Despite being integral in its crafting, the US was a latecomer to international asylum law. For almost two decades after the first Refugee Convention, the race-based quota system continued to dictate entry into the US, and political leaders were content to use ad hoc tools like special visas and parole to resettle certain groups of refugees without offering a universal right to asylum to all. It was only in 1965—after the highly publicized trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann deepened the public’s understanding of the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement brought the struggle for racial parity onto a national stage—that Congress finally overhauled the racial quotas, opening the door to refugees who would have been otherwise barred from the US. Three years later, the US signed on to a UN protocol on asylum. It took a decade more for these shifts to be reflected in US law. In 1979, Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, introduced legislation that laid out mechanisms for both refugee resettlement and asylum processing. The following year, the bill was signed into law; the Refugee Act established the nation’s first official procedure for hearing asylum claims.
Even after these formal protections were in place, the US continued to use asylum to advance its own interests—and, increasingly, as a geopolitical chip in the Cold War. This was evident as early as April 1980, only a month after the Refugee Act was passed, when over a hundred thousand Cubans set sail to Florida in a mass exodus that came to be known as the Mariel Boatlift. As with so many other 20th-century refugees, most Marielitos were fleeing a crisis that the US had a role in creating—in this case, by way of a decades-long trade embargo on Cuba. President Jimmy Carter was initially reluctant to allow the Marielitos in because he did not want to “reward illegal entry.” But accepting the exiles offered Carter the opportunity to fire a symbolic salvo against Cuban President Fidel Castro, a key Cold War rival. So, after a period of detention, Carter eventually granted them parole into the US, declaring that May that his administration would “continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from Communist domination and from economic deprivation, brought about primarily by Fidel Castro and his government.” The US later gave many of these refugees federal support as well as a pathway to citizenship.
The belatedly warm, if instrumental, welcome the Marielitos received stood in stark contrast to how the US treated Haitians who had been fleeing dictatorial regimes since the 1950s. Successive US presidents saw Haitian President François Duvalier (and later his son and successor, Jean-Claude) as a bulwark against Communism in the Caribbean. This meant that the asylum requests of many of the journalists, activists, and academics critical of the Duvaliers were seldom approved. In 1980, Carter did temporarily allow Haitians parole into the US, but within a few years President Ronald Reagan reversed the policy—jailing recently arrived Haitians and instructing the Coast Guard to intercept and turn back any future boats.
As with the enslaved exiles from Saint-Domingue and the German Jews aboard the SS St. Louis, the US was preventing Haitian refugees from reaching its shores because once they did, they were owed something—something that the US did not see as being in its interests to grant. The sociologist David Scott FitzGerald called this tactic the “North American moat,” which he characterizes as a “radical move to externalize borders” in order to thwart asylum seekers from landing at US shores. It would prove to be an overture that future US administrations would build on, racing to push the moat-and-border regime to its inevitable extreme.