Seems pretty unlikely to "drag down the lifeboat," honestly. As noted above, under the current regulations we see about 30-40% of asylum applications approved. There were just under 500K applications filed last year. We currently approve about 20K-30K asylum requests per year (we don't process all the applications timely, which is why there's a backlog). So if we timely processed all applications within the same year they were filed, you would end up with between 120K-180K additional new legal residents, in a country of 330 million people. Which would be about 0.5% of the U.S. population. We would go from having about 1.1 million new legal residents per year to 1.2-1.3 million new legal residents per year (again, in a country of 330 million people). There might certainly be some costs associated with that - but some of those costs would be offset by benefits, and they couldn't possibly be large enough to support that metaphor. - albaby

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Well, I have come around to your way of thinking, that the only available option is to expand the courts as necessary. However, the legislation that authorizes the courts must also modify the criteria for asylum to put some limits in place and by limits I mean some caps on the number of new applications that will be accepted linked to the current backlog in the courts. We must bring intake and processing capacity into equilibrium.

Apart from that, a lot of people will be necessary to staff the court operations plus temporary housing, food service, etc. I assume multiple processing center every 100 miles or so along the border. That would take 20 centers to be built and staffed. Living in the desert at one of these centers may make it hard to attract and retain employees.