No. of Recommendations: 10
The international rules for asylum as I understand them state that you need to be fleeing to a country that borders yours, not just some place else on the globe you want to go to.No, that is not true. There is no "first safe country" requirement in international law.
You just zapped your own argument. There has never been a shortage of Establishment GOP types willing to give the democrats everything they want along the border. Just look at the current bill.And there's never been a shortage of Centrist Democratic types willing to give the GOP what they want along the border, either. That's the point - these immigration negotiations get started because there are sizable blocks
on both sides that are willing to move towards what the other side wants. But they get derailed because maximalists prefer the
status quo to actually fixing some of the major problems. Which is what's happening right now.
You mean besides a wide open southern border and vast misuse of the parole system? Besides that?The
status quo is the
status quo, and has been for 40 years. The southern border isn't wide open - literally millions of people get arrested and detained when they try to cross it, and other than the percentage of folks that are able to establish asylum claims (a small fraction of those who get detained), they end up getting deported in the end.
What have Democrats
gained from Congress on immigration in the last 40 years? Seriously? Every effort to reform immigration to provide for a pathway to citizenship - for DREAMERs or anyone else - has
died in Congress. The 2007 immigration reform bill died. The 2013 immigration reform bill died. Immigrant advocates have gotten
virtually nothing through Congress in forty years, either.
The
only major immigration legislation that's passed since the 1986 act was the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act - which was a
hardline enforcement bill, pushed through by Clinton as part of his triangulation efforts for the midterm elections. Like his welfare reform and crime bills, modern advocacy groups in the Democratic coalition
hate the IIRIRA, because it basically did exactly what you claim never happens - it gave conservative hardliners a lot of stuff they wanted, with virtually nothing to offset it to help immigrants. Which is why it's gone down the memory hole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Immigration_...No one's show me a single thing that the democrats are willing to trade. Nor has anyone shown me a single thing that Republicans are willing to trade. Seriously - there was a time when they would at least even pay
lip service to the idea of normalizing the legal status of DREAMERS by passing....well, the DREAM Act. Even that's gone now. There is literally no reform to the immigration system that the Republicans are willing to trade in exchange for the tighter enforcement they claim is so critical. Which is why the House GOP was threatening to torpedo the current discussions -
no matter what the deal was - even before Trump got involved. Because they know there is nothing at all that they want to give the Democrats, no matter what's on the table in exchange.
