Asylum Archipelago examines refugee and asylum policy in the U.S. empire from 1975 to 2003. Moving archipelagically from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean through the Panama Canal to the Northern Mariana Islands, it analyzes how U.S. federal officials, with both cooperation and contestation from territorial policymakers and foreign governments, employed extraterritorial and intraterritorial legal regimes to construct the U.S. refugee migration apparatus. This apparatus operated within and between unincorporated territories, U.S. military facilities, freely associated states, and ostensibly sovereign countries which became borderlands, transit points, detention sites, and places of resettlement depending on domestic and foreign policy concerns. Asylum Archipelago studies how this apparatus evolved by attending to the experiences of Vietnamese, Korean, Haitian, Cuban, Kurdish, Iraqi Arab, Chinese, and Chin migrants. While the externalization of U.S. migration policy infringed upon migrant, territorial, and Indigenous rights, it also provided opportunities for places within the U.S. empire to renegotiate their legal, political, and economic relationship with the United States. The right to control migration especially emerged as a central pillar in formal territorial status adjustment processes and decolonization movements. By studying these relationships, Asylum Archipelago repositions the United States as an empire of migrants rather than as a “nation of immigrants.” The history of refugee migration in the U.S. empire ultimately reveals the history of the United States’ body politic, as the U.S. federal government routed (un)desirable migrants to and from places wherein occupied peoples strove for self-determination and decolonization.