Yves here. Having had such loose immigration enforcement, I am not sure how the US puts the genie in the bottle. Yes, there are legal and moral reasons to allow asylum-seekers to enter. But the evidence is strong that most immigrants who seek entry via the Mexico border are economic migrants and not victims of persecution. And it’s also painfully difficult, save for prominent figures (or victims of targeting of particular ethnic groups) to determine if most asylum claims are bona fide.
Here is who the US says is eligible for asylum:
To be eligible for asylum, you must be:
Inside the United States
Able to demonstrate that you were persecuted or have a fear of persecution in your home country due to your:
- Race
- Religion
- Nationality
- Social group
- Political opinion
So it’s bothersome to see painfully well-meaning articles pretend that the US does not have a big problem with illegal economic immigrants, both currently and historically. And this does not sit well with workers who suffer from competition from them, as well as entrants who went through the legal hoops to have the right to live and seek employment here.
By Jessica Corbett, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
Migrant rights advocates were outraged by Monday reporting that U.S. President Joe Biden plans to hold an event at the White House on Tuesday to unveil a long-feared executive order that would block people from seeking asylum when the number of unlawful border crossings hits a certain threshold.
Biden’s order “would shut down asylum requests to the U.S.-Mexico border once the number of daily encounters hits 2,500 between ports of entry, with the border reopening once that number declines to 1,500,” according toThe Associated Press—and various other media outlets that also cited unnamed officials who cautioned that the final figures could still change.
The Democrat is expected to invoke Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was previously used by former President Donald Trump—the presumptive Republican nominee to face Biden in November—and sparked legal challenges.
“We will need to see the E.O. before making any litigation decisions,” Lee Gelernt, an attorney who serves as deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, toldAxios of Biden’s expected move. “Any policy that effectively ends asylum protection for people fleeing danger would raise significant legal problems, as it did when Trump tried to end asylum.”
In response to a social media account tracking “Biden’s Wins,” which welcomed the reported order, Gelernt’s ACLU colleague Gillian Branstetter said: “This is not a ‘win’—it’s a monstrosity. Asylum is a human right.”
2020: Protect asylum! No kids in cages!
2024: Protect asylum? No! Kids in cages! https://t.co/d41ZGI3MND— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) June 3, 2024
After one social media user sarcastically told Branstetter, “I’m sure you’ll love Trump’s border policies,” she stressed, “This is Trump’s border policy.”
American Immigration Council policy director Aaron Reichlin-Melnick similarly said that “the politics may have changed by the law hasn’t; Trump tried to invoke section 212(f) to block asylum at the border and was slapped down in court. Biden’s effort to do the same will also face immediate legal challenges.”
Reichlin-Melnick also highlighted a policy brief that the American Immigration Lawyers Association released in response to the reports, which takes aim at both the legality and effectiveness of the Biden administration’s supposed plans.
“The decision by this administration to criminalize migrants—many of whom are fleeing harm—is deeply disturbing and misguided,” said Sarah M. Rich, senior supervising attorney and interim senior policy counsel at the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a statement. “We have witnessed how such prosecutions can be weaponized to separate and traumatize immigrant families.”
“Prosecuting people seeking safety in the U.S. for these immigration violations will lead to more Black and Brown people being incarcerated at the expense of immigrant families and communities,” Rich continued. “We call on the Biden administration to instead adopt a humane and welcoming immigration framework that centers our values as a nation that welcomes immigrants.”
CNN reported that “unaccompanied children would be exempt—a key piece of the executive order that would worry immigration advocates who have said such an exemption could encourage some families to send children to the border on their own.”
Save the Children U.S. declared that “seeking asylum is a basic human right. We’ve seen what happens when children and families are separated and their right to safety is restricted. We can’t let that happen again.”
