Introduction

The Refugee Act of 1980, initially proposed by Senator Ted Kennedy in 1979 and ultimately signed into action by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, intended to address the problems of refugee resettlement and asylum-seeking disorganization in the United States. The bill clearly defined who qualifies as a refugee, the process by which someone may apply for asylum, put in place a process for humanitarian crisis that would lend itself to admission of more refugees, raised the cap on refugee admissions, and established a process by which each president could determine the number of refugees admitted into the United States in each fiscal year. The history of the Refugee Act from 1980 starts with legislative regulation in the early years of the 20th century. Reaching back to 1891, when the Bureau of Immigration was established, policies for and against immigration have shaped the United States of America. To understand, where the 1980 Refugee Act has its roots, becoming familiar with other immigration legislation like The Immigration Act of 1917 or The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and The Immigration Act of 1924, is very helpful to understand the bigger picture. Furthermore, events like WWI & WWII, the Cuba Crisis and the Vietnam War significantly influenced immigration and refugee regulation in the U.S.

We argue that, while the Refugee Act of 1980 succeeded in the organizational aspect of refugee and asylee admission, providing concrete definitions and process guidelines, there is a fundamental flaw in the bill, giving the president too much power to determine the cap on refugees each year. Allowing every president to place a cap on refugee admission into the United States based upon humanitarian need and national interest, as the bill lays out, provides ambiguous guidelines for refugee caps, allowing presidents to decide cap numbers based more on personal belief than actual humanitarian needs of refugees. Similarly, the Attorney General is given nearly ultimate power in terms of admission of asylum-seekers into the United States, allowing for politicized interpretation of the language of the Refugee Act to exclude asylees at the border. We argue that any cap may be placed in the name of ‘national interest’ and that any asylum seeker may be denied by rejecting their reasoning for entrance,  allowing things like xenophobia and traditional conservatism to take precedence over the needs of refugees.

The three main pages of this website track the history, implementation, and consequences of the Refugee Act of 1980. The page lead-up to the Act tracks the history of refugee admission in the United States pre-1980. The page on implementation explored how the  Act passed with little resistance because Congress was controlled by democrats and the President, Carter, was also a democrat. The ease of the acts passing resulted in the use of ambiguous language that granted the President too much decision making power with little oversight. Finally, the page on the consequences of the Act explores the ways in which the particular language in the Act give extreme power to the President and Attorney General, which allows for exclusionary and xenophobic policies like those of the Reagan and Trump administrations.