The End of Asylum

Below is the abstract of an article from vol. 7-8 of Limen, the journal of the International Network for Immigration Research (INIR). A pdf of the article is below; download the whole issue, including this article, here.

The dramatic political, social, and technological changes since World War II have made the asylum regime established by the 1951 Refugee Convention unsustainable. Because asylum is seen as a “right”, it has become a challenge – arguably an existential challenge – to the sovereignty of developed nations. The measures proposed or taken so far have failed to address the fundamental contradiction between international asylum rules and modern conditions. The beginning of a solution, then, must be to withdraw from multilateral treaties that relate to asylum and for each nation to develop its own asylum policies based on its own interests.