President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to reassert America’s commitment to refugees after the Trump White House’s slashing of the resettlement program, part of the current president’s anti-immigration drive.

In 2016, President Barack Obama aimed to admit 110,000 refugees. President Trump lowered the cap on refugee admissions every year of his presidency. For fiscal year 2021, he set the cap at 15,000, the lowest on record.

Biden promises to take a starkly different approach from his predecessor: to “set the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000, and seek to raise it over time.”

For decades, the United States led the world in offering protection to people fleeing persecution in other countries. Now the Biden presidency will mark a return to the political consensus that the U.S. should continue to do so, refugee policy experts say.

But while the president has the authority to set refugee admissions numbers, it will take time to rebuild the nation’s resettlement program after four years of the Trump administration largely dismantling it, according to Becca Heller, executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project.

“The point is not to hit 125,000 — the point is to signal both to the rest of the world and also to the domestic population in our own government that this is a priority again,” Heller says. “It’s less relevant if we hit the exact number and more relevant that we say, ‘Admitting refugees is really important. We are going to aim at this high number and invest in infrastructure and get as close as we can.’ ”

Here’s a look at some of the main challenges ahead for the Biden presidency as it seeks to roll back the sweeping changes to the refugee program.

Budget cuts have gutted the infrastructure for resettling refugees

Nine religious or community-based organizations known as resettlement agencies have contracts with the State Department to resettle refugees.

The agencies’ budgets are based on the number of refugees admitted. Low admission levels reduced government funding, which decimated programs supporting newly arrived refugees. After the State Department told them to pare their operations, many agencies had to shutter or scale back offices and lay off workers.

“We’re looking at a very big ramp-up because, over the last four years, there’s been an 85% cut and an effective demolition of the refugee resettlement program,” says David Miliband, president, and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, the largest of the nine resettlement agencies.

The backlog is huge

More than 120,000 refugees are in the pipeline, passing rigorous security and medical checks, waiting in line, sometimes for years. In addition, thousands of Iraqis who worked for the U.S. military and are now at risk are waiting too. In 2020, there were 4,000 slots for Iraqis who aided the U.S. military, but only 123 were resettled.

Those seeking refuge in the U.S. have to submit to interviews with immigration officers and security officers. In Iraq, interviews slowed to a trickle last year with the withdrawal of nonessential employees from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Refugees are scrutinized more thoroughly than any group that comes to the United States.

The Trump administration added new “extreme vetting” requirements, and that is swelling the backlog of applicants, says Heller, of IRAP.

“Extreme vetting is really inefficient. It’s not better vetting by redundancies that are unnecessary or busy work for the intelligence community,” Heller says. The new vetting rules were kept secret until IRAP sued to force a disclosure.

“Now, you have to be able to provide every address you’ve lived at for the last 15 years and every passport number you had for the last 15 years, every social media handle that you’ve had for the last 15 years,” says Heller. “There’s no indication that it does anything for anybody’s safety.”

A divided Congress has to set the budget for refugee resettlement amid a pandemic

The Refugee Act of 1980 established the mechanism for resettlement, including the president’s annual determination on refugee arrivals and a provision for consultations with Congress that sets the annual budget for the resettlement program.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work — but the Trump administration consistently ignored the provision to confer with lawmakers, according to refugee advocates.

So far, the election has produced a divided Congress. Members may not have the appetite to take on immigration policy amid the coronavirus pandemic and an economic recession, says Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute. The Biden administration will also be consumed by the COVID-19 crisis.

“For the first 100 days, there will be very little bandwidth for a Biden administration to deal with anything other than COVID. We have never faced a crisis like this before,” Chishti says. “We can’t expect a huge leap on immigration policy. If people expect that this is going to happen tomorrow, they will be in for a big disappointment.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/11/933500132/biden-plans-to-reopen-america-to-refugees-after-trump-slashed-admissions

The post Biden Plans To Reopen America To Refugees After Trump Slashed Admissions first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Rohingya refugees gather behind a barbed wire fence in a temporary settlement set up in the border zone between Myanmar and Bangladesh on April 25, 2018. YE AUNG THU/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

With its square white tents perfectly aligned against the yellow sands of the Sahara, Adam’s home could be a model refugee camp. Except it’s not. The government of Niger and the United Nations refugee agency, or UNHCR, call the camp a “humanitarian site.” Real refugees, for the government, are those who come from the war-torn zones of neighboring Mali and Nigeria and who are housed temporarily until there is a lull in fighting, at which point they are expected to return to the other side of the border.

The Sudanese at the humanitarian site are different, caught between journeys. They fled the conflict in their homeland of Darfur and headed north, crossing various borders to reach Libya—which proved to be as dangerous as the country they had left behind. Then they went south to Niger, this time fleeing detention centers, slave markets, and arrest by European Union-backed Libyan coast guard units.

