6/11/20

By Josh Rubin

Good lawyers, lawyers who are good people, fight the battle on the ground for more just treatment of supplicants who come to our borders and line up on the bridges over the rivers polluted with the bodies of the defeated. And there is special language that goes with the job, and that language forgivably hardens into the structure of the battle lines.

An immigrant is someone, someone with less than full legal status, who wants to get in. What stops that person are the rules, sometimes laws, enforced against them by people deputized to act in the interest of those with full legal status. At the border, reinforced by guns and armor, we play a game of 20 questions that in more normal times may result in the immigrant being granted permission to perform the act of immigration.

Good lawyers, good people, learn the questions, and work very hard to figure out the answers that might work. They learn as best they can to speak the language that will unlock the gates for their clients.

So we have terms like asylum, credible fear, non-refoulement. And every so often those terms uttered in the right order, into the right ear, make it happen. But I want to clear something up. The necessity for these incantations does not mean that our understanding of border issues ought be constrained by the terminology.

A case in point: Asylum, a much manipulated concept whose first principal is that the supplicant must face horrendous danger in the place left behind. On those legal skirmish lines, good lawyers try to demonstrate just how dire it is back home for the asylum-seeker. While the authorities cynically move the bar. Not only does it have to be bad, they say, but it has to be inflicted by a certain kind of people, for a certain kind of reason. And they have to ask someone else first. And, by the way, they are doing it again, changing those rules again right now. And, also by the way, if there’s a pandemic, all those rules get suspended anyway.

So, what I want to do is make sure we remember that the rules of the game are made by people who are not good people. That they are cynically constructed, and not at all built from laws that arise from our most human, our good, impulses. That they are a pretense.

Here are the rules I propose. The right of people to pursue decent lives for themselves and their families cannot be restricted by someone’s determination that they don’t have it bad enough. Because that is what asylum code addresses, and I say we do not have the right to judge how another suffers. Or by whose hand. We, good people, should not be allowed to draw lines like that.