Who can seek asylum in the United States? An excerpt from exiled Leon Trotsky autobiography " My Life "

In the last chapter of Leon Trotsky's autobiography " My Life " he reflects on the right to political asylum in the post World War I world : [ The democratic right of asylum obviously does not consist in a government’s showing hospitality to people who hold views similar to its own – even Abdul Hamid did that. Nor does it consist in a democracy’s admitting exiles only with the permission of the government that exiled them. The right of asylum consists (on paper) in a government’s giving refuge even to its opponents, provided they undertake to observe the country’s laws. I of course could enter Germany only as an irreconcilable opponent of the Social Democratic government. In giving an interview to the Constantinople representatives of the German Social Democratic press who called on me for that purpose, I supplied the necessary explanations, which I will quote here just as I wrote them down immediately after the conversation: “As I am now applying for admission to Germany, where the majority of the government consists of Social Democrats, I am chiefly interested in clarifying my attitude toward the Social Democracy. In this respect there has been no change. My attitude toward the Social Democracy is just what it was. More over, my struggle against the centrist faction of Stalin is only a reflection of my general struggle against the Social Democracy. Neither you nor I stand in any need of vagueness or ambiguity. “Some Social Democratic publications are trying to see a contradiction between my stand on the question of democracy and my request for admission to Germany. There is no contradiction. We do not at all ‘deny’ democracy as the anarchists ‘deny’ it, verbally. The bourgeois democracy has advantages in comparison with the state forms that preceded it. But it is not eternal. It must yield to Socialist society. The dictatorship of the prôletariat is the bridge to Socialist society. “In all the capitalist countries Communists take part in the parliamentary struggle. There is no difference in principle in the usage of the right of asylum, and the usage of suffrage, of the freedom of the press and assembly, and so forth.” ]