Ron DeSantis Is Making an Asylum Crisis of His Own
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Tyler Moran
@tyler_t_moran
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Great essay by @DLind -
The United States
is a sanctuary, or at least is supposed to be. While who deserves asylum has often been politically fraught question, the idea that some people do merit it was bipartisan.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Ron DeSantis Is Making an Asylum Crisis of His Own
Does America still embrace its international obligation to provide sanctuary to at least some unauthorized immigrants?
5:01 AM · Sep 27, 2022
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https://archive.ph/K76Cq
When nearly 50 migrants were lured onto a pair of planes in San Antonio and dumped on Marthas Vineyard this month, a sequence of events arranged by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, it was an escalation of what his fellow Republican governor, Greg Abbott of Texas, has been doing since spring: sending busfuls of migrants to sanctuary jurisdictions, ostensibly to protest what they call President Bidens open borders immigration policy.
Mr. DeSantiss stunt wasnt meant as a policy critique. If it had been, he would have had to acknowledge that by the logic he and other immigration hawks have been using for years he was encouraging future migration by (falsely) promising jobs and government benefits to migrants.
But even trollish stunts have consequences for policy debates. The broader the attacks by the Republican governors, the narrower the space of alternative policies they could support. By refusing to articulate what America ought to be doing on the U.S.-Mexico border, Mr. DeSantis is painting himself and his party into a corner where the only acceptable position will be rejecting the principle of asylum entirely.
Asylum has become a policy problem for both parties. The Biden administration is attempting to address complaints like those Republicans have made in the past that the system takes too long to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate asylum seekers. Republicans, meanwhile, are gleefully erasing any distinction between the two.
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