Subject: Re: Why the border bill will fail
Asylum seekers aren't illegal aliens. The U.S. is a signatory to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. People who are refugees - who meet the criteria under both the 1951 Convention and U.S. law - have a legal right to be free from being expelled or returned to their home countries. That obligation - and not the "safe third country" - is an obligation of the U.S. under international law. What we are allowed to do under international law is to provide a process for how we manage and assess the refugees we find within our borders. But we never will - and cannot and should not - ever get to the point where there are zero asylum-seekers in the U.S.

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Agree, zero for any length of time is not desirable. But as a sovereign country we should have that option, period. If we don't, then that 70 year old convention needs revisiting, but not really if we had some backbone. Here is the concluding statement on wiki about that 1951 straitjacket,

There is no body that monitors compliance. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has supervisory responsibilities but cannot enforce the Convention, and there is no formal mechanism for individuals to file complaints. The Convention specifies that complaints should be referred to the International Court of Justice.[19] It appears that no nation has ever done this.

An individual may lodge a complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or with the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, but no one has ever done so in regard to violations of the Convention. Nations may levy international sanctions against violators, but no nation has ever done so.

At present, the only real consequences of violation are 1) public shaming in the press, and 2) verbal condemnation of the violator by the UN and by other nations. To date, those have not proven to be significant deterrents << bhm commentary... "Not Proven"...Except for the USA, where it is applied as an absolute deterrent, much to the satisfaction of the open borders crowd>>

I can live with the shaming <ha> if the alternative is to see resources denied to citizens to pay for unlimited refugees; or if the alternative is to see NYPD cops being beaten by criminals who should never be here; or seeing victims of scooter gangs being dragged around, and so on. Any compassion intended by the 1951 convention has been undermined by criminals and economic migrants gaming the system. Times have changed in 70 years. As a sovereign nation we have not only the right but an obligation to protect our borders as we see fit, and we should not care what the grand poobah at the UN has to say about it.