Seeking Asylum is Legal

Without question we have a large number of people living in this country who entered outside of legal channels, as well as many who entered legally but overstayed their visas and never went home. A burning question facing our politicians, and indeed everyone in this country is "What do we do about it?"

First, a little history.

For the first half of our country's history, there were restrictions on who could apply for citizenship, but virtually none on who could actually enter the country. Quite the opposite, the United States actively encouraged immigration. It wasn't until the 1880's that laws began to be passed regulating immigration. The first restrictive immigration law was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Exclusions were added bit by bit in subsequent years excluding the mentally ill, those with infectious diseases, those "likely to be a public ward" (unable to work) and after President McKinley was assassinated, those with anarchist connections. In 1921 immigration quotas were put into place. The quotas were based on the percentage of people from a given nationality already living in the United States at that time. Naturally, since these numbers tended to skew toward Northern European whites, the quotas in practice restricted non-whites from immigrating.

In 1943 the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed and in 1952 all racial references were removed and in 1960 national origin quotas were eliminated. Preferences would now be given to those with skills that were needed, asylum seekers, refugees and family members of previous immigrants.

Despite changes made in recent decades, it's not difficult to see that immigration law in this country has an undeniably racist background.

So what about the supposed crisis at our southern border? For years, the number of apprehensions of people attempting to enter the United States illegally had been going down. During Trump's first year in office he bragged regularly about how the numbers had fallen, taking credit for a years-long trend. But the number of attempts to enter the country illegally have shot up again to near record levels. Why? An entirely predictable reason for this increase is the Trump policy of making it more difficult for asylum seekers. Seeking asylum is perfectly legal. You present yourself at a US port of entry and declare your intention to seek asylum. You are then allowed into the country and given a court date. (Trump claims that virtually none of these asylum seekers show up for their court dates, in reality the number of no-shows is around 25%) But the Border Patrol has been instructed to turn people away and have them wait in Mexico for their applications to be processed. The conditions in which these asylum seekers have been forced to wait are unsafe, so naturally many will seek to cross over illegally.

The Trump administration has responded to the crisis by arresting those who have been caught, and keeping them, including their children, in unsanitary and frankly barbaric conditions.  The flood of asylum seekers has been characterized as an invasion. They have been painted as drug smugglers and human traffickers. Trump and his administration somehow think that the rest, the ones who aren't drug smugglers and human traffickers (oh, and rapists) are here to take advantage of our social programs and live tax-free off of the rest of us hard-working 'Mericans. But think about what it must take to pack up your family, with few possessions or resources beyond the clothes on your back, to walk thousands of miles to an uncertain future...how terrible, how horrible must it be back home. It used to be that a large percentage of immigrants from Mexico and Central America were single men looking for work, but now it's whole families. If your son was being threatened with mutilation or death if he didn't join a gang, if your 13 year old daughter was going to be the "girlfriend" of a gang leader. If the government and police  just accepted their bribes and let it happen, what would you do? What American wouldn't do what ever it took to keep his loved ones safe, yet we judge these refugees from violence as parasites.

And even those who cross the border illegally and settle here. The right-wing chorus would have us believe that they are receiving benefits that could go to citizens. Other than free school lunches, those who are undocumented can't get government benefits...because they're undocumented. However, they do pay taxes, taxes that are taken out of every paycheck, including FICA, which they won't be able to claim upon retirement...because they're undocumented.

What's the solution? There is no simple solution. But the solution isn't simply to build a giant wall and further militarize the Border Patrol. Perhaps make it easier for those fleeing poverty and violence to apply for and receive asylum. Perhaps spending money on more immigration judges, advocates and lawyers, developing a system, like tracking devices, to ensure that asylum seekers show up for court. We spend so much time and money trying to hold back the tide that we lose sight of the fact that many of these people who we are so quick to bar the door for could be productive members of American society. There are already millions who are undocumented who go to work every day, pay their taxes, take their kids to school, spend money in our local businesses and are virtually indistinguishable from those of us who were born here.

Let's stop looking at these people as a foreign "other" and treat them as fellow human beings worthy of compassion. Let's drop the divisive and hateful rhetoric and include a humanitarian concern for the asylum seekers and refugees as part of any solution.