Rather than restricting the right of people to seek asylum, the U.S. government should be adequately staffing the program for considering asylum claims to reduce the current prolonged wait. https://t.co/wTtC5UolH9
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) June 3, 2024
Meanwhile, Congressman Henry Cuellar, a right-wing Texas Democrat who has criticized Biden for not increasing border enforcement and is currently battling bribery charges, praised the president’s pending policy.
“I’ve been briefed on the pending executive order,” said Cuellar. “I certainly support it because I’ve been advocating for these measures for years. While the order is yet to be released, I am supportive of the details provided to me thus far.”
At least five Texas mayors have been invited to the White House for the Tuesday event, according to CNN. Plans for the order come a few weeks before the first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle and follow the proposal last month of U.S. Department of Homeland Security rule to fast-track the rejection of certain asylum requests, which was condemned as a “return to failed Trump-era policies.”
The reporting also follows the Sunday electoral victory of the next Mexican president, leftist Claudia Sheinbaum—who on Monday received a congratulatory call from Biden. The AP noted that “the number of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border has declined for months, partly because of a stepped-up effort by Mexico.”
Biden’s anticipated action would also come after the U.S. Senate again killed the bipartisan Border Act. While Republican senators blocked the legislation at the direction of Trump, who wants to continue campaigning for president on immigration policy, the measure was also opposed by progressive lawmakers and advocates.
Among the few Democrats who spoke out against the Border Act was Sen. Alex Padilla of California. Praising his floor speech last month, the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies said that “this bill offers no solutions for immigrants and refugees. No measures to actually address the humanitarian and operational challenges at the border. Just more cruelty and chaos.”
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Asylum seekers and other migrants from areas decimated by the Empire are a threat. Why would they let those people in except as a fig leaf? Of course they need to undercut domestic labor with “illegals” and such, but they also have to be aware these people cannot be as easily controlled, except through force. They have not grown up under the cultural propaganda machine and so are not as easily herded as free range, McDonald’s-fed Americans.
And in light of that, one should note that what Biden does is limit the number of legal migrants that can be processed per day, adding to the hoops a migrant has to jump through. Also creating a market for selling positions in the line.
Fewer can enter legally, meaning more demand for entering illegally. And illegal immigrants can be denied every right, making them easier to control than legal immigrants. If the purpose of the system is what it does, the illegality is the purpose and it gives control.
Ah, the old Lionel Hutz approach:
Care to join me in a belt of scotch?
153 days till the usian voting event, I expect the pandering to increase along the lines chief dan george elucidated in the josey wales movie
“endeavor to persevere!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atzmdijMfRY&t=271s)
The AP noted that “the number of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border has declined for months, partly because of a stepped-up effort by Mexico.”
…and partly (imnsho) because being working class in USA sucks and they’re voting with their feet as is said. Looks like we need another fast and furious….
Maybe instead of picking some arbitrary number as a cut off, they should actually check to see if people showing up at the border are actually in need of asylum, and not just trying to jump the line for immigration.
All kinds of asylum seekers showing up near me. Very nice people, however their countries of origin are not currently in turmoil, and they tend to be upper middle class in their own countries from what I can tell, based on news reports and immigrants I’ve met personally. Asylum seekers get fast tracked for housing and jobs, in places where housing that the working class can afford is in extremely short supply. They then become workers filling low level positions created by the business surplus catering to wealthy tourists.
Meanwhile tent cities continue to expand and nobody does much for any of those people except give them the boot when their shoddy residences become a little too visible. Wouldn’t want to upset the tourists paying top dollar to come here!
Are you even sure that your neighbors are even “asylum seekers,” or did they just say that to gather sympathy? I used to work with an NGO that helped asylum seekers find a job and a place to stay, and let me tell you, these was absolutely no “fast-tracking” for these people. The fact that your neighbors being so visibly well-off, and I presume, already have a place waiting for them when they arrived, make them sound less like asylum seekers and more like investor-immigrants.
