Boehner's Border Bill, Ctd
By Andrew Sullivan
Jonathan Cohn dismisses the House bill as a “sideshow” in the border crisis:
The real story here is just how lousy the House border bill is. It focuses heavily on border security, even though, as my colleague Danny Vinik and many others have noted, the current crisis has nothing to do with security. Kids are showing up and seeking out agents, so that they can turn themselves in. The House bill also would change a 2008 law under which unaccompanied minors from Central America receive different treatment than those from Mexico. That's a more defensible and serious step, although it also has a serious problem its sponsors don't address. Many of the children have plausible claims for asylum or special juvenile status. Returning them more quickly means they won't get a chance to make their cases.
Really, though, the most striking problem with the House bill is how little money it allocates to what is a very big problem. Much of the reporting on the House bill I've seen mentions that it includes funding for agencies that house new arrivals and process their immigration claims. But, as David Rogers noted in Politico this week, the funding discrepancy with both the Senate version is "stark"—just $22 million for the Justice Department, compared to the $123 million in the Senate's bill. One reason for the discrepancy is that the Senate bill wouldn't just pay for more judges to hear immigration cases. It would also help pay for lawyers, so that children had the benefit of legal counsel, something they desperately need when pleading their cases in a strange country an in a strange language. The House bill doesn't.
Allahpundit disapproves of the bill for a completely different reason:
Under the House's scheme, illegal immigrant children would get no fewer than five chances at various points, starting with apprehension by the Border Patrol, to convince authorities that they have a credible fear of being returned home and therefore qualify as refugees.
The current scheme for returning kids from neighboring countries, i.e. Mexico, allows the feds to send them home expeditiously if they agree to be deported. Immigration advocates hate that, partly because they fear that the agreement is being coerced and partly because they know that the more convoluted the legal process is, the more illegals will be able to elude it once they're here. They loathe voluntary deportations. And apparently, so does the House bill. Go figure.
With so much of the debate hinging on whether the migrant children qualify for refugee status, asylum, or neither, Dara Lind unpacks the standards by which those decisions are made:
[E]ven though being threatened by a gang doesn't qualify someone for asylum on its own, a child can still qualify for asylum if he or she proves that the gang was targeting him or her based on one of the five categories above: race, religion, political beliefs, nationality, or membership in a particular social group. The "social group" standard is the most flexible — and some judges will grant it to children if the gang has targeted their relatives, as well. Asylum lawyer [Jason] Dzubow says, "If the gang wants to kill everyone in my family, including me, family is a 'particular social group'" — one of the five categories of persecution that are protected in asylum law. "And so I might get asylum for that reason." It's also possible for a child to argue that he was targeted by the gang because of his religious beliefs, or couldn't join the gang — and therefore risked death — due to religion.
July 31, 2014 at 6:47PM
via The Dish http://ift.tt/1nXGwKz