7/4/2018 - Betsy McCaughey Townhall.com
People hoping to settle
in the United States wait years for a green card to be legal residents. They
play by the rules. These law-abiding newcomers must feel like idiots, watching
what's happening on the southern border.
Hundreds of thousands
of Central American migrants are walking right in. They're not waiting in line.
They're using "asylum" requests as their E-ZPass. Just 12 percent of
requests from El Salvadorans, 11 percent from Guatemalans and 7.5 percent from
Hondurans are actually granted, according to the Department of Homeland
Security. Never mind, the request gets them in.
It's a shameful
distortion of a program intended to provide a haven for true victims of
state-sponsored religious, ethnic and political persecution. The U.S. offered
asylum to Hungarian anti-communists after their uprising was crushed by the
Soviets in 1956; to Cubans fleeing Castro's prisons; to Vietnamese after the
fall of Saigon to the Communists in 1975; to Chinese political dissidents
escaping the crackdown after Tiananmen Square in 1989; and more recently, to
Chinese Christians and Muslims threatened for practicing their religion.
Not to be confused with
what's happening on the southern border. Migrants walk up to a border agent
with a familiar story. Women typically plead they're victims of an abusive
boyfriend or husband, and men claim they're escaping gang violence. They're
detained briefly, but many are then released into the United States and given a
date for an asylum hearing.
Being granted asylum
means hitting the jackpot. Asylees get the Refugee Cash Assistance program,
including medical care, a housing allowance and hundreds of dollars a month in
cash. All inclusive, as the Sandals getaway ads say. In contrast, immigrants
who go the green card route are ineligible for most benefits for years.
Half who use asylum as
their excuse for crossing the border never even file a claim or show up at a
hearing. They're also winners. After all, they made it inside the U.S., unlike
the East Asian waiting 12 years to enter as a legal worker.
Last weekend, open
borders advocates held 700 marches across the country, protesting the Trump
administration's policies. One target was Attorney General Jeff Sessions'
recent clarification that domestic abuse is not sufficient grounds for seeking
asylum. A few immigration judges have granted asylum on those grounds, but it's
not how asylum is defined.
House Democratic Leader
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., accused Sessions of "staggering cruelty." But
Sessions is right. The asylum law "is not a general hardship
statute," he says. If every hardship qualifies for asylum, it will mean
everyone can come in.
That's the marchers'
objective. And increasingly the goal of the progressive flank of the Democratic
Party. Their rhetoric suggests any limit on immigration is a crime against
humanity. New Yorkers like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, who toppled Congressman Joe Crowley last week, and Cynthia
Nixon, running to unseat Gov. Andrew Cuomo, are calling for the abolition of
the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.
A similar battle is
raging inside the European Union, which is overwhelmed by mostly bogus asylum
claims from North African migrants. More than 70 percent of their claims are
rejected, according to special envoy of the U.N. High Commission on Refugees,
Vincent Cochetel. But the migrants who are turned down for asylum stay anyway,
eluding deportation. They're straining public schools and government benefits
and provoking a backlash against German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government.
Last weekend, EU leaders tentatively devised a plan to screen asylum seekers in
disembarkation centers along the North African coast, before they make their
way across the Mediterranean to Europe. Trump is proposing something similar to
vet asylum applicants on the Mexican side of our southern border, before they
enter the U.S.
In America and Europe,
demagogues tell us to have a heart and let everybody in. But the public
understands that immigration affects public schools, wages, taxes, even
cultural identity. That's why we have immigration laws.
The aspiring Americans
who obey those laws and wait their turn deserve our respect. Allowing other
immigrants to jump in front of them using flimsy asylum claims is a slap in the
face.
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