How “populist Republican” xenophobia damaged the conception of vital immigration laws…
Trump and Miller destroyed it, and even if Biden can fix it, then what?
I read a piece in Politico today, which seamlessly characterizes the current debacle established by the “populists” in the last four years. For those who may not read my postings regularly, the term “populist” is how I classify the Republican party — at least until they choose to repair their party.
The article is written by Jack Herrera, and it’s vastly consequential because it describes the onslaught the populists have inflicted on the country’s perception of the process of immigration. Herrera depicts a notion where our country — despite Republicans or Democrats in power — would embrace the importance of allowing people to immigrate after escaping a miserable environment. This was especially pivotal in the last two decades, as many from South America/Central America have had to escape violence and impoverishment to try and develop a new way of living in a completely foreign country.
Since World War II, presidents of both parties have accepted millions of asylum seekers, honoring the treaties and statutes that the U.S. agreed to over the decades after the Holocaust affirming a right to refuge for people fleeing persecution. Taking in refugees has never been particularly popular in American public opinion, leaving the system vulnerable to a populist political attack, but governmental leaders had been able to invoke notions of America’s standing in the world to depoliticize asylum policy and keep commitments relatively steady. No longer.
Since Trump mainly used executive action — circumventing Congress — to change policy, it may not be hard for Biden to reopen the U.S. to refugees and asylum seekers over the next four years. But in the longer term, closing the political divide that Trump widened on asylum will prove much more challenging. Thanks to the last administration, asylum in the U.S., once globally reliable, has become like the carpeting in the Oval Office: something that can be torn up and remade from president to president. (Herrera, Politico)
There’s a particular sentence that stands out, conspicuously: “governmental leaders had been able to invoke notions of American’s standing in the world to depoliticize asylum policy and keep commitments relatively steady.” I can’t understand why the populists take on this role of inferring we just ban people trying to flee a country – a country where they have no chance to survive. For the last four years, Trump and the populists took on this manta of decreeing migrants as undeserving for seeking the very thing they are lawfully entitled to. Sometimes I ask this: how many of these populists even grasp the fundamentals of immigration? Do they even have a clue about what is occurring throughout the world in these countries? Or is it just pure xenophobia? Sadly, for most, it’s the latter. And only the latter.
Herrera describes another central point:
More than anything else, Trump and Miller tried to make it as painful as possible to seek asylum in the U.S. Whereas prior to the Trump administration, most asylum seekers were paroled as they awaited the outcome of their cases, at various times during Trump’s tenure, more than 90 percent of asylum seekers in the U.S. remained locked in detention centers. Some families who fled political persecution in their home countries spent over a year in jail where they had hoped to find freedom. Even the family separation crisis was a result of efforts to deter migrants, including those seeking asylum.
Trump’s broadsides against asylum didn’t stop after Biden won the election. During the time before inauguration, the outgoing administration issued new rules, orders and guidelines on asylum at break-neck speed. “I can’t do my job, because I don’t know what the law will be next week,” one asylum attorney told me in December. While issuing new policies with weeks left in a presidency might have seemed simply petty, it had a serious effect: Much of it cannot be dismantled overnight. Even advocates acknowledge that to properly change things, the Biden team will have to produce studies and legal arguments, draft new plans, and, at times, allow for lengthy public comment periods, before they alter the Trump doctrine. (Herrera, Politico)
It became the goal of the Trump administration to knowingly paint asylum seekers as demagogues, which in turn fueled a massive public belief that anybody attempting to follow the law to seek asylum was malevolent. I’m also sure when you analyze it further, the populists can’t answer how the immigration process even works for an asylum seeker. Perhaps they also lack awareness of the scrutiny these migrants must endure when they first arrive — even after they have traveled arduously through perilous landscapes.
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Nonetheless, Trump has managed to paint the picture for many Americans — some populists, others Republican — that migrants are aspiring to damage our country. As we know, the Trump administration had no aspiration to repair the issues occurring in their countries of origin. Herrera brings up a significant actuality.
“When Trump took office, 35 percent of Republican voters believed the U.S. had a responsibility to accept refugees, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Just a year later, that number fell to just 26 percent. And by 2019, a PRRI survey found that fewer than half of Republicans said they would oppose a law banning all refugees — from anywhere, for any reason — from entering the United States.”
The toxicity of the issue within the GOP electorate makes bipartisan action on asylum difficult to fathom. In 2013, a comprehensive immigration reform bill supported by President Barack Obama won the support of 14 Republicans in the Senate (though it would later go on to die in the House). On his first day in office, Biden sent his own immigration bill to Congress, which, alongside a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, includes a bevy of asylum reforms. But with the current state of polarization in the U.S., it’s hard to imagine Biden winning even one Republican Senate vote, much less 14. POLITICO reported that the Biden White House is open to Congress pursuing his legislative proposals on immigration and asylum piece by piece, rather than as a whole package, but it’s not clear that strategy will any more successfully lead to passage. (Herrera, Politico)
This brings us to the most injurious concept: the full realization that Republicans (especially populists) have sunk into outright xenophobia, particularly over the last ten years. I wonder, most of the time, why Republicans feel so enabled to proclaim this country as their own. To me, it seems more advantageous to allow more migration, as over time it’s more beneficial for economic gains, and many industries currently rely heavily on labor from immigrants entering this country. Instead of forcing them to hide, why not embrace it? Furthermore, the realization that fewer than half of Republicans would oppose a law banning refugees is sordid. This is just another example of the destruction Trump and Stephen Miller inflicted on the Republican party. It was feasible the party was xenophobic in the past, but they didn’t always show it. They still believed in the rule of law and the morality that comes with honoring the law. At this time, they want to create a new law, a law that unambiguously wipes out lawful immigration.
Looking back on Trump’s tenure, the most lasting effect of his politicization of asylum, suggests Cato’s Nowrasteh, might be partisan gridlock and the sustained impossibility of ever being able to guarantee through legislation a stable system for refugees that isn’t susceptible to the election of a new president with Trumpian disposition. “Trump made Congress totally irrelevant when it comes to immigration,” he says, “and that’s devastating to American institutions of government.”
“Whether Biden goes all the way in the other direction, and opens everything up, or the next Republican president shuts it down, the uncertainty in the political system is very damaging,” says Nowrasteh.
Trump’s ultimate legacy, by tearing down in four years a system that had solidified over decades in international agreements and federal law, is to create a new status quo in which the fate of asylum seekers globally ultimately lies at the whims of whoever is in power. (Herrera, Politico)
Herrera makes it obvious; Trump/Miler wanted pandemonium, and he portrayed these asylum-seeking immigrants as an impairment to our country. He had no desire to allow congress to construct policy to overhaul the crises; he just wanted to convey to the country that we could principally create a system rescinding them. President Biden will attempt to repair the destruction Miller and Trump imposed, but then what? How do we get rid of xenophobia?
Works Cited:
- Herrera, Jack. “One Way Trump May Have Changed Immigration Forever.” Politico. March 2, 2021. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/02/biden-immigration-trump-legacy-asylum-refugees-472008. Accessed March 2, 2021.
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