What America can learn from Europe’s asylum overhaul

We are experiencing a global refugee crisis, and have been for a long time. At the end of 2025, there were 117.8 million people forcibly displaced from their homes “as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.” Nine million of them were seeking asylum.

In 2015, more than a million asylum-seekers fled to European Union countries. This had a number of adverse consequences, such as overloading the EU’s asylum systems. It caused a significant rise in xenophobic, racist and antisemitic sentiments, which then contributed to a decade of popular support for far-right parties. Border facilities became overcrowded. Member states had difficulty processing asylum applications in a timely manner.

The U.S. is facing a similar challenge — its asylum system has been overwhelmed by asylum seekers, too. As of the end of April, its immigration court had a backlog of more than 3 million pending cases, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had a backlog of more than 1.5 million affirmative asylum applications at the end of 2025. The average wait for a hearing before an immigration judge has reached 4.3 years, with some courts approaching six years.

In 2024, the EU introduced a Migration and Asylum Pact, a complex set of legislative files for managing migration and the asylum applications that are consistent with European values. A modified version of the pact became fully applicable on June 12 of this year. 

The pact contains dozens of provisions, including mandatory screening at borders; an expanded Eurodac database for biometric data; accelerated border processing for........

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