A political conception of asylum.

摘要

Is there a normative justification for limiting asylum to persecuted people, and denying it to others whose need for admission---due to poverty, hunger, or generalized violence---may be just as urgent? This thesis offers a defense of the current law's persecution requirement by calling attention to asylum's political, as opposed to humanitarian, function.;The thesis begins by offering an account of asylum's historical role. Drawing primarily on Greek and early modern sources, I find that asylum functioned as a grant of immunity against another state's illegitimate exercise of authority. Granting asylum therefore required states to make critical substantive judgments about another state's treatment of its citizens. The persecution criterion evolved against this historical backdrop.;I offer two arguments for continuing to limit asylum to persecuted people. First, asylum provides its recipients with a political good: membership in the state of refuge. This distinguishes asylum from other important refugee policies, such as temporary protection and in situ relief, which provide only protection and succor. I maintain that persecuted people have a moral priority to the type of relief that asylum uniquely offers, insofar as their standing as members in their home state has been repudiated.;Second, asylum has a politically valuable expressive dimension: granting asylum to a refugee communicates condemnation of her country of origin. It therefore serves as a law-level sanction against abusive regimes, and serves to warn those regimes that more coercive sanctions may be forthcoming. Limiting asylum to persecuted people preserves its expressive dimension; expanding eligibility to include other needy people dilutes it.;The argument of the thesis has important implications for a non-ideal liberal theory of immigration, suggesting a need for a more fine-grained analysis of refugee policy than liberal theorists have offered thus far. Such a theory must differentiate among various refugee admissions programs by taking note of their different functions, and allocate refugees among these programs accordingly.