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Morality, Responsibility, and Immigration
Imagine my wife and me coming to the realization we just can’t give our kids the safe, happy life in America all children deserve as a human right. The health care is lousy and expensive. The neighborhood school is full of drugs and gangs, and the kids don’t learn much there anyway. What can we do?
We’ve never been to Switzerland but we heard it offers opportunities. We just want a better life for our kids. So we hire someone who knows how to wrangle kids into Switzerland (a sleazy travel agent, coyote guide, human smuggler) and send our two off to enter there against the law and live with a paid third party, maybe with some distant relative, maybe on their own. They don’t speak any local languages but some do-gooder enrolls them in a public school with free meals who then has to figure out what to do with them. We pay no taxes for all this, of course. Then Switzerland, under a new government, sends them home to live with their own parents in their home country where they speak their native language and practice their native religion and culture in ways not easily accessible in Switzerland.
Sorry to single Switzerland out, because immigration restrictions are not unique to the Swiss. All countries have borders. They have to so they can make decisions about who can enter their country and who can become a citizen. No non-failed state allows people to simply move in. Every border globally is designed to place a barrier in between those allowed and those who are not. Some countries do not want immigrants, some choose immigrants by job skills, some by religious beliefs, some seemingly just because unaccompanied children still too young to work as drug mules or prostitutes were smuggled over the border by coyotes.
A new analysis by the Brookings Institute says more than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration. The findings point to family separations that far eclipse those of Trump I under its “zero tolerance” policy, when about 5,500 children were removed from their parents. The numbers get a little fuzzy; today’s 100k kids also include American Citizen children scooped up accidentally when their illegal parents are arrested, while the 5k number represent all foreign children taken into custody immediately after crossing the southern border and not technically deported. No matter, because the bottom line, that the U.S. takes children into temporary custody and punishes them for their parents’ actions as part of enforcing long-standing immigration law, remain valid.
Most of these kids are soon just set adrift in America when their parents get arrested. U.S. law gives illegal parents a choice of being removed with their children back to their old country or placing their U.S.-born children with a designee in America. That can literally be anyone, and there is no oversight.
“We found that remarkably few end up in foster care — children stay with friends and family who don’t have a legal obligation to care for these children,” said one study. Children are often left in the care of older siblings or other immigrant families already grappling with immigration status. These “guardians” usually lack any legal basis to make educational or medical decisions for the left-behinds, so those decisions just are not made. This is the on-the-ground immoral, unChristian, system the Democrats blame on the cruel policies of the Trump administration. The unspoken about part is that the U.S. has practiced such a policy long before Trump. About 7,600 unaccompanied minors were deported between fiscal years 2012–2015 under the Obama administration. During that same period, Obama deported some 171,000 unaccompanied children at the border, most of whom arrived with smugglers, not parents.
The issue of what is best to do with children in our immigration system is complex. If your sense of right and wrong relies at all on the numbers, the numbers are likely lying to you. Nobody really wants the truth here, because it confuses their beliefs on what is right and wrong on immigration.
One thing that is clear is there is no sense that parents bear any responsibility for what happens to their children once those kids cross illegally into the U.S. with a smuggler or are born in the U.S. to out-of-status parents who know they are subject to deportation at any time. There is no responsibility placed on employers who exploit illegal workers and act as a magnet to draw them and their families to the United States. There is no responsibility to a broken Biden asylum system (now on pause under Trump) that brought illegals to America knowing they could live here indefinitely while they waited for their mostly bogus cases to be heard (“Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for an asylum claim). And who is responsible for the children left behind to be taken in by nearly anyone, a sibling, a relative, or God help us all, a clever pedophile?
The morality of child deportation sits at the intersection of law, sovereignty, and human rights. When immigration enforcement involves children, many too young to understand the systems acting upon them, the moral questions become far more difficult than the legal ones. A society may have the legal right to deport children or deport families with children, but the deeper question is whether exercising that right is ethically justified, and under what circumstances. But if we just ignore immigration laws, basically America’s policy for the last few decades, the law itself becomes arbitrary and ultimately not reasonably enforced against anyone. This leads to hundreds of thousands of kids being sent to the U.S. via human traffickers, a dangerous and thus immoral act in itself.
The peak year for legal immigration to America was 1907. Your great-grandfather entered a rapidly industrializing nation desperate for workers with no time to waste deporting kids. But a humane immigration system cannot be built solely on outrage over modern enforcement or nostalgia for Ellis Island. Enforcing the law harms children, while failing to enforce the law incentivizes more dangerous migration involving children. Any serious immigration policy must confront both realities at the same time. The United States does not merely need harsher enforcement. We need a 21st century asylum and immigration policy. The blame lies there, not on soon another new administration hoping something better just comes along.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden’s Southern Border Political Sleight-of-Hand
Joe Biden is playing voters for suckers. He thinks he can snap up their votes with some sleight-of-hand new policy on the southern border. This all comes cynically as the border is emerging as a major issue in the campaign for president; only 28 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the matter so far, and voters overall mark it as their second biggest concern, after the economy. But why fix anything when you can just fake the rubes out?
