The “Asylum Crisis” is a Choice
If you listen to politicians talk about the border, you may notice a trend that crosses party lines. Policymakers consistently portray themselves as having no real choices when it comes to immigration. In their telling, they are the mighty few who dare to protect the land, even when that duty earns them criticism from their fellow citizens.
What they rarely talk about is the fact that our immigration policy, especially when it comes to asylum, is a choice. The fact that it may be an implicit choice does not change anything. Things don’t have to be this way; we watch news coverage of children drowning just meters from shore because our policymakers decided that this was the most preferable option. Would it make you feel any better if they assured you that they saw it as the “least bad” option? It sure wouldn’t make me feel better. For example, here’s Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, defending the Biden administration’s decision last year to force all asylum seekers to ports of entry and require appointments, all of which directly contravene the established conditions for seeking asylum:
“We are strengthening the availability of legal, orderly pathways for migrants to come to the United States, at the same time proposing new consequences on those who fail to use processes made available to them by the United States and its regional partners.”
Do you feel better now about this policy? Is it reassuring to you that the reason for putting people’s lives in danger is to ease the administrative burden on Customs and Border Patrol? Me neither.
I can already hear the protests now: there are so many people, we don’t have the facilities to house all of them, it’s already hard enough to find a job as it is. I will readily concede that welcoming large numbers of asylum seekers and other migrants in a short time can be a logistical challenge. There’s no doubt that any sudden uptick in needs among any population generally requires quick thinking and some late nights for the people in charge. However, logistical challenges can be overcome if there are resources and political will. I’ll give you two guesses as to which of those we’re lacking in the US (hint: check out our defense budget).
It would take some serious allocation of funds and human resources to ensure that people arriving at US borders receive the medical care, food, water, and full asylum consideration they deserve. But just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Why is it that everyone swelled with American pride when JFK said we were going to the moon “not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard”, but we shrug our shoulders in bland acceptance when our leaders say that treating asylum seekers with basic human decency is too hard?
This brings us back to the idea of choice. Too many of us accept this reasoning because, I suspect, we unconsciously realize that meeting this bare minimum standard of humanity might compromise some other things we value more. What if we divert more resources to provide proper care at ports of entry and that leads to higher taxes? What if we start providing more housing for people at hotels and that leads hotel room prices to go up due to scarcity? What if some of them are housed in my neighborhood and I become a minority?
Some of these might seem like valid considerations, until you remember that they are being weighed against actual human lives. When we refuse to treat migrants and asylum seekers according to literal international laws and figurative human decency laws, people die. Period. These choices are paid for in blood.
We deserve better from our leaders; we should be able to expect them to articulate clearly both the benefits and the costs of their policy decisions. But it is also incumbent upon each of us to consider the implicit choices that we make each day and to confront their consequences head-on. These are choices; they are not simply things that are happening to or around us. What we need to realize is that if the current situation is a choice, then we can make a different one. We may not be able to choose utopia, but there’s a whole lot of daylight between that and the status quo. With more conscious choices, I believe we can shrink that gap.
