In the recent proposal put forward by President Trump and two Republican Senators regarding legal immigration, it was announced that the annual number of refugees seeking political asylum would be arbitrarily capped at 50,000, rather than at a level mandated each year by the president.

Asylum is a defining element of America’s national identity. The United States bears a special stake in the plight of refugees, which originated well before the Statue of Liberty famously urged foreign nations to send “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” Indeed, it was on the eve of American independence in 1776 from Great Britain that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense promised an “asylum for mankind.”



It was this uplifting vision of America’s unique role, widely shared by the Founders, that defined the broader purpose of independence. In a world of tyrannical governments, the United States would welcome victims of oppression willing to forsake Old World allegiances.

Not that the infant Republic immediately embraced persecuted fugitives. America would not officially grant asylum to refugees for over 60 years. Although President George Washington supported an expansive immigration policy, the French Revolution, coupled with a rebellion in Ireland against British occupation, unleashed a tide of xenophobia cresting in the Alien Acts of 1798. A congressman from Massachusetts fumed that he did “not wish to invite hoards of wild Irishmen.”

Freedom has often been advanced by unforeseen circumstances in the most unlikely of moments. Rather than the inevitable consequence of Revolutionary idealism, America’s adoption of political asylum owes a great deal to the most violent naval mutiny in British history, in which the sadistic captain of the frigate HMS Hermione, along with nine other officers, were murdered and thrown overboard off the western coast of Puerto Rico in 1797.

President John Adams’s catastrophic decision two years later to extradite to Britain a reported Irish mutineer, who claimed instead to be an American citizen “impressed” by the Royal Navy, and his subsequent hanging led to a domestic uproar that helped to elect Thomas Jefferson in the tumultuous presidential election of 1800.

Due to the prolonged “public clamor” over the martyred sailor, the federal government wouldn’t surrender either a citizen or an alien to a foreign power for 43 years after his execution, resulting in a policy of de facto asylum for political refugees.

When America finally resumed extradition to Britain by virtue of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842, exempted from the list of extraditable crimes were political offenses, including mutiny, desertion and treason, as they would be in Congress’s first extradition law (1848).



This was the point at which political asylum became the formal policy of the United States - a major achievement in helping to fulfill the iconic promise of the American Revolution. (It bears noting that in order to gain Britain’s assent in 1842, notwithstanding the frequent desertion of British soldiers across the Canadian border, the treaty forbid that runaway slaves to Canada be extradited to their former masters.)

Today, opportunities for asylum in America stands imperiled on multiple fronts, not least owing to the priorities of President Trump. Such is the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States seeking sanctuary that the waiting period for a hearing can take up to six years. Many applicants continue to languish in detention centers.

Diverse reforms would help to improve the asylum process, including prioritizing the admission of families, especially women and children, the most common victims of abuse and the least prone to violent crime.

Serious efforts need to be made not only to improve screening and to appoint larger numbers of asylum officers and judges but also to permit indigent refugees some form of free counseling. Conversely, lawyers who knowingly facilitate fraudulent applications should be punished.



At a time when America has grown reluctant to promote democracy abroad by nation-building, the need to afford sanctuary has grown all the more acute. If we have failed, time and again, from Vietnam to Iraq, to remake foreign countries in our image, the United States should remain true to its historic identity, all the while encouraging other democracies to follow our example.



The Trump administration and Congress should reaffirm not diminish America’s commitment. On this issue, it is no time for the United States to lead from behind, much less succumb to nativism. The successful integration of all foreign immigrants into American society, of course, remains critical.

Admission, like citizenship, entails responsibilities as well as benefits, first and foremost the privilege of residence in the United States. Domestic opposition to immigration might subside if sustained attempts were made to offer instruction not only in English but also in the basic tenets of the American system of government, beginning with the essential premise of equality before the law, irrespective of gender, race, religion and sexual orientation.

However culturally diverse, the nation rests upon a historic commitment to democratic-republicanism, with a balance struck by the Founders between majority rule and minority rights.

Americans remain bound not by religion, ethnicity, race, or, for that matter, language, but by a set of political values embedded in the Constitution. It is those same principles on which the doctrine of political asylum is predicated in a world beset by intolerance and oppression.

Roger Ekirch is professor of history at Virginia Tech. He is the author of American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution

