Immigration, Migration, Asylum: Legal and Otherwise.

The Wall Street Journal had a long article on the situation at the US’s southern border on Tuesday.¹  The Financial Times had one on Europe’s problems Thursday.²  The thing that is clear from both articles is that the asylum systems in both the United States and Europe are no longer fit for purpose.³ 

The system we have in the United States doesn’t work in a time of global travel and smartphones.  It was designed, and its standards were set, for a time when the number of people seeking asylum was limited.  Most people didn’t know their options, and even if they did, few of them could travel to where they could exercise them.  The number of asylum seekers was small, and the standards were set on that basis.

That isn’t true anymore.  International travel may seem expensive to some, but it is affordable for millions of migrants and asylum seekers.  And smartphones make information, and misinformation, instantly available.  Which results in so many people applying for asylum at our southern border that we can’t handle even the applications.  People know the system; they know what to say; so we let them in, temporarily, in theory, until they can have a hearing on whether they are entitled to stay, which could be far in the future.  Whether they are entitled to stay, legally, we may not know for years.  How many will stay, illegally, we’ll probably never know.

What we do know, or at least some of us believe, is that the present system cannot continue.  We can’t continue to let three million, or more, people come in every year just because they want to.

I understand the stories of many of these people are heartbreaking.  Consider the story at the end of the article in The Wall Street Journal:

“Ibrahima Bah decided to flee Guinea after his in-laws took his daughter Assiatou to undergo genital mutilation.  The 7-year-old died during the procedure.  He feared the same fate could befall Assiatou’s twin, Hadja, and that their older sister, Fatoumata, would soon be forced to marry against her will.

Bah, his wife and two surviving daughters flew to Brazil before braving bus trips through the Amazon, a slog through the Darien jungle and corrupt police in Mexico.  They reached the U.S. in September.

‘I want my daughters to be protected,’ he said. ‘To grant them asylum and be protected, and also for them to have a better education and to have a life that they are free to live.’”

It’s terrible.  But can we take in every person who has a story like this and can figure out a way to get to our border?  Even if the rules from 75 years ago would allow people with stories like this to enter, when we set those standards, most people with such stories couldn’t actually come – or even knew they were entitled to come.  We didn’t do this deliberately.  It was just the way it was.  But that is not true anymore.  People can come and they know they can get in, at least temporarily.  Should we let all of them in?  Can we let all of them in?

It’s not easy.  The answers aren’t simple.  I don’t know what the answer is, but I do have some thoughts:

• We need to figure out how many immigrants/migrants/asylum seekers we can let in each year.  This number will need flexibility, based on conditions around the world, but there has to be some upper number for most situations.
• We need to build a system that can handle asylum requests, etc., right away.  If that means hiring more staff, then we need to do it.
• We have to figure out what happens to asylum seekers who aren’t entitled to stay.  This may be the toughest one, but this can’t be a huge loophole for entry.
• We need to get the story out about whatever new system we come up with, so people know the door on the border no longer opens automatically.
• We need to agree on and put the new system in place right away, once we start to discuss it, so there isn’t a massive rush to get in under the old system.

One last point: Anybody who says the answer is easy and they know what it is, doesn’t know enough about the situation to have an opinion worth listening to.
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¹ Whether you call it a “crisis” or something else, probably depends on who you are planning to vote for in November.  Since I don’t have to vote for either of them (the “advantage” of living in Illinois), I can call it whatever I want. 
² Laura Dubois and Adam Samson, “How Europe is outsourcing its border fencing,” Financial Times, April 11, 2024. 
³ A big part of Europe’s solution to the problem of migrants and asylum seekers is to pay countries like Turkey and Tunisia, etc., to block the migrants from even getting to Europe’s borders.  Many in Europe seem to turn a blind eye to how this is done.  (See footnote 2.)  This post focuses on the United States’s situation.