Biden took executive action earlier this month to turn away asylum seekers who cross the southern border illegally when the weekly average of daily border crossings exceeds 2,500 between ports of entry (it has exceeded that number consistently since Biden took office, averaging about 4,500.) Administration officials, reports The Hill, “walked a tightrope announcing the order, a forceful but targeted shift on asylum rights — one that administration officials said is not comparable to the Trump administration’s system-wide crackdowns.”
Well, maybe. The president’s decree certainly rhymes with a 2018 Trump policy, invoking the same powers to deny people seeking asylum. Federal courts blocked that one. The American Civil Liberties Union says it will challenge the Biden ban as well.
Otherwise, all well and good, except when you drill down a bit. For the last three years Biden policy allowed 4,500 or more asylum seekers to illegally cross the border daily, seven days a week. That number meant the southern border alone produced a million immigrants every 200-some days, a significant number given otherwise only about one million legal Green Card-type immigrants are allowed into the U.S. each year. The border does not discriminate; in addition to the flood of poor Mexicans entering the U.S. this way, the in-flow from the southern border is chock-a-block with Serbs, Chinese, Central and South Americans, as well as Africans from a multitude of countries. Almost none of those people got there on their own, benefiting from organized crime and human traffickers to help them make the arduous journey from say Nigeria to Texas. It was worth it to most, as standard Green Card applications (except for spouses of American Citizens) can be backed up for years, decades for certain categories. Why wait when you can be one of 4,500 lucky daily winners? Reducing that 4,500 to 2,500 a day is good one guesses, as it means Biden policy only comes close to doubling immigrant numbers yearly.
What was left untouched by the new executive order was the Biden method for handling those 2,500 claiming asylum.
Humanitarian parole refers to a discretionary mechanism employed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to allow individuals to remain in the United States on a (theoretically) temporary basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. It was never intended to replace regular visas or Green Cards but rather to be a form of temporary relief.
Prior to Biden, humanitarian parole was typically granted in cases involving medical treatment not available in the individual’s home country, urgent family needs, or situations where the person can contribute significantly to the public interest, say as an artist fleeing a repressive government. Pre-Biden, the decision to grant humanitarian parole was mostly made on a case-by-case basis.
The previous two administrations averaged about 5,000 individually-selected cases per year, not per day as under Biden. Past uses of mass parole include the one-time flood of migrants after the Vietnam War (340,000 people) and the Mariel Boatlift (125,000) from Cuba. Every administration, Republican and Democratic, used parole in emergencies; none had made it the cornerstone of an ongoing mass migration program before Biden. Parole used this way is part of the asylum process which is being abused daily on the southern border.
Asylum applicants must demonstrate if sent home they would be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those five protected grounds has varied based on American domestic politics. For example, since 1994, LGBT status has been a possible grounds of asylum. Victims of domestic violence were granted consideration for asylum under the Obama administration, rolled back under Trump. However, asylum never has been and was never intended to stretch to economic situations affecting blanket-like most everyone in a country. “Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for a legit asylum claim. Until Biden. Economic immigrants without legitimate claims to asylum have taken advantage of slow processing by American authorities. A Mexican man caught on the border who says he came just to work may be sent back almost immediately. However, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case, however frivolous.
The 1996 Clinton Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act requires those seeking asylum be detained while their cases are processed. But for logistical and political reasons, prior administrations simply released most asylum seekers into American society to wait. Asylum seekers become eligible for work authorization if their case has been pending for more than 150 days, as almost all do. Trump instead directed the letter of the law be followed, ending this catch-and-release system. He also negotiated for many asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico instead of working in the U.S. Biden did away with Trump’s reforms.
Biden’s new executive order also contains loopholes for unaccompanied minors, and those applying at a formal port of entry, who won’t count against the 2,500 daily limit. In May 2017, when Trump made an exception for minors, the number of unaccompanied children soared by 329 percent. The smugglers are quick to adjust to any changes in U.S. policy.
Biden of course was equally quick to blame his opposition for the mess he created. While senior administration officials did not explicitly tie the timing of the executive order to the election, they argued the measure was a result of congressional Republicans’ inaction. “If Congress refuses to act, and if congressional Republicans refuse to act, the president is prepared to do so,” one official told reporters. The president and White House officials previously said it was up to Congress to enact changes at the border and suggested Biden’s hands were tied on the issues. They never were.
Republicans chastised Biden for waiting to take executive action on the border and argued this measure is too little, too late. They are correct. It made no sense for Biden to throw open the southern border to faux asylum claims in the first place. It made even less sense for him to maintain there was nothing he could do about the crisis he created, that it was up to Congress alone to fix it, when obviously the executive orders issued by Trump were always available, as well as the weak-tea of Biden’s own order. So, when angry Joe Biden says that there was nothing he could do about the southern border without Congress acting, he was lying. The border crisis is caused solely by Biden’s decision to employ humanitarian parole on a large scale, a decision that can be rescinded anytime. Reducing the daily influx of asylum claimants from 4,500 to 2,500 just months before the presidential election is indeed too little, too late.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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