The Niskanen Center reports on a bipartisan effort to enhance asylum claims adjudication:
Chiefly due to the ongoing concerns about processing asylum seekers on our southern border, Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Representatives Henry Cuellar (D-TX-28) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX-23) introduced the bicameral, bipartisan Border Solutions Act of 2021 last month.
At a high level, the bill establishes four regional asylum processing centers where DHS and partner agencies conduct criminal history checks, identity verification, biometrics collection, medical screenings, initial asylum interviews and credible fear determinations, and provide legal orientation. There are also a fair number of additional protections for children placed with sponsors, including mandating that HHS check in on children within 30 days of their release to a sponsor with a telephone call, and then every two months afterward, and enhancing penalties for trafficking. A pilot program is proposed to increase expediency of the process and efficient review of cases, and there are provisions for increasing personnel across the board: from judges and asylum officers to CBP and ICE personnel.
What is the point of faster asylum claims processing? Is it to more quickly deport those making such claims? Is it to usher claimants into the interior more quickly to facilitate their integration the wider undocumented population? Does the proposal simply hope to provide greater comfort to migrants while they await claims adjudication?
Or perhaps the sponsors think we are overlooking many legitimate asylum claims from the Northern Triangle countries. Many poor people live in bad neighborhoods in the Northern Triangle, but this does not historically qualify as a legitimate asylum claim. Or if it does, then millions of people in the Northern Triangle deserve asylum.
All this once again frames illegal immigration in the perps-or-victims context. Is this necessary? Can we not simply treat migrants as people who would like to work in the US for higher wages? Must we put them into some moral category in the process?
More elaborate asylum facilities will not end illegal immigration. They will not address the status of undocumented immigrants. Such an initiative is no more than policy bankruptcy dressed up as constructive engagement, a Hail Mary pass hoping for something, anything.
The simple reality is this: There are lots of menial jobs in the US that our citizens do not want, but which pay seven times the unskilled wage in Honduras or Guatemala. As long as that is the case, migrants are going to find one means or another to get across the border. Closing off one channel (or is it opening one up?) will simply move the action elsewhere, as it always has. After fifty-six years of unbroken policy failure, surely the proposed answer is not 'Try harder'? That's the next big idea?
How about this: Lift the prohibition on migrant labor and move to the legalize-and-tax system which worked fine for alcohol, gambling and marijuana. Let's try something really radical for a change. Something like the textbook, proven policy solution.