In the past few years, both private concerns and national debates have been focused on the increasingly important issue of immigration, emigration, and asylum seeking. As citizens of Latin American, Middle Eastern, African, and Asian countries have watched their regimes both topple and grow in dictatorships, millions have fled their countries of origin in pursuit of safer and better lives. Although seen as a paradise for feeling refugees, America has yet proven itself to grow colder in its attempts to grant immigrants happier lives within its borders. Among other popular issues, the subtle problem in the firm resettlement doctrine has pushed away hundreds and thousands of immigrants with the idea that they, in fact, had homes elsewhere. However, such an easy answer has not proven helpful for immigrants as they battle to convince courts that, although they may have fled to other countries when fleeing danger in their own nation, they still seek to resettle in the United States, as they are blocked with an unjust doctrine that keeps refugees at bay. 

The firm resettlement doctrine has its roots in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which established a framework for protecting asylum seekers in America. In the Convention's definition, a refugee is anyone who is recognized by the competent authorities of the country in which he has taken residence as having the rights and obligations which are attached to the possession of the nationality of that country and any person who has acquired a new nationality and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality. This indicated that persons who have the rights and protections that citizenship affords do not need protection in another country, and herein the issue of resettlement was born. 

Later on, the Convention formally solidified its ideas with the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980 in which asylum law became codified as it allowed aliens who were physically present in the United States to legalize their presence by applying for asylum. After the Convention, cases began to arise in the Supreme Court which challenged the Court's understanding of firm settlement. 

Before the 1990s, an alien's resettlement in another country was only one factor to be considered in evaluating an asylum claim. In those years, Courts looked at the circumstances of the time in which the aliens lived in their resettled countries, such as the time they spent there, whether they intended to stay there, and therefore the Court approached the plea for asylum through a holistic lens that did not prohibit asylum to individuals who simply lived in another country for a while before they sought to relocate to America for safety. However, after the 1990s, the resettlement doctrine underwent changes that altered its practical use for asylum seekers as courts began to mandatorily deny aliens asylum based on their resettlement in another country. 

Firm resettlement is defined as entering into another country with, or while in that country receiving an offer of permanent resident status, citizenship, or some other type of permanent resettlement. In order to battle this bar to asylum, immigrants can attempt to show that they only entered the other country as a necessary consequence of their flight from persecution and that they only remained in that third country as long as was necessary before they could travel again. Another route that immigrants may take in pursuing an exception to the asylum bar is that their living conditions in the third country were so substantially restricted that they, in fact, did not resettle. For example, if an immigrant flees to the nearest country of refuge but does not wish to permanently relocate and start a life in that country, this offer for permanent residence is not negated by the immigrant's unwillingness to stay. In this manner, the United States has put restrictions on refugees that effectively state that if a refuge is feeling their country, the very next country that they may choose to catch their breath in, maybe be their new country of residence whether they like it or not. This creates a situation of hopelessness and injustice for many immigrants who then turn to the United States for a better life but are yet stuck with the first choice of the country they made in their escape from danger. 

Through these strict restrictions to asylum seekers, the resettlement doctrine ceased focusing on whether the immigrants were still fleeing, and instead focused on the question of whether an actual offer of permanent resettlement was given to the immigrants in the third country. In this way, the immigrants are now faced with the burdens to demonstrate that they were not fully resettled. This, in turn, creates more burdens on asylum seekers and further restricts their paths toward safety as they turn to the United States for protection and freedom from their pasts.