Trump's War on Children

[_Chap]

Trump really likes being on the cover of Time magazine, doesn't he?

Well, here's one for his collection. He's sure to be proud of this depiction of himself standing up to all those rapists and drug dealers:

[_Hawkeye]

Jeff Sessions claims asylum system rampant with fraud and abuse

Sessions and President Donald Trump share a goal of changing the asylum process. In his October list of immigration principles and policies, Trump outlined tighter controls of the asylum process, including elevating the threshold standard of proof in credible fear interviews.

On the question of fewer meritorious asylum claims, however, there is no data that plainly speaks to that trend. Sessions pieced together an argument that relies on assumptions and ignores the growth of refugees.

"Indeed, there has certainly been an increase in asylum claims — but this corresponds with the increase in refugees around the world," said Lindsay M. Harris, an assistant professor of law and co-director of the immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of the District of Columbia, David A. Clarke School of Law.

She continued, "One of the humanitarian crises producing refugees happens to be south of our border, and this accounts for the exponential increase in asylum claims and individuals seeking protection in the U.S. through the credible fear system, rather than a sudden increase in fraudulent claims."

Thousands of Central Americans have left their countries in recent years due to gang violence and poverty.

Asylum in the United States may be granted to foreign nationals based on persecution or fear of persecution back in their home countries or last country of residence on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

To Sessions, the process in which asylum officers find individuals have a credible fear of persecution "has become an easy ticket to illegal entry into the United States."

Laws were "never intended to provide asylum to all those who fear generalized violence, crime, personal vendettas, or a lack of job prospects," Sessions said.

The Obama administration in 2009 announced policy changes to automatically consider for parole individuals who had a credible fear of persecution or torture. (Previously, parole had to be requested in writing) The change became effective in January 2010.

Harris said there’s been no evidence to suggest that the policy change influenced people to flee their homes and seek protection in the United States. The increase in people seeking asylum was "very much based on the humanitarian crisis in central America," she said.

Credible fear numbers
Federal data do show a significant spike in credible fear cases from 2009 to 2016. But it is not a simple comparison.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in fiscal year 2016 decided on nearly 93,000 credible fear cases, and fear was established in about 78 percent of the cases. The agency in fiscal year 2009 reviewed more than 5,000 cases, but that data does not specify in the number where fear was established.

This information, however, would not answer whether the findings of credible fear were genuinely deserving. That is difficult to quantify, experts said.

Sessions said that many individuals who are released after a credible fear determination never show up to their immigration hearings or even file an asylum application once they are in the United States — suggesting "they knew their asylum claims lacked merit and that their claim of fear was simply a ruse to enter the country illegally."

The assessment that not applying for asylum is an indication of fraud is "absolutely not true," said Harris, the University of the District of Columbia professor.

Asylum seekers are released with "very little orientation" of what’s expected next and many even think they have already applied by having articulated their case to asylum officers. Some even think they have already been granted asylum upon released, Harris added.

Additionally, Sessions noted that in 2016 there were "700 percent more removal orders issued in absentia for cases that began with a credible fear claim than in 2009."

But a failure to appear before a judge doesn’t necessarily mean the asylum claim was baseless, experts said.

In-absentia orders and individuals’ failure to go to court may also be attributed to other factors, such as errors in address reporting by the respondent, errors in addresses in the notices from the courts to the respondents in proceedings, lack of education and inability to receive mail, said Geoffrey A. Hoffman, director of the University of Houston Law Center Immigration Clinic and a clinical associate professor.

Individuals represented by counsel are also much more likely to attend court, Hoffman said.

"The issue of fraud in individual cases should not overshadow the reality which is that grants of asylum are extremely low, especially for applicants who are not represented by counsel," Hoffman added.

Federal agencies have limited capabilities to detect asylum fraud.

Applicants may have fled their countries without a passport or birth certificate, may have left countries where "documentary evidence was not available," or may have fled using fraudulent documents in order to hide their identity and escape persecution, said a December 2015 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

"As such, asylum officers and immigration judges must make decisions, at times, with little or no documentation to support or refute an applicant’s claim," said the GAO report.

"Like any administrative system, there has long been fraud in the asylum process. I don’t think anyone knows how widespread it is, but the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at USCIS has been in place since 2004 and has been successful in weeding out at least some of the fraud," said Jaya Ramji-Nogales, an immigration law expert and professor at Temple University.

Our ruling
Sessions said, "Claims of fear to return have skyrocketed, and the percentage of claims that are genuinely meritorious are down."

The number of claims by immigrants citing credible fear to return to their home countries has significantly increased from 2009 to 2016. While there has been fraud in the asylum system, it’s uncertain and difficult to determine whether the percentage of "genuinely meritorious" credible fear claims is down, experts said.

