At 70, the global convention on refugees is needed more than ever

WHEN THE Turkish coastguard found them in the Aegean in the dead of night, they had been adrift for three hours. The air was hissing out of their rubber dinghy. The motor would not start. Anas and the eight other Somali men shielded their eyes from the glare of the searchlights. His wife, Faduma, the only woman, panted from stress and exhaustion. They had paid $2,000 apiece to a smuggler to reach Greece. Faduma, six months pregnant, was the first to climb onto the Turkish boat.

That was the couple’s first attempt to reach Europe after leaving Somalia last year. “We are never going do this again,” Anas says. He hopes to stay in Turkey.

Some 11,000km (7,000 miles) away, in Tijuana, Mexico, another couple try to cross a forbidding border. José and María, who did not want to give their real names, fled El Salvador after José appealed to police for help in recovering stolen cows. The gang behind the theft threatened to kill María and their young son. With help from a sister living in America they paid a smuggler $10,000 to bring them to Texas, where they turned themselves in to the border patrol and asked for asylum. The agents expelled them to the desert near Juárez. That was a “devastating” moment, says José.

José and María made their way by bus west to Tijuana, where they live with dozens of other families in...