Refugee & Migrant Rights

WHY ARE PEOPLE LEAVING THEIR COUNTRIES?

People are fleeing their homes trying to find safety.

Over 120 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide. This includes internally displaced people, refugees, asylum seekers, and people in need of international protection. There are tens of millions more migrants – people who are on the move and have left their countries and crossed borders to seek a better life.

Some might be fleeing because of violence, war, extreme poverty, persecution due to their race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, or the consequences of the climate crisis. Or they might believe they have a better chance of finding work and stability in another country or they want to reunite with family, study, or pursue their dreams.

People on the move include more than 43 million refugees worldwide who have fled their countries because they are at risk of serious human rights violations and persecution there. They have been recognized as refugees legally and have a right to international protection.   

More than 6.9 million asylum-seekers have left their countries and seek protection from persecution and serious human rights violations but haven’t yet been legally recognized as refugees. There are also 5.8 million people in need of other types of international protection who are displaced around the world. The United States has codified the right to seek asylum into U.S. law, assuring that people have a right to seek safety in the U.S. regardless of their manner of entry.

WHY IS IT AN ISSUE?

Many people feel overwhelmed by the numbers, have seen lots of new arrivals in their communities and schools, hear political rhetoric demonizing people seeking safety, and see people moving across borders as a global crisis.

This is not a crisis of numbers or security – the people are not the problem. Rather, the causes that drive families and individuals to cross borders, such as human rights violations, cruel deterrence policies that create humanitarian emergencies, and the ways that politicians respond to them, are the problem.

In the United States, decades of outdated and cruel immigration policies have caused irreparable harm to refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants. Congressional inaction and a reliance on cruel deterrence, enforcement, and detention policies have resulted in violations of both U.S. and international human rights and refugee law and resulted in a broken system plagued by backlogs, abuse, and human suffering.

These policies and practices implemented in the last decade include among others:

• Mass unlawful expulsions of asylum seekers at the U.S.- Mexico border back to the very danger they fled or into extraordinary danger in Mexico
• Externalization policies that force people to wait in danger in Mexico for months at a time.
• Bans on the opportunity to seek asylum
• Family separations that have ripped children away from their families at the border, and every day in communities across the U.S. when family members are swept up in raids or targeted for immigration enforcement,

Increasingly arbitrary and indefinite detention of asylum seekers and vulnerable community members in a massive detention system plagued by physical, sexual, and medical abuse, anti-Black racism, and an ever-increasing death count.

People have the human right under U.S. and international law to seek asylum without discrimination of any kind.

Racist refugee and immigration policies have caused catastrophic, irreparable harm to millions of people, spurning and violating both national and international laws and human rights obligations. These policies are aimed at dismantling the asylum and resettlement systems, punishing people from seeking safety, upending communities with mass deportations, and protecting white supremacy.

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

The United States border policies are not working – for anyone.

Communities across the United States are struggling to make ends meet, while they see billions of their taxpayer dollars fuel policies at the border that have created heartbreaking humanitarian crises and chaos in communities across the country, from small towns to big cities. Brave, resilient families and individuals are arriving at the U.S. southern border to exercise their right to seek safety and seek a new life where they follow their dreams and contribute to their new communities only to be thrust into a broken system that prolongs and profits off their suffering.

The United States is abandoning decades-old international obligations to uphold the human right to seek asylum and not send people back to the very harms that they fled.

AIUSA has developed a Human Rights Blueprint for the Border, a better way to guard the safety and dignity of all our communities: