If someone earning $100k a year tries to apply for welfare and is rejected, that’s not the same as someone who applies for welfare for legit cause and gets turned down. The former is trying to game the system and the latter is not.
Not that I am saying that these Central American migrants are $100k earners but you get my point.
I know what the phrase means. And I see how magellan01 tries to wield it like a club, too.
Since the phrase does not likely apply to the overwhelming majority of people making a 1500 mile trek on foot that has no guarantee of a happy ending this is an assertion that I could not let go unchallenged: it’s idiotic. It’s idiotic to think that everyone who applies for asylum in the US who does not receive it was lying and scheming.
It’s so far detached from even possible reality, that it deserved note and scorn, IMO.
More isn’t always better. In some cases, it can even worsen problems if it’s going into a program that is poorly crafted. Just looking at the number going up or down isn’t all that useful IMO.
USAID’s Country Development Cooperation Strategy for Honduras, on the other hand, breaks out the lines of effort for assistance. (That’s the CDCS itself in pdf format and the page it’s linked from is here.) This plan was developed in conjunction with the Government of Honduras (GOH) based on their request for assistance. The execution of the plan is in conjunction with both GOH and NGOs. It also parallels a regional agreement between the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador and Guatemala, and Honduras), the Alliance for Prosperity. Those countries have committed 5.4 Billion USD to working towards those complementary objectives. The US committed less than a third of the funds to efforts in those three countries; we bring the benefit of long service government officials expertise that’s hard to account for.
Briefly, the three development objectives support security, prosperity, governance. There’s supporting intermediate results for the development onjectives(DOs) to be pursued in the CDCS if you want to dig in but the three DOs in the CDCS for Honduras are:
We’re not simply giving money to the Northern Triangle countries. We’re spending money and providing assistance to specific programs tied to specific changes we, and they, agree will help their domestic instability. They are paying the bulk of the funding needed and we’re helping. Assessing the effectiveness of specific programs is hard. Determining adequate funding to do a good cost-benefit analysis is hard. Most of us are too profoundly ignorant of the subject to have anything resembling an informed opinion about specific levels of funding.
No. As Velocity pointed out, you do not understand the point. A closer example would be if someone who is not really a minority, checks a box on a college application as a minority, say Native American, at an elite university. It may work, it won’t hurt, so, hey, why not? Does that help you understand “gaming the system” better?
Your posts indicate otherwise.
Good thing no one made that claim then. Whew.
I do not know about the validity of any individual, but given some of the interviews I’ve seen of the people and the history of previous groups, it’s safe to say that there are:
Do you disagree?
Let’s break down that claim, shall we?
Additional reasons not mentioned in the linked article why an asylum applicant might not be granted asylum might be:
a) the applicant was granted another, more straightforward form of relief from deportation, so the asylum case never needed to be decided on its merits (such as a marriage-based green card application);
b) the applicant had a well-founded fear of persecution based on one of the protected grounds, but was disqualified from asylum eligibility for an unrelated reason (missing the one-year deadline, having a disqualifying criminal conviction - and you might be surprised how minor a conviction can be that disqualifies someone from asylum eligibility);
c) the applicant might have a well-founded fear of persecution, but was unable to convince the judge of that for reasons such as PTSD, mental illness, lack of education/sophistication, illiteracy, detention hundreds of miles away from legal assistance with no access to a phone or research materials, lack of access to information and documentation corroborating his/her claim, or, you know, being a traumatized, non-English-speaking toddler separated from all family members;
d) Almost forgot this one! The applicant may have gotten shitty legal advice from previous counsel. In fact, I’m working on a case right now for a married couple who got incorrect legal advice from not one, but two previous lawyers about their eligibility for asylum and/or withholding of removal as each other’s dependents (they each have independent claims). And these are literate, college-educated people, not illiterate Central American farmers.
I’m sure there are other reasons I’m not thinking of.
And a chunk of the cases mentioned in the linked that are administratively closed may be in that status because, say, the immigration judge used some of the last remaining shreds of judicial discretion that immigration judges have left to, for example, administratively close the case because the asylum applicant is married to a U.S. citizen, and requested time for the marriage petition to be decided on its merits by USCIS so the entire system, which is beyond overloaded, didn’t have to waste resources adjudicating an asylum case when the applicant might have a much more straightforward route to permanent residence.
Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal
Former court interpreter, Executive Office for Immigration Review, Office of the Immigration Judge
Saying you didn’t make the point you did make and then making the same point again isn’t helping your case.
No, not everyone who isn’t granted asylum is “gaming the system”. That’s idiotic.
Prove it to me. Show me that the other 80% of asylum applicants were somehow attempting to fraudulently gain a grant of asylum. Show me that none of the rejected applications simply didn’t meet the criteria for asylum and that all of them were frauds.
You made the claim; now back it up. Cite?
I love this board.
The caravans are blow-back from 2009 when the US attempted to legitimize the Honduran coup. This specific caravan came from San Pedro Sula, which has a murder rate of 159 per 100,000. To put that into comparison for you, Chicago’s murder rate fluctuates between 15-20 per 100,000.
The office of refugee resettlement will be the ones to support them once. They spends about 500mil each year (not their entire budget), they help stabilize the refugees in numerous ways. For comparison, in the short period of time Trump had his family detention going on down by the border that costed about 2 billion dollars. It’s cheaper to help these people relocate and get back on their feet.
Also, for a person to claim asylum they must be at a designated port of entry (the southern border), you cannot claim asylum at an embassy. That’s how the law works. The whole caravan situation with people grouping together like a “mob” is because there is safety in numbers. They are traveling far, and it’s dangerous so people from many different countries stick together to make this trip.
I also just watched Beau’s video!
Well, according to my understanding, people have up to 1 year after being in the US to claim asylum unless they have extraordinary circumstances.
So, ‘no’ to your question.
No I don’t disagree. But so what?
However after the 1-year deadline they can still apply for relief from removal called “withholding of removal” or under the Convention Against Torture. Those forms of relief have somewhat different burdens of proof, and don’t include dependents unless the dependents have (and win) independent claims.
Well I DID say “unless they have extraordinary circumstances”
but seriously, thanks for the extra info!
These people are indeed poor-mostly without many resources. They do not seem like a worthwhile target of gangs.
As pointed out above, these people are likely travelling with all their worldly possessions, and even without “stuff” there is money to be made in people trafficking so girls and women are particularly vulnerable. They’re low-value targets but they’re also easy ones.
Gangs aren’t necessarily only interested in immediate money, they also often want things like labour, disposable new members (especially teens) and of course ‘fun’ (including rape targets). To the sufficiently unscrupulous, the poor are a resource.
Plus poor doesn’t mean they have nothing at all and it’s a lot easier to get the little a poor person owns off them than it is to get the lot a rich person owns. Poor people can’t afford to defend themselves so well.
Anytime! And bonus, because there are so many misconceptions flying around, here’s a basic primer on how the asylum and refugee processes work.
The Crusades. Yeah, those Crusades. A small group sets out and talks up their quest at every inn on the route…