Dear Friend,
In the news, we have heard a lot about the crisis of migration at our southern border. I want to talk to you about real solutions to deal with the issue on the level of symptom but also root cause.
No wall is going to solve this issue. No increased militarism at the border is going to solve anything. The vast majority of illegal drugs coming through the border are coming through legal ports of entry, and many of the migrants coming through the border are actually asylum seekers who surrender themselves at legal ports of entry.
On the level of symptoms, we need to streamline our failing asylum system. It currently takes asylum seekers five or six years to get a court date. We need to hire far more asylum officers and judges, and we need to give jurisdiction to asylum officers to adjudicate these cases on their own so that we can have much faster and fairer hearings.
On the level of root cause, we need to think about why so many people are migrating in the first place. And no one in Washington wants to admit that, too often, the causes lie at least indirectly with U.S. foreign policy and intervention in Latin America. We must rectify this harm. |
