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August 18, 2021

Dear John,

Today, the Biden administration unveiled a proposed rule that would represent a fundamental reform of the U.S. asylum system, which is struggling to cope with rising requests from asylum seekers arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

As my colleague Doris Meissner notes in a new commentary: "Today's asylum system is failing both by undermining U.S. obligations in domestic and international law to protect those fleeing from persecution and by undermining the ability to ensure orderly and predictable control of entries at the border."

The proposed rule would shift asylum decisions in border cases from the immigration courts, where huge backlogs can mean waits of several years for a decision, to asylum officers who are specially trained to decide protection claims. While this appears to be a technical processing change, at base the plan would help preserve asylum as a bedrock element of the U.S. immigration system while also recognizing that a credible immigration system requires both deterring unlawful entry and ensuring the right to seek humanitarian protection.

The administration's announcement today owes its origins to policy recommendations that Doris and co-authors made in a seminal 2018 report (available here: [link removed]). We at MPI are committed to advancing policy solutions that can ensure fairness, efficiency, and consistency in the U.S. immigration system.

The commentary is available here: www.migrationpolicy.org/news/biden-asylum-processing-proposed-rule.

With best regards,

Andrew Selee
President
Migration Policy Institute

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The Migration Policy Institute is an independent, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. MPI provides analysis, development, and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at the local, national, and international levels. For more on MPI, please visit www.migrationpolicy.org.
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