Let me reverse my stubbornness here for a moment and explain a bit, even though there seems to be little interest as to why “refugee” is important.
Both refugees and asylees are people who are fleeing violence or war in their home country. The home country’s government can’t or won’t protect them, so they have to leave for their own safety. The difference is that you apply for refugee status in your home country, and you apply for asylee status once you’ve fled to the destination country.
If you’re granted refugee status in the US, then you can come to the US and get a work permit and qualify for all sorts of federal aid programs. If you successfully get asylum status, then some but not all of those problems are available to you. And to be clear, many of these people legitimately are fleeing war and violence and should be legitimate candidates for refuge and/or asylum.
Ironically enough, if these people were refugees then that would solve many of these problems. They would apply and get approved in their home countries, not at the US border. They would arrive at the various resettlement hubs distributed across the US. They would qualify for significant federal aid (not lavish, but adequate to start a new life). If they were actually refugees, there would be no border crisis at all!
The fact that they can’t get refugee status is because the refugee ceilings are too low. They were decreasing for decades, then Trump gutted them, now Biden has partially restored them. In fact Biden has done great here, he’s increased the ceiling to the highest in 30 years. Could he do more? Technically he can act without congressional approval, but he can’t make Congress approve the aid, and he can’t make nonprofits come up with the donations needed to help to absorb them.
But all of this is beside the point. Granting refugee status and funding would solve this problem, but given that we have people in this thread screaming about “the refugee” problem, and proclaiming that they don’t really care if these people are refugees, asylees, or migrants… are these people interested in raising the refugee ceiling and passing the accompanying aid? No, of course they’re not going to vote for more refugee status, and they’ll punish any politician who supports this. They want fewer refugees, not more, for reasons that have nothing to do with funding or legal status.