A caravan of 7,000 Hondurans (“The Committee to Re-elect the President”?) are making their way through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S. The good news is that they are entitled to free housing, free food, free health care, and a free smartphone as soon as they arrive (“The Contracting States shall accord to refugees lawfully staying in their territory the same treatment with respect to public relief and assistance as is accorded to their nationals” — Article 23 of the UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees).
However, there seems to be a dispute about whether these 7,000 folks are restricted in terms of where they can apply for asylum. From “President Trump Threatened to Turn Back Caravan Migrants If They Don’t Claim Asylum in Mexico. That’s Not Legal” (TIME):
President Donald Trump has said the Central American migrants traveling via caravan should seek asylum in Mexico – and threatened that they will be turned away if they reach the U.S. border.
“People have to apply for asylum in Mexico first, and if they fail to do that, the U.S. will turn them away. The courts are asking the U.S. to do things that are not doable!” he tweeted Sunday.
But following through on that threat could violate international law, experts say.
As a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, Mexico is obligated to protect people who are outside of their country and afraid to return due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on religion, race, nationality or membership to a particular social or political group.
The United States is also a signatory. And while Mexico is required to offer protection for refugees under international law, migrants have no obligation to request it there.
Under U.S. immigration law, the the United States can deny asylum if a person can be returned to a country where their life or freedom is not in danger, but only if the U.S. has entered into a bilateral or multilateral agreement that codifies the arrangement.
The U.S. and Canada have such an agreement. It says that people must seek refugee status in the first country they arrive in—either the U.S. or Canada—but there are some exceptions for cases of family reunification.
No such agreement exists with Mexico.
Additionally, some argue that Mexico would not meet the standards for such a designation. For one, given high rates of crime, there are credible safety concerns.
(In other words, the country in which Americans are willing to pay $1,000 per day to vacation is intolerably dangerous for a Honduran native speaker of Spanish.)
In Europe, it seems that “the country where an asylum seeker first enters the union is responsible for registering the asylum application and taking fingerprints.” (see “Explaining the Rules for Migrants: Borders and Asylum,” nytimes, 9/16/2015) But the U.S. is not part of this “Dublin Regulation,” so perhaps the last paragraph of the TIME article is definitive:
“If people who are fleeing persecution and violence enter Mexico they need to be provided access to the Mexican asylum system, and those entering the United States need to be provided access to the American asylum system,” says Chris McGrath, a UNHCR spokesperson.
Suppose that the TIME article and the UN bureaucrats are right and a caravan of 7,000 Hondurans can transition through Mexcio to California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, wouldn’t it work equally well for all of the migrants currently in the EU? There are millions of refugees in Germany. They are the majority of the welfare recipients in Germany (Wikipedia: “In April 2018 more than half, at 55%, of the recipients had a migration background. According to the Federal Employment Agency this was due to the migrants lacking either employable skills or knowledge of the language”). Instead of paying out Hartz IV benefits every month to a refugee, why not offer him or her a one-way plane ticket to a Mexico border town? Maybe the U.S. will deny the refugee’s application for asylum after 2 or 3 years, but during all of that time, the German taxpayer is relieved of the responsibility for paying Hartz IV. The refugee will be way better off as well because (a) no need to learn German, and (b) the American welfare system provides for a much higher standard of living than the German Hartz IV welfare system.
We’re told that the Europeans don’t love us anymore because Trump. What is stopping them from wishing bon voyage to Airbus A380s full of welfare-collecting refugees enthusiastic about living the American Dream in California or Texas via Mexico?
Alternatively, is it possible that Trump is right? Is there a rule that prevents a refugee from traveling to a lot of intermediate countries before settling down in the place that offers the most generous “public relief and assistance as is accorded to their nationals”?
Related:
PhilG: If Honduran migrants can’t be forced to stay in Mexico because of “high crime rates,” does that mean we have to let in all 130 million Mexicans?
Tony: For their own sake, let’s hope those Mexican refugees can make it all the way through to Canada. http://howsafeismexico.com/compare_mexico_us_cities.html says Boston has a higher murder rate than Mexico City. I’m not sure that I believe those numbers. The Canadians themselves say that Mexico has a lower murder rate than some U.S. cities, but a higher murder rate overall (still lower than Brazil’s, for example). See https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/mexico-record-homicide-rate-1.4497466 for how Mexicans who value safety need to get to Canada, whose murder rate is only 1/4 that of the U.S.
The Canadian article explains that St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans and Detroit have higher murder rates than Mexico. Under International Law, must the Canadians then welcome American residents of those cities as refugees in Vancouver?
If countries are required to follow the UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees then what’s stopping any country’s government from asking its citizens “if you do not feel safe, which country do you want to migrate to as refugees?” and then shipping those citizens to the destination country on the grounds that they are not safe in their native country?
Bottom line, we have outdated laws that require desperate reform.
There are millions of refugees in Germany. They are the majority of the welfare recipients in Germany (Wikipedia: “In April 2018 more than half, at 55%, of the recipients had a migration background. According to the Federal Employment Agency this was due to the migrants lacking either employable skills or knowledge of the language”).
This assertion about refugees doesn’t necessarily follow from the statistic. Not all migrants in Germany are refugees.
