One of the Institute’s long-term areas of research interest is the status of asylees, refugees and migrants around the world. While these groups have always constituted vulnerable populations in the United States and in many other nations as well, Donald Trump has, since 2015, led a campaign in the U.S. to demonize these individuals in the eyes of a substantial minority of Americans. He used his campaign for office and the four years of his administration, beginning in 2016, to vilify this population by claiming that most were criminals, terrorists or wastrels. His assertions were uniformly false, but his use of such tropes was hardly new in American history. Immigrants have long been ostracized in this country as somehow less than and dangerous to those who already reside here. Paradoxically, these claims have often been offered by those, including Trump, whose parents or grandparents were immigrants themselves.  

As I write, several leaders in European and Latin American nations have emulated Trump and have similarly scapegoated immigrants and refugees to gain or to retain power. This rhetoric and policy stance was exacerbated in some European nations by the exodus created by the Syrian civil war and Afghanistan’s collapse. This turn has led the European Union and the United States to adopt policies temporarily to suspend or block the international right to asylum, a convention those nations had long supported. Overall, these leaders’ decisions and practices have led to a reality that finds the international community’s most fragile states, with least capacity to do so, shouldering a continuing disproportionate responsibility for the world’s migrants, refugees and asylum seekers despite efforts adopted by the United Nations in 2018 to avoid just such a scenario.