Make America an Asylum of Liberty Again

The recent wave of political arrests in Europe shows that a different kind of Iron Curtain is descending on the Old World. Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, was arrested in France for “complicity” in hosting an encrypted messaging platform that has been used for illegal acts. European Union officials threaten Elon Musk with the same fate. Several British citizens have been arrested for hate speech on social media—as has happened before. Eric Zemmour, a French intellectual who ran for president in France’s last election, has been fined more than a dozen times for “racist hate speech” for speaking out against unlimited Muslim immigration.

Up until the 1990s, America would offer succor, support, and aid to political dissidents who were arrested for thought crimes or took actions against a despotic regime. America offered asylum to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after he was banished from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Even further back in our republic’s history, Whig congressmen and senators demanded that Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian revolt against the Hapsburgs in the mid-nineteenth century, be released from detention and invited him to visit the United States. America also attracted exiled scientists like Joseph Priestly, who found in America “the Mistress of the Science, as well as the Asylum of Liberty” (in Jeremy Belknap’s phrase).

America’s old asylum policy, which was ultimately guided by our national interests, admitted politically oppressed dissidents into the country, which reinforced our own commitments to fostering political freedom and individual courage at home. America would be a republican example for all people who struggle for freedom and political independence abroad.

Sometimes this meant visiting political dissidents on their home turf to highlight our sympathy with their commitment to political liberty. President Ronald Reagan famously met with Soviet dissidents in defiance of Communist officials in visits to the Soviet Union during the 1980s, as did his cabinet officials.

At other times, it involved welcoming genuine political refugees to the country. In the aftermath of the revolutions in 1848, millions of Forty-Eighters, as they were called, left despotic governments and were allowed to settle in the Midwest, including in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, among other cities. Later on, America welcomed refugees in the early 1920s. Among those refugees were my great-grandparents who fled the Bolsheviks in rural Russia. My relatives who did not flee were never heard from again.

Today, however, tyrannized Europeans do not come to America like they did in the past, because America itself is no longer seen as much of a refuge of liberty.

In fact, elite liberals have been doubling down on America’s new commitment to banning hate speech. Pro-life advocates have been harassed and arrested due to violating the FACE Act. January 6 protestors are locked away in jail with ludicrously long sentences. Policemen are being held as political prisoners because a black man died while being arrested. Social media anons have been prosecuted for funny memes.

America is no longer an asylum of liberty, because it is caught in the grip of the same ideological frenzy sweeping across the European continent.

Not once has a Biden Administration official visited a political prisoner in Great Britain, France, or Germany. Not once has the administration complained against Germany banning political parties or France fining politicians. Not once has it lifted a finger to make asylum for such political prisoners a reality.

As President Trump forms a “national unity” ticket of sorts, he should announce that America will once again be an asylum of liberty. When it serves our national interests, America should allow entry to law-abiding, productive, and competent Europeans who have been arrested for phantom “hate crimes,” had their free speech undermined, or been subject to political persecution, just as we once encouraged Eastern Europeans under the Soviet boot to emigrate here.

This means that America would have to put our own house in order too. We must stop persecuting our own political dissidents and, at the very least, pardon those who have been put in prison unjustly. Punitive progressives should be punished at the polls and in the courtroom for their censorship, blatant political prosecutions, lawfare, and advocacy of hate crimes. Fines against citizens wrongly targeted should be cancelled or reimbursed, and lawyer fees for the prosecuted could come out of the Office of Civil Right’s budget.

Putting the asylum of liberty theme front and center on a national unity ticket would mean de-emphasizing more partisan goals (like, for instance, pro-life legislation on the Right and environmental dogmatism on the Left), but it could forge a political consensus consistent with high-minded, enduring American principles. 

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