Did someone forward you this? Subscribe here free!
Good morning, Roca Nation!
President Trump announced some pharmaceutical imports will face 100% tariffs. The UK’s Prime Minister announced that workers will be required to have digital ID cards (free). NYC Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the mayoral race. A gunman opened fire at a church in Michigan, killing one before setting the building on fire (free).
We’ve made today’s deep-dive free for all readers. If you enjoy it, please consider becoming a Roca Member. Members support our mission and get a deep-dive (plus four news stories) each morning.
By Max Frost
A barber in Venezuela is tired. Tired of the gangs that run his neighborhood, tired of making a couple of dollars a day. So he heads north, walks across the Rio Grande, and claims asylum.
Or a taxi driver in Senegal: It’s one of the safest countries on Earth, but he wants more opportunity, wants to help his family build a new home in their village. So he flies to Central America, gets a ride north, walks into the US, and claims asylum.
These asylum seekers are a far cry from those 74 years ago, when the principle was established. Many believe they have broken the system.
In the wake of World War II, millions of people found themselves uprooted by conflict. In 1951, with the horrors of Nazi totalitarianism fresh in their minds, nations gathered in Geneva to create a system to accommodate those fleeing from conflict and oppression. They created the Refugee Convention, an agreement enshrining the principle that no one should be returned to a country where their life or freedom would be at risk.
For decades, asylum was a relatively small part of the immigration landscape, largely focused on Cold War dissidents and individuals from war-torn countries. But not today.
In recent years, millions – or even tens of millions – of migrants have entered Europe and the US and claimed asylum. The people often cross the border illegally, turn themselves in, and file a claim, kickstarting a years-long process. 70 years ago – or even 20 years ago – asylum seekers were mainly dissidents or refugees. In 2025, they could be anyone who wants a better life.
The Trump Administration is now attempting to overhaul this system. While it may be leading the push – and its solution may not be widely popular – it’s not alone in calling for change: Germany’s chancellor has said the system is in “shambles”; the centrist-liberal Economist says, “The global asylum system is falling apart”; even the head of the UN’s migration body says it’s “outdated, slow, and vulnerable to abuse”.
So what has changed? When and why did the asylum system break? What should replace it? That’s the subject of today’s deep-dive.
The right to seek asylum was codified in the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which emerged from the horrors of World War II. It obliged signatory countries to assess claims from refugees – people fleeing persecution on grounds such as race, religion, or political opinion – and not to return them to danger.
The US brought its laws into alignment with this framework through the Refugee Act of 1980, which established a formal asylum procedure for those arriving at US borders or already on US soil. During the Cold War, asylum was often granted to individuals fleeing communist regimes or other geopolitical adversaries, and the overall number of claimants was relatively modest.
In 1980, shortly after the Refugee Act was enacted, the Mariel boatlift brought over 100,000 Cuban asylum-seekers to Florida in a matter of months. A similar surge of Haitian boat migrants soon followed. The government was able to plug the holes, but cracks had been exposed.
By 1996, amid concerns about abuse of the asylum system, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. This law created the “expedited removal” process for those who enter illegally, paired with a credible fear screening – a rapid interview to weed out baseless asylum claims – as a filter. Even then, asylum remained a relatively niche avenue: As recently as 2014, the US received just 48,000 asylum claims. For context, in 2012, the EU received 250,000.
But then, things changed.
In 2015, the EU received 1.2M – a near quintupling in just three years. The number has since dropped below 500,000 only once, during the pandemic. Last year, it received 912,000.
In the US, meanwhile, asylum claims doubled between 2011 and 2016, and doubled again by 2018. In 2023, the US recorded 480,000 asylum claims – 10x the 2014 figure and 12x the 2011 one.
In both the EU and US, asylum systems have not been able to keep pace, and asylum backlogs are millions of people long. Longer backlogs mean it takes longer to decide whether an asylum claim is valid, keeping justified claimants in limbo longer and giving unjustified claimants more time to settle into a society, making it harder to remove them.
In the US, the increase in asylum claims has corresponded with a fall in the share of asylum grants. In 2011, 31% of asylum claims were granted; in 2022, just 14% were.
Many people file a claim and then simply vanish, never intending to actually pursue an asylum case, and studies have found that many asylum seekers are actually not the poorest or most vulnerable of their societies. They’re well enough off to leave, but too poor to figure out a legal pathway. As The Economist recently reported:
In the past two decades many have discovered that asylum offers a back door. Instead of crossing a border stealthily, as in the past, they walk up to a border guard and request asylum, knowing that the claim will take years to adjudicate and, in the meantime, they can melt into the shadows and find work.
Now, the backlash is coming.
Denmark’s Social Democratic government has adopted a goal of “zero asylum seekers”; the UK has sought to bar anyone entering the country illegally from claiming asylum; Italy has sought to keep asylum seekers in Albania while awaiting an asylum decision.
The Trump Administration is now seeking to solve the problem in the US.
