Jeff Crisp, RSC Visiting Fellow, has authored an article in PassBlue examining the Trump administration’s approach to the global asylum system.
Extract:
In recent months, the Trump administration has made it increasingly clear that it wants to dismantle this global asylum system, claiming it is outdated, does not serve US interests and puts too much power in the hands of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which was created at the same time as the 1951 Convention. According to US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, whose father came from an Austrian-Jewish refugee family, “the asylum system has become a huge loophole in our migration laws.” Revisiting the 1951 Convention, he said, “should be a top international priority.”
Instead of the Convention, Landau has argued that a new framework should be established by the international community, or “the need to revisit the asylum system in the 21st century.” The case for such an initiative was summarized in a September 2025 presentation given at a New York City hotel on the margins of the UN General Assembly high-level week. It was pointedly titled, “The Global Refugee and Asylum System: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It.”
According to the statement, fixing the system would require the UN and its member states to recognize that people do not have a right to seek asylum in the place of their choice and that refugee status is temporary rather than permanent. Sovereign states, rather than international organizations, should have sole responsibility for deciding when it was safe for refugees to be returned to their country of origin. And those countries should be obliged to accept the return of their citizens when it was deemed by the deporting country that they no longer needed asylum or their applications for refugee status had been rejected.