12/8/2018 - Michael Reagan Townhall.com
Earlier this week I was
at an event that honored Malala Yousafzai.
Malala, in case you
don't recall, is the brave young school girl from a village in Pakistan who was
nearly killed in 2012 by the Taliban.
She was just 15 when
she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for publicly speaking out for the
right of all girls to receive a free, safe and quality education.
Malala, who became
world famous while she lay in a coma for 10 days in a British hospital, was
lucky to be given asylum in Britain with her family.
She went on to create
the Malala Fund, which she says is dedicated to giving every girl in the world
"an opportunity to achieve a future she chooses."
In 2014 she became the
youngest person to win a Nobel Peace Prize and now, at the ripe old age of 21,
she's studying philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford.
When I texted my son
Cameron to tell him I was at the event honoring Malala, he pointed out that she
was a perfect example of why the United States and countries like Britain offer
asylum to refugees.
Unlike the 6,000
migrants from Honduras that are now in Tijuana trying to crash their way into
the United States, Malala and her family were in serious danger.
They met the
international definition of a refugee perfectly - "a person with
well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality,
political opinion or membership in a particular social group, who has been
forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or
violence."
Those 6,000 Central
American refugees, as my son also pointed out, are not just trying to take
advantage of our generous immigration system and hours of sympathetic liberal
media coverage.
By cutting in line, and
by clogging up an already backed up application process, they are making it so
that the people that truly deserve asylum - worthy refugees like Malala and her
family - might not be able to get it.
Realistically, despite
Rachel Maddow's tears, most of the migrants from Honduras or Guatemala rushing
our southern border are never going to meet the qualifications for asylum, a
bureaucratic legal process that takes a long, long time.
Only about 40 percent
of applicants from around the world in any given year qualify for asylum,
according to the National Immigration Forum's web site.
As of July there were
more than 700,000 pending asylum cases in our overwhelmed immigration courts
and the average wait time for a hearing was 721 days.
During 2017, when there
was a big jump in asylum applications from Central America and the total cases
filed hit 200,000, only about 30,000 individuals were approved.
As Tucker Carlson
pointed out last week, to argue, as the left and liberal media do, that those
Honduran migrants in Tijuana automatically deserve to be let into the U.S.
because of the poverty and violent crime in their native land is patently
absurd.
If poor living
conditions and rampant violence are the basis for asylum in America, Carlson
said, then the whole country of Honduras should get it.
I don't know if most
people know it, but more than half of the individuals who were granted asylum
in the United States in 2016 - 20,500 souls - came from two places:
China (22 percent) and
the Central American countries of El Salvador (10.5 percent), Guatemala (9.5
percent), Honduras (7.4 percent) and Mexico (4.5 percent).
Most of them - 44
percent - ended up living in California, which helps to explain why one of the
richest states in the Union is now the home for about 7.4 million people who
live in poverty, more than any other state.
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