Separation Anxiety

Here is my advice on “full court press” stories from the media.  Do a little research before forming an opinion. By “full court” I mean, all out emotional hand wringing and calls for immediate responses from government. The sensational stuff is frequently wrong or skewed to elicit emotion instead of information.

   

Case in point is this latest immigration dust up over kids being separated from families. My internal radar started going off as soon I saw heard of crying kids and ‘mean-spirited’ border policies. We all know Trump is a hawk on border security so making the case that he gleefully detains kids is an easy one to make. But my instinct told me there was more to this story than brutal crack downs and forced separations, because isn’t there always more to the story?

 The best thing I read was Rich Lowry’s article on the situation at the border. I’ll retell as much of it here as I can but the best thing to do is read it. For starters most immigration at the southern border has been from Mexican men up until about 10 years ago. That’s important because a lot of the men arrested were alone, and got sent back to Mexico after being scooped up at the border. It doesn’t account for all the cases but does explain the majority of arrests and detentions. Many were caught and released into the US.  Unaccompanied minors would often get picked up as well. But holding kids in detention was bad policy so the court put restrictions in place.

The Flores Consent Decree (the current law governing hold times) puts limits on how long the government can hold onto unaccompanied minors, set at 20 days. This includes those traveling with families. The last 10 years saw an increase in families coming together. The problem is they don’t have the space to accommodate all family units that arrive together. ICE also needs to check the validity of the claims that the kids are actually traveling with parents and not random guys using them to get in. If the families picked up together want to go home, they are released together fairly quickly. If they don't want to go home, they can apply for asylum. Asylum applications gum up the works and delay the status of migrants. This is where most of the separation happens.

Families get ‘separated’ when adults apply for asylum after being arrested in border sweeps. Anyone arrested can apply and they have 10 days to get an attorney and plead their case. It isn’t easy to get though. The standards for political asylum fall along pretty neat lines. Either the state (of the migrant’s home country) has oppressed their religion or they face a genuine threat of death upon arriving back home. Think of dissidents, activists and Christians who’ve been beaten, impression and tortured. That could apply to some people in Central America crossing the border, but probably not thousands.

While awaiting asylum the adults (kids don’t get asylum) are separated from children because otherwise the government would have to hold them until the legal process completed. The government isn’t about to hold onto to kids for a legal process that may take over a year. So they either release the kids into the United States to stay with relatives or ‘responsible’ parties while the case for their parent is pending. The only other option is releasing both parents and children together into the United States and hoping they show up for the asylum trial. The problem is they aren’t likely to show up. Also, this is a big country with a lot of places to hide.

Ideally we would have enough space to accommodate whole families at the border while their application filters its way through the courts. But if it takes a year to process that means the family is essentially behind bars (even in good conditions) the entire time. Imagine how much worse this could be? Tens of thousands of families waiting in camps for long stretches over an unlikely outcome. If Congress dumped the Flores Consent Decree and allowed children to stay with their parents, we would expect to see it. As of right now, ICE only has room for a handful of families they can accommodate. 

Building Thousands of camps will play very badly with the American public.

 That’s exactly what’s going to happen though. President Trump signed an executive order the other day to do just that. If the public doesn’t like the sight of children being removed from their parents they will really hate the next phase. But without a new law from Congress, it's the only option. 

Congress is responsible to come up with a solution not the president. The executive branch enforces the law and the legislative branch (Congress) writes new ones. Ted Cruz proposed doubling the number of judges reviewing asylum cases as well as building additional facilities to house families. All with the exception that they weren’t already wanted in their home countries for crimes. It’s clear to me the only solution the Democrats want is to release the migrants into the country or turn asylum cases into a rubber stamp approval process. In other words, Amnesty. 

 Most people agree that keeping children and parents together is best, but the solution so far is large tent communities. If the asylum process becomes a quick backdoor for admittance into the country than a border wall would be pointless. Why build a massive wall when showing up a point of entry and demanding asylum practically guarantees a free pass? This is a tough problem to solve because we live in a prosperous country where others want to emigrate. It’s difficult to maintain borders when so many want in.

Putting pressure on Mexico to tighten their own borders could do some good. Mexico has no incentive to stop their own population from leaving. Remittances from the US to our Southern neighbor topped 24 billion dollars last year. That’s money send home from migrant workers in the US. It’s a major source of revenue for a country without a lot of investment. Either by heavily taxing the remittances (never popular) or finding some type of direct investment to offset the transfers, it must be in their interest. It wouldn’t stop the migration altogether but it could certainly stem the tide.

I don’t know the exact breakdown of people coming into the country from the Southern border, their nationalities, their ages, how many are escaping poverty, or how many are gang members selling drugs. A lot are probably interested in giving their children a better future than what they can expect at home. But without a rigid process for enforcement, this problem only gets worse.