Many of the asylum seekers have come to El Paso Texas, a city Chris and I have frequently driven past on our way to the easy life of Arizona.  We did so again this year. I have frequently thought of the immigrants that come there seeking safety and a better life. I have never done anything to help those people. I have not even stopped to look.  That is not something to be proud of.

I remember listening to El Paso Mayor Dee Margo on television  a couple of years ago. He was a levelled headed-Republican when Trump was president. The mayor explained how El Paso and Mexico got along well with each other, contrary to Trump’s claims in his inauguration speech. Thousands of people walked across the border peaceably in both directions every day.

When Donald Trump was president in 2016  after being elected on an anti-immigrant platform, he helped to make things worse. He called out the border city of El Paso during his State of the Union Address. In the process he made false claims that the city at the time was overrun by violent crime. Trump falsely claimed that El Paso urgently required his wall to stem the tide. Mayor Margo denied there was an emergency at the border.  He said people from El Paso got along fine with the people from Mexico.

This is what Trump said:

“The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime, one of the highest in the entire country and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities,… Now, immediately upon (the wall’s) building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.”

Yet this is what USA Today and the Arizona Republic jointly published about  El Paos which:

 “as never one of the most dangerous cities, the violent crime rate peaked in 1993, and had declined dramatically over the next decade, the El Paso Times found. The rate was at a low by 2006, when the federal Secure Fence Act was passed. By 2011, two years after the fence was built in El Paso, violent crime rates had actually increased slightly

In general, El Paso has long been considered one of the safest big cities in America. “Our city police’s community-relations efforts and the cooperation between our law enforcement agencies contributed to making our city a safe place to live and work before border fencing was put in place,” El Paso Mayor Dee Margo, a Republican, wrote in an opinion column published Sunday by USA TODAY. “

The truth was that El Paso was very different from what Trump advertised to be the case. His antics were not helping matters

More recently, things got worse in El Paso as a result of a global crisis of immigration. El Paso was always proud about welcoming immigrants, but it has been overwhelmed. Recently, the new mayor declared a state of emergency there.

According to Fareed Zakaria in his CNN special in 2023, in Eagle Pass Texas there were “more migrants in one month than it had total residents.”The turmoil at the border had a dramatic effect on border politics. Zapata County in Texas had not voted Republican since the 1920s! Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama by 43 per centage points. But  Donald Trump won in 2020. People there thought, rightly or wrongly, that Trump cared about the border. It didn’t matter that his policies made little sense. As is so often the case, when it comes to politics, reason and immigration keep little company. Republicans made gains all the along the Texans southern border.

And it seems they are doing so again.

Nearly everyone acknowledges that immigration everywhere is a mess and no one wants to resolve it. Problems are not confined to the United States.   Partly, that is because too much ideology is intertwined with immigration issues. They are thorny issues that ideology does not help in solving. Particularly when ideologues like Steve Miller in the US, get involved things just get worse.

One person who does understood the issues and is not an ideologue, is CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who is himself a proud immigrant to the United States. He looks at immigration with empathy and without ideological blinders, ignoring ideologues on both the left and right.

First of all, Zakaria acknowledges, unlike some liberals, that there is a problem at the American border. As he said in 2023,

“It is no longer just a partisan talking point, or a hyperbolic claim on Fox News. The country has been facing a surge of migration the likes of which has never been seen. A Record 2.4 million migrants were apprehended at the border last fiscal year [2022]. That shattered the record made the previous year, and nearly equaled the population of Chicago. Hundreds have been arriving each day at some border cities. Sometimes tens of thousands of migrants in a single month. Homeless shelters have been overwhelmed. Families have been sleeping on the streets. These borders are no strangers to big migrations, but they have never gone through anything like this. Numbers went down in recent weeks after new restrictive measures were introduced, but the numbers still very uncertain.”

It is not enough to say, as some liberals do, that we are a nation of immigrants. It is not enough to say, as Donald Trump said, “our country is full.” Particularly when a country is not full and actually needs immigrants for its economy and to fill jobs that are unfilled to the dismay of employers, statements like Trump’s must be based on ideology, not facts. At the same time when Biden seemed to invite the entire world to America that was also a huge mistake.

