  Shacknove speculates that this narrow understanding of refugees is likely the consequence of real-world political pressures from leaders who are wary of the international legal obligations that would follow from a more expansive definition. As he puts it, “…states reason in reverse from their fear that they will be forced to shoulder the burden of assisting refugees unilaterally to a narrow conception of refugeehood which limits the number of claimants.” (Shacknove 1985: 277) Whether one accepts the international legal definition or lobbies on behalf of a more expansive conception, however, there is broad-based support for the view that refugees constitute a special category of potential immigrants who possess particularly urgent claims to admittance. Thus, while theorists may vehemently disagree as to whether a country has a right to design and enforce its own immigration policies, even those who affirm a state’s general right to exclude foreigners typically make an exception in the case of refugees. It is one thing for the United States to refuse to admit a Russian ballerina who would like to study and perform in New York, for instance, but is another thing altogether for it to turn away a political dissident who rightly fears persecution by the oppressive regime in her home state. In the latter case, the dire nature of the refugee’s circumstances are thought to give her a pressing claim which trumps whatever presumptive right a state generally has to reject hopeful immigrants. More recently, however, some have come to question this line of thinking. Few suggest that a state has no duties to imperiled foreigners, but theorists increasingly question whether a state’s duty to assist refugees must come in the form of admitting them. Consider the Kurds in Northern Iraq, for instance. Given the abuses they suffered under Saddam Hussein’s rule, many would argue they should have qualified as refugees. One way to offer assistance would have been to provide them refuge in various foreign countries. But as history shows, this was not the only way to help. Another option was to protect the Kurds where they lived, by securing a safe-haven fortified by a no-fly zone in Northern Iraq. (A third possible option might be for rich countries to pay poorer countries to admit the refugees.) Of course, for a variety of reasons, countries might prefer not to intervene in the affairs of a foreign state, but the important point is the more general lesson that, even if we take for granted that stable, wealthy countries can have stringent duties to refugees, it does not follow that these duties must be paid in the currency of open borders.