Before he came to Niger, on his first journey, Adam had even managed to reach Europe. He got to Italy but was arrested at the French border and deported to Sudan. Since then, he has gone by the nickname “Italy.” He isn’t happy waiting at the humanitarian site, but the UNHCR staff told him that if he didn’t like it there, Niger could send him back to Libya. In 2019, there were painfully few resettlement flights from the humanitarian site to Europe, but they did exist, and they gave Adam hope. He dreams of returning to the country that gave him his name. Or anywhere in Europe, really. The present offers no possibilities.

Getting to Europe is now almost impossible. The drip feed of resettlement was turned off in early 2020 as the virus reconfigured our world. In September, he texted us: “There is no future for me.”

Left: A migrant sits near a fire inside a tent at a camp outside Bihac, in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, on Nov. 19, 2019. ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Right: Migrants make their way through Serbia near the town of Subotica on Sept. 9, 2015, toward a break in a steel and razor fence erected on the border by the Hungarian government. CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

Since the beginning of the pandemic, drawbridges have gone up across the world, limiting the movement of business travelers, vacationers, and asylum-seekers. But while airlines eagerly anticipate tourism returning to normal, many of the limitations on asylum enacted during the current crisis are likely to be become permanent. This year, more than 90 countries have stopped processing asylum claims. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, thousands of migrants, fleeing wars at home and looking for a route to Northern Europe, were interned in camps, while in Malaysia and Thailand, boats containing Rohingya refugees were turned away. In the Mediterranean, the virus has proved a potent weapon for politicians seeking ways to justify Europe’s blockade of irregular movement from the south.

The far-right’s political rhetoric blames refugees for carrying COVID-19. At the beginning of March, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, stated that he is “fighting a two-front war: One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus.” The right has conflated the two issues, building on a centuries-long history of scapegoating strangers as diseased. Asylum-seekers are actually no more likely than anyone else to carry the virus, and its initial spread followed the pathways of international air travel rather than irregular migration. But the pandemic is a useful excuse, according to Susan Fratzke of the Migration Policy Institute, “for countries to put in place anti-asylum policies they would have pursued anyway.”

The measures taken in the last six months are not exceptional policies pursued in a time of crisis but a crisis put to good use to complete a project already 30 years in the making: an almost total blockade against refugee movement and the end of asylum as a practical possibility.

A group of young Afghan boys stand outside a tent supplied by UNHCR at a camp in Pakistan on Jan. 1, 1989. HOWARD DAVIES/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

The right of asylum has always been ambiguously positioned between law and geopolitics. When the U.N. Refugee Convention was first adopted in 1951, it applied only to Europeans trying to find their place in a new jigsaw of nations following World War II. All the focus of postwar discussion was on “non-refoulement,” the principle that means asylum-seekers cannot be sent back to the countries from which they fled if they would continue to be persecuted there. The enshrining of non-refoulement was a reaction to the original sin to which the convention was a response: that many countries refused entry to Jewish refugees during the war. That refugees can’t legally be sent back to dangerous places, however, doesn’t mean that they are guaranteed a place to go—a limitation in the convention that is brutally exposed by stories like Adam’s.

Not that Adam was much thought about when the convention was signed. It would take until 1967 for a protocol to be signed that generalized the right of asylum outside of Europe to anyone with a reasonable fear of persecution on the basis of their political opinions or membership of a persecuted group. Even after the signing of the protocol, the right to asylum remained fragile. While in theory, signatory countries have to take in asylum-seekers, no one country has a duty to do so, and in reality, asylum policies are always sculpted by the demands of national immigration politics.

In the 1950s and ’60s, there were relatively few asylum cases in Europe and the Anglophone world, simply because workers were needed, immigration rules relatively lax, and it was easier to migrate than to go through complicated asylum procedures. Those who did apply could be held up as political victories: the victims of communist systems in Hungary and Poland whose failure was evident in their flight.

As the oil crisis unfolded in the 1970s, bringing soaring unemployment to Europe, the demand for immigrant workers slackened, immigration restrictions hardened, and immigrants became useful punching bags for politicians looking for scapegoats for the global economic downturn. The seeds of popular discontent took root after the guest workers who had come to Europe in the 1950s and ’60s stayed, becoming the target of political anger. The firming up of immigration policies was accompanied by a rise in the number of people applying for asylum, as those fleeing conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, and the wars of Central America tried to get to safety.

From the beginning, the institution of asylum was bound up with the political economy of nation-states. With the crises of the 1970s came the institutionalization of a new way of keeping asylum-seekers out: the refugee camp.

