Afrikaner refugees from South Africa arrive at Virginia's Dulles Airport in May.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
Laura Madokoro is an associate professor of history at Carleton University. Shauna Labman is the executive director of the Global College at the University of Winnipeg.
The Trump administration has made a number of recent moves that fundamentally undermine the American legal protections in place for refugees. These include: suspending refugee admissions; allusions to abandoning the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees; and funding cuts to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The administration’s most recent salvo suggests that it will fundamentally transform the way refugee protection is imagined in the United States, with a preference for refugees who can “fully and appropriately assimilate,” as stated in a release from the White House on President Donald Trump’s inauguration day, and, according to proposals recently reviewed by The New York Times, refugees who are “aligned with the President’s objectives,” which refers mostly to white applicants.
In many ways, this is not surprising. The actions build on the first Trump administration’s efforts to create categories of “good” and “bad” refugees, most notably through cuts to resettlement and the so-called Muslim ban. The U.S. government seems intent on ignoring international law, which provides people with a universal right to seek asylum – as outlined in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 33 of the 1951 Convention – and move to a system of race-based criteria.
By making this shift, the Trump administration is undermining decades of progress to rectify the race-based exclusions and political agendas that characterized the foundations of early international refugee law. When the international community first began to consider special protections for refugees under the auspices of the League of Nations, it did so by naming specific ethnic groups. These included refugees from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and later Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich. When drafters of the 1951 Convention first met in Geneva and New York in the wake of the Second World War, they had the fates of 11 million European refugees and displaced persons first and foremost in their thoughts. They also had the communist threat in mind, and made a direct effort to ensure that pro-Western, anti-communist refugees would be protected.
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Meanwhile, refugees from the 1947 partition of the Indian sub-continent, and the civil war in China (which led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949), were written out as ‘national’ issues and beyond the purview of the international community. This ‘national’ language was a euphemism for race. Discrete organizations, including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (including Jewish refugees until 1952), and the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency, which addressed health and welfare concerns for refugees displaced during the 1950-1953 war, remained outside the parameters of the 1951 Convention.
Further, the original temporal and geographic limitations of the 1951 Convention meant that signatory states had to make a deliberate decision to apply the terms of the convention beyond the situation in Europe. Many countries did so – including Germany and Denmark – but not the United States, which instead implemented the subsequent universalizing 1967 Protocol in 1968.
The 1951 Convention sought to universalize refugee protections by using a definition that underscored a “well-founded fear of persecution,” rather than naming a specific ethnicity or nationality as grounds for protection. Yet race-based hierarchies still persisted. The Canadian government, for instance, did not sign the convention protocol until 1969, for fear that it might have to admit non-white refugees at a time when race-based exclusions were overtly woven into Canadian immigration law. As was the case in the United States, the Canadian government wanted workers and migrants who would not result in a “fundamental alteration” in the character of the Canadian populace (to quote from prime minister Mackenzie King in the House of Commons in 1947).
In the decades since, both Canada and the United States have emerged as leaders in refugee protection, most significantly through resettlement programs with global reach. Canada’s refugee determination system is often hailed as the “gold standard.” Yet we are in a time of lessening access to claims protection, reductions in Canada’s private refugee-sponsorship program, and a hardening of the border as a barrier via the expansion of the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement. These moves, alongside the swift changes in the United States, will have widespread and devastating impacts on people who desperately need protection.
The Trump administration’s suggestions for a privileged form of asylum for white and politically aligned refugees is not new – it is a throwback, and one that undermines decades of progress. Governments need to call the Trump administration to task for the gross politicization and racialization of international refugee protection. And they need to do so by addressing their own hypocrisy as well.