Washington Post: Democrats Want to Streamline Asylum Process for Migrants

Democrat Senators will offer an election campaign bill which would streamline the asylum process for migrants emerging from Central America — but do nothing to protect Americans from cheap labor migration, according to the Washington Post.

“The hope is that the plan will give Democrats the basis for a substantive [2020] blueprint to respond to the asylum-seeking crisis — and, more broadly, an answer to Trump’s xenophobic and nativist nationalism, a vision to contrast with his,” says the report by Post’s progressive columnist Greg Sargent.

The bill apparently offers no legal changes that would reduce the huge government-created incentives for foreign migrants to use the catch andrelease loopholes to get blue-collar U.S jobs, to live in the U.S. welfare state, or to birth U.S. citizen children in the United States.

Instead, the bill would provide more financial aid to Central American countries and would allow migrants to apply for asylum in their home countries instead of hiring coyotes to smuggle them up to the U.S. border.

The bill would also try to speed the migration process by spending U.S. funds to “substantially increase the number of immigration judges to unclog court backlogs.”

The bill would also protect foreign migrants from fraud by smugglers, the Post says.

“The bill creates new criminal penalties for smuggling and the defrauding of migrants — particularly children [and] also reforms procedures pairing unaccompanied children with adult sponsors and enrolling them in local school districts,” says Sargent, who did not suggest that Democrats wish to reduce the number of migrants who get asylum.

Overall, Sargent writes:

The Democratic vision is that retreating on our international humanitarian commitments to asylum seekers is unacceptable, and that the problem can be managed better, through a combination of addressing home conditions, providing other avenues to apply, and rationalizing the process for arrivals. Providing counsel and better information, increasing their chances of success, would incentivize showing up for hearings.

Sargent’s summary suggests that the Democrats want to have the taxpayers provide free lawyers to the migrants. That legal aid would boost the number of migrants who would win green cards via the asylum process, and then allow them to import their families, compete for blue-collar jobs, drive up rents in urban areas, and send more foreign children into blue-collar Americans’ crowded schools.

Meanwhile, Trump is trying to reduce the inflow of migrants. Sargent says:

Trump, by contrast, refuses to entertain the very idea of managing the problem without dramatically scaling back our humanitarian commitments. That’s a goal in itself. He and immigration adviser Stephen Miller just want far fewer immigrants here, and are deeply devoted to that end.

Those are the broad outlines of the debate we’ll be having in 2020.

The pro-migrant position is risky for 2020 Democrats because Trump’s Hire American economic and immigration plan is raising wages and salaries for Americans.

Trump’s pro-American policies are also creating workplace opportunities for disabled Americans, for women, and for minorities.

Even GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham is drafting a GOP bill that would allow border agents to detain migrants for 100 days, so ending the catch and release loopholes which have allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to get jobs in the United States.

The Democrats’ plan to streamline — but not reduce — the fast-growing Central American migration is politically risky, partly because the migration is unpopular outside their progressive base and the business sector.

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including roughly one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.

The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas.

This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.

This policy of flooding the market with cheap foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment from the heartland to the coasts, explodes rents, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest and rewards investors for creating low tech, labor-intensive workplaces.