Tents tightly packed together are lit up at night at the Shah Mansoor relief camp in Swabi, Pakistan, on June 21, 2009. PAULA BRONSTEIN /GETTY IMAGES

Ethiopian refugee women wait to receive items distributed by the Kenyan Red Cross at the newly built Somare refugee camp in Moyale, Kenya, on March 19, 2018. BRIAN OTIENO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

A Syrian refugee from Aleppo sits with his children in a makeshift tent in a camp in the town of Kab Elias in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 20, 2016. PATRICK BAZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Over the last 30 years, such a journey has become increasingly difficult, and most refugees now live in camps in countries like Kenya, Lebanon, and Pakistan, next to the war zones from which they have fled. At the end of 2019, there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and 85 percent of them were hosted in the developing world.
While it is very difficult to get asylum, it is easy to get into a refugee camp. Building a good life there, however, is nearly impossible.

Residency in such camps is predicated on the idea, enshrined at the heart of UNHCR, that refugees will either be resettled or will return home. This means that most refugees are not allowed to work, do not get citizenship in their host country, and are provided only minimal services designed to maintain life—but not build a good one. Camps are supposed to be temporary, but with resettlement increasingly difficult and wars never-ending, many never leave. The consequence? In places like the Darfuri refugee camps in Chad, hundreds of thousands of people have grown up without citizenship, dependent on handouts, and waiting for futures that will never arrive.

From the perspective of UNHCR, such camps save lives. In historical perspective, however, such camps are devices to manage uprooted populations. Effectively, camps function as cages, as the American sociologist David Scott FitzGerald names them, designed to keep people from coming to wealthy countries and applying for asylum.

A man gives water to migrants heading to the border with Guatemala as they travel aboard a truck in Cerro de Hula on June 3. Nearly 100 migrants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Cuba headed in a caravan from Choluteca, Honduras, to Mexico were stopped by the police for sanitary controls amid the coronavirus pandemic. ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Since the 1990s, Europe, the United States, and Australia have tried to prevent asylum-seekers from making applications inside their territories, despite legally remaining signatories to the 1951 convention and the 1967 protocol. The measures they have taken include the tightening of the global visa regime and limitations on travel, as well as the externalization of border controls far from the actual frontiers of the nation-states in question. Since the 1980s, the U.S. Coast Guard has increasingly intercepted asylum-seekers at sea and forcibly repatriated them without legal hearings, while Australia offshores its asylum-seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru much as companies move factories overseas—it saves money, and horrors are easier to bear if they don’t take place in the homeland.

In Europe, the last 30 years have seen the continent’s borders moving steadily south, even as North Africans find it increasingly hard to cross the Mediterranean. In recent years, African and European officials have called Niger, Libya, and Sudan “Europe’s new southern border.” This new frontier wall is constituted by an expanding set of drones and border fences, sometimes guarded by militia forces subcontracted by Europe that can intercept migrants in places where human rights abuses are less visible. While Australia has built buffers in other countries and constructed a system of offshore processing for asylum, Europe has focused on blocking asylum-seekers south of the Mediterranean. Amid all its other disagreements, on the necessity of this new frontier, as the writer Thomas Meaney noted last year, Europe is singing from the same hymn sheet.

A group of migrant men, mainly from Niger and Nigeria, travels across the desert in northern Niger toward the Libyan border post of Gatrone on Jan. 15, 2019. SOULEYMANE AG ANARA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Migrants stand on an inflatable boat during a rescue operation by a French NGO in the Mediterranean Sea on Aug. 10, 2019. ANNE CHAON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Sudanese refugees from Darfur gather amid tents during a sit-in outside the UNHCR office in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Dec. 12, 2015, demanding better treatment and acceleration of their relocation. KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Life in Libya wasn’t easy. Adam moved between temporary jobs, working in restaurants and for construction firms, being beaten and harassed, and eking out a hard-scrabble existence at the edge of Libya’s civil war. After a year, he decided to leave for Europe. In 2016—the peak year for sea crossings to Italy, with 181,000 arrivals—he boarded one of four dinghies, each filled with 140 migrants. He made it to Sicily and traveled to Rome, intent on heading to France, but he was arrested just before the border in Ventimiglia and driven to the Sudanese Embassy, where he was interrogated and deported to Sudan. On arrival, he was extended the common welcome that Sudanese intelligence customarily affords returnees and was brutally interrogated.

Adam’s deportation was enabled by a deal that Italy—like several other European countries—struck with Sudan that allowed Sudanese intelligence agents to come to Europe and interview asylum-seekers in order to facilitate deportations. This deal was struck with the very Sudanese regime that Adam fled, effectively ensuring his refoulement. Following Adam’s deportation, a group of Sudanese nationals won an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights against their deportation under the same scheme. Amid this and other legal challenges, Europe continues to rely on the externalization of its borders as its principal means of evading legal scrutiny.

