Last week immigration officials called the massive number of refugees gathered at the southern border a crisis. They used terms like “operation emergency” and a “systemwide meltdown.”
President Trump threatened to close the border, separate more parents and children, keep people in jail awaiting the adjudication of their asylum petitions, and move others to “sanctuary” cities.
However, rather than deterring people from seeking asylum, his threats have had the opposite effect. According to a recent New York Times article, in February alone the number of migrant families at the border rose 560 percent from the same time one year ago.
While Trump’s “just-go-home” message to refugees is clear, what they’ve been hearing in their countries is — get to the U.S. as fast as you can before things get worse.
Administration actions that have exacerbated the problem include the government shutdown, done in an effort to strongarm Congress to approve funding for a border wall, and the subsequent furloughing of judges and other key immigration personnel, which pushed back the adjudication of asylum claims by years. Then there was the separation of children from their parents. The massive mishandling of this initiative, cost (and is still costing) millions of dollars in order to reunite families, not to mention the black eye it gave to the U.S.’s reputation around the world as a supposed beacon of fairness and opportunity.
The threat of ending aid to poor countries from which most of the immigrants hail (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador) will only exacerbate the mass exodus.
Finally, the administration’s no-more-room-for-you approach not only is untrue but undermines the very foundation of American values – inclusivity, compassion and equality. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” has now become, we don’t want you unless you’re rich, and preferably white.
Why not employ a simpler solution. Instead of continuing to shut down, turn away, depersonalize, demonize, imprison and separate, wouldn’t it be more cost effective to just facilitate the adjudication of asylee claims?
The Administration position that Congress needs to fix immigration law, is inaccurate. We already have laws that spell out how asylum claims work. The immigrant must show he has a “credible fear” of being persecuted in his home country due to his “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” This is not easy.
The law doesn’t need to be fixed. What’s needed is to process the claims more quickly.
The first step, the credible fear interview, already happens fast. People seeking asylum are interviewed by an immigration official within days of their arrival and a preliminary determination is made – is the immigrant’s fear of being returned to his country credible?
According to the New York Times, “Out of nearly 100,000 credible fear interviews during the year that ended in September 2018, an asylum officer confirmed a credible fear 74,677 times – a nearly 75 percent approval rate.”
That means that at least three-fourths of the people seeking asylum presented enough initial evidence to permit their claim to move forward. Most people desperate to cross the border are not fakers. They’re truly afraid their families will be hurt or killed if returned to their countries.
The time lag, however, comes with the next step. Once having cleared the credible fear requirement, the people must then await an individual hearing before an immigration judge where a much higher level of scrutiny occurs. The shortest amount of time this takes on average is two years.
During that wait, the immigrant is released into the U.S. on bail or personal recognizance and begins a life here. He or she integrates into a community. If bringing children, those children start school, make friends, learn English. Two years go by. Conditions change in their countries, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. But even if the fear they felt upon arriving in the U.S. has lessoned, uprooting them at that point is not only impractical but cruel.
If more judges were appointed (especially at the border) and more courts built, more prosecutors hired (and, I hope, court-appointed defense attorneys, as well), the process would move much faster. Instead of waiting a minimum of two years, claims might be adjudicated within six months.
That’s how you make the immigration system work better. Not by trampling the long-held values of a country that welcomes the less fortunate, but by vetting asylees’ claims more expeditiously.
The arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees per year will not stop through punitive action and threats. The conditions these refugees seek to escape make the potential benefit of trying to come to the U.S. worth the risk of being rejected. In fact, in coming years, migration will likely only increase due to climate change, the growing disparity between rich and poor and the advance of right-ring leadership in countries around the world.
So, I end with the full poem by Emma Lazurus, born into a large Sephardic Jewish family which originally migrated to escape the Inquisition in Portugal. It’s called “The New Colossus.” The words are important enough to have been engraved on the Statue of Liberty.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.
The Problem With The Immigration System Is Not Lax Laws, But Lack of Adjudicators curated from Above the Law
No comments:
Post a Comment