6/16/20

By Josh Rubin

On the subject of the comments period open for response to newly proposed asylum rules...

The Trump administration has taken steps that have choked the natural flow of migration at the southern border. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the mechanism they chose was the distortion of a concept known as asylum, which set rules by which a person is judged eligible for entry by demonstrating that their reasons for leaving their homes were dire. That they suffered.

Asylum is a policy, a principle in international law that arose from the shame felt when people fleeing Nazi persecution were turned away by other countries. So rules were set up to evaluate persecution. Even this feint at good intentions has since been perverted by the xenophobic impulses of our and other countries. These contortions have created painful and cruel displacement of people seeking refuge, and impoverished encampments like the ones with which we are familiar in Matamoros, Mexico, and other places.

The rules of asylum, based on measurements of suffering, when stated plainly, would sound absurd, were they not the enactment of crimes against humanity. They already virtually choke off entry for those coming by land, that is, the poor. Currently, blaming the pandemic whose fever burns hottest in our own country, the new border rules have suspended the dog-and-pony show of immigration courts, and are turning back refugees without even sham consideration.

And now, new rules are proposed that make the implausible, the granting of mercy, impossible. And we are asked for comment on the proposed rules, another sham process in the bureaucratic miasma. What are we to do?

Here is my comment. It starts further back, it steps us away from the framework we are being asked to work with. My comment asks: by what right do we tell people that the river makes a line that they cannot cross on their journey to a better life. By what just principle do we defend this line with massive military might?

We are told that strong borders are important, even by liberal voices that timidly call for more sympathetic treatment of the tired and poor. But on what basis do we need that strength? With open eyes it is not so hard to see that there are malevolent forces in the world. But with the same open eyes we can see that those forces are not breaching our borders, but are already here, hoarding wealth, and drawing awful lines everywhere they go, and defending them with guns.

So, we need safety from those forces, and the way to get it is to do work that tears down privilege, national, racial, class. The new rules proposed for asylum, worse than the old, belong to a worldview built on the defense of privilege, one that needs to protect its turf by drawing lines and spilling blood.

To hell with those rules. That is my comment.

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