In 2016, the EU signed a 6 billion euro ($6.6 billion) deal for Turkey to keep Syrian refugees on its soil—including those returned from Greece. In effect, Turkey became a cage, much like the refugee camps farther south. In the same year, Niger—a major recipient of EU aid, with one billion euros (about $1.18 billion) earmarked for 2017-2020—enforced a new law that allowed its forces to arrest migrants as early as Agadez—the last sizable town at the edge of the Sahara, still 700 miles from the Libyan border. This, according to EU officials, is a model arrangement.

The borders of Europe are moving south, and with this expansion, the border guards are also changing. In 2009, then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made an agreement with Libya’s leader at the time, Muammar al-Qaddafi, that enabled Italian coast guard units to swiftly deport immigrants to Libya. In the intervening years, there has been regime change in Libya, but Italy’s priorities have remained unchanged.

A weak Government of National Accord (GNA) was established in Libya in March 2016, though it barely had control of parts of Tripoli. The fictional sovereignty of the GNA didn’t stop the EU, led by Italy, from training the Libyan coast guard. Many of those coast guard units had, until recently, been militias involved in migrant smuggling. Adam had left Libya from a terkina (corner—a name used for the places that migrants gather before boarding boats) in Sabratha, thanks to a smuggler connected to Ahmad al-Dabbashi, otherwise known as Al-Ammo, “the uncle,” who had risen from being a wheelbarrow porter to the most famous migrant smuggler in Libya. He was shortly to diversify his business and become a coast guardsman as well.

After his interrogation, Adam returned to Darfur, to the same internally displaced persons camp in which he had grown up. It was still guarded by the same militias that were still killing his people. “We haven’t seen you for a long time,” they said. “Where have you been?” Adam resolved to leave again. He was fed up with being hunted and chased.

When Adam returned to Libya in 2017, the situation had changed. Al-Ammo was no longer a famous smuggler in command of a militia but the head of an anti-migrant force recognized by the GNA. His terkina—a former Italian tuna factory—was now an official detention center for migrants. Rumors of a 5 million euro ($5.9 million) grant from the Italians, though, proved blood in the water, and the sharks circled. Rival smugglers attacked Al-Ammo and expelled him from Sabratha, as 10,000 migrants fled once again, this time from what became known as the Sabratha war, only to be arrested by Al-Ammo’s rivals and caged in deportation centers along the coast.

No matter which commander is in charge, the militia forces have proved themselves to be adept jailors. In 2018, at the EU’s behest, Libya’s so-called search and rescue zone was recognized, allowing the coast guard to expand its area of operations away from the coast. The results were impressive. The number of arrivals in Italy decreased from 181,000 in 2016 to just 23,000 in 2018.

Officially, the EU condemns the arbitrary detention of migrants in Libya, which is still not a signatory to the 1951 convention. In reality, of the approximately 500 million euros ($590 million) the EU has given to the GNA since 2016, some proportion has gone to the coast guard. It’s the numbers that matter. In 2018, one high-level EU official told us that “our goal is for the numbers of migrants arriving in Europe to decrease. Our policies are successful. We don’t care about the consequences in Libya or Niger.”

A woman carries a child past flames after a major fire broke out in the Moria migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Sept. 9. ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

In Europe, populist politicians have used the pandemic to stoke fears of migrants. Sicily’s regional president, Nello Musumeci, attempted to close all the migrant centers on the island at the end of August—before he was blocked in court—and blamed immigrants for spreading the virus. Musumeci’s rhetoric echoes that of the former interior minister, Matteo Salvini, who is attempting to restart his stalled political career by calling for a halt to all migrant boats landing in Italian waters. Port after port has been turning away migrant boats during the last few months, with front-line states like Malta announcing blanket bans on NGO vessels carrying migrants disembarking on their shores.

This leaves people like Adam trapped. When he returned to Libya, he fell into the same cycle, stuck in abusive jobs that refused to pay him. He resolved to leave, for Niger. In Agadez, he was pushed into the humanitarian site a few miles away from town. There he waits, unwilling to return to the government militias waiting for him in Sudan and unable to get to Europe.

The emphasis on non-refoulement in the legal architecture of refugee law has created a situation in which—thankfully—some people are not returned to war, but neither are they able to make new lives. Instead, they are caged in camps and detention centers and effectively left stateless.

In Libya and Niger, UNHCR has effectively become a proxy for the EU, its second-largest donor. It’s not entirely UNHCR’s fault. Even before the pandemic, of the 50,000 registered refugees and asylum-seekers in Libya, UNHCR was only able to resettle 2,000 people per year, mainly to Europe, due to governments’ reluctance to accept refugees. In such a mismatch between demand and supply, UNHCR has focused on keeping refugees warehoused.