Sorry, but I just doubt the credibility of your story. I’ve heard so many people making up the same BS to justify their anti-asylum stance. Like, do you really believe that the gov is going to treat poor Americans any better if tomorrow there isn’t any asylum seeker at all?
Trump schmump. All this bipartisan strike down tells me is that US employers are not done gorging themselves on cheap migrant labor, and likely never will be. Sadly Nigel Farage was right: Western economies are addicted to this, and people trying to help are only acting as enablers.
“Yes, there are legal and moral reasons to allow asylum-seekers to enter. But the evidence is strong that most immigrants who seek entry via the Mexico border are economic migrants and not victims of persecution.”
The false implication here is that economic conditions cannot possibly constitute persecution. Yet the past and present are replete with famines, genocides, sanctions, and other state-directed actions which induce suffering in entire populations. The United States is responsible for a remarkable amount of such actions, and the countries of origin of many immigrants to the United States are quite frequently those that have been subjected to these persecutions, particularly Central America & the Caribbean.
I don’t care much about the law as an arbiter of morality, but for those who do, international law quite plainly places the right of human beings to ree movement and opportunities to make their case for resettlement—however difficult it is to judge the so-called “validity” of those cases—above the Department of Homeland Security’s non-existent right to enrich weapons companies, global surveillance conglomerates, and other government contractors through “border security” hysteria. Also, asylum claims are to be made upon (meaning after) entry.
Like most nation-states, the U.S. is illegitimate and rules primarily through force against its critics alongside benefits to its apologists.
First, as many readers have pointed out, liberalized immigration is not done out of any desire to make up for the damage the US has done with its nation-breaking. It is to bring in exploitable labor. Most immigrants have not obtained a regularized status and they are exploited economically. So your unspoken premise that the immigrants wind up better off is not a given, even though that was their motivation for entry.
Second, you gloss over that most countries are far more restrictive on immigration than we are. Our “awfully open” borders policy is an anomaly.
No, my premise (unspoken or otherwise) isn’t that anyone who comes to the U.S. will lead a better life because of it. It’s that the U.S. doesn’t have the right to kick them out for their supposed motivations. Whether people on the move are lucid or deluded as to what will come of that journey is irrelevant to the question of whether they should be allowed to do so. I certainly don’t believe the U.S. government or the corporate interests that run it would let them do so for benevolent reasons, I’m not a liberal progressive.
Nor do I “gloss over” your assertion about immigration restrictions, since I don’t take it as a fact. I’m willing to accept that the U.S. is less restrictive than the E.U. countries, as I’ve come to this conclusion from my own research and actually speaking with immigrants, but that leaves at least 150 other countries, many of which couldn’t pay for the kinds of highly militarized borders states like U.S. have (however much their elites might desire to build such a thing, or enforce nationalist xenophobia by other means).
I unlike you have moved abroad, 2x, both neither spousal or sponsored by an employer, as in the hard way. The second time I did a pretty extensive survey of the better high end of third world options. Most are restrictive. For instance, in Malaysia, you need to have an income EVERY YEAR of over $100,000. Every one I looked at (even the ones that had comparatively low income requirements) required proof of income and/or assets and a clean police report. That BTW can be difficult to prove up if you’s made some international moves (I had a friend who had been transferred around a few times by her employer who had a tough time getting all the relevant countries to cooperate, and her destination was not the UK or EU).
None of this is asked of purported US asylum seekers. So you are wildly out of touch as to how most countries, even moderately poor ones, operate. For instance, every non-citizen in Thailand (and it is very hard to become a citizen, you need to become fluent in Thai and I have met just about no one who is, even among the many with Thai spouses) must check into Immigration every 90 days, no matter what your visa category is. We don’t ask anythihg like that of any migrants here.
That’s all well and good regarding the legal requirements of 2 southeast Asian countries, but is far from the practical, on-the-ground enforcement of the entire non-European world, which I’m sure you know is often quite divergent from what they claim their requirements are.
