Let them eat cake
To the editor:
There are 8 billion people on the planet. According to the U.N. Commission on Refugees 1 out of 8 of us are a refugee or displaced persons. The feeble plea to immigrants from Vice President Harris, “Don’t come.” rings as genuine as Marie Antoinette’s suggestion that the peasants eat cake if they have no bread.
The Supreme Court has stayed the end of Title 42, a health edict to force “asylum seekers” to stay in Mexico. But most undocumented immigrants entered vetted on a visa they simply overstayed. Last century the annual US quota was varied but averaged about 164,000 immigrants annually. Today we hand out about a million legal visas per year including family, student, and temporary worker visas. Ninety percent of all students who enter on a legal visa overstay. ICE can barely bother to route the 10,000 immigrants annually processing out of our prisons, never mind find anyone not in custody who chooses to stay.
Two hundred judicial vacancies and the refusal of past administrations to hire immigration staff, fiats stretching past the limit of asylum visas to 70,000 worldwide per year have backlogged the asylum system. Eighty to 90% of those who enter the country asking for “asylum,” when adjudicated, turn out to be ineligible. But by not hiring judges, the backlog swells the ranks of those “waiting for a hearing.” Thus our wealthy can let the hungry in without legal job protections. Desperate job seekers for the 80 million full-time jobs arguably undermine wages in the USA. There are 335 million people living here legally. Many complain the wages on those 80 million jobs are inadequate to the task of living. The visa asylum quota is now over 300,000. By law limited to 70,000 per year cap for the our entire country the Bush administration was the first to double that for Afghanistan by non-aggregating. Seventy thousand was intended to describe how many our economy could reasonably be expected to integrate. Our employment would have to double to keep up with the swelling “unaggregated quota.” In today’s Congressional theater on the subject, no common ground is found, minus chortles over the suppression of wages through cruel work practices aided by this unfair labor competition.
There are currently about 200 vacancies in the judiciary branch and we could easily triple our immigration judges. Those judgeships have languished unfunded and unfilled. Unsurprisingly the judiciary branch seems impatient about extending the Rule 42 to keep immigrants endlessly waiting in Mexico for an adjudication that can’t happen because of the backlog created by Congressional fiat. It’s a Catch-22 game that has given the border guards dizzying numbers of arrests. Mostly Title 42 is returning adult Mexican male “asylum seekers.”
The two-party system has few useful answers. While the billionaires in the Senate argue to criminalize those entering, it seems to be as business people, they find it lucrative to fill low-wage jobs with people afraid to demand better. Even Mar-a-Lago was staffed with undocumented workers. The past administrations, starting with Bush, added 70,000 more annual asylum visas for each country who voted for socialism or lost a war. Afghanistan, Chile, Columbia, Ukraine — there are now more than 300,000 visas for asylum seekers annually authorized to enter in additional to the US “cap” of 70,000 asylum visas. This in addition to the 1 million annual visas. These giveaway visas remain, without sufficient processors hired, unprocessed. Thus special demographic constituents can feel heard, while remaining unhelped. But more importantly, they remain disempowered to participate as citizens.
The other party of the wealthy insists on reifying child smuggling, blurring the lines of Presidential fiat for children smuggled across the border. While insisting on the mantle of lawfulness in all matters not related to immigration, the promises to non-citizens of asylum anarchy ring hollow the Democrats’ assertion of legal rectitude. Again the upshot is desperate competition for jobs pitting workers in limbo who cannot access poverty aid legally, against legal residents to see who can bid a job down to the lowest starvation wage. Congressional districts swell with “constituents” who cannot hold the officials to heel, as undocumented people cannot vote in elections. But the disenfranchised swell the Census count, adding Congress seats to disenfranchised residents. And, again, the desperate work so cheaply.
Whatever party you claim, recognize that there has never been sufficient tax money allocated for the immigration service to hire more judges to adjudicate claims for asylum visas promised. If you want the rule of law in this country, you have to start, I think, with a commitment to using an orderly system. Think about that if you believe your political party is at all interested in fixing this. There are only rich people holding Federal office. The rich don’t stay rich by encouraging fair wages. Pretending the “problem” lies outside this vested interest has only confused the debate. Telling people “Don’t come,” even if you can say it with a straight face, is not the same as processing the visas promised.
Ellen Starbird
Cape Coral