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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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There appear to be two paths to US citizenship. A legal route, which is nearly impossible for most people, and an illegal route which gets easier and easier.

I am given to understand the situation is more an abuse of the asylum system. Somebody comes in, gets caught, and requests asylum, with a halfway-plausible story. It gets provisionally accepted, but the backlog for formal evaluation is like a decade long, so they get to stay in the US until that happens. Even if the formal hearing results in them getting booted out immediately, they still had a decade in the country, and can do it all again the next day.

And in turn, it is promoted by pro-immigration NGOs that coach every immigrant to plead the threshold claim necessary to get an asylum decision.

A similar thing would happen in the criminal justice system if every offender demanded a trial by jury. They don't, because sentences are high enough that they'll take a plea, but there is no such incentive in immigration courts.

[ Amusingly enough, a trial by jury is unquestionably a defendant's right under the BOR and goes back centuries, but the asylum debacle was created whole cloth by Congress in the last 70 years. ]