There has perhaps never been a greater fraud perpetuated against the American people than the modern U.S. asylum system, and new reporting suggests the Biden administration knows it.
“Documents show the Biden Administration is well aware a great proportion of the migrants traveling to the U.S. from South America are coming for economic reasons, rather than escaping persecution,” according to a recent report from The New York Post.
Those who have followed this issue for a long time understand that the vast majority of migrants who apply for asylum are not escaping persecution in their home countries, but are simply looking for work or welfare in the United States. Leading officials in the White House know this as well as anybody, but have still exploited the public’s misunderstanding of current asylum procedures to justify the importation of millions of economic migrants into the country. Of course, the American asylum system turned into a scam long before the current administration.
International asylum law — which the United States has embraced for decades — allows for foreign nationals to seek asylum if their life or liberty is threatened due to their race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group. In other words, the asylum system was not created for anyone other than those facing real persecution by the governments in their homelands on account of an immutable characteristic.
In media reports, the millions of illegal aliens who now pour into our country on a yearly basis are often referred to as “asylum seekers” and “refugees” in a complete bastardization of what those terms were originally intended to mean. This has been a tremendous propaganda coup for anti-borders activists and politicians, who routinely paint those who advocate for stronger border security as heartless toward vulnerable people seeking refuge.
The vast majority of foreigners who claim asylum at the border today are not legitimate refugees, but are here for economic reasons, and have successfully gamed the nation’s asylum system in order to avoid deportation and remain in the country indefinitely. There is a whole cottage industry of non-governmental organizations and legal groups who abuse asylum protections in order to overwhelm the U.S. immigration system. Many of these organizations are funded by U.S. taxpayers. In a cruel irony, American citizens are watching their hard-earned tax dollars fund the destruction of their nation’s sovereignty.
This asylum scam has led to situations like the current debacle in New York, where many of the city’s finest hotels are now filled with migrants who have no right to be here. One such alien was recently arrested after shooting a woman in Times Square and firing at New York City police officers. Another group of unruly migrants were caught on camera earlier this month mercilessly beating New York police officers, and then subsequently released by the city without bail. These are the people the modern U.S. asylum system protects.
When your average person hears the term “asylum,” they think of desperate people fleeing the tyranny of history’s greatest monsters, particularly harkening back to the World War II era. The anti-borders industrial complex goes to great lengths to conflate those refugees with 21st-century economic migrants because they understand that this is the best way to maintain sympathy for their destructive agenda.
Considering the nation’s history, most Americans hold tremendous sympathy for and want to help those who are fleeing persecution. Anti-borders activists seek to exploit the compassionate instinct of the average American in order to implement their lawless agenda. Most Americans are busy in their lives and do not have time to fully grasp the intricacies of immigration and asylum law, so they are unaware of how much they are being taken advantage of. The people in power — including those making policy in the federal government — do understand this, and that’s what makes their actions so nefarious.
The right to asylum has become a national suicide pact. Instead of being invoked to prevent vulnerable groups from being victimized by tyrants, it has become a loophole to overwhelm our country and drain our resources. As British theorist Stafford Beer famously said, “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
In 2024, the purpose of the U.S. asylum system is to import cheap labor for corporations and political patrons in both major parties. This is not just a legal atrocity, but a moral one as well. No nation should bind itself to asylum rules that force it to surrender control over its border and compromise its security. It is past time for the United States to stop selectively enforcing our immigration laws and start enforcing them as written.
Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.
