ABSTRACT
For American refugee policy, the decade of the 1980s began in certitude and ended in doubt. The decade began with the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, which promised that the United States would afford welcome to the persecuted of the world. But immediately after the passage of the Refugee Act, Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel, allowing Cubans to flee north to democracy and freedom; late in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, allowing East Germans to flee west to democracy and freedom. On November 21, 1990, President George Bush declared, “The Cold War is over.” But more than communism had died. In the intervening decade, all the foundations on which our previous refugee policy had been built—that refugees would provide an additional weapon in the war on communism, that American pressure groups would work with the government and not against it, and that the flow of refugees to the United States would be orderly—had gradually eroded and were now crumbling.
