American Citizens Seek Asylum in Belgium
When people hear the word asylum, Americans are not the first group that comes to mind. And yet, last year twenty-four American citizens knocked on the door of Belgium’s asylum services. Officially, Belgium continues to regard the United States as a safe country with a functioning democracy. And yet something feels wrong.
This tension between formal stability and experienced insecurity also appears on another, less mediagenic level. Not among anonymous asylum seekers, but among a small group of American intellectuals whose professional work consists precisely in warning against authoritarianism. Strikingly, they themselves have chosen to leave the country.
The most telling case is that of Timothy Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe and authoritarianism. Together with Marci Shore and Jason Stanley, he left the United States and moved to Canada. All three worked for many years at Yale, and all three specialized in analyzing democratic erosion, propaganda, and fascism.
Their departure was not a pragmatic career move, but a political choice. Not because the United States has suddenly become a dictatorship, but because, in their view, such regimes rarely emerge overnight. They grow slowly, through habituation, institutional pressure, and shifting norms.
Canada is not the only country confronted with American citizens relocating there, as in the case of Snyder, Shore and Stanley. Belgium, too, has seen American citizens applying for asylum. Under Belgian asylum law, the United States remains a safe country. Dissatisfaction with a government or its policies is, legally speaking, not sufficient grounds for protection. And that is correct. But safety is not only a legal category. It is also cultural, institutional, and intellectual.
Americans who apply for asylum must follow the same procedure as other asylum seekers. If their application is rejected and they are unable to remain through another legal pathway, then they must return to the US. Expectations are that the number of asylum seekers among American academics, artists, and activists will rise.
Their departure suggests that certain forms of criticism, knowledge production, and democratic vigilance have indeed become more precarious.
Just as with the growing number of asylum applications filed by U.S. citizens, the scale of this departure remains limited. But its significance lies not in quantity, but in what it reveals. Small numbers can be powerful signals. A canary does not die because the entire mine collapses, but because it is the first to notice that the air is changing.