Sessions’ statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.

Notice the Green Part, which defines asylum. Sessions and Trump have willfully ignored the law by reinterpreting it to mean something else because they think, on a hunch apparently, that most of the people coming are flat out lying about their conditions back home. So they just arbitrarily decide who is lying and who isn't, based on no credible evidence whatsoever. The law says they have to explain why their filing for asylum, not that they have to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that they're telling the truth. Because we all know Trumpers will never believe them anyway. SO they get rejected, and then Sessions uses that rejection ratio as evidence they're lying. It is a circular argument really.

Oh, and Trump's claim that Mexico's immigration laws are the "strongest in the world" flies in the face of the fact that tens of thousands of immigrants travel through Mexico with relative ease, coming from other countries before arriving at our borders. This notion that immigrants should be educated, well planned and organized enough to know they need to go directly to a "port of entry" ignores the fact that most of these people are poor and leaving harsh conditions. They're not middle-class Americans traveling on their solar powered hover-boards and using GPS.

[_Res Ipsa]

Refugees are people that have fled their country of origin for one of a number of enumerated reasons. A refugee can seek admission to the US by one of two methods: (1) apply for admission as a refugee, which can be done at an embassy, or through the UNHCR or an NGO; (2) Enter the US anywhere (not just at a port of entry) and file an application for asylum within one year of entry.

[_Hawkeye]

Refugees are people that have fled their country of origin for one of a number of enumerated reasons. A refugee can seek admission to the US by one of two methods: (1) apply for admission as a refugee, which can be done at an embassy, or through the UNHCR or an NGO; (2) Enter the US anywhere (not just at a port of entry) and file an application for asylum within one year of entry.

Yeah, well, asylum seekers aren't exactly synonymous with refugees. And applying for refugee status at consulates isn't a viable option for tens of thousands of asylum seekers because it only pertains to a certain kind of refugees who are in "imminent danger." From the link I provided above, it explains how you can apply for refugee status at a consulate and who qualifies:

Temporary refuge is a form of short-term protection from physical danger when the danger is both immediate (for example, a person is being pursued by a mob) and exceptionally grave (most often when there is a risk of possible death or serious bodily injury). It is also available to people who are in immediate danger of persecution based on the traditional grounds for asylum (described above).

In practice, this option tends to apply to high-profile figures, but it may be open to a few others as well. It provides temporary shelter by allowing people who need protection to enter and stay in the embassy or consulate after closing hours, at least until the danger ceases or the person chooses to leave. This option does not involve getting any help leaving the host country.

If you believe you might need temporary refuge, keep in mind that (depending on your home country’s relations with the United States) staying at a U.S. embassy or consulate could actually attract very negative attention to both you and embassy personnel, and put you at greater risk in the near future.

[Guest]

Return of the Blood Libel

The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages.

What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here (and, in his mind, refugees in Germany), are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.

And you know what this reminds me of? The history of anti-Semitism, a tale of prejudice fueled by myths and hoaxes that ended in genocide.

First, let’s talk about modern U.S. immigration and how it compares to those sick fantasies.

There is a highly technical debate among economists about whether low-education immigrants exert a depressing effect on the wages of low-education native-born workers (most researchers find that they don’t, but there is some disagreement). This debate, however, is playing no role in Trump policies.

What these policies reflect, instead, is a vision of “American carnage,” of big cities overrun by violent immigrants. And this vision bears no relationship to reality.

For one thing, despite a small uptick since 2014, violent crime in America is actually at historical lows, with the homicide rate back to where it was in the early 1960s. (German crime is also at a historical low, by the way.) Trump’s carnage is a figment of his imagination.

True, if we look across America there is a correlation between violent crime and the prevalence of undocumented immigrants — a negative correlation. That is, places with a lot of immigrants, legal and undocumented, tend to have exceptionally low crime rates. The poster child for this tale of un-carnage is the biggest city of them all: New York, where more than a third of the population is foreign-born, probably including around half a million undocumented immigrants — and crime has fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s.

And this really shouldn’t be surprising, because criminal conviction data show that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.

So the Trump administration has been terrorizing families and children, abandoning all norms of human decency, in response to a crisis that doesn’t even exist.

Where does this fear and hatred of immigrants come from? A lot of it seems to be fear of the unknown: The most anti-immigrant states seem to be places, like West Virginia, where hardly any immigrants live.

But virulent hatred for immigrants isn’t just a matter of rural rubes. Trump himself is, of course, a wealthy New Yorker, and a lot of the funding for anti-immigrant groups comes from foundations controlled by right-wing billionaires. Why do wealthy, successful people end up hating immigrants? I sometimes find myself thinking about the TV commentator Lou Dobbs, whom I used to know and like in the early 2000s, but who has become a rabid anti-immigrationist (and Trump confidant), and who is currently warning against a pro-immigrant plot by “the Illuminati of K Street.”

