to recognize children who do not fall under the strict guidelines of the Convention definition but still should not be sent back to their countries of origin. It also extends the principle of nonrefoulement to prohibit the return of a child to their country "where there are grounds for believing that there is a real risk of irreparable harm to the child." International sources Refugee law encompasses both customary law, peremptory norms, and international legal instruments. The only international instruments directly applying to refugees are the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Both the Convention and the Protocol are open to states, but each may be signed separately. 145 states have ratified the Convention, and 146 have ratified the Protocol. These instruments only apply in the countries that have ratified an instrument, and some countries have ratified these instruments subject to various reservations. U.S. refugee law Various regions and countries have different variations of refugee law. They all stem from the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol which relates to refugee status. The United States became a party to this protocol in 1968. Despite playing an active role in the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United States has yet to ratify the treaty, making it the only nation in the UN that is not party to it. Refugee status first emerged as a legal category in the United States in the 1940s, responding to an influx of Eastern Europeans fleeing Communism. In response to this influx, Congress established refugee migration as "distinct and separate from general immigration admissions" upon the recommendation from the House Committee on Postwar Immigration. The Committee argued that the right to seek asylum be made "an explicit part of United States immigration policy." Although the aftermath of World War II brought forth a refugee crisis, the large influx and resettlement of Indochinese refugees led to the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. This law incorporated the International Convention's definitions of a refugee into U.S. law. In doing so, it codified into US law that a refugee was an individual with a "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion." Furthermore, ratifying this Convention meant the elimination of previous "ideological and geographical discriminations" against