The Los Angeles Times front-paged an article on Sunday where legal writer David Savage discussed the state of asylum law, which looks rather squishy to your humble blogger, and I assume to other non-lawyers as well.
One sees within those loosening asylum parameters the relentless hand of immigration lawyers pushing for ever more foreigners to be admitted, even though the US immigrant population hit a record 43.7 million in July 2016. Corrupt immigration lawyers like the refugee/asylum categories because they have the halo of victimhood that lefties love. Of course the “victim” foreigners are would-be immigrants and very undesirable ones at that. Central American nations are crime-ridden hellholes with very low levels of education. They are top scorers in the murder sweepstakes: a 2014 Wall Street Journal article, titled Latin America Is World’s Most Violent Region, reported that Honduras is the top murder spot:
Hondurans, who are many of the caravansters, shouldn’t be given asylum in America; they should be sent home and kept out of the United States. Government officials cannot sort out the “good” foreigners from the criminals, as we have seen with the importation of thousands of MS-13 gangsters as a result of Obama policies. Plus, the second generation is often more inclined to bad behavior, so the cutesy kiddies so beloved by the media (see above photo) soon may grow up into less appealing adult criminals.
A lot of this misguided liberal do-goodery is based on the 1951 Refugee Convention, a document which has become outdated given the vastly increased population from problematic societies versus the receiving nations of North America and Europe. Back in 1951, the world population was 2.6 billion, compared with today’s number of 7.6 billion — a near tripling of humans on earth in just 67 years. And the great majority of population growth occurs in the Third World.
The math is going the wrong way for the First World to be the welfare office for the Third. So the 1951 ideas about a world rescue system need to be scrapped. The United States cannot be the world’s flophouse, and certainly not for likely criminals.
Immigration courts are deeply split on who can claim asylum over violence in home countries, By David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2016
Central Americans who travel north to plead for entry at the U.S. border are taking their chances on an immigration system that is deeply divided on whether they can qualify for asylum if they are fleeing domestic violence or street crime, rather than persecution from the government.
The law in this area remains unclear, and the outcome of an asylum claim depends to a remarkable degree on the immigration judge who decides it.
And sitting atop the immigration court system is Atty Gen. Jeff Sessions, a long-time advocate of much stricter limits on immigration who recently has taken an interest in reviewing asylum cases.
Lawyers say they are troubled by a legal system in which decisions turns so much on the views of individual judges.
Among the 34 immigration judges in Los Angeles, two judges granted fewer than 3% of the hundreds of asylum claims that came before them in the past five years, while another judge granted 71% of them. The disparity is even greater in San Francisco, where the judge’s rate of granting asylum claims ranged from 3% to 91%.
Overall, asylum seekers would do much better in San Francisco, where 32% were denied between 2012 and 2017, compared to a 68% denial rate in Los Angeles during the same period, according to TRAC data from Syracuse University.
This is not news to immigration lawyers. A decade ago, several law professors published a study called “Refugee Roulette” that revealed how asylum cases depend heavily on the views of individual judges. “The level of variation was shocking. And it hasn’t changed,” said Georgetown University Professor Philip Schrag.
[. . .]
Last fall, Sessions spoke to a meeting of immigration judges and complained America’s “generous asylum” system has become “overloaded with fake claims. … The credible fear process was intended to be a lifeline for persons facing serious persecution. But it has become an easy ticket to illegal entry into the United States,” he said.
In the past week, the American Bar Assn., faith-based groups and a coalition of immigration law professors submitted “friend of the court” briefs to Sessions urging him not to reverse years of precedent involving women fleeing abuse and terror.
But veteran immigration judges are not optimistic. “[Sessions] just wants more people to be removed,” said Paul W. Schmidt, a retired immigration judge from Virginia and an outspoken critic of the attorney general. “He will make it a lot harder for Central Americans to get asylum.”
The dispute begins with the words of the asylum law. In the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress adopted the United Nations standard and said people may seek asylum if they are “unable or unwilling to return” to their home country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Under the law, asylum seekers are treated differently than, for example, refugees from a war-torn nation or immigrants seeking work.
[. . .]
But the odds of winning asylum are not good for Central Americans. In the past five years, China had the largest number of asylum seekers in the U.S. immigration courts, and only 20% of their claims were denied. Ethiopians did even better, with only 17% denied. By contrast, the highest denial rates arose from claims brought by natives of Jamaica (91%), the Philippines (90%), Mexico (88%), El Salvador (79%), Honduras (78%) and Guatemala (75%).
Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who works now at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter enforcement, said it is not surprising that Sessions will reconsider rulings on asylum in cases of domestic violence. “Right now, the law is very unclear. The phrase ‘particular social group’ is vague. A lot of these claims are compelling, but that doesn’t mean it is ‘persecution’ under the law. If a gang wants to recruit me, that’s not persecution.”
Last month Sessions criticized a caravan of Central American asylum seekers that approached the border as a “deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system. There is no right to demand entry without justification. Smugglers and traffickers and those who lie or commit fraud will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
