People all around the world look to the United States as a land of opportunity and safety. Every month, tens of thousands of people arrive at US border checkpoints and ask to be granted asylum. Over the last decade, the number of people showing up at the southern U.S. border seeking protection has increased five-fold to more than 200,000 every month. That huge increase has so overwhelmed the system that getting a final answer often takes years. There is bipartisan agreement that the asylum system is broken. How we fix the backlog, though, depends a lot on how we answer the question at the heart of today's podcast episode: what is our obligation to asylum seekers? Are we responsible for taking these individuals in? We’ll be hearing from two previous asylum seekers about the challenges of seeking asylum in the United States, a writer who had an eye-opening experience learning how America’s asylum process differs from other countries, and two former immigration judges with differing perspectives on how we should implement asylum law in the United States. As we hear each of these perspectives, we’ll consider this question: what do we owe people who are no longer safe or able to prosper in the countries where they happen to have been born?

Podcast Guests:

Razak Iyal, sought asylum in the U.S. in 2013, granted asylum in Canada in 2017

Joe Meno, Author of “Between Everything and Nothing: The Journey of Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal and the Quest for Asylum”

Makaya Revell, CEO of Peace Promise Consulting, granted U.S. asylum in 2022

Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, former immigration judge 2006-2014 (York, Pennsylvania)

Paul Wickham Schmidt, adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University, former immigration judge 2003-2016 (Arlington, Virginia)

**This episode is part of Season 3 on Top of Mind: Finding Fairness. From health and immigration to prisons and pot, how can we get more peace and prosperity for all?