Law, Power, and Justice

How a broken asylum system warped American immigration.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/origins-immigration-border-crisis-biden

Excerpts

in Ciudad Juárez on March 27, when a fire in a Mexican migrant detention facility killed 40 people who were trapped inside, as security guards walked away.

Over the past few years, a toxic combination of political instability, criminal violence, and the punishing economic aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed the highest levels of migration in the Western Hemisphere since World War II.

the system prevents asylum seekers from going to work to contribute to the U.S. economy

there have been no clear-cut procedures for deporting asylum seekers whose claims are rejected, 

Known as a transit ban, the latter measure is similar to one attempted by U.S. President Donald Trump, and in practice will shut down access to asylum across much of the southwest border. Most unauthorized crossers will be detained and swiftly deported to their home countries. In early May, Biden also ordered 1,500 additional active-duty troops to the border.

the asylum bureaucracy has become its own de facto immigration system. It no longer serves people escaping danger that it was designed to protect; nor does it bring any order to the challenges of securing the border and integrating newcomers into the U.S. economy

The origins of asylum date back to the Refugee Act of 1980. Signed into law by the Carter administration, the legislation was adopted in part to make amends for the country’s shameful refusal to accept Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

the 1951 Refugee Convention: protection can be granted to someone who has “a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

Asylum, on the other hand, is the route for people who are already in the United States—even if only by a few feet over the border

strict parameters of the U.S. persecution standard in lengthy proceedings based on complicated, constantly evolving laws. Without a competent lawyer, the final narrow passage is almost impossible to navigate, and in immigration court there is no right to an attorney provided by the government.

Advocates took up their cases in the courts, litigating to expand the definition of persecution to include victims of gang crimes, sexual assault, and domestic abuse. During this period, the backlog of asylum cases pending in U.S. courts rose nearly sixfold.

Obama hoped that aggressive border enforcement would win him Republican support for broader immigration reform. The political calculus never succeeded, but the border became difficult and expensive for families to cross

Trump…reversed hard-won protections for women and victims of gang violence; and modified the rules to make it even harder to win asylum in court. Trump separated migrant children from their parents, a policy of calculated cruelty that public outrage forced him to abandon.

As the pandemic’s economic damage took hold after 2020, Cubans despairing of progress under their country’s decaying communist regime embarked on the largest exodus from the island since the 1980s