Immigration is a wicked problem, and not just in the US or Canada. Immigration is a problem around the world. But it requires critical thinking to tackle it, not just blind ideology.

As Fareed Zakaria asked,

“Why is this happening now? It is a unique moment in the history of the hemisphere. The pandemic and climate change with its brutal storms, droughts, and disease led to economic meltdowns, political unrest, and a perfect storm of migration. Cuban migration to the United States rose nearly 500% in a single year. Columbian migration rose over 1,100%! Over 7 million people have fled Venezuela to the US and other countries. That is close to the exodus from war torn Ukraine.”

As Rachel Self, immigration attorney, said, “It’s a perfect storm in a system that is ultimately breaking. These are all people who had families, had lives, had jobs, and then their countries fell apart and then they take the journey and the journey itself is a life or death experience. As David Frum, a thinking person’s conservative, pointed out, “more people than ever before moving to more places in the history of the world.  And that creates wicked problems everywhere.

At the outset, I want to say that rich countries like the US and Canada have an obligation to give asylum to legitimate claimants. That is an obligation under international law agreed to by an international convention. Canada and the US are both rich countries and they can afford to establish such a system. In the US under their current system, it takes years for legitimate claimants to have their cases heard.  Each country is entitled to have claims adjudicated to ensure that only legitimate claims are accepted. Applicants must be accepted as genuine claimants fleeing persecution. Economic migrants do not have an automatic right to enter the country unless they have legitimate claims based on persecution. The US is not putting enough resources into the system to allow it to work properly efficiently and swiftly enough. They must do that. That is their clear responsibility, even though tax payers will inevitably be less than keen to pay.

During the delays in both countries, the asylum seekers in the country inevitably get attached to the country they inhabit and grow connections to the people there that are difficult to break and often lead to citizens of those countries gaining sympathy for them and then pressing their countries to make exceptions or improve their reception. This makes things more difficult. And the longer they stay waiting for their cases to be adjudicated the worse things get. As a result of this things have got very bad in the US. A good part of the problem is the lack of resources devoted to this. Looking the other way does not solve this problem. Currently in the US many claims take many years to be adjudicated because of a lack of resources.

Canada and the US are part of the problem. They must change their ways and stop shirking their responsibilities. They must not take advantage of delays to discourage claims when they are partly responsible for those delays.

We must remember that those who are comfortable in a country, such as the vast majority of Canadian and Americans, many of whom are themselves immigrants or of whom nearly all are ancestors of immigrants  and are prone to exaggerate the difficulties of accepting large numbers of asylum seekers. How many refugees can we really tolerate?

Once one is privileged it is easy to see the privilege as natural and justified but is it? What really gives Americans and Canadians the moral right to say, “No more!” as Trump did when he was president. He basically tried to keep out all immigrants, not just unjustified asylum claimants because that was popular with his base supporters.

Many of the original settlers arrived in this continent from Europe where they often did often did not face persecution, let alone extreme persecution. Yet they thought they could come here whether the inhabitants wanted them or not.

Some countries like Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon are able to take millions of asylum seekers even though they are much smaller and much poorer countries than Canada or the United States.

We must all recognize that since the time of the reforms after the World War the world has changed dramatically. That is in part the consequence of climate change and political change, both of which were significantly, but not solely, caused by western countries. Both are contributing immensely to increased immigration around the world. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there  currently are more than 40 million  refugees and asylum seekers around the world. How can the world deal with that many? And we must realize that the climate problems and political problems that have created this deluge of refugees and asylum seekers are not going away any time soon. In fact, things are likely to get worse. Much worse! So what do we do about it?

