via REUTERS
Joe Biden’s border crisis is over. It didn’t take new laws, just a new president.
But it’s only a temporary reprieve. What happens next time we get a president — as we will — with Biden’s border philosophy?
Nothing can completely Biden-proof the border (as it were). But one important change would make it much harder for a President Jasmine Crockett or President Gavin Newsom to illegally usher in millions more illegal aliens.
End asylum.
After all, the Democrats’ rationale for admitting all those millions of illegal border-crossers was that they had a “right” to claim asylum, the legal protections offered to political or religious refugees.
Many never even bothered to apply, but those who did produced an immigration-court backlog that may never be cleared.
That means these illegal-alien applicants will get to stay (and work) here “legally” for years before their hearing dates arrive — having kids, buying homes, putting down roots.
And when they lose, as most will, how are we supposed to find and remove them?
A new Heritage Foundation report laid out several important ways to reform and restrict asylum.
Such changes would great first steps, but they don’t go nearly far enough.
Asylum needs to be abolished altogether.
Current asylum law was invented in 1951 to deal with the fallout of World War II and the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
Three-quarters of a century later, it’s an anachronism, a Cold War relic out of place in today’s very different world.
Unlike refugee resettlement, which countries affirmatively choose to do (wisely or not), asylum represents a surrender of national sovereignty.
Instead of a country’s government deciding to bring in refugees, asylum means the illegal alien gets to decide, by claiming the legal right to stay in the country he has infiltrated — whether that country’s people like it or not.
When asylum involved the defection of a handful of Russian ballerinas, that surrender of national sovereignty was not a big deal.
But today, the USSR no longer exists. “Developing nations” are no longer ruled as European colonies, and their populations have exploded. Transportation and communication is cheaper than ever.
All that means asylum has morphed from a way of protecting individuals facing persecution into a vehicle for mass, nation-breaking illegal immigration.
Ending asylum in the United States will first require our withdrawal from the United Nations framework known as the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol.
To do so, President Donald Trump can simply give the UN Secretary-General one year’s notice — a move that the White House considered during Trump’s first term, but never followed through on.
But that alone won’t be enough: Congress must also amend the 1980 Refugee Act, which incorporated the UN treaties’ asylum provisions into US law.
The revised measure can eliminate any opportunity for an illegal alien to stay under any circumstances, by dismantling the asylum pipeline entirely.
A person who infiltrates the US border or overstays a visa and claims a fear of returning home to avoid deportation should have no right to remain.
Instead, anyone claiming fear of return should automatically be sent to a third country with which we’ve made arrangements.
Any illegal immigrant genuinely fleeing persecution will be grateful for sanctuary anywhere — any port in a storm.
But since claims of asylum are almost always bogus, that circumstance should be vanishingly rare.
This plan differs from the Remain in Mexico policy developed during the first Trump term and restarted in the second.
Under that arrangement, illegal immigrants still get to apply for asylum in the US, but are sent back across the border to await their hearing dates.
It’s a useful stopgap, but only that — because the ability to apply for asylum at all is the magnet drawing illegal migrants.
In fact, the Trump administration is already in talks with a number of countries to take in deportees whose home nations won’t take them back.
Applying that model to “asylum seekers” would be expensive at first, since we’d have to cover the host countries’ costs.
But once it became clear that shouting “Asylum!” was no longer the golden ticket to America but instead to Mongolia or Burundi, wannabe illegal aliens would look elsewhere.
Congress can adopt other measures, too, to keep a President Crockett or Newsom from reprising Biden’s border-busting.
Legislation should curb immigration parole, bar any president from giving work permits to illegals, and cap the number of appeals allowed in immigration-court cases.
But ending asylum would be the single most effective measure to limit illegal immigration now — and to take away the left’s most powerful tool in its never-ending crusade to erase America’s borders.
Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.