The Expansionist: Asylum Is for POLITICAL Refugees

Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Asylum Is for POLITICAL Refugees

There is enormous confusion and wilful misrepresentation of "asylum" in the present swirl of events at the United States' southern border. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says plainly, at the very top of its article on "Asylum":

Asylum, in international law, [is] the protection granted by a state to a foreign citizen against his own state. The person for whom asylum is established has no legal right to demand it, and the sheltering state has no obligation to grant it.

The term "asylum" without what used to be a clarifying adjective, "political", before it, is being maliciously misused to cover people who are NOT being oppressed by their government, but to people who may be fleeing civil war, drug czar violence, simple poverty or unemployment, and even domestic abuse by a spouse. NO, that is NOT what asylum is for. People fleeing conditions that have nothing to do with governmental oppression are NOT seeking "aslyum". They may be fleeing to what they hope will be refuge from bad conditions, but there's a big difference between refugees and asylum-seekers
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There is NO "human rights" issue in the refusal of the United States, or any country, to allow people to pour over a border without permission from that country. The United States has very generous immigration laws, and does grant asylum to many people fleeing actual persecution. But we have no obligation in law or morality to let just anybody in who wants in, for reasons having nothing to do with governmental persecution. Especially do we have no obligation to let in women who don't want to stay with a spouse whom they claim is abusing them. It cannot be our purpose to break up families when the woman takes her spouse's children away from him and moves them hundreds or even thousands of miles from the father. It is thus grotesque for soft-heated, and soft-headed, Americans to talk of separating children from their parents when a woman takes them across the border without their FATHER.
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The U.S. is not empty anymore. This isn't the nineteenth century, when we had huge expanses of basically unpopulated prairies and woodlands to fill with people who would develop the land and contribute to society. We now have some 328 million people, and a growth rate of 1% a year. The U.S. Census Bureau says we have:

One birth every 8 seconds
One death every 12 seconds
One international migrant (net) every 28 seconds
Net gain of one person every 13 seconds

At the same time as our population keeps growing, the number of jobs keeps shrinking, lost to foreign competition, corporate and government downsizing, and automation. Most illegals willingly accept lower pay and few to no employee benefits, as undercuts American workers, esp. Americans who are most vulnerable to unfair competition. Each of these is a troubling trend; together, they foreshadow economic disaster, and we need to STOP admitting so many foreigners into this crowded nation, esp. people who show no desire to assimilate into our national culture, but hold themselves aloof in linguistic and cultural ghettos of their own creation. This is esp. true of immigrants from Spanish America, who have so many communities of size and so much television, radio and, for those who can read, newspapers and magazines in Spanish that they feel no need, more than just no desire, to learn English and mix with others.
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We have no reason to subvert our civilization for the sake of foreigners. We didn't make their countries, nor their crime-ridden neighborhoods, nor their marriages bad. (Admittedly, American drug users have wreaked havoc in various parts of Latin America by inciting war among competing drug gangs, but that is not the doing of our Government nor American society in general, and it is up to the governments of those other countries to suppress such violence and protect their citizens. We have no authority to intrude into law enforcement in other countries. Nor do we have the resources to be the police force of the entire planet.)
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If the people of this country, acting thru our Government, want to admit refugees from things that have nothing to do with persecution, that is of course a choice we are entitled to make. But if we let in just everyone who wants to live here, some on unrealistic expectations that their life would be hugely better in a country where they do not speak the language and do not have the education to enable them to succeed in THIS society, we could be overwhelmed by hordes of invaders. I don't want a BILLION foreigners within our existing borders. If outsiders want into the United States, let them petition to bring their countries, with their resources, into the Union as States. Then we WOULD have the authority and ability to provide for these masses, and they would for the most part stay in their own culture, with their own people and their extended families, but achieve many of the benefits of our society in relatively short order.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:29 AM

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