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I'm increasingly against the concept of "asylum" in general. A lot of discussions about immigration seem to take it for granted that we must let in a nonzero percentage of "asylum seekers," that this is just some sort of given, or law of physics or something. It's not. The number of asylum seekers we have to take in is zero.
It must suck to live in a place controlled by warlords and gangs. But life sucks in a lot of place and in a lot of time periods. Sometimes it even sucks within the borders of the U.S. I don't believe I or my countrymen have a special moral duty to shelter every single person who shows up at the border with some unverifiable story of persecution. The idea sounds good in theory, but in practice it is one of those ideas that seems unstable in its theoretical limited form and which inevitably decays into its more stable degraded, excessive, unlimited form (see also college financial aid).
Even a midwit like me can tell that there are simply too many people in LatAm and the 3rd world for the U.S. to absorb without impacting the living standards of Americans, so I have to suspect that "taking care of asylum seekers" is really a pretext for serving some other ideological belief, like "increasing diversity" or "destroying white hegemony" or "free market absolutism." I guess there are a few true believers among the suicidally altruistic (religious charities come to mind) but I wager that they're a minority and are mostly the "useful idiots" that the ideologues in power use to further their ideologies.
Taking somewhat of a devil's advocate position (I'm not a fan of the current asylum system either), you're eliding a lot of ground in your last paragraph. There's a big distance between asylum which "impacts the living standards of Americans" and asylum levels which amount to "suicide." I think people can reasonably believe that society should be willing to accept some level of inconvenience/diminishment of living circumstance short of suicide in order to save people facing near-certain death (i.e. Yazidis fleeing ISIS, Russians/Ukranians facing conscription or displacement, etc.)
I'd also argue that not all asylee populations are problems in the U.S.; Cubans in Florida don't seem so harmful, and the Vietnamese diaspora that settled in southern California after US troops left Saigon has, after some initial friction in the 70's, settled in very nicely.
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Merely living in a place with lots of crime is not ground for asylum. First, a person cannot shiw eligibility for asylum where "the harm that Petitioner fears is not distinct from '[m]ere generalized lawlessness and violence," which "generally is not sufficient . . . to grant asylum . . . .'" Caamal-Rosales v. Garland (9th Cir 2022)(unpublished case). Moreover, the applicant must show that he was specifically targeted because of his race, religion, or membership in a particular social group.
Also, where persecution is by private parties, "the applicant must show that the government condoned the private violence 'or at least demonstrated a complete helplessness to protect the [applicant].'" Bertrand v. Garland, 36 F. 4th 627 (5th Cir 2022).
Unverified stories don't cut it. The burden of proof is on the applicant to prove all elements of an asylum claim. Which is why the grant rate has historically been low. See, eg, this article, complaining that recently "asylum officers have granted asylum in nearly 31 percent of the border cases that they heard to completion — or almost twice as often as immigration judges historically had."
The real issue is the enormous backlog in adjudicating cases. See here. Given that, it is a worthwhile gamble to come here and give asylum a shot. At least you will give your kids a better life for a while. If we increased funding for immigration courts, etc, the problem of dubious asylum claims would largely disappear.
Another idea is a treaty whereby asylum applicants are randomly assigned to a country to have their application heard and to be resettled in if approved, rather than the current system whereby the applicant basically picks his country.
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Or it's a product of post-war hangups: a bunch of people refused to take as many Jews as they could have, and they'll never be allowed to forget it (see the infamous "none is too many" from Canada)
Just as no one can attack the entire DEI infrastructure when faced with its extremism because doing so places you against the Civil Rights Act, people can't just dismiss the entire concept of asylum even though it's impossible to live up to the claims it makes (as you say: it's actually a suicide pact if taken to its conclusion) and it is used to basically smuggle in economic migrants by blurring the lines between them and asylum seekers (probably because they are blurred in the minds of the pro-migrant class)
Some people may simply be willing to pay some cost to live up their values, even though obviously there's more refugees than viable spots and their values simply cannot fully be implemented.
Come on now. It's quite possible for something originally created for honest motives to be coopted later by abusers, without it being the fault of the Jews. I have no doubt that the Commerce Clause really was put there to control commerce, just like Jews really did need asylum during World War II. Using "asylum" as a pretext for illegal immigration because of how the bureaucracy works no more calls Jewish persecution into question than using the Commerce Clause for everything else calls into question its original intentions.
You mean like my other example - African-Americans and the Civil Rights Act?(I swear, right when I'm trying to tone down on my pathological hedging and over-explaining I run into a situation where I apparently needed to clarify some more...)
I think perhaps the Culture War has made you oversensitive? "Jews were left to die in industrialized murder and everyone agrees that was bad, so now no one can argue against asylum as such without taking the Nazi card to the face" is not by any charitable reading equivalent to "it was the fault of the Jews" and especially not "calling Jewish persecution into question" , especially when I gave another example of a minority with a similar dynamic that usually isn't used to imply that the victims are actually the secret protagonists of Western civilization and weren't actually oppressed (if anything the traditional argument is 'yes, but it's been X years now.")
Which you don't seem to take offense at or even note...I'm not really sure how that makes sense. Either you recognize the point I was making, in which case why not be charitable and apply it to the original example (since obviously what unites these two groups is not the sense that they're both secret protagonists of Western civilization), or you don't, in which case why are you not also defending the honor of African-Americans and how I'm "calling black persecution into question"? It seems like an easy point to make without any of the stuff that muddies the "JQ"
For what it was worth, I thought it was obvious what you meant.
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I think a lot of bad law and politics are made by such over correcting, and I don’t think it’s the fault of previous victims, but at the same time, the over correcting is often defended by reference back to the original sin. And until such time as we can come to grips with the situation without any such attempt met with accusation of “denying” the original problem, it cannot be fixed into something sustainable. I think you can create a real asylum rule-set that would allow truly persecuted people in without having to simply create an “I declared it” carve out for anyone who wants in.
Having congress or parliament create laws that rigorously define the conditions for seeking asylum and requiring that people either wait in the original country for a hearing or living in a camp on the border seems reasonable. You could allow legislation to be passed to declare asylum zones for specific countries and classes of people (with sun setting) to allow for true emergencies.
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