The 1951 convention is no longer fit for purpose. In 1949, a group of intellectuals, including Albert Einstein—himself a refugee—and Bertrand Russell wrote a public letter to U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie suggesting a more cosmopolitan way of dealing with refugees. “History made them citizens of the world, and they should be treated as such.” The refugee problem was rather an opportunity, the letter held, to “let the ideal of world-citizenship subsist not exclusively in theories and programs, but also in courageous experimenting and in a genuine respect for the human person.”

The International Refugee Organization (IRO)—the precursor to UNHCR—reacted with hostility to the suggestion of a world passport for the displaced: Refugees were a problem, there were no international rights, and repatriation or resettlement was the only way for refugees to find their place in a world of nation-states. The result, 70 years later, is a growing population of stateless people across the world—the very situation that the IRO and UNHCR were designed to prevent.

Discussions around a Global Compact on Refugees in 2018 might have enabled a real discussion of how to reform the practice of asylum in the 21st century. Instead, there was little change to the current legal framework, and even those changes were spurned by the United States and Hungary. On a map of nation-states painted with an increasingly thick brush, there is no room for asylum, and for those like Adam, the future may be a country he shall never visit.

In December 2019, several hundred Darfuri refugees walked out of the humanitarian site and organized a protest in front of the UNHCR office in Agadez. After three weeks, Niger’s security forces pushed them back to the camp and arrested more than 300 of them, including Adam, who spent two months in prison.

In July 2020, the refugees resumed their protests, this time in the humanitarian site itself. One of their WhatsApp messages this month reads: “7 September, the 50th consecutive day of our peaceful protest to ask our rights to decent life, and the UNHCR didn’t visit the camp. They left us in the desert.”

Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/11/new-refugee-convention-asylum-libya-italy/

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Immigration advocates and even some Central Americans mulling entering the U.S. are reportedly rooting hard for a Joe Biden victory in November, encouraged by the Democratic nominee’s pledge to dismantle President Trump’s border policies.

Biden has said he plans on “modernizing” the U.S. immigration system by working with the international community and tackling “irregular immigration.” He further plans on re-establishing the nation’s “commitment to asylum seekers and refugees,” according to his campaign website.

That has buoyed the hopes of some who oppose Trump’s hard line on illegal immigration.

“I want Trump out,” a Honduran woman reportedly told the Center for Immigration Studies during a January fact-finding mission in Mexico, the Washington Times reported Thursday.

“I’ll wait for that because it would make things easier to get it,” she said while reportedly holding a child.

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A cornerstone of President Trump’s successful 2016 campaign, when chants of “Build that wall!” echoed at his rallies, the illegal immigration issue has been almost absent from the debate stage so far this year.

Once he took office in 2017, Trump followed through with a massive immigration overhaul that included more than 400 executive actions on immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute. His administration has also increased border regulations and asylum restrictions, created its Remain in Mexico program and attempted to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

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Biden has acknowledged “the pain” that was started under the Obama-Biden administration with the practice of family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, and released a broad proposal he would try to implement if elected president on Nov.  3.

The former vice president has said he would prioritize restoring the asylum system while working toward new methods for immigration detention.

“If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” Biden said in August during the Democratic National Convention. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum-seekers.”

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Trump has not yet released any details on his second-term immigration policy plans.

But the president is likely to pursue continued work on the southern border wall and further attempts to dismantle DACA, while introducing a “merit-based” immigration system to replace the current system.

Trump has not yet released any details that spell out what the “merit based” system would entail.

Source:  https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-has-immigrants-advocates-hoping-for-reversal-of-trumps-border-policies

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McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — The Trump administration has enacted the most sweeping immigration reforms of any U.S. presidency and has accomplished this through broad-brush measures, as well as utilizing minute technical loopholes in the law, and the coronavirus pandemic to get around Congress, according to a report released Friday by the Migration Policy Institute.

The report, “Dismantling and Reconstructing the U.S. Immigration System — A Catalog of Changes under the Trump Presidency,” found immigration to be President Donald Trump’s No. 1 goal during his first term and that he was able more than any predecessor before him to enact change by issuing over 400 executive actions, taking advantage of existing laws and shutting down the Southwest border to all asylum-seekers under the guise of COVID-19.

“The administration of President Donald J. Trump has dramatically transformed the U.S. immigration system, in bold-brush, sweeping ways but also in small technical details across the immigration portfolio. After pledging to take one of the most activist agendas on immigration in modern times, the administration has delivered on nearly everything the president promised on the campaign trail, almost exclusively via executive fiat, ignoring a Congress he had originally pledged to work with on systemic reform,” the report found. “Trump has dismantled and reconstructed many elements of a U.S. immigration system that was last reformed in 1996. Humanitarian protections have been severely diminished. The U.S.-Mexico border is more closed off than perhaps any time in U.S. history. Immigration enforcement appears more random. And legal immigration has experienced a historic contraction.”

