Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) is one of the primary sponsors of an anti-immigrant bill that the White House supports and one of the Senate’s leading immigration hardliners. He also revealed on Friday that he has no idea how asylum, a crucial prong of our immigration system, actually works.
I applaud the administration’s efforts to fix our broken asylum system. Individuals with valid asylum claims should apply in their home countries or a safe third country, not by showing up at our border.
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) November 9, 2018
It’s not clear what Cotton is even talking about here — he gets both our current system and how the Trump administration seeks to alter that system wrong.
“Asylum” is a form of relief the United States extends to foreign nationals who are persecuted in their home country based on their “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Though federal immigration law provides two distinct processes that an immigrant may use to obtain asylum, both require the immigrant to be “physically present in the United States,” or at least to arrive at an American border.
So a system requiring asylum seekers to “apply in their home countries or a safe third country” would be a fundamental shift away from existing law.
Nor does the Trump administration appear poised to make this shift. Last week, the Trump administration posted a regulation that would make it harder for asylum seekers who cross into the United States from Mexico between ports of entry to obtain asylum. But even if this new regulation is upheld by the courts, it does not do what Cotton suggests — that is, it does not change our immigration law to require asylum seekers to apply from another country.
Indeed, it should be obvious why such a system would not be desirable from the perspective of an immigration hardliner like Tom Cotton. Physically traveling to the United States is hard, while applying for asylum outside the United States would be, for many potential asylum seekers, much easier. Under the system Cotton envisions, the immigration system would be overloaded with applications from foreign nationals located in other countries who figure it is worth taking a shot.
Meanwhile, the class of immigrants who are most in need of asylum —those who face very real threats of persecution in their home nation — will be too busy fleeing that persecution to pause to file an application for asylum with the U.S. government.
The system Cotton envisions, in other words, would overburden our immigration system with marginal applications, potentially lead to more foreign nationals being admitted to the United States due to the sheer volume of these applications, and would be likely to exclude the most worthy applicants.