This entire line of discussion is quite apart from the points of my comments, however, which were:
1. “The false implication here is that economic conditions cannot possibly constitute persecution.” In fact, they can.
2. “the U.S. doesn’t have the right to kick [immigrants] out for their supposed motivations”. (Neither do Malaysia, Thailand, E.U. states, and so on.)
I chose those examples because they are low income countries. Higher income countries are more restrictive.
Economic conditions are not political persecution. There are many countries that have huge swathes that are poorer that Central America. Start with Bangladesh and considerable parts of India. It is absurd to suggest that the US toss its own citizens under the bus to take them in.
Your second point is a straw man of the law. The onus is on the asylum seeker to prove the bona fides of their political persecution. If they are economic migrants, by definition they will fail to make that case on an evidentiary basis. It is hard to be able to provide adequate evidence of bona fide persecution cases, such as women who suffer from systemic sexual violence such as in the blood diamond and blood minerals areas of Africa. They can’t prove the abuses they have suffered personally even when they are pervasive where they came from.
Yves, I am surprised that no one has made the argument that this is just a cynical election year ploy by Mr. Biden
to win votes in this year’s election. And that immediately after being re-elected, he will open the floodgates again.
Of course the legality of this Executive Order will be
challenged, and may be reversed. What is interesting
is the timing. We see how slowly the legal system works.
So the order probably would not be reversed before
Nov 6. Immigration is Trump’s ace card, delay of
justice his main tactic. I find a certain poetic justice.
The danger, of course, is that the mathematics of
the House/Senate race may not be helpful to his party.
But Biden as President in 2025 would enable the
continuation of, for example, of the Justice Dept, and
possibly upset the retirement plans of Thomas and Alito,
But that’s another story for another day……
Yes, I was remiss in not saying so clearly.
(Neither do Malaysia, Thailand, E.U. states, and so on.)
sounds like you’re an open borders proponent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
..
I missed your bogus claim about Thailand. You can absolutely have your visa revoked for many things regarding your motives here. Most countries will revoke visas if they find you made misrepresentations during the application process.
As usual, this looks like election-year drama. Genocide Joe and the DNC need to distract people and migrants have always been a convenient scapegoat. JB also needs to burnish his image with the D-party faithful, what with the bipartisan support of genocide in Palestine and all.
Asylum status appears to be largely political anyway. Do Palestinians get asylum? What about Ukrainians? Arbitrary interpretation of the criteria would seem normal. Just like violating US law in exporting arms to Israel, the law is arbitrarily interpreted and abused.
Haitians fleeing death squads (due largely to US meddling and coups) should get asylum, but do they? Venezuelans and Cubans fleeing the blockade should get it as well, but do they?
No one gives a toss about disposable populations, the US gov does not give a toss about the vast majority of US citizens, why would they give a toss about migrants and asylum seekers? Just look at US foreign policy (including siege warfare, aka “sanctions”), trade policy, debt-trap diplomacy etc. Why would a ruthless empire, supporting genocide, and leading us to the brink of nuclear confrontation, care about anything but maintaining hegemony? The drama continues
I wonder what percentage of these immigrants are victims of the failed foreign policies of the US and its supporters.
Many but not as many as you think. A decent percentage are from China and Africa, flown in to meet smugglers. The Chinese ones sound like scam victims. They have apparently been told they can easily find a job paying $10,000 a month.
To be sure, the majority of immigrants are mere economic migrants, such as Indians and Chinese, and accepting them only benefits the capitalist class, which wants cheap labor and should not be deceived in the beautiful name of tolerance. But some immigrants are the result of U.S. interference in their internal affairs, and it is the moral obligation of the U.S. to rescue them from the hell it has created.
We do not have the ability to tell the difference. I have said that repeatedly. And by all accounts, the economic migrants vastly exceed the migrants resulting from US misconduct. Mexico was poor in the early 1980s with no US nation-breaking. The entire region ex Costa Rica is poor. We can’t fix that.