Report co-author Sarah Pierce told Border Report that the Trump White House has “moved at a rapid-fire pace doing executive action after executive action — some of them have been bold sweeping motions, but a lot of them have been very small technical changes that haven’t really risen to the public’s attention.”

This includes the utilization of a 1944 relatively unknown law called the Title 42 Public Health Charge, which the administration cited in shutting down the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada on March 20 to stop the coronavirus from spreading. The administration has extended the restrictions at least through the end of August and many analysts believe he will continue to keep the borders closed until the Nov. 3 election.

“With this dual crisis of a public health crisis and an economic crisis on the back of this pandemic you’d expect this administration’s agenda to take a backseat, and that just hasn’t been true at all. They’ve been more active than ever and have used the pandemic as an opening to accomplish some of the things they weren’t able to accomplish previously including completely closing off the Southwest border from asylum-seekers, limiting the number of legal immigrants coming into the country, and limiting the number of temp workers coming into the country,” said Pierce, who is an immigration policy analyst for the nonpartisan think-tank based in Washington, D.C.

The 115-page report found that during Trump’s time in office, his administration has successfully been able to limit entry into the United States, especially arrivals from the Mexico border, by implementing policies such as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, which forces migrants to remain in Mexico during their U.S. immigration hearings, and third-country agreements that the Department of Homeland Security reached with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which require migrants to claim asylum in the countries they pass first after leaving their homelands.

“Together, the policy regime blocked asylum access or eligibility for the vast majority of asylum seekers,” the report found.

The vast majority of those placed in MPP have not been granted asylum, with only a sliver of applicants actually being accepted into the United States, migrant advocates say. Many have waited for over a year in tent encampments, such as one in Matamoros, Mexico, during their court proceedings, which have been placed on hold indefinitely with the coronavirus pandemic.

Migrants are seen on Jan. 28, 2020, living at a tent encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, Texas. about 1,200 migrants have lived at the encampment since July 2019, many sent there as part of the Trump Administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols Program, which requires migrants to remain in Mexico during their U.S. immigration court proceedings. (Sandra Sanchez/Border Report file photo)

The president has been successful certainly in sealing off the southern border from arrivals,” Pierce said.

The report found the administration has successfully limited U.S. immigration through: travel bans; reduced visa processing; enhanced border security; interior enforcement; tougher immigration courts rules and regulations; and repeated efforts to stop programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

A couple of areas that Trump has not been as successful is in nationwide implementation of an E-Verify system that would electronically verify that all employed workers have proper work authorization. He also has not been able to implement measures to verify birthright citizenship, as he has promised during his campaign. And, if re-elected, Pierce says she expects these are two areas the Trump administration would stress during its next four years.

Sandra Sanchez can be reached at Ssanchez@borderreport.com.

Visit the BorderReport.com homepage for the latest exclusive stories and breaking news about issues along the United States-Mexico border.

Source: https://www.borderreport.com/hot-topics/immigration/report-trump-administration-most-active-on-immigration-in-us-history/

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Policies put in place by the administration of US President Donald Trump have cut off access to asylum in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic, sent COVID-19-positive people back to Latin American countries — where outbreaks are now spiraling — and exacerbated an already dire situation for asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection said 33,510 people were arrested for border crossing in November, the sixth straight month of decline since May, when 132,000 people — a 13-year high — tried to illegally cross into the U.S. from Mexico, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The majority of migrants detained were families and unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America and seeking asylum in the U.S. About 9,000 of those arrested in November were families traveling together.

Border crossing arrests typically fall in the winter and pick up in the spring as it gets warmer, but the May-to-November decline this year was still the biggest in “absolute numbers” and second-largest of any six-month period ever by percentage in the last century.

From the last few months of the Obama administration into the first few months of the Trump administration, there was a 76% drop, with a smaller peak of 47,211.

“This is a direct result due to this president’s strategies to address the historic flood of Central Americans, families, illegally crossing the border,” CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said Monday at a press conference. “The network of initiatives have worked and continues to work.”

According to TWSJ, a migrant shelter in Tuscon, Arizona, has seen its arrivals fall from more than 100 a day to less than 40 a day, while a shelter in McAllen, Texas, that opened for migrants, ended up serving other homeless people in the community because it had so much extra space.

“We had a cold front, we had space to allow the homeless to come in and we opened the doors,” Catholic Charities Executive Director and Sister Norma Pimentel told TWSJ.

A shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, also reported its number of migrants housed has dropped from 170 people over the summer to 98 currently, many of which are awaiting their asylum cases to be resolved by the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, which has sent 54,000 migrants back to Mexico since January.

Immigration experts say the MPP, otherwise known as “Remain in Mexico,” is one of the single biggest factors in the decline in border arrests because those arrested know they’ll have to then remain in Mexico for several months while their cases are decided.

The Trump administration also is looking at ending birthright citizenship.

