A Key to the Border Crisis?
Even the Left now admits that we have a crisis on our southern border. President Trump did not invent an emergency, it’s real. Illegal immigrants are pouring across in numbers greatly in excess of what we have seen in the past.
President Trump wants to halt the inflow, but he appears to be stymied as to how to do so. The problem is that if these immigrants claim asylum, as they do, courts have interpreted U.S. law so as to give them a “right” to remain here while their application for asylum is processed. The number of asylum claims is so great that hearings are backlogged for years. We do not have enough room to hold them while they await their hearings, so they are released--to disappear into the millions of illegal immigrants already here. As the word spreads southwards that you can stay in the U.S. if you just say the magic word “asylum”, the caravans grow in number and size. We are left helpless in the face of an invasion.
As I have written previously, every country in the northern hemisphere will eventually have to use deadly force to defend its borders or be submerged in a sea of barbarians from the south. But we are not yet at the point where we have the moral courage to do that. So, in the meantime, what is the Trump administration to do, keeping in mind Bismarck's dictum that politics is the art of the possible?
The starting point, I think, is the realization that what we are witnessing is gross abuse of the request for asylum. If we look at precedent, asylum is something that has sometimes been granted--it is not a right--to individuals who are being persecuted by their own government. That is not the case here. These are economic migrants, or people simply fleeing crime and disorder. They are not victims of government persecution. Nor are we dealing with individuals, for the most part. Whole families, large ones, request asylum. Indeed, small children are being sent alone. Are we to assume their government is persecuting them for political reasons? If not, then precedent says they have no grounds for claiming asylum.
Similarly, because people seeking asylum were fleeing their governments, they claimed asylum as soon as they got over the border into a different country. The fact that they are not doing so here by requesting asylum in Mexico is also evidence that their claim is fraudulent.
My proposal, then, is that the Trump administration declare that all claims of asylum by immigrants who come in groups, including families; who are minors; who come from countries where the likelihood of political persecution is small; and who have not requested asylum in the first foreign country they enter are ipso facto fraudulent. Such immigrants have no right to a hearing, hence no right to remain in this country. When apprehended, they will immediately be sent home.
The Left, of course, go to court and get some liberal federal judge to rule that such action by the administration is unlawful. The key here is for the administration to appeal the case as directly and quickly as possible to the Supreme Court, in the meantime continuing to enforce its ruling that such claims are ipso facto fraudulent. The authors of our Constitution did, you may recall, anticipate strife among the three branches of the federal government.
So long as the Trump administration continues to enforce the new policy, with mass expulsions of people attempting to commit fraud, the Left as well as the Right will want the Supreme Court to rule quickly. The abuse of the request for asylum is, in these cases, so blatant I am confident a majority of Justices would rule in the administration’s favor.
Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.