Asylum theater on the southern border
Conn Carroll
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Sometimes, a fellow writer turns a phrase that so efficiently captures a complex story that you are instantly jealous.
That is how I felt when I heard the Washington Post’s immigration reporter Nick Miroff describe the situation on our southern border as “asylum theater.”
WHAT BORDER DEMOCRATS ARE SAYING ABOUT BIDEN’S BORDER
Here is part of his exchange with Andrew Sullivan on the Dishcast:
MIROFF: If you look at the Immigration and Nationality Act asylum, someone who comes into the country and sets foot on U.S. soil has the legal right to seek asylum in this country if they … if they have a credible fear of being a victim of religious or political persecution or for their membership in a particular social group, which is, well, the one category that is a little squishier.
But in general, yes, that is what this process is reserved for.
Now, what’s going on is that all of these people who are entering the country across the border, who are being taken into custody, they are stating, effectively, a fear of harm if returned to their home countries.
And by doing that, they really slam the brakes on the detention and deportation process, particularly the deportation process. At this point, with so many people coming in, the government doesn’t even have the ability to screen those fear claims. They’re just basically giving them a court date and appointment where a judge will then hear those claims and make an initial determination.
Now, when the Border Patrol gets so overwhelmed that they can’t even complete that process, they are literally giving people a piece of paper saying to basically self-report to ICE in their destination city in the United States. And so they’ve done this on a large scale over the past two years.
SULLIVAN: Simply because they do not have the staffing to process the number of people trying to do this?
MIROFF: They don’t have the staffing, and they don’t have the detention space. Despite setting up these huge tents that they’re using like overflow spaces, which cost a fortune to operate. But getting back to the beginning of your question, how many of these people apply for asylum? The actual percentage of people who complete the asylum process who actually go through it and comply with the whole process, that’s actually quite low.
And so this is really a loophole, a gap, and in our enforcement system, where, by making a fear claim, and getting into the court system, this incredibly backlogged system, where there’s more than 1.5 million pending asylum claims, once you get into that system, you’re almost guaranteed to be able to remain in this country and work here for a certain number of years.
And even if you are eventually ordered deported, you are not a priority for enforcement, at least under the policies established by the Biden administration. And the chances of … if you’re working and you stay out of trouble, the chances of being deported are quite low.
And this is why when you ask about the administration, saying the border is closed, that’s really, you know, I see that as just sort of a messaging campaign, a kind of signaling for the U.S. population.
But that’s not how migrants are making their decision to invest in migration, right, because migration is an investment, it costs a lot of money to hire a smuggler to pay the bribes that you need to get into the United States. So if you’re making that investment, it’s like a rational calculation. Is this a good time to go or not? And you’re going to make that decision based upon what your friends and your family members probably in the United States are telling you, not what the government is saying.
SULLIVAN: Right? Tell me, this is a very simple layman’s question, which some of our listeners may also have, which is, OK, they have to raise a certain amount of money to get the coyotes and the other paraphernalia to get them to the border, and then over, why don’t they just buy a simple plane ticket? And come as a tourist and never leave?
MIROFF: A lot of people do do that.
SULLIVAN: Oh, obviously, they do. But I’m just saying, I don’t see why that isn’t, it’s certainly more convenient than struggling across desert. So would these people be immediately suspected at immigration?
MIROFF: Yeah, someone from Haiti or Central America, or many countries in Latin, many countries around the world, you know, there are visa requirements, you can’t get on a plane to the United States. It’s just not possible.
And so while there is a significant number of people who arrive legally on a plane with a visa and then overstay that visa and remain in the country, and eventually oftentimes adjust their status in order to be able to stay here and become permanent legal residents there for millions of other people who are either attempting this journey or considering this journey. That’s simply not an option. They have to cross the border, and, in many cases, they have to resort to this asylum theater basically that we have now.
Do listen to the whole hour-and-15-minute podcast. If you care about border security, the entire episode is worth your time.
Miroff is no conservative. He’s a straight reporter. And he is honest and smart enough to see exactly what is happening in Washington and at the southern border.
The activist base of the Democratic Party has completely overrun whatever “moderate figures who had experience at DHS” were in Biden’s White House. These hardcore immigration activists have successfully dismantled all of former President Donald Trump’s border enforcement policies, thus allowing economic migrants from poor but perfectly safe countries to enter our country and stay forever, even though very, very few of them are ever actually granted asylum.
Until we elect a president who is committed to shutting down “asylum theater” by closing the asylum loophole, as Trump did with his “Remain in Mexico” policy, the situation at the southern border is only going to get worse.
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