Alternatively, is it possible that Trump is right? Is there a rule that prevents a refugee from traveling to a lot of intermediate countries before settling down in the place that offers the most generous “public relief and assistance as is accorded to their nationals”?
This is an interesting question. Has Trump cited a provision of the 1951 refuge convention or some subsequent treaty? If not, it’s reasonable to assume that he’s just lying, given his track record.
The other very real option, of course, is to withdraw from the UN convention.
If it doesn’t serve American interests — and providing an open door against which any migrant can push manifestly does not serve American interests — then why stay in?
Particularly if we’re required to provide the full firehose of the American welfare system.
I feel badly for these people, and there’s little doubt that the situation must be pretty bad to warrant such a long and arduous journey. But welcoming everyone willing to undertake it, and providing a full welfare state when they arrive, will only create a whole fresh class systemic problems (beginning with the acceleration of American insolvency).
“A caravan of 7,000 Hondurans (“The Committee to Re-elect the President”?)”
Best joke about this I’ve seen. I emailed a friend saying I wondered if the RNC had someone selling arms in the Middle East to fund their journey northwards.
“providing an open door against which any migrant can push manifestly does not serve American interests” – Why not? America was built by migrants.
Baz: You’re the perfect candidate for my proposal to allow unlimited immigration to any state or city that wants to pay the costs of providing housing, health care, and food to those immigrants and their descendants. See
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/01/28/compromise-unlimited-haitians-for-communities-that-prepare-to-welcome-them/
There need not be a national policy on this.
> Why not? America was built by migrants.
It certainly was — before there was a vast welfare state.
Making the comparison between today’s welfare state and the immigration experience of the early United States is ludicrous, and I think you know that. But it’s very hard to discern sarcasm online, so just in case you’re serious:
My ancestors came to the United States, found jobs (and later, started businesses), learned English, and assimilated into (and thereby, helped evolve) US culture. I’m sure that they had assistance from their immigrant community, and in turn helped others who came later. I don’t think there’s any serious argument that this was an uncommon immigrant experience for the time.
It was also a different regulatory culture. Starting a business wasn’t nearly the ordeal that it is today. If you wanted to cut hair, you rented an office and you cut hair — you didn’t need permission from the Licence Raj to wield scissors. But today, in some states more than 50% (!!!) of low-income occupations require a licence!
There was no minimum wage, so there were more opportunities for people at the very bottom rung (which, let’s face it, is where uneducated migrants who don’t speak English are). If you wanted to work for 10 cents a day and live in a ghetto, that sucked, but it’s better than starving — and it was your choice. And it’s the first step of learning a trade, and learning the language, and assimilating into the community. People don’t have that choice today.
If we were talking about welcoming migrants with no recourse to public funds, that’s an entirely different argument. But that’s not the debate that anyone is having.
Moreover, there are more than 6 times as many people in the US today vs. when the Statue of Liberty was erected. At what point does it become reasonable to say maybe we don’t need to welcome absolutely every person who wants to come? (I think there are far too many people in the world in general, but good luck having that conversation.)
phik: I don’t think there is any way to convince true believers that today’s immigrants, on average, won’t be huge contributors to the U.S. economy. It does not help to point out that nobody in the U.S. has to work or that the early immigrants were successful mostly because the marginal product of labor is much higher for the first workers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_product_of_labor ) and we’ve now fully exploited most of our natural resources.
If, on the other hand, we have a mechanism by which communities that sincerely believe in migrants can take on all of the financial costs and risks, I think we would end up with a happy balance. The communities that actually do want immigrants would be willing to pay for them (100+ years of housing, health care, and food if that is what the immigrants and their descendants end up consuming). We wouldn’t have situations like now where someone in Boston can virtuously vote for more migration knowing that the migrants are very unlikely to settle in Massachusetts (we do have comfortable welfare benefits, but the best free houses are reserved for incumbents; a migrant may not want to wait 5 years in the cold until a free apartment becomes available).
[see https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_work_versus_welfare_trade-off_2013_wp.pdf for how welfare in Massachusetts pays roughly 118 percent of the median salary, but again, that’s for people who’ve made it through the housing waiting list.]
The immigrants from the 1870-1925, like my own ancestors, only turned out not to be a problem because of relentless, forced assimilation during a 40 year period when immigrants were only allowed from English speaking countries. Take my fairly large ethnic group, Italians. To the extent they found jobs it was due to a demand for low skill labor that does not exist. To the extent they started businesses, it was to serve other Italians in their Italian speaking ethnic neighborhoods. Their children were forcibly assimilated via aggressive propaganda in public schools. Their gangs were smashed with harsh police tactics, including the use of torture. It wasn’t until a generation after World War II that we were fully assimilated.
When someone says “they said that about the Italians,” the answer is yes they did, and they were right, and they did something about it we are unwilling to do today. THAT is why the prior immigration wave was not a problem. What benefit did we bring? You can now get obese on pizza AND cheeseburgers! What a trade off.
Hard as it may be to admit, the positive things that come to mind when we talk about “America”: the Constitution, the Economy, our rise to a world power, even our ability to take immigrants, were all built primarily by WASPs.
Wouldn’t the Commies just gun down whoever tried to cross the border in either direction?
In the Soviet Russia, the border guards was a regular part of the military, equipped with machine guns and attack helicopters.
If you are not certain about their resolve, just check out the Berlin Wall crosses.