In recent years, political asylum and refugees have become acute issues in public debate in Western Europe and North America. The debate has become especially heated since 1989 and the breaching of barriers between Eastern and Western Europe, with East Germans, Albanians, Romanians, and Yugoslavs all trying to move west. Most asylum-seekers continue to come from the Third World. Those who manage to enter the West face growing hostility, poverty, and even violent attacks. In France immigration has already shifted political discourse sharply to the right, testing the nation's tolerance toward foreigners and shaking its liberal foundations. Xenophobia and brutal physical attacks on foreigners by skinheads and extreme right-wingers throughout Germany have caused politicians in Bonn to reconsider their country's asylum provisions. Governments everywhere appear reluctant to open their doors when they are not sure how many will benefit from their hospitality and for how long. To many industrialized countries, asylum-seekers are perceived mostly as economic migrants in search of a better life. Actual migratory pressures from the South and perceived threats of exodus from the East have only served to reinforce this restrictive attitude to asylum. The refugee problem has reached such a critical point that the very institution of asylum is being threatened.

In the 1990s, an increasing number of refugees make their way to the countries of the West. While the annual number of asylum seekers to Western Europe and North America averaged about 20,000 in the mid- 1970s, by 1990 this figure had jumped to more than 500,000. Unlike previous migrants, many of these asylum seekers came from non-Western countries, including Iran, Turkey, Sri Lanka, and Ghana. Their flight to the West was but a small part of a worldwide refugee problem that has grown larger since the 1980s, especially in the Third World. The vast majority of the 17.5 million people now considered to be refugees are located in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Despite the improved international climate created by the thaw of the Cold War, the current asylum crisis is likely to continue throughout the decade; the mass exodus of Kurds to Turkey and Iran in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war is one reminder of this.

The Berlin Wall is down; the Cold War is finally over. With the stunning victory by the United Nations forces in the Persian Gulf, President George Bush has proclaimed a “new world order.” Bush provides this description of the old world: “Until now, the world we've known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and cold war.

Refugee policy in the United States is a recent offspring of American immigration policy. Like its parent, refugee admissions are firmly entangled in the thicket of national politics and are Janus-faced. One face presses for admission, the other urges restriction. While the gates of admission are always guarded, time and circumstance determine which face prevails.

Canadian policy on the protection of refugees has evolved through three distinct traditions. During the first era, refugee protection was constructed as a matter of immigration control. Indeed, until the middle of the twentieth century, Canada had no law or policy specifically oriented to the admission of refugees. Refugees simply applied for permission to enter Canada under the auspices of the general immigration scheme, the primary purpose of which was to promote domestic economic interests. The erosion of this historical view of refugees as immigrants has occurred only gradually, such that even today most refugees protected by Canada must meet immigration selection criteria, in addition to showing that they are at risk in their home country.

The dark side of European history, the waves of persecution, the pogroms, and the explosions of political and ethnic violence have produced movements of refugees throughout the period of recorded history. There is nothing new in the phenomenon of forced displacement, of individuals and groups being suddenly uprooted and tragically torn from ties of nationality, of home, of family. One of the marks of social progress in Europe has been precisely the range of responses that have been developed to handle such movements of people, responses that have resulted in a codification of laws and the evolution of international institutions which, particularly in the twentieth century, constitute a remarkable example of internationalism and human solidarity. Such social progress has never been smooth; indeed it is disfigured by historical moments of great cruelty and shame where states have denied asylum to persons in acute distress. Worse, as the experience of Nazi Germany demonstrates, European states of immense sophistication and cultural richness have been capable of unspeakable savagery, which has led to the creation of enormous human displacements within Europe and beyond. Nevertheless, the right of asylum itself has become established as a norm of civilized international behavior in Europe and many millions of persecuted and marginalized people have benefited from it. Many millions more have within their family history an experience of someone who was forced to move, victimized by repression of their race, religion, their nationality, their opinions; and elsewhere, those who perished in ghettos, concentration camps, and unmarked killing fields.