Opinion: America’s definition of ‘refugee’ needs an update

American leaders of all political stripes lament the nation’s broken asylum system, but they also fall lockstep into short-sighted, reactive fixes that don’t solve the underlying problem: an outdated and unresponsive refugee definition that fails to address the actual threats that refugees face in the 21st century.

Faced with rising numbers of asylum seekers, policymakers’ first instinct is to limit who and how many can be granted asylum. President Joe Biden recently followed that pattern...