Asylum Applications Hit Record High in Final Year of Biden Administration: OECD

The United States registered record-high asylum applications during the final year of the Biden administration, accounting for more than half of all filings across developed nations, according to a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The OECD’s annual migration report, released on Nov. 3, said that asylum applications to member countries—which include the United States—continued to increase in 2024 and were the highest on record, with 3.1 million new claims, a 13 percent increase from the prior year.

“The surge was driven by the United States, which alone registered an estimated 1.7 million asylum applications,” the report states.

While permanent migration to developed countries fell by 4 percent in 2024, following three years of sharp post-COVID-19 pandemic increases, the United States bucked this trend, where permanent migration soared by 20 percent during President Joe Biden’s final full year in office.

By contrast, the sharpest declines in permanent migration last year were seen in New Zealand (56 percent decline) and the United Kingdom (41 percent decline), following two years of what the OECD report described as “unusually high” levels of permanent work-related migration.

Family reunification remained the leading channel of permanent migration across OECD members, while work-related migration fell 21 percent and humanitarian entries jumped 23 percent. Altogether, OECD nations recorded 6.2 million new permanent immigrants in 2024, which is 4 percent lower than the previous year and the first overall decline since 2020—but still 15 percent above pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.

Record Humanitarian Flows

While the OECD report did not attribute the U.S. surge in asylum applications to any specific policies, some analysts have pointed to the Biden administration’s expansion of humanitarian parole and asylum processing as key factors behind the record numbers.

During Biden’s term, the administration broadened eligibility for humanitarian parole programs covering nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela; set up “Safe Mobility Offices” in Latin America; and raised the annual refugee ceiling to 125,000—the highest target in years. It also extended Office of Refugee Resettlement benefits to large groups of non-refugees, such as Afghan and Ukrainian parolees, as documented by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a think tank.

In a Nov. 3 note, CIS senior researcher Nayla Rush wrote that “the Biden-Harris administration changed the essence of resettlement itself,” expanding the refugee apparatus to include parolees and other non-traditional categories. She noted that federal funding for refugee processing rose from $932 million in fiscal 2020 to $2.8 billion in fiscal 2024, reflecting “welcoming policies [that] led to higher costs.”

Rush added that “admitting increasing numbers of ‘refugees’ did not necessarily equate with extending refuge to those genuinely facing persecution,” writing that the former administration had “prioritized the admission of ‘refugees’ from Latin America to try and discourage illegal border crossings.”

President Donald Trump, by contrast, has taken a markedly different approach. Besides cracking down on illegal immigration, the Trump administration recently set the refugee-admissions ceiling at 7,500 for fiscal 2026—a 94 percent reduction from Biden’s target and a historic low.

“Refugee resettlement must be conducted in a manner that serves the national interest, promotes efficient use of taxpayer dollars, protects the integrity of the United States immigration system, and supports refugees in achieving early economic self-sufficiency and assimilation into American society,” Trump wrote in an Oct. 30 memo.

Soon after taking office, Trump adopted a directive blocking foreign nationals who cross the U.S.–Mexico border illegally from seeking asylum, though the policy has faced a legal challenge.