“I think the big factor has been the Trump administration policies,” Migration Policy Institute Director of Research Randy Capps told TWSJ.

Source: https://moneyandmarkets.com/us-mexico-border-crossings/

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janissary procession through the Brandenburg Gate on Türkischen Tag (Turkish Day), Berlin, photo via Wikimedia Commons

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 993, November 1, 2018

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Turkey, which hosts some 3.5 million refugees, is generally considered a transit or bulwark country in the ongoing refugee crisis. What is less known is that Turkey is also generating refugees of its own.

According to data from the Greek Asylum Service, over the past two years, the number of asylum applicants from Turkey has grown from 189 in 2016 to 2,463 in August 2018. This represents an increase of approximately 1,300%. Moreover, according to Eurostat, approximately 25,000 Turkish citizens applied for asylum in European countries between 2016 and 2017.

The most popular destination is Germany because there is already a substantial Turkish minority there. Between 2016 and 2017, more than 14,000 Turkish citizens applied for asylum in Germany alone. Compared to the number of applicants from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, these numbers appear unimpressive. However, if we consider the alarming rate at which the number is increasing, and that Turkey is a relatively stable and somewhat democratic country, the refugee flows from the country are a cause for concern. Their causes and potential impact on the EU warrant examination.

Turkish refugee flows were caused, for the most part, by a combination of the abortive coup attempt in 2016 and the ongoing economic crisis. After the failed coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan embarked on a “crusade” to weed out all those suspected of being affiliated in any way with exiled religious leader Fethullah Gülen, whom Erdoğan believes was the coup’s mastermind. For the past two years, Erdoğan has persecuted soldiers, academics, teachers, journalists, and other citizens on suspicion that they are part of the Gülen network. Approximately 150,000 civil servants have lost their jobs and the Turkish police have made over 50,000 arrests.

The second major stimulant of Turkish refugee flows is the ongoing economic crisis. The country’s economy is in a shambles. After years of growth, low-interest rates, and massive, government-backed construction projects, the economy is now in freefall, and the consequences for Turkey’s stability are not yet known.

Since the beginning of 2018, the Turkish lira has lost 42% of its value against the dollar. Inflation rose from 7.2% in January 2015 to 15.9% in July 2018.Ankara also has a high level of debt due for repayment. According to the estimates of the Fitch credit rating agency for 2018, Turkey’s total financing needs will be almost $230 billion.

Despite the bleak economic situation, Erdoğan appears reluctant to implement tighter monetary and fiscal policies out of fear that he will lose the support of his political base. Instead, he has adopted inflammatory, conspiratorial rhetoric against the global financial markets, which he accuses of “waging a secret war against Turkey.” The country’s precarious economic situation is exacerbated by its strained relationship with the US.

These factors have provoked fears among the Turkish population of persecution, unemployment, and restrictions on travel due to the revocation of passports. In response to these fears, some Turkish citizens are attempting to migrate to the EU. The most common route is to cross the Greek border via the Evros River and then, with the help of smugglers, continue on to Europe.

According to data from the Migration Policy Institute, in 2016, the number of Turkish citizens who were granted protection status was 900. In 2017, that figure reached 5,555. This represents an increase of over 300%. These data represent the share of first-instance positive asylum decisions relative to all decisions made in each country. Positive decisions include refugee protection, subsidiary protection, and humanitarian protection. In 2017, the average rate of recognition of asylum applications from Turkish citizens in Europe was 36.0%. This means that in one out three cases, Turkish asylum seekers were granted refugee status.

(Of course, recognition rates vary significantly among European countries. Norway holds the highest rate of recognition with 89.7%. By contrast, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria have yet to reach a positive decision. Greece has a rate of recognition of 54.5%.)

This substantial increase is striking for two reasons. First, it reflects the speed at which the total number of asylum applications from Turkish citizens has risen. Second, it shows that European asylum services recognize that Turkish citizens are being persecuted.

The first major complication when dealing with Turkish refugees stems from the fact that the EU signed an agreement with Ankara in an effort to curb the flows of Syrian refugees. Under the agreement, all Syrians who reached the Greek islands after March 20, 2016, would be returned to Turkey. For each refugee returned to Turkey, one refugee from Greece would be accepted into the EU. Hence, under the agreement, Turkey is considered a “safe third country” that can accept incoming refugee flows.

But this no longer makes sense. European countries now grant refugee protection status to Turkish citizens, meaning they acknowledge that they are suffering persecution in their home country. How, then, can the EU continue to justify the characterization of Turkey as a “safe third country?”

The issue of Turkish refugee flows could be the final nail in the coffin of the agreement, which has been extensively criticized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as well as by non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. The criticisms revolve around the fact that Turkey cannot be considered safe as it denies refugee status to non-Europeans and is unable to provide effective protection under international law. While some analysts view the agreement as “too big to fail,” it is uncertain whether Turkish refugee flows will allow the agreement to be maintained as is. Even if the EU chooses to uphold it, it cannot deny that Turkey is itself now a generator of refugees.

