Asylees are refugees

What you will notice when we talk about asylum in the US is that we make asylum seekers jump through some hurdles that are really artificial, that have nothing to do with ferreting out fraud or any other legitimate purpose. I mean we seem to take every opportunity to throw in new make-or-break procedural requirements and drop deadlines and nobody balks. We say it’s about fraud. But I think most Americans feel that our government is equipped to ferret our fraud. It’s something else.

We as a people, we Americans, we want to help refugees. We know what refugees are. Refugees are our Old World forebears on ships. Refugees are people boiling water over driftwood in camps. Today’s asylum seekers often don’t fit our idea of refugees.

We have a system for taking "our share" of the world's refugees. It's called resettlement. That's where we and the other developed countries put all of the (recognized) refugees in a pot and vet them and assign priority based on this or that criterion and divvy them up. If we can serve some geo-political smack on a rival nation, then even better (Remember “Soviet Jewry”?).

It's an awful system. It takes too long and too many people fall through the cracks and, oh, we can talk all day about the flaws in that program. But whatever its flaws, there is at least some satisfaction in knowing that it at least tries to be systematic; that we've at least tried to "save" the people who were most in need of saving (or, failing that, most capable of being saved.)

And that is precisely the opposite of asylum, which “rewards” people who manage to break through our nation’s defenses and land on our shores; which is to say, who didn’t wait their turn, didn’t play by the rules, didn’t stay put. It’s that there is an implicit comparison with the “deserving” refugee. If they came on a visa; at least they were prosperous enough to warrant a visa. Even if they jumped the fence; well, at least they were able-bodied enough to jump the fence.

But contemporary global reality does not really support this black-and-white dichotomy. It is ironic to attack asylum as a haven of the privileged NOW. We only have that impression because we have more asylum seekers, and they are different from the asylum seekers of old. We only have more and different asylum seekers because information and travel technology have opened up international migration to the humble.

Our class of asylum seekers is increasingly representative of the world’s refugee population. I think we as a people could really embrace and celebrate that uniquely American fact, and insist on a rigorous but compassionate and forgiving asylum program.