More than 1 Million Migrants Are in the U.S. Seeking Asylum

In this Sunday, July 28, 2019, photo, migrants in Tijuana, many from Cameroon, listen to n
AP Photo/Elliot Spagat
Neil Munro

A federal report reveals that 1.15 million asylum-seeking people are already living in the United States, even as Joe Biden’s 2020 platform promises to welcome many more migrants.

The resident number of asylum seekers is “enough to make them the 43rd largest state,” said a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies, which used federal 2019 data. According to the report:

There were 1,148,416 pending asylum cases in the United States — at a minimum. If those applicants were a state, they would be the 43rd largest in the United States, ahead of Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, the Dakotas, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming.

The federal number is roughly one out of 300 Americans or one out four 18-year-old Americans. It is roughly equal to the population of Dallas, Texas, or San Jose, California, and it hurts American employees by flooding the labor and housing markets.

And Joe Biden wants to admit many more refugees.

Biden’s 2020 plan promises to “reassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees,” wipe out President Donald Trump’s asylum reforms, let companies import more visa workers, and let mayors import temporary workers. Biden also wants to accelerate the inflow of chain migration migrants, end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.

In contrast, Trump is likely to reject migrants, narrow asylum claims yet further, and fund the transfer of migrants waiting in Mexico back to Latin American countries. His 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. For example, in many speeches, Trump generally ignores the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to Americans.

Asylum seekers are different from the illegal population of at least 11 million migrants, which includes about 8 million illegal workers.

The asylum seekers are legally allowed to stay in the United States, and most are allowed to get temporary work permits to compete against Americans for jobs. This means the asylum seekers are similar to the roughly 2 million temporary foreign workers who arrive via pipelines, such as the H-1B visa.

These three categories — 8 million working illegals, 1 million asylum seekers, and 2 million temporary workers — add roughly 11 million workers to the nation’s workforce of roughly 150 million workers. That is good for employers because the extra workers reduce employers’ need to compete for workers with offers of benefits and wage raises.

The three categories also add roughly 17 million consumers to Wall Street’s economic and housing forecasts, so spiking revenues and stock values.

The population of asylum-seekers consists of three groups, most who are stuck in backlogged approval processes:

Refugees: Federal law allows the Department of State to select foreign people overseas for refugee status, such as people displaced by wars in Somalia and the Congo. The department has selected almost 4 million people since 1980. This program is supported by progressives who want to promote divide-and-rule diversity in Minnesota and other states and by cheap-labor business groups who want a continued inflow of cheap labor. In many cases, the newly imported refugees are used to replace prior refugees who were injured at low-tech slaughterhouses.  This current inflow of refugees is now small because President Donald Trump set the 2019 inflow to 30,000.

Affirmative Asylum: In 2019, 130,132 people already in the United States asked the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for asylum, pushing the end-of-year backlog up to 598,692, according to the State Department’s annual report to Congress on refugees. Many of the applicants are illegal migrants who have been working in jobs and want to get legalized.

Defensive Asylum: Foreign people who are getting deported can ask the Department of Justice (DoJ) immigration judges for asylum.  That backlog has risen to 549,724, according to the CIS report, and has greatly slowed the deportation of economic migrants, illegals, and people who failed to win Affirmative Asylum. This category includes the migrants who arrive at the U.S. border from Latin America, India, or Africa, and who must first convince tUSCIS officials that they have a “credible fear” of persecution in their home country. If they pass the initial credible fear test, they can ask the DoJ judges for defensive asylum. In 2019, 105,439 people –mostly from Latin America — passed the initial test for credible-fear asylum requests.

These huge inflows have crowded out the public’s prior view of asylum as a remedy for foreign wars and disasters. In turn, the huge inflow has caused a massive drop-off since 2014 in public support for the acceptance of persecuted people.

In response, Trump has gradually reformed regulations to shrink the number of people who can apply for asylum or who can get work permits while they wait for asylum. Trump has also begun using a 1996 law to conduct “Expedited Removals” from the United States, which reduces detained illegals’ ability to plead for asylum.

Progressives denounce Trump’s curbs on asylum but have not suggested rules to exclude people who seek asylum for economic reasons. Mother Jones, for example, a left-wing outlet, has posted several articles lamenting the drop in accepted asylum claims:

Right now, it doesn’t matter how detailed, how plausible, how consistent your story is. It doesn’t even matter, in a basic sense, how true it is. Asylum is dead. And the power of stories—the one asylum seekers like Gaspar and Francisco tell to save themselves, the one the US government tells about the fairness of our laws, the one we tell ourselves about our goodness, our decency as Americans—died with it.

Open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control on American professionals, centralize technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and to get many progressive reporters to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.

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