Sorry for the tardy reply. Had a family reunion to go to and hit an unfortunate browser button that wrecked a lot of typing. This post is impossible to quote so I have to do it a piece at a time, and I've got a life!
kurtster wrote:
Well golly gee willickers, Wally. It looks like I conflated refugees with asylum seekers. It was late and I also read your unrelated interjection of refugees into this discussion about immigration before replying. The thought stuck in my mind. I do not know why you injected refugees into this. It is indeed a separate subject with its own set of issues. And considering how nearly everyone around here openly conflates legal immigration with illegal immigration I do not feel badly about my unintended conflation of refugees and asylum seekers. So with that thought in mind I will correct my post and you can have at it again. Though please do comment on my rejection of the the notion that there are no lines for getting into this country legally. After all, some 1 million people do it every year ... You skipped right over that.
It wasn't clear which kind of immigrants you didn't want to allow into the country, but it also looked like you didn't know the difference. It's not the only thing you're confused about
Only recently was the US policy defining refugee asylum status broadened to include economic hardship, which I think is an abuse of the program. Another abuse of the program is that the refugees asylum seekers are not stopping at the first available safe place and seeking asylum. Instead they bypass countries to get to the US. That violates the very spirit of being a refugee seeking asylum. It is the first broken rule that comes before the second broken rule of crossing our border illegally.
Speaking of conflating legal and illegal immigration...I tried to explain how the current (legal) immigration system works to provide some insight into why people go around it. I'll try again, but first I want to deal with the first point.
I tried to take your repeated claim that the Obama administration added economic hardship to the qualifications for asylum seriously, so I went looking for any kind of reference to that and didn't find it, not even in a right-wing fever swamp like
CIS. The conditions for asylum are set by statute (and set quite a while ago) so it seemed dubious that the executive branch could adjust them.
There is no US policy, no law, no executive order, nothing that defines refugee or asylee status to include economic hardship. I'd be happy to argue that point with you (starving people out of their homes
ought to qualify, but it doesn't) but I'll just issue this challenge: find that policy and you get 11 Internet points.
Here is an analysis by the anti-immigration group Center for Immigration Studies that backs that up. Here's a
clip of Obama saying the opposite of what you're claiming. In fact, he sounds a lot like you.
I'm not just bringing this up to embarrass you. This isn't the only time you've fallen back on this trope (that the only reason anybody ever has to leave one country for another is economic) so I'm hoping to move this discussion in a productive direction, and that won't happen until I can bring the dispute back to the universe we actually live in.
The Rohingya are not leaving Myanmar for a paycheck. Teenagers fleeing Salvadoran gangs are not coming to start paper routes. Syrians aren't fleeing unemployment.
You don't get to define what it means to be a refugee. There is no rule that requires someone fleeing one country to not "bypass" another country on the way to safety. If you flee El Salvador by walking thru Guatemala (a country beset by very similar problems of gang violence and political strife) are you "bypassing" Honduras and Belize? How about Brazil? Didn't stop in Kazakhstan either!
The folks arriving at our southern border aren't the only people fleeing other countries. Most of them don't have the means, determination, or desperation to travel that far. We only see the seriously motivated.
Motivated, perhaps, because they have friends or family in the US who can support them while they rebuild their livesâsupport they wouldn't have in, say, Mexico. Maybe Mexico isn't dealing well with its flood of recent arrivals. Whatever: they don't need to conform to your image of a refugee. There is no such requirement (applying for asylum before you get here) in US or international law. That's
an additional hoop the Trump administration is trying to make asylum seekers jump thru, and it probably won't stand up in court.
The last article I posted explained how the existing process works but it didn't go into the numbers. Last year we saw 1.2 million legal immigrants enter the countryâabout the same
number of people as drop out of high school every year. By comparison
we'll graduate about 3.6 million high school students this year. 1.2 million people is about .36% of our population. To put that in a global perspective Jordan, a country with 9.5 million people in 2015, has absorbed
about 1.4 million Syrian refugees. Lebanon, which is much smaller and had about 6 million people in 2016,
has absorbed about 1.5 million. That's just a taste of the
current global refugee crisis.
