Just as the civil rights movement affected attitudes toward immigration, notions about the universalism of human rights eventually affected refugee policy, with the adoption of the international definition of a refugee in the Refugee Act of 1980. The Cold War definition, in contrast, had been related specifically to those fleeing Communist or Communist-dominated countries. As early as 1948, the United States had subscribed to the idea that all people, regardless of where in the world they lived, had certain inalienable rights. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the United Nations conference that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and lent her considerable prestige to the endeavor. During the height of the Cold War, however, U.S. leadership in the field of human rights diminished as U.S. foreign policy increasingly relied on realpolitik, which included support for authoritarian regimes as long as they allied themselves with the west against the Communist threat.

During the 1960s, however, as the civil rights movement took hold domestically, the United States also became more active internationally in setting out human rights standards. After almost two decades of logjam in the General Assembly over the primacy of civil and political or economic and social rights (with the United States and its allies supporting the former and the Soviet Union and its allies the latter), separate treaties were drafted. In 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) were adopted, although it took a decade longer for them to enter into force. Although the United States was active in the drafting, particularly of the ICCPR, the treaties did not go to the Senate for ratification until the Carter administration; in the end, only the ICCPR was ratified, and not until 1992. The covenants marked only the beginning, however, in international activity on human rights.