AMERICA USED TO HAVE EMPATHY FOR THE PERSECUTED

People describe the United States as a “melting pot,” an example of a democracy’s best attributes. Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus,” at the Statue of Liberty’s base, yearns for a beacon of hope for vulnerable populations, the “huddled masses” long before World War II awakened an understanding that it took an international community to protect humanity from our worst inclinations. Lazarus’ poem was set in the background of her advocacy for protections for Jewish people fleeing Czarist Russia in the late 1800s. Several decades later, during World War II, the U.S., like much of the rest of the world, was slow to accept Jewish refugees. Some of those refused entry later died in the Holocaust.

Modern-day asylum law was a reactionary solution to the world’s failures during World War II to protect the most vulnerable populations targeted for cruelty and persecution solely based on immutable, personal attributes. The United Nations, in another response to World War II atrocities, created an international legal standard, based on “non-refoulment,” to protect people who faced persecution. Our commitment to non-refoulment is the basic concept that as a society, we cannot send vulnerable people to a country where they may suffer persecution.

It is no surprise that asylum’s protected grounds relate closely to people targeted by the Nazis because of their religion (Jewish), race (Roma, non-white), nationality (Allies and their supporters) and political opinions (opponents to the Third Reich and fascism). A fifth ground of protection was created as a “catch-all” for people in a particular social group, with unifying characteristics that they could not or should not be forced to change (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, mental illness, etc.). From the tragedies of World War II came an agreement in the international community that the least of us deserves the most of our collective protections.

Asylum law as a constant is necessary to ensure a functioning, democratic society so that people who need protection know that it will always be there. All that changes from one year to the next is where asylum seekers originate. Ten years ago, asylum seekers came from East Africa and the Middle East. Pockets of Haitians, Cubans and people from the former Soviet Union sought refuge in the U.S. when their own government’s corruption and policies targeted them.

In the last five years, individuals fleeing Central America came to the U.S. to seek asylum. Asylum seekers are often the “canaries in the coal mine” of worsening conditions in their countries long before the media or general public are made aware of these atrocities.

These are the people whose own government is a bad actor or fails to protect them. The principles of U.S. asylum law have remained unchanged since World War II and have been among the toughest in the world. Just because you come from a country in disarray does not mean you automatically get asylum; approval rates are low because the legal standard is so high.

The U.S. asylum law’s constancy eroded with the Trump administration’s concerted efforts to chip away at the longheld legal precedent of allowing asylum seekers to enter our nation.

I look at these asylum seekers in Mexico and wonder how a policy like this would have impacted my mother if it existed in Hong Kong when she fled during World War II, at the age of 2, with my grandmother and uncle, then a year old, from China. My grandfather fought against the Communists, but the Nationalists were losing the civil war. Hong Kong, under British rule, opened its borders to Chinese asylum seekers for limited periods of time daily. My grandmother always said, “If you did not make it into Hong Kong before they shut the border again, then you likely were fated to be captured and harmed by the Communist Chinese.”

The lessons learned from World War II and our country’s attempts to prevent future atrocities are being ignored and even destroyed by the actions of this administration. Not only have we repeated history by preventing asylum seekers to plead their case inside the U.S., we have refused a whole category of people from the possibility of safety much like we did when we turned those ships of Jewish people around and sent them back to their fate in Nazi Germany. This administration’s actions dim the beacon of hope so symbolically embodied by Lady Liberty and illuminated by Lazurus’ poem. My only hope is that Americans, aware of the erosion of our melting pot, push against the political weaponization of asylum law and return to a reverence of our contract to the international community and humanity that the least of us deserves the most of our collective protections.