Deputy Secretary Landau Hosts Panel on Reforming the Global Refugee and Asylum System

Name: "Deputy Secretary Landau Hosts Panel on Reforming the Global Refugee and Asylum System"
Uploaded: 2025-09-25
Duration: 12 min 22 s
Description: "Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau distinguishes asylum from immigration and questions whether the postwar refugee system still fits current migration, in the State Department's upload of his September 25, 2025 panel."

September 25, 2025 · U.S. Department of State · 0:12:22

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau opened a State Department panel titled “The Global Refugee and Asylum System: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It” by calling migration one of the defining topics of the 21st century, according to the State Department’s upload of the September 25, 2025 event in New York. Landau traced the refugee system to the aftermath of World War II and the failure to protect people persecuted in Nazi Germany and the Axis powers.

Landau drew a distinction he said is often conflated: immigration, which each sovereign country sets for its own reasons, and asylum, which he said was always meant to be a much smaller subset. Under U.S. law, he noted, asylum requires a well-founded fear of persecution on enumerated grounds such as religion, race or political opinion, and economic privation is not a basis for asylum.

Landau said the panelists had not coordinated their views and that he spoke for the United States and himself. He said the United Nations had been instrumental in building refugee and asylum systems worldwide, and he framed the discussion as stepping back, a quarter-century into the 2000s, to assess mass migratory flows against that original design.

Why it matters

The panel frames the administration’s asylum doctrine — a narrow, persecution-based exception distinct from general immigration — as the premise for its proposed overhaul of the global refugee system, as Landau stated it.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Deputy Secretary Landau Hosts The Global Refugee & Asylum System: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It”, 2025-09-25 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-09-25). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.