As Zakaria said,

“We need entirely new laws, standards, courts, so that asylum can be granted, but through some orderly rational process, rather than just leaving it up to officials in countries that are overwhelmed by illegal entrants at their borders. The migrant process is exposing democratic weakness at every level. From an administration that is scared to take on its progressive wing and take bold action, to states like New York and Massachusetts that have right to shelter rules that are utterly unworkable under the face of this onslaught. Unless Democrats seize control of this issue, the politics of this will have the same effect as under other western countries—rocket fuel for the populist right.”

As David Frum said, “if democracies are unable to solve the issue of immigration, autocracies will do it for them.”

 Donald Trump’s “big beautiful wall” has not worked even where it was built. But most Americans recognize that he is right when he says the current system is not acceptable. If a wall is not the answer, and I don’t think it is, we must do better. As Zakaria said, Trump was “willing to take extreme measures to end it and they know no such thing about his Democratic opponents.”  On the issue of immigration Trump is respected in the US much more than Biden. And According to a recent poll, immigration is the most important issue on the minds of Americans.

Yes, immigration is a wicked problem. Liberals need to understand that open borders are not acceptable to their citizens and won’t be tolerated by them.   Conservatives need to understand that their countries need more workers and immigration can help their economies as it helps them fulfill their moral and legal obligations.

In the US the Secretary of Homeland Security has repeatedly said the asylum system is broken. That means that revolutionary changes to the system are urgently required.  Looking around the world, where so many countries in the world are experiencing the same problem, it is difficult to deny the urgent need for not just reform, but revolutionary change to the system.

To understand the issue, we must get back to fundamentals. During World War II there were disgraceful and often successful attempts by governments around the world to deny asylum to Jews and others fleeing Nazi persecution, torture, and death. Canada and the United States were both among the disgraceful countries. Both countries were complicit in sending ships of asylum seekers back to Europe where many of them ended up in Nazi death camps, where they died,  to the eternal shame of such countries.  The infamous statement of a Canadian official who was asked how many Jews Canada should take said, “none is too many.” In more recent times, Donald Trump when he was president, told potential asylum seekers, “Our country is full,” even though it clearly was not full and actually and needed laborers. The history of countries being asked to accept asylum seekers has not been pretty.

Then after the war the international community reformed the system and even made radical changes that worked well. For a while. Countries like Canada and the US began to accept asylum seekers. Asylum seekers who were fleeing persecution were by international law given the right to come to countries like Canada and the US and many others and seek asylum. Again that system worked well, for a while.

After World War II, as Fareed Zakaria said, people who faced extreme persecution, because of their religion, race or beliefs, were able to find  pathway to arrival to their country. Then countries like Canada and the United States, became a refugee country, from extreme persecution. Yet eventually this system became unworkable. As Fareed Zakaria said,

There are two realities that are critical to turning this idealistic impulse into a workable system.

“First, there are tens of millions of people around the world who could plausibly claim that they faced persecution and the US cannot possibly take them all.

More importantly, the US cannot be forced to give priority to people who break the law and enter the country illegally and then claim asylum status to legitimate that entry, as opposed to those who follow the rules, apply from their own countries and wait their turn. But that is what is happening everyday now at the southern border.

Second, these asylum cases must be special and distinct from all cases all over the world who are trying to immigrate to the United States, because they are fleeing poverty, disease or violence. People who fall into this category fall into a complex and elaborate system that entails several mechanism for obtaining various kinds of visas and work permits some of which can eventually turn into a green card and eventually citizenship. But instead of going through that arduous lengthy legal process many seem to have decided it would be simpler to pay cartels to help them cross the border illegally, present themselves as asylum seekers, and slip into the country while their cases are being adjudicated.”

According to the Homeland Security Inspector General, in just one 7 month period between March 2012 and August 2022, the federal government released 1 million migrants into the US and then immediately lost track of over 177,000 of them who had failed to give an address or had provided an invalid one.

When the system of due process collapses as it has, it is most unfair to those who have legitimate claims to asylum or legal immigrant status. There is only one solution to this crisis. President Biden should either ask Congress for authority to use existing executive authority suspend entirely the system of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending.”

