Asylum, Part I: What Idealist America Handed to Realist America

Ten chapters and an appendix. Asylum's most distinctive feature is not a low standard of proof but a low threshold of access: INA 208 allows any person who has arrived in the United States to apply, regardless of status. The paper traces the 1980 Refugee Act, the risk allocation implied by a well-founded fear standard below fifty percent, the epistemic problem of private facts occurring abroad, the parametric effects of the 1995 reforms, and the administrative-capacity question behind roughly 2.4 million pending cases in 2026.

The value choice was real. The scale, pathways, and incentives it assumed were not the ones that arrived.

1. 01Access, not the standard of proof, is the design choice that produced today's volume.
2. 02A sub-fifty-percent standard deliberately accepts false positives to avoid false negatives.
3. 03Facts occurring abroad in private are structurally difficult to verify, so credibility becomes the decisive instrument.
4. 04The 1995 reforms altered incentives more than they altered eligibility.
5. 05Backlog is a capacity outcome, and capacity is set by appropriations, not by doctrine.
6. 06The trilemma: generosity, accuracy, and speed cannot be maximized together.

This page is the abstract and outline. The full text is not published on this site.