I don’t know what drives such people — but we’ve seen this movie before, in the history of anti-Semitism.

The thing about anti-Semitism is that it was never about anything Jews actually did. It was always about lurid myths, often based on deliberate fabrications, that were systematically spread to engender hatred.

For example, for centuries people repeated the “blood libel” — the claim that Jews sacrificed Christian babies as part of the Passover ritual.

In the early part of the 20th century there was wide dissemination of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a supposed plan for Jewish world domination that was probably forged by the Russian secret police. (History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as more tragedy.)

The fake document received wide dissemination in the United States thanks to none other than Henry Ford, a virulent anti-Semite who oversaw the publication and distribution of a half-million copies of an English translation, “The International Jew.” Ford later apologized for publishing a forgery, but the damage was done.

Again, why would someone like Ford — not only wealthy, but also one of the most admired men of his time — have gone down this path? I don’t know, but clearly such things happen.

In any case, the important thing to understand is that the atrocities our nation is now committing at the border don’t represent an overreaction or poorly implemented response to some actual problem that needs solving. There is no immigration crisis; there is no crisis of immigrant crime.

No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred — unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done. And anyone making excuses for that hatred — who tries, for example, to turn it into a “both sides” story — is, in effect, an apologist for crimes against humanity.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Why not just go to a US embassy in Mexico if, say, you're from a neighboring country and apply for refugee status? Or crap, just “F” ing cross the border illegally and apply within the year?

https://cis.org/Report/Fraud-Credible-Fear-Process

Unlike refugees, who are screened before coming to the United States and can be denied refugee status before they enter this country, aliens who enter illegally and claim a "credible fear" of persecution have not been screened before physically entering the United States; as explained below, the process for screening those individuals after they enter the United States is vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

This report examines the incidence of fraud in the asylum application process generally, and the credible fear process specifically, and identifies some of the factors that facilitate that fraud. Asylum is an immigration benefit that allows those who receive it to remain in the United States, work, receive public benefits, and become legal permanent residents and eventually citizens.

It's being abused and everyone knows it.

- Doc

[Guest]

Why not just go to a US embassy in Mexico if, say, you're from a neighboring country and apply for refugee status? Or ____, just ____ ing cross the border illegally and apply within the year?

Well I already explained this once. Refugee status from a consulate is typically reserved for high profile individuals who are under imminent danger, such as being an assassin's target of the Cartel, etc.

It's being abused and everyone knows it.
- Doc

Based on no evidence presented in this thread.

An unsupported assertion from an anti-immigrant organization that was started by a white supremacist is hardly encouraging.

I mean, Jesus H. Christ, you know the outfit is bad when Heritage and Cato dismiss them as too extreme, racist and biased.

[_Jersey Girl]

"Republicans should stop wasting their time on Immigration until after we elect more Senators and Congressmen/women in November," he tweeted. "Democrats are just playing games, have no intention of doing anything to solve this decades old problem. We can pass great legislation after the Red Wave!"

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/Tr ... 73761.html

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

When everybody is racist, no one is.

Who We Are

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization. Since our founding in 1985, we have pursued a single mission – providing immigration policymakers, the academic community, news media, and concerned citizens with reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States.

The Center is governed by a diverse board of directors that has included active and retired university professors, civil rights leaders, and former government officials. Our research and analysis has been funded by contributions and grants from dozens of private foundations, from the U.S. Census Bureau and Justice Department, and from hundreds of generous individual donors.

Our board, our staff, our researchers, and our contributor base are not predominantly "liberal" or predominantly "conservative." Instead, we believe in common that debates about immigration policy that are well-informed and grounded in objective data will lead to better immigration policies.

The data collected by the Center during the past quarter-century has led many of our researchers to conclude that current, high levels of immigration are making it harder to achieve such important national objectives as better public schools, a cleaner environment, homeland security, and a living wage for every native-born and immigrant worker. These data may support criticism of US immigration policies, but they do not justify ill feelings toward our immigrant community. In fact, many of us at the Center are animated by a "low-immigration, pro-immigrant" vision of an America that admits fewer immigrants but affords a warmer welcome for those who are admitted.

- Doc

[_Hawkeye]

Ah, so you're going to go with the ole "All sources on the internet are equal" thing? And places are credible so long as they claim to be?

The fact that the only source you can provide to agree with you is one that has been roundly debunked by those on the Left and Right, pretty much reinforces my previous point about outliers. Except I wouldn't even call this an outlier. We're basically talking about the National Enquirer of Immigration studies. And it is interesting you have no problem with the fact that it was started by a man whose sole purpose was to produce literature that supported his racist views.