A Trip Down The Asylum Immigration Lane

Sri Pinnamareddy

I am an immigrant. And if you ask me about, what were the struggles about being an immigrant? I would respond by getting a green card and pneumonia. Despite being an immigrant, I have been selectively placed in a bubble where society labeled as “the good ones.” Yes, my parents have struggled, but that is the cliche immigrant story. Politics constantly compares the undocumented immigrants with law-abiding legal immigrants. The distinction that they fail to differentiate is on education level, socioeconomic status, country of origin, the reason for immigration. Of course, both types of immigrants want a better future and economic prosperity. However sometimes the stories get mixed up and we like to delineate them as “good” and “bad”, yet this places a dangerous precedent without considering the unique situation of particular immigrants.

What started with “We are going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” has come to travel bans to largely Muslim countries, attempts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, separating families at the border, and finally the H1-B ban. This was just the highlight reel of “Buy American, Hire American.” Trump’s anti-immigration agenda was portrayed no longer as an immigration issue but rather as national security and economic issue.

One of the first places this is apparent is asylum.

So let’s talk about Asylum.

And then let’s talk about how Trump effectively killed asylum. During Trump’s impeachment, many eyes were turned away from the devastating humanitarian crisis in our Southern border where thousands of asylum seekers were living in deplorable conditions. 55,000 people were in lack of access to work, little access to medical services, there were rarely any bathrooms. Now a majority of these people, Trump used the image of the “migrant caravan” to accuse them of “rapists and crime-causing citizens.” This was the rationale used by the conservatives called the Migrant Protection Protocols, where the people coming to America to seek asylum must remain in Mexico for the US to process their case.

This is where that becomes problematic. If you think about logically the reason why these families are coming to America in the first place, you will hear the stories about Central American countries being the breeding ground for rapists, gangs, and extortionists. The reality is people don’t want to claim asylum, they don’t want to leave their countries, they are forced to apply for asylum. If they stay in their country, their sons become a part of the gangs for basic necessities, and their daughters sell their bodies forcibly or to just survive. When the US keeps them in Mexico, you are placing them in the same danger that they were trying to escape. By 2020, Less than 1 percent of 24,000 so-called Remain in Mexico (Migrant Protection cases have resulted in asylum protection. Under MPP, more than 57,000 people have been returned to Mexico to await court proceedings on their asylum claims. Half have ended up in border towns such as Nuevo Laredo leading over 816 instances of rape, kidnap, and assault. In fact, studies show that 1 in 4 asylum seekers are subject to violence because they are targeted by drug-cartels while they seek work and food in Mexico.

Asylum is the legal right to admit people in desperation to a country. America has been severely dismantling that right and has made these people “illegal”. In fact, let's take a look at the asylum process. Of all the ways that individuals can immigrate to America, asylum is one of the hardest ones to gain admission. You take a thousand-mile journey putting your life in danger, you show up at the border, you have to prove your life is in danger, and just cross your fingers and hope you get admitted for asylum. In the final interview process, you have to establish that you have a “credible fear” for seeking asylum. However, this isn’t even based on your perception of fear, it is based on the administration’s perception. Trump has then denied that gang violence and domestic abuse does not count as “credible fear.”

Especially, with an administration that wants to end asylum, things could not be getting worse. Trump’s strategy is to prevent asylum seekers at all costs so that they either get scared away or die during the journey. One of these policies is Metering, it is a cap on the total number of asylum seekers that can be admitted during a day. Before these policies, border cities like San Ysidro were allowed to process 100 per day, after MPP that number had dropped down to 20. Therefore, thousands of people are put on the asylum waitlist. So if you are trying to flee gang and cartel violence, it takes 9 months to even apply for asylum. But then the conservatives went hmmm….that’s not enough, we are still accepting a few thousand asylum seekers, let’s just end asylum through the transit rule. This is where you have to get rejected for asylum in another country in order to even apply for asylum in the United States. That means if you apply for asylum in Mexico, you would have to wait months in order to get accepted or rejected, but by that time you are placing your life in serious danger. This is the perfect excuse for America not accepting asylum seekers… “Ahh, I’m sorry you didn’t apply for asylum in Guatemala or Mexico and just hope you don't get killed as they took months to review your application.” If that isn’t worse enough, the administration is working on Safe Third Country Agreements which basically says if you are coming from Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador, it’s a declaration that your country is safe enough to live there. This further decreases the validity of any “credible fear” statement.

This graph shows the number of admitted refugees and asylees in the past years.

The same way the nation has deemed “good” and “bad” immigrants. The conditions of legal immigrants and those seeking asylum are distinctly different and it’s foolish to compare those situations, and ask them “why can’t you be more like them?” It becomes more tragic when you come to realize the nativist perspective leads to dangerous precedents. Over 22.7% of American immigrants are able to get lawyers, now if you are an asylum seeker in Mexico that number drops to 1.2%. Without knowing your legal rights about asylum, you are placed in a lose-lose situation.

Now, this just gives a glimpse at the difficulties in the immigration process. Americans repeatedly place the blame on the immigrants themselves rather than the system and the “laws” that make them illegal. The reality is there is no viable pathway for current unauthorized immigrants and prospective immigrants who came through unauthorized channels to gain legal residence. The Pew Research Center finds, As of 2017, 83% had lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years, while only 8% had been in the country for five years or less. During that time period, the majority of these undocumented immigrants are law-abiding citizens who pay taxes without receiving healthcare benefits or welfare because they do not want to risk deportation. In fact, if you are accusing undocumented immigrants of crime, taking away jobs, and leading to an economic downturn, your vision has been veiled by media stereotypes. In fact, undocumented immigrants pay up to $11.64 billion in taxes and are subject to 8% of their income up for taxes compared to the standard 1%. Additionally, immigrants historically have led to more jobs because they are twice as likely to start a business and hire native people.

However, this immigration dispute is not just Trump-era politics, we fail to see the perspective where many of Obama’s policies lead to the separation of families at the border. We imagine this as a partisan issue, but both sides are responsible for the perpetuation of the border dispute and no holistic solution to address it. However, it is correct that Trump’s zero-tolerance policy has led to major step backs in the American immigration policy. Under Obama and the Bush administration, there was no blanket policy to prosecute immigrants from coming.

What the US government has done is that it has made asylum immigration illegal by tweaking the laws and making it impossible to seek asylum. If that is the law. Then I think it’s fair to not follow that law.

-SP