Refugees and Immigrants

International law makes a distinction between ordinary migrants and political refugees. The United States-together with a few other countrieshas had a long tradition of providing sanctuary to victims of political persecution, and the screening procedure for admitting refugees has been quite different from that used for ordinary economic migrants. Before the 1970s, the number of admitted into the U.S. as refugees was quite small in normal years; under the Immigration Act of 1965, six percent of the visas allotted were reserved for refugees, who were almost exclusively from communist countries or the Middle East. Abnormal influxes, such as the large number of Hungarian refugees after 1956 and Cuban refugees after 1959, could be handled by a special provision authorizing the attorney general to parole aliens into the United States in emergencies. Since the mid-1970s, however, with a vast and sustained exodus from Indochina, the adequacy of the refugee law came under scrutiny. The ad hoc nature of the parole power, and a recognition of the vast numbers of refugees worldwide (estimated to be between thirteen and fourteen million) led to the Refugee Act of 1980,2 raising the number of refugee preference slots from 17,400 to 50,000 per year. This law did not create the hoped-for order in processing refugee applications, however, since almost as soon as it went into effect, 120,000 Cuban boat people arrived in Florida when the Cuban government decided to allow (or force) their departure. At the same time, 15,000 Haitians landed in the U.S. Torn between welcoming them and trying to stop them, the administration, after much confusion, decided to let

Criminology · Dilemma · Epistemology · Human rights · Immigration · Political science · Refugee · Sociology · European Criminal Justice and Data Protection · International Law and Aviation · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Philosophy

• Assessing National Human Rights Performance

  Jack Donnelly, Rhoda E Howard•Human Rights Quarterly•1988

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• UNHCR, Human Rights and Refugees Collection and Dissemination of Sources

  Open Access•Elisa Mason•International Journal of Legal…•1997

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