Eric Adams’s border plan would only make asylum theater worse
Conn Carroll
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A day after saying “there is no more room in New York” for migrants, New York City Mayor Eric Adams released a six-step plan “to address the migrant crisis.”
His policy prescriptions include:
ASYLUM THEATER ON THE SOUTHERN BORDER
1. a government official solely focused on overseeing the migrant response and coordinating all relevant agencies and government entities, including the U.S. Border Patrol; 2. a decompression strategy at the border that evaluates asylum claims, establishes a plan for each migrant’s arrival — before entry into the United States — and a system to fairly distribute newcomers regionally; 3. additional congressionally allocated funding through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to implement that strategy at the border and in the localities where the migrants end up; 4. expedited right-to-work status for asylum seekers who are allowed to enter the country; 5. a clear, congressionally passed pathway to residency or citizenship for those who enter this country legally; 6. leadership that takes an all-hands-on-deck approach by bringing together nonprofits, the faith-based community and the private sector, alongside state and local government, to meet this challenge.
Basically, Adams’s plan for fixing the border is just more money and more amnesty — more money for federal, state, and local governments to house, feed, educate, and provide medical care for the millions of migrants illegally crossing our southern border, and amnesty for those that are already here.
At no point in his plan does Adams ever explain why the border crisis is happening now. The closest he comes is when he says that migrants are “pouring in” from countries with “failing governments.”
When did all these governments start failing exactly? Did governments throughout “Central and South America, and the Caribbean” all suddenly fail the day after Joe Biden was sworn into office? Because that is when the border crisis started.
Notice how every item in Adams’ plan is focused on processing migrants into the country faster. What happens when, as Washington Post’s immigration reporter Nick Miroff points out, the vast majority of these migrants fail to win their asylum claims? Is Biden going to deport them all? Is Adams going to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down illegal migrants in his city and send them back to the country they came from?
Of course not.
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What is happening on the southern border, and what Adams’s plan would only make worse, is asylum theater. That is when economic migrants, who want to make more money here than they can in their home countries, illegally cross the southern border, claim they are afraid to return home, and are then placed in our asylum process, where their case will take years to decide.
Again, almost all of these economic migrants will eventually lose their asylum cases. But that doesn’t matter. All that matters to them is that they were released into the U.S. Once they are here, migrants know that Biden will make no effort to deport them, and that Democrats like Adams will do everything in their power to stop ICE from deporting them. Adams’s plan does nothing to change this incentive structure. In fact, it only makes it worse.