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Nikolaos Lampas is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Piraeus, Greece. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Peloponnisos, Greece.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/turkey-refugee-crisis/

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The post Thousands of U.S. troops to stop an “invasion” of migrants. first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

A summary of the judgment said the Court of Justice had dismissed “in their entirety the actions brought by Slovakia and Hungary.” The quota program was “necessary to respond effectively and swiftly to an emergency situation characterized by a sudden inflow of displaced persons,” the court said.

The case has highlighted a deep divide in the European Union as it has sought a joint solution to dealing with the more than one million people who have come to Europe in the past two years, straining resources, roiling politics and drawing criticism from rights advocates who say that the bloc risks violating international laws on the treatment of refugees.

Many member states were lukewarm toward the quota plan from the start, but Hungary and Slovakia stood out by openly spurning their quota requirements and trying to overturn them. A looming question is whether the European Commission, the bloc’s administrative arm, will renew the relocation program.

“Given the tense politics of internal solidarity, it might make more sense for the commission to avoid insisting on the commitment, having made its point,” said Elizabeth Collett, the European director of the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization. “Few E.U. member states have actually met their relocation quota, and most were just a lot more passive about it.”

The 2015 program to relocate migrants traveling through Greece and Italy to other countries was put into place as the crisis of migration from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere reached its peak, but only about a third of nearly 100,000 places have been filled.

Huge numbers of migrants arriving in Greece and Italy have made journeys to countries like Germany and Sweden; arrivals have slowed since the program’s inception, and not all migrants in Greece and Italy qualify for relocation.

More than one million migrants have applied for asylum in Germany, whose foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, welcomed the ruling on Wednesday as “explicitly clear,” emphasizing that all European Union members would now be expected to accept their quota of refugees.

“I have always told our Eastern European partners that it is correct to put questions to the courts,” Mr. Gabriel said. “But now we can also expect that all European partners will uphold the ruling and the carry out the decision without further delay.”

Hungary could be ordered to pay fines if it fails to take in its quota of 1,294 people, though enforcement might require the European Commission to bring its own court case.

Poland and the Czech Republic may face similar legal action, but Slovakia has accepted a small number of migrants relocated from Greece and has recently shown a greater willingness to find common ground with Brussels.

Peter Szijjarto, the Hungarian minister of foreign affairs and trade, called the ruling “outrageous and irresponsible” and said “the real battle is only just beginning,” insisting that no one would be relocated to Hungary against its wishes.

The quota system was introduced as part of an effort to relieve the burden on Greece and Italy, where migrants — many of them fleeing the war in Syria — reached the European Union in huge numbers in 2015 and 2016. But the bloc soon faced intense opposition from member states in Central and Eastern Europe that resented any obligation to accept a preset number of migrants arriving in Greece and Italy.

The program formally ends Sept. 26, but migrants arriving in European Union states until that date can qualify. According to estimates by European officials, about 22,000 people who have arrived, or who are expected to arrive in Greece and Italy before the September deadline, could be eligible for relocation. But only about half of them are likely to qualify for relocation to another member state, where then they could apply for asylum, officials said.

Ms. Collett said Europe’s leaders were increasingly focused on an effort to stop migrants from trying to get to Europe in the first place. That entailed closer “relationships with key third countries like Niger and Libya, or simply providing cash to encourage governments to limit flows,” she said, referring to funding for programs like job creation and for security measures to keep migrants from attempting the hazardous trip to Europe.

Elements of that approach have enraged Oxfam, a charity that warned the European Union last month that migration policies preventing people from leaving Libya exposed them to torture, rape and slavery.

In March 2016, the European Union reached a deal with Turkey to send back asylum seekers who had taken clandestine routes to Greece from Turkey. That measure, including payments of up to 6 billion euros, or $7.1 billion, to help Turkey manage its refugee population and a pledge to reinvigorate talks on the possibility of Turkey joining the bloc, slowed the flow across the Aegean route to a trickle.

That deal is looking increasingly tenuous, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called last weekend for an end to negotiations with Turkey, infuriating Ankara. Since the original agreement with Turkey, the focus has been on the so-called Central Mediterranean route used by many migrants to travel from Libya to Italy.

According to the International Organization for Migration, 125,860 migrants and refugees have arrived in Europe by sea so far this year. Nearly 80 percent arrived in Italy, with the rest divided among Cyprus, Greece and Spain. More than 2,500 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean, the group said.

That number of arrivals is less than half the number registered in the same period last year, when 3,238 died at sea.

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/world/europe/eu-migrants-hungary-slovakia.html

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