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How to solve the migrant crisis in 2 easy steps

How to solve the migrant crisis in 2 easy steps

Last updated on: October 30, 2023 at 8:26 pm by Jane the Actuary

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How to solve the migrant crisis in 2 easy steps 2023-10-30T20:26:55-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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The background: Chicago and New York are both dealing with migrant crises.

(Yes, this part of the blog post is from memory; I’m not going to dig out the sources now.)

In New York, the city has adopted a “right to shelter” ordinance that obliges the city to spend however much money it takes in order to provide shelter to anyone who seeks it. This may have been intended for a small(er) number of homeless people, with the intention that they would provide beds in homeless shelters; but the ever growing number of men, women, and children — but primarily men — claiming asylum and making their way to New York because of this promise, has created a tremendous financial burden, as well as, reportedly, leading to the city taking over hotels and destroying businesses (that is, when a hotel restaurant depends on guests as customers, or simply from the damage these men cause since, the reality is, many of them spend their days drug-dealing.

In Chicago, there is no official legislation promising to provide shelter, food, and healthcare to asylum-seekers but there is still the intent by the city to do so, and a belief that they are obligated to.

In both cases, the city blames Greg Abbott of Texas, but the buses organized by the state of Texas are only part of the story. The federal government and even Catholic Charities provide flights or bus rides to anywhere asylum-claiming migrants want to go, not just where they have an “official” sponsor but whatever family members or immigrant community they want to connect up with, or wherever they believe they will receive more benefits or have a better ability to work in one area or another.

Now those “blue state politicians” are howling, but rather than calling on Biden to stop releasing asylum-claimants, they are instead demanding that the federal government bear the cost of the commitments they have made.

So, yes, here’s my solution:

Provide for all the basic living necessities of asylum-claimants — shelter, clothing, food, medical care, schooling for children and ESL for adults —

but with a catch:

these shelters must come with very restricted come-and-go privileges. Children can attend school, but adults who leave (except for medical care, court appointments, etc.) forfeit their right to claim asylum. And, naturally, because of the cost of this endeavor, and the inappropriateness of obliging people to stay their long-term, this must be paired with a large scale-up in the hiring of immigration judges — and the hypothetical legislation establishing this system of shelters would need to affirm that economic conditions in one’s home country are not a sufficient basis for asylum. Of course, it goes without saying that anyone found ineligible for asylum must be deported immediately and any political barriers to that deportation must be lifted.

Is it “un-Catholic”? Even the most pro-immigrant of bishops and popes have acknowledged that a country does not have an unlimited obligation to let in would-be immigrants, but that it is entirely acceptable to “this much, and no more, immigration” to ensure that the country’s own citizens are not burdened.

And no bishop and no pope is an economist or a social scientist who can take the general principle of “love your neighbor” and claim to be the expert on what the impact of any particular immigration policy would be on the economy and society of the receiving country, beyond the honestly quite useless platitudes like “diversity is our strength.”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A100203houston_lg.jpg; By U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), www.ice.gov. Please credit by saying “Photo Courtesy of ICE”. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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