 

Actually Biden has done exactly that and much to the surprise of many a non-partisan group of Senators this year came up with a plan that they believed everyone should endorse. In fact, it looked like 67% of the Senators liked the plan and were about to approve it, when Trump told his minions he did not want them to agree to the plan. Most agree he  did not want the parties to come to a non-partisan agreement because he wanted to use the issue on the campaign trail instead. His Republican sycophants of course followed suit as did those in the House of Representatives.

As a result, these measures Republicans have been screaming for are stalled until after the election. The immigrant “crisis” is not as important as scoring political points.

Liberals, such as Democrats in the US, are failing to see the problems with immigration and conservatives and populists and authoritarians are getting ready to pounce on this election issue again, as they did in 2016 in the US. That issue helped spur Trump’s surprising victory in the race for the American presidency. From the first day of that campaign when Trump came down the escalator in gaudy Trump tower and lambasted Mexican illegal immigrants as rapists and murderers is message has resonated with people. Conservatives, including populists and authoritarians, have been successful in latching on to the issue of immigration around the world. Fareed Zakaria, an astute political analyst, is warning Democrats that the issue of immigration could “cripple their chances at the polls” in the upcoming national elections in the US.” Why is that?

It is true that the US Republicans are taking advantage of this problem and keep hammering the Democrats for what they call their policies of open borders. Such rhetoric plays well with nearly everyone, because virtually no one wants open borders. Most Americans think the Republicans, led by Trump are better able to deal with what they see as chaos at the border.

According to Zakaria it is more than that however. He says the other reason Democrats are getting hammered in the US is that “their [Democrats] policies are wrong. Grossly inadequate to the challenge at hand. Apprehensions at the southern border are surging again.”

The borders across the US are bending as they encounter waves of arrivals that seem well beyond the ability of American border agents to effectively deal with. As Zakaria said, “Now that American cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C., local governments there are facing back-breaking expenses to house them.” They frankly don’t know what to do.

 Of course, as I have said before, such expenses should be born by the federal government and not state governments. Immigration, whether legal or illegal is a national issue and costs should be paid by the nation, not the states which are being inundated. That is painfully unfair.

As Zakaria said, “New York city Mayor Eric Adams was exaggerating only slightly when he said, this problem will destroy the city.”

If Republicans are able to persuade Americans that these problems have been exacerbated by weak policies of the Biden administration and states with Democratic governors or Democratic led state governments, this issue could drown Democratic leaders around the US. There are few issues more amenable to Populist manipulation and fear-mongering than images of chaos at borders and massive impositions of expenses upon receiving states, provinces, or governments.

According to Zakaria, “the Biden administration proposals  have amounted to band-aids on a massive open wound.”  Similar arguments are being made by populist opponents of existing government around the world.

As we drove towards the southern USA, Christiane and I frequently  listened to National Public Radio (NPR). One day weI listened to an interesting discussion on immigration. This is always a hot subject in American politics. It energizes a lot of people both on the left and the right.  Americans love to complain about what the other side is doing or failing to do on this issue. It is considered a major problem for the country but no one tries to fix it. Everyone wants to complain instead. That is much more fun. Added to that, both sides want to score political points by blaming the other side for the problem when really both sides are to blame. As a result, of course, nothing does get done. And the complaints continue to pile up. That makes for a wicked problem that seems impossible to solve.

Meanwhile asylum seekers in the US are told on arrival to the U.S. to contact the Department of Homeland Security. When they follow those instructions, they are told the Department will respond to them and they should wait. They should wait patiently. The asylum seekers typically have to wait between 4 and 5 years, for a response to their request for asylum. Only after that is an adjudication hearing held. Then, if the asylum claim is denied, the seeker can appeal the decision and this will likely result in another 5 years of delay. Meanwhile the asylum seekers have a decade to live in the country and become what Israeli’s call a fact on the ground. They are there. There is no denying this. Meanwhile those asylum seekers may hold jobs and have children while in the U.S. The children might become American citizens and can’t be separated from their parents.

Meanwhile how can the United States think of itself as a civilized country when it seems to be operating without honour?

What is the result? A bloody mess.