DHS Sets 1-Year Delay of Work Permits to Asylum Migrants

Asylum seekers queue for a turn for an asylum appointment with US authorities in Ciudad Ju
HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has begun implementing a regulation that blocks and delays the award of work permits to migrants who ask for asylum.

The August 25 rule says migrants who ask for asylum at the border now must wait a year to get work permits. The rule also denies work permits to migrants who apply for asylum after they are caught sneaking across the border by border officers, who have committed felonies or domestic violence in the United States, or who have been caught driving while drunk or high.

Elite-backed pro-migration groups have filed a lawsuit against the rule, which aids blue-collar Americans.

The rule was drafted after department officials discovered that many migrants were getting work permits in just 30 days, or 180 days, once they were caught and quickly released at the border — even though their asylum pleas would not be heard in court for more than a year.

The promise of near-immediate work permits encouraged hundreds of thousands of economic migrants to make the expensive journey to the United States because it allowed them to quickly get jobs and repay their travel debts to the cartel-affiliated coyotes. The legal jobs also allow the hard-working migrants to hire coyotes to place their children into the “Unaccompanied Alien Children” pipeline for delivery to their residencies in the United States.

In 2019, 439,000 asylum-seeking migrants got new or renewed work permits, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“This rule is going back to a tried-and-true policy regarding asylum seekers,” said she said.

President Bill Clinton’s administration set the 180-day rule only to aid the few asylum seekers who were released when their asylum claims could not be quickly processed, she said. “The Clinton administration did not want to offer [quick] work permits as an incentive to make asylum claims,” she said.

But the huge rush of migrants to the border in 2018 and 2019 overwhelmed detention spaces, forcing the release of many migrants, she said. “Trump is reinstating a [no-incentive] principle that was adopted by the Clinton administration and was widely accepted as a sensible reform at the time.”

The new rule was implemented following a routine two-month delay after it was first published in June. The rule says:

The proposed amendments would make asylum applicants eligible to apply for employment authorization 365 calendar days from the date their asylum application is received. The 365-day period was based on an average of the current processing times for asylum applications which can range anywhere from 6 months to over 2 years

Elite-backed pro-migration groups are suing to block Trump’s rule, which helps American blue-collars get decent jobs at decent wages.

The board members of the two groups, the International Refugee Assistance Project and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, include former top officials in President Barack Obama’s administration, investment bankers, and prestigious lawyers.

CBS reported on one of the groups’ plaintiffs, who is a Central American migrant now living in Ohio:

As a single mother of two young children, including her nine-month-old U.S. citizen daughter, W.L. worries about her ability to support her family, particularly in the midst of a pandemic.

The asylum-seeking mother, who says she was a victim of sexual violence in her native Guatemala, does not have a permit to work legally in the U.S., and under a new Trump administration rule taking effect Tuesday, she will not be able to apply for one for the next seven months.

“We need work permits to cover our basic necessities, especially for our children,” W.L., who asked for her initials to be used rather than her full name, told CBS News in Spanish.

Wealthy people gain economically and politically from the continued inflow of the legal and illegal workers, who also serve them as consumers and renters, and by expanding divisive diversity throughout Americans’ society.

In contrast, the beneficiaries of Trump’s DHS rule include tens of millions of blue-collar Americans who have faced growing job competition and wage loss from many millions of legal and illegal migrants. The migrants have also helped drive up Americans’ housing prices, further disadvantaging white, black, and brown blue-collar families and their children.

The elites fund the pro-migration lawsuits because it “strikes their sense of social justice and their desire to help less-privileged people around the world, and because it feeds into the fantasy of what [they think] the U.S. asylum system is supposed to be doing,” said Vaughan. She continued:

They’re so insulated from reality that they don’t understand the effects this has on Americans and legal immigrants. They see these asylum seekers as willing workers who can take service jobs and factory jobs and think there will be no consequences for Americans. They see this as a free lunch with no downsides  — but they don’t have to compete with [the asylum seekers for jobs, their [grown] children don’t have to compete with them for jobs….. their children are not in the same schools.

Moreover, Vaughan added, the work permit rules are needed to help legitimate asylum seekers: “This is necessary to avoid abuse of our asylum system, and the beneficiaries will be legitimate asylum seekers .. .who will not have to wait long to have their claims heard.”

Trump has been “unstoppable” in trying to block the flow of migrants across the U.S. border, admitted Miles Taylor, a former DHS official who is organizing former officials to oppose Trump’s reelection. During an August 25 podcast report in theDailyBeast.com, Taylor said:

I’d actually just become the Deputy Chief of Staff [in 2018] and so before that I’ve been [Chief of Staff] John Kelly’s national security adviser, and so had been doing nothing immigration and was glad not to be doing immigration, because everyone who was doing immigration was just suffering daily at the President’s unstoppable obsession with building the wall and blocking caravans.

Trump’s border security policy helped push up wages for blue-collar Americans at a faster rate than white-collar wages. However, it still leaves millions of illegal migrants in the United States.

Trump’ focus on immigration makes sense, in part, because it is very popular and he can expand his vote total by expanding the turnout of non-college voters — including working-class blacks — in  battleground states:

Since June 2020, Trump also has begun to trim the huge inflow of white-collar visa workers who take jobs from huge numbers of U.S. college graduates. That is a late and incomplete response to his March 2016 promise: “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”

In contrast, Biden’s 2020 campaign is promising a nationwide amnesty for illegal immigrants, rapid increases in legal immigration, and a dramatic jump in refugee settlement. Biden also promises a temporary halt to border enforcement, the inflow of more visa workers, plus a green card giveaway to many temporary visa workers who already have taken jobs from American graduates.

Each year, roughly four million Americans turn 18 and begin looking for jobs and wages.

But the federal government helps CEO s and investors by inflating the labor supply with roughly one million new legal immigrants, and by allowing companies to keep roughly two million blue-collar and white-collar visas workers in jobs needed by Americans.

The labor force inflation is worsened by the resident population of at least eight million illegal migrant workers, and by the arrival of many new illegal migrants and so-called “overstay” people who do not leave the United States when their visas expire.

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