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 and release 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.