Who Qualifies for ‘Asylum’?
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/magazine/who-qualifies-for-asylum.html
According to international law, if a person merits asylum by showing she has a ‘‘well-founded fear of being persecuted’’ based on race, nationality, religion, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, she is no longer a migrant, who can be sent away at any time. She must be recognized as a refugee, with a right to be protected for as long as it is unsafe to return home. Yet many of the 380,000 people who have arrived in Europe this year from countries like Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan have sought legal refuge, risking suffocation in smugglers’ trucks and drowning at sea, only to find themselves described as a threat and a nuisance.