Think my post was lost into the ether (no customary mod wait notice) – changing username sometimes helps.
Ireland is a supercharged mini version of this right now.
A policy option people have missed (though may be more obvious to MMT’ers), is that with simultaneous housing/construction-labour/immigration crises, encouraging migration into construction work (with training as necessary), for building houses (with these workers housed first) is a potential win-win-win for solving each crisis.
When governments are deliberately stoking each of these crises to worsen one another, though – then sadly, opposing further immigration is the correct choice for the public – though not for political parties, they should be vying to provide something like the above solution, yet are not (in Ireland, Sinn Fein seem to have been completely blindsided by all of this).
That one car dealer in Iowa is only going to vote for Trump one time in November now!
It still allows 2500/day (assuming an honest count in the first place) before anything happens. That’s almost 1M/yr.
My take is that Biden is counting on the courts to strike this down. He gets to say he tried in an election year, but doesn’t have the tools because of the Republicans in congress.
It’s a crazy formula of exceeding an average of 2,500 a day over the course of a week (is it a rolling week or a calendar week???). Count on Team Dem to make things even more complicated than they need to be.
Count on all parties to ignore the unaccompanied minors, let alone attempt to track them once in the US. There are human tragedies all around that process.
That starts with families who entrust their children to coyotes for a fee.
Camping, fresh air, Darien Gap, some companionship along the routes.
Eventually the kids who survive to make it to the border without too much physical, emotional or psychological damage are then handled by the inefficient processing system.
What happens to them?
No accountability, Washington’s favorite word recently, and no acknowledgement of that little corner of Hell experienced by the smallest victims.
Missing in Biden’s list of justifications is being forced to move by an unlivable climate. As a little “warm-up” for what’s to come, dozens of poll workers in India died of heat exhaustion during the recent election. As wet-bulb 35″ becomes more common around the globe, and in places where few have air conditioning and even reliable electricity, what will our reaction be to desperate migrants seeking a place that doesn’t kill them even if they’re sitting quietly in the shade? Shouldn’t our reaction be influenced by the fact that we here in the United States, with our Happy Motoring and McMansions cooled to 68 degrees in the height of a Phoenix summer, have been by far the biggest carbon emitters among the nations?
Preparing our country to welcome as many of these poor people as possible seems to me a worthy “national project” around which we could coalesce, but our elites prefer to use buying bombs and playing “Hitler of the month” games to keep us on task.
The issue is straightforward. Migrants first started to come from Guatemala. Of course in the past, these Mayan Indians were subject to persecution, but now they came simply because they could no longer make a living on their land, or they had been driven from their land by government/corporate power. These are clearly economic migrants, but except for niceties of law, I see no difference. If they stay put, they die. If they move, maybe not.
The next wave of migrants have come from a number of countries, all of which are or have been affected by US economic sanctions, extractive corporations, and regime change political operations, such as Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras, Haiti, et al. Again, these people found themselves in identical situations as the Guatemalans. Stay put and die or move.
The US has greatest responsibility for this mess due to its predatory Latin American policies and indifference to climate change. In a way, these people come to put their mortality in the face of American actions and inactions.
The US could fix the migrant crisis easily by 1) stopping its destructive policies—sanctions and meddling; 2) enacting vigorous climate change mitigation programs; 3) paying reparations for the destruction and lost lives it has caused.
A flood of immigrants is our ruling elite’s favorite trick against their own domestic working classes, see Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, ETC. ‘Funny’, isn’t it, how they all seem to operate off the same script on this issue.
If there wasn’t a border crisis, US elites would have to find some other way to get their sought-after scab labor. And that’s precisely why it won’t be solved, unless they find some better immigration scam I guess.
It is in the interest of the privileged to protect their privileges, but the assumption of a moral or legal right to impose suffering to preserve the privileges of a minority always deserves questioning.