Let's look at the US immigration system. I'm going to use
numbers from 2017 because I can get them; that year we saw 1,127,745 legal arrivals. The proportions don't change muchâthe number of refugees went down and the number of asylees went up, but these were always a small part of the mix. Here's how they got in:
Immigration of immediate family members of citizens is unrestricted. Start a family overseas (or marry a Slovenian model) and you will very likely be able to get visas for your spouse, unmarried children, in-laws, or orphans that you want to adopt. If you do you have to demonstrate that you can support them. These made up 46% of immigrants.
There is an additional pool of visas (480,000) reserved for extended family members and immediate families of aliens with permanent residency (on track for citizenship). There's a catch thoâthe number of immediate family visas is subtracted from this total. To ensure that immediate family members don't shrink this pool to nothing there is a minimum set by Congress in 1990 of 226,000. This number is limited by per-country caps that throttle this down further (it's immigration law! It's complicated!) so in 2017 extended family members made up an additional 21% of immigrants. So 67% (755K or so) were family members of people already here.
BTW those per-country caps result in waiting lists. For Mexico the current wait is about 20 years.
Refugees and asylum seekers made up 13%. Refugees were about 5% of total immigration (way down since 2017).
About 12% were employer-sponsored (if you're rich enough and self-employed/run a business you can self-sponsor).
There are a number specialty visas for former Iraqi translators, foreign nationals serving in the US armed forces, and a few others. These are about 2% of all immigrants.
So what's left? If you don't fit into any of those categories, just want to come here to build a better, freer life how do you do it? The remaining 5% (50K) are assigned to the Diversity Visa programâessentially a lottery. You pay your money and take your chances. Doesn't matter how long you've waited, doesn't matter how many times you've tried. Your future is down to dumb luck, and the odds suckâevery year
over 20 million people apply.
So for the vast majority of the people who want to come here there is no path, and there absolutely, positively is no line you can stand in to wait for a slot. There hasn't been since at least 1990.
Worse yet is the assumption that we owe them a place in our country. This attitude explains why the countries they are leaving are failing. No one wants to make the sacrifices that are required to improve their own situation at home. Instead, they pack up and leave for greener pastures rather than fight for their rights at home. We have tried sending money to these countries to improve conditions, but as usual this money does not get to where it is supposed to go. The governments siphon off the majority of the monies via public corruption. Trump rightly cut off these funds because they were not being used to benefit the citizens. Maybe we should get the Peace Corps going down there. I have no problem with sending aid to these people /countries except when it doesn't go where intended.
About 3/4 of the refugees that make it to the US are women and children. What role do you expect them to play in fighting off Guatemalan gangs, or ISIS, or barrel bombs dropped from a helicopter, or the Venezuelan government?
How much good do you think the Peace Corps would do against Sudanese Janjaweed? Think Myanmar would let them in? Would there be room for them in
Dadaab?
This isn't about spending money, at least not much and not for longâand we get to keep the people it would be spent on.
1) yeah, I'm dumber than a box of rocks because I support Trump.
I'll leave that conclusion to historians and your own conscience. I will say this: you don't know what you're talking about.
2) yes there are rules, the same rules for everyone. How can you say otherwise ?
Because I've read them. And no, they aren't the same for everybody, and there is no line.
3) yes I did read the article twice, once when it was first posted a year or so ago and again last night. I am not lying.
That isn't exactly making you look good here.
4) economic hardship was added during Obama's administration to the rules for granting asylum.
No, it wasn't. Sorry to keep answering this, but you keep repeating it.
5) as usual I'm a xenophobic and bigot for even thinking about discussing the subject of legal vs illegal immigration.
No, you're just confusing the two and talking out your ass about both.
6) that responsibility lies with FDR and his party. They effectively closed the borders to all from shortly after his election all the way through WW II.
I'm almost certain you just tried to make a point.
Oh and according to the article, I would be of the colonists. That used to be something to be proud of. Now it is viewed as being that of a racist slave owner. This is the view of this nation's founding and founders that seems to be circulating this country presently, that before the Civil War everyone either owned slaves or were slaves. So much for studying history ...
You salvage what dignity you can from any source you like. Me, I'm proud of things
I did, not what my ancestors did. They get credit or blame for that. This post? That's on you.