea of people being able to seek sanctuary in churches. But a lot of what people in the sanctuary movement were actually saying, too, was that the U.S. was not abiding by its own laws about asylum. It was denying that to Central Americans who were coming into the United States in the 1980s fleeing the wars in Central America. There was also this critique that the U.S. was actually in some part responsible for why people were fleeing, so it was all the more important that the U.S. abided by the law.
So, asylum is used as an exception to an already exclusionary system, and it was always that way?
Before the Civil War, for the first 100 years of U.S. history, basically the states controlled people’s mobility in the country.
So there were rules in different states about who couldn’t come in. Massachusetts had rules about people who were poor couldn’t come in, people who were convicts couldn’t come in, and the ship owners who brought people to places like Ellis Island would have to pay a head tax in New York. In California, that’s where a lot of the earliest anti-Asian immigration laws happened. The state laws against Chinese people and then some literal race riots pushed the federal government to actually get involved.
One of the reasons that that didn’t happen sooner in U.S. history is because of slavery. The slave states didn’t want the federal government in charge of mobility, because that would mean inhibiting the interstate slave trade. It would also mean that free Black people would be able to travel around, and that’s not something that the slave states wanted. Even some of the northern states dramatically restricted the mobility of free Black people. That’s why you had, in the early part of U.S. history, the state laws being the ones that were regulating immigration. So it wasn’t open, but it just wasn’t regulated by the federal government yet. After the Civil War, the federal government basically adopted many of the more restrictive laws that existed at the state level.
The border right now is closed to asylum-seekers. People can’t go to a port of entry and request an appointment. CBPOne is down. Is there a precedent of that in U.S. history, where there’s a de facto ban on asylum?
Well, the ability to apply for asylum didn’t exist in U.S. law until the 1970s. Before that, there were two ways you could see the pre-history of asylum developing: One was they would ask to be excepted from an exclusion on arrival and the second way they could kind of seek asylum was they could ask not to be deported if they feared being harmed in their home countries. But there was no asylum as we know it.
In the 1920s, the U.S. passed extremely strict quotas. So it meant that only a certain number of people could come to the United States in any given year from certain countries. If you came from a country in which the quota was reached, you were excluded. There were some exceptions to that, but the quotas were pretty strict in the sense that if you came above the quota, it didn’t matter. [A version of the quota system still exists today.]
Then, after World War II, there was this move to sort of create a refugee system recognizing what happened during the Holocaust. The fact of the matter is that people understood that if they had allowed more immigrants into the United States, many of them wouldn’t have been killed in Europe. We didn’t provide refuge to people who were murdered and gassed. That was something that struck people, and that’s why the refugee resettlement program developed.
But the United States actually did not sign onto the international Refugee Convention until 1968 and then did not incorporate the language of the Refugee Convention—defining a refugee and calling for the procedure to seek asylum—until the 1980 Refugee Act. What happened [then] is that asylum was uncapped. There was no restriction on it. That was very, very new.
Now, the Biden administration tried to cap it—and the Trump administration is just trying to end it.
The Trump administration’s movement in this direction to try to basically not allow for asylum-seeking—with the exception of the federal government announcing that it wants to resettle white people from South Africa—is this comparable to the 1920s?
In the 1920s, there was a suggestion at one point to basically just halt all immigration, period. Congress didn’t go for that. One of the things that’s reminiscent is that the 1920s was also a very racist period. The people who could come—in the small quotas that were created—were very skewed towards what was basically Germany and England. At the time, Italians and Jews and Poles and Greeks were not actually considered fully white, so those groups got less quotas. At the time, Asians had no quotas; they could not come in. Africans could not come in. So basically, you had a system set up in the 1920s of basically the vast majority of the people coming in were considered at that time, Anglo-Saxons. You really had a kind of eugenic racism infusing the limited number of people who could come in, so in some ways we’re very akin to that.
I should say, there were no numerical restrictions on migration from Mexico, from countries in the Americas, to the United States until the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. People could come and go. That’s why you had a lot of circular migration. That’s not to say it wasn’t criminalized and there weren’t deportations. In fact, the Border Patrol was created in 1924, but the Mexican border was quite porous, as was the Canadian border.
You’ve talked about a current lack of pathways to citizenship or permanent legal status creating a permanent class of people living in legal limbo in the United States who cannot participate fully in democracy. How has that changed over time?
Congress used to create ways for people who had come in through humanitarian pathways, usually things like parole or people who had been seeking asylum and were in like this long backlog for a long time, and even some people who had just crossed unauthorized—there used to be ways in which those folks could regularize their status.
A couple of examples: In 1956, the United States government paroled in about 40-50,000 Hungarian refugees, and a little while after that Congress passed a law that gave those folks a path to get a green card and then become citizens. The same thing happened with the people who were refugees from the Vietnam War. Same thing for people who came in from the Soviet Union, from Eastern Europe. Same thing actually happened up through the 1990s. In 1997 Congress passed a law called NACARA, that basically allowed people from Central America—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and also a couple of people from Eastern Europe—to basically adjust their status rather than waiting in a long backlog for asylum. Cubans have probably the most famous adjustment law on the books.
Since 2000, essentially none of these laws get passed, and a lot of people are living in the United States in these limbo statuses, like temporary protected status, for many, many years, and there’s really no way for them to regularize. There’s been a lot of reluctance over the past couple of decades to really provide these folks with a path to permanent status, so that’s why people have been living in these limbo statuses.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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