Julia V. Taft - Asst. See our testimony The U.S. Humanitarian Entry Program Lacks Coherence - Feb. 24, 1998. The distinction between a refugee and an asylee is that the former applies for entry to the United States from abroad, and the latter is already in the United States, legally or illegally when the application is made. The distinction originally also required that a refugee apply for protection from outside his country. However, the United states has chosen to accept applications from persons while still in their homeland.
Examples are in the former Soviet Union, in Cuba and in Vietnam.
The above definition was first adopted in the Refugee Act of 1980. It mirrors the internationally adopted refugee definition. Asylees are counted against that annual ceiling. The ceiling is not on the arrival in the United States of new refugees, although it sets the framework for that process, but rather the adjustment to permanent residence for refugees and asylees who have already been in the country for at least a year. Spouses and children of refugees or asylees may be accorded derivative status as refugees even though they might not meet the definition in their own right.