In a recent hearing, Trump’s nominee to run the State Department’s refugee division said, "Perhaps the most important root cause of the mass and illegal migration today is the abuse of refugee and asylum systems…The current framework of international agreements and norms on migration developed after the Second World War in a completely different geopolitical and economic context. It cannot be expected to function in our modern world, and indeed it does not."
Last week, at the UN General Assembly, the US proposed revising global asylum rules so that asylum seekers have to claim asylum in the first country they enter, not one of their choosing. It also called for making asylum temporary.
The State Department official who proposed the changes said, "The asylum system has become a huge loophole in our migration laws…I think we have to be realistic that these laws are now being abused.”
While defenders of the current system are increasingly scarce, they still exist.
Mark Hetfield, president of a refugee resettlement group HIAS, recently said, "Right now, if someone comes to the border of any country because they are fleeing for their lives on the basis of race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion, they have the right to protection…If it were to change, we'd be back to the situation we were in during the Holocaust."
Yet Hetfield is increasingly in the minority. Too many people claimed asylum, and now, it may be broken for the rest.
Editor’s Note
If you enjoyed this deep-dive and want one like this daily, please consider becoming a Roca Member. Members fund our mission. Without members, there is no Roca!
Thanks for reading today’s edition of WeThe66! As always, we want your feedback, thoughts, and criticisms. Drop a line with it here.
We got a lot of replies to yesterday’s story on the closure of mental health institutions across the US. Thanks to those who wrote in. We’re sharing some of those emails below.
One reader wrote:
As the parent of a daughter who developed schizophrenia at age 20 I can personally attest that the state of mental health care in the US is terrible. Luckily for her she had parents who would move heaven and earth for her and we had the money to do it. The worst part is that when it started we had no clue what was happening and there was no 'in between' place to go to get help. The only thing that helps we found out is medications and since you can't find a psychiatrist without at least a 6 week wait list your only option is to commit them. And even though ours was considered a more upscale treatment center, the experience was horrendous. We discovered that all the can do for treatment is over medicating; she was a zombie and after two weeks they released her to us and said that was all they could do. No diagnosis, no appropriate medication, no direction. And our daughter was losing her mind in front of us. It took a miracle of a friend's connections with a NP psychiatrist and now 8 years later she is finally functioning and trying to find a FT job. Another issue you have is compliance. The drugs suck. And once the patient starts to feel 'better'they don't think they need the meds anymore, stop taking them, and you're back to ground zero. It takes months for the right drugs to start making a difference and years to find that drug. And every time we had to commit her cost $15,000 dollars. It was a nightmare and we have to do better.
Callie said:
This is a really great question. I am a nurse and I live in and around Portland, OR. I have never worked in Mental Health but have worked in primary care (in Portland) where we tried to take care patients with severe mental health illnesses. These patients are usually homeless, not taking medications, and cannot care for themselves and are easily victims for drugs and crime. I have seen wounds and infections that you cannot believe someone can still be living through. The burden on the ER and hospital system is insane which leads to burnout with nurses because we can’t fix this problem, they just keep coming to the ED for care. It is sad to see a 1st world country not caring for our most vulnerable population. There has to be a balance where we can give them autonomy along with a clean/safe environment and giving them their stabilizing medications. These patients will never be able to live as normal member of society and it falls on us to be able to proved care for them. I have seen families member try so hard to get them institutionalized and unable to. There is not enough resources and these patients cannot, and won’t, live with their family members. I do think it the State and Counties responsibility to provide these resources and I will pay taxes for this. Thank you for covering this story.
Sharon wrote:
Wow. My heart hurts as I remember working as a social worker in a half-way house in the 80s before Reagan closed them down. A lot of good and healthy human welfare organizations closed as well as the bad ones. I remember President Reagan saying the churches will take care of their communities. It was a long game played. Now, as an avid church member, my church mission takes care of about 20 community missions from feeding poor children to providing food and showers to the homeless. More churches need to stop sending their members to foreign countries and to look around, reach out their own neighborhoods for their mental health needs.
And Levi from VA said:
It seems like the answer is always in the messy middle with this and many other issues. There are no simple answers to mental health issues. We can't just incarcerate these people in institutions to hide them away and throw away the key, that was seen as inhumane and it is. But so is just having few supportive institutions and resources to help these people so that they end up on the streets or worse. I'm not an expert in this areas so I can't suggest a solution, but I'm sure there are very smart people out there who know what would work better than just letting people deteriorate on the street and cause physical danger to others around them in some cases. However, I'm sure this will take a good amount of resources, which is never popular on the right, and conflict with both extremes of the "easy solution" supporters on both sides of the spectrum (lock them up vs. provide nothing other than possibly free housing which alone will not solve the problem for many of the people with serious mental health issues. Maybe you guys could follow this up with some additional reporting about what the current slate of proposed solutions are for this issue from the left and right (if they've already taken sides here) along with what the non-political parties who are just trying to solve this very sticky social issue from a practical and pragmatic perspective?
Don’t miss out on our latest stories — find them below if you haven’t read them yet:
Thanks and see you tomorrow,
Max and Max
