Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

In March 1980, Congress and the Carter administration put an end to the policy chaos and passed the Refugee Act. By then, the US was admitting, on average, roughly ninety thousand refugees each year. Now the government would have an actual blueprint, bringing US law into step with long-standing international compacts. It began with some definitions. According to the act, a refugee was someone outside his homeland, unable or unwilling to return because of either outright persecution or a “well-founded fear of persecution.” Such persecution was defined as being based on “race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” Immigration lawyers, judges, lawmakers, and government officials would spend decades fighting over the underlying ambiguities. But for the time being, the act represented an unqualified advance in American legal practice. As one congressman pointed out, on the House floor, these definitions identified refugees by “a more universal standard based on uprootedness rather than ideology.”