Humanitarian-induced immigration, in its many diverse channels, has grown to account for an estimated 20 percent of the 1.3 million foreign-born now settling in the U.S. each year. Other democratic industrial nations of the West face even greater flows relative to their smaller populations. The power of the refugee lobby, rising migration hunger overseas, and ever more generous readings of refugee law portend rapid future growth. For three decades the U.S. has compensated for the overtaxed formal refugee and asylee pipeline with a series of measures to allow in far more humanitarian claimants for ostensibly “temporary” forms of protection, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), or by disguised amnesties.

The U.S. asylum system has become the “hole in the fence” for millions of dubious claimants — and a major immigration magnet in itself. For patronage-hungry legislators in an age of ethnic identity politics, humanitarian admissions are choice pork. Vague legislation and aggressive litigation by the human rights bar, feminists and gays have persuaded the courts to open asylum to new victim groups. If the U.S. is to meet legitimate demands for protection without accepting population-swelling mass settlement, much tougher screening is needed, such as rigorously limited temporary stays; offshore protection of claimants; tight limits on appeals; and narrower definitions of persecution.

Arrivals of new immigrants and births to children of immigrants already here now account for about two-thirds of America’s population growth. The U.S. added nearly 33 million people in the decade of the 90s and 20 million were immigrants or their U.S.- born children.

Formal admissions of refugees and asylees, which is only a fraction of overall humanitarian entries, came to about 105,000 in 2002, about 11 percent of all legal immigration. Between 1945 and 2001, 3.6 million refugees and asylees were formally settled in the U.S. These numbers, though an important force in postwar U.S. population growth, are probably about half of the actual influx of humanitarian or humanitarian-induced immigration since the 1980s. How did it get to be this way?

The U.S. signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which ambitiously proclaims in Article 14 the right of every person in the world to “seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”1 Despite the wording of the article, the U.S. has consistently held that the “right” in question is to apply for asylum, not to receive it. The Universal Declaration is just that, a declaration, not a binding treaty.