Humans have and will always migrate to better opportunities as water flows to the seas. Channeling this flow of human potential wisely can make a nation more prosperous. Damming it can stagnate the nation, and create the potential for bursts of built up violence.
Creating practical and plentiful legal pathways can reduce illegal migration and reduce human suffering. Enacting foreign policy that takes into account the well-being of your neighboring countries is also prudent to avoid excessive migration pressure. The USA has historically been somewhat decent in the former, and lousy at the latter.
This executive order appears ill-advised as it will increase human suffering and illegal immigration. Would love to explore more innovative solutions that take reality and humanity more in account.
Please tell me how well this is working out in Germany. Your preachy premise is not borne out by facts. People do not have a right to a better way of life, as shown by the collapse in income and class mobility in the US. If we have obligations on that front, it is to our citizens first and foremost.
My apologies for the preachiness. I am not saying people have a right to a better life, I am only saying that it is natural for them to seek a better life, and accepting this rather than fighting it can lead to better outcomes.
If there was no migration into Germany I would believe their economy would be worse off given the aging demographics. Perhaps one can say that the influx of people looking for a better life has propped up the economy.
I love the cartoon that shows a capitalist with 99 cookies telling the working man with one cookie to watch out for that immigrant is going to steal his cookie.
P.s. Thank you for your excellent work here, I look forward to reading the links and comments daily!
Sorry for scolding. Some readers were getting moralistic without considering who was benefitting from both our nation-breaking and our letting a lot of illegal immigrants in, as in the well-off, at the expense of the poors.
For lower income people, while that sound sensible, consider the inertia. Costs to go back and re-establish yourself, and then admit failure. Look at the poverty in the banlieues around Paris.
Now Syrians were asylum seekers, but in Germany, the most recent data I could find says 80% were at risk of poverty, whatever that means exactly. Recall that the reason Merkel was willing to take them in was Syria had a very good educational system.
Turks were economic migrants; Germany had a guest worker program a LONG time ago and many never returned. Even so, The Conversation reported in Jan 2023: Many Turkish people who migrated to European countries are worse off than those who stayed at home : https://theconversation.com/many-turkish-people-who-migrated-to-european-countries-are-worse-off-than-those-who-stayed-at-home-194004.
So not as clear cut as you might think.
I’m getting extremely tired of seeing quotes from ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, Save the Children and the rest of the NGO crowd.
Mass immigration is a monstrous class project. Remember all those wildcat strike actions we used to hear anecdotes about back in the craziness of 2021 and 2022? That’s all gone now…smashed by a combo of Fed rate hikes and waves of migrants once Biden opened up the floodgates.
Logan Airport in Boston still has an entire terminal shut down so the state can house hundreds of migrants there. Massachusetts has housing/rental prices that are so high it’s giving everyone nosebleeds!
This state is run by team dem from top to bottom. We have a ruling class that’s unfit to govern.
To be clear, the Republicans aren’t any better. But in this state, we’ve pretty much extinguished the whole species, so there’s no one else to blame.
This is as much a case of the complexity of people’s lives reduced to arbitrary quotas and legal terminology.
For example:
-Poverty caused in part by imperialist policies and/or war is a form of violence.
-Displacement from gentrification (including by mostly white Americans and Europeans going to live in poorer nations like Mexico without paying taxes there and causing rents and other prices to go up) is a form of violence.
-People seeking to immigrate for a better life are often also escaping violence in their families and communities (eg domestic violence, sexual violence, anti-LGBT persecution, racism, etc.) that make it extremely difficult for them to advance economically.
There are many more examples.
Most immigrants carry immense trauma that remains for decades. I can attest to that myself as a gay immigrant from Mexico who encountered intense poverty upon coming to the US as a teenager and today am older, disabled, and living under the poverty line. I have also worked with poor immigrants in many capacities and relate to them (us) daily.
But beyond all that, the 2501st migrant seeking asylum may be someone that meets all the criteria for asylum and shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to request it and just be tossed back like an object to an even more painful fate.