The Slow and Silent Death of Asylum
Herika Martinez / AFP / Getty Images
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a “perfect storm” for the 80 million refugees around the world facing sudden poverty, declining humanitarian aid, and deteriorating health conditions in crowded camps. Instead of helping to address the plight of the world’s forcibly displaced, however, western governments – most notably the United States – have used the pandemic as an excuse to further restrict access to asylum. After 9/11, the government pushed a narrative of refugees as national security threats to limit the entry of asylum-seekers. In 2020, the pandemic has allowed the US government to justify its crackdown on refugee rights under the guise of public health concerns.
85% of displaced persons globally live in developing countries; many of them are employed in the informal sector and lack access to vital social services, including health care. In light of the global recession, refugees in developing countries have often been the ones hardest-hit by skyrocketing unemployment rates and rising poverty. Refugees living in makeshift camps are unable to abide by stringent social distancing rules and sanitary guidelines. To make matters worse, humanitarian aid agencies are facing a shortage of funding from governments and private donors.
But the situation may be even more dire for refugees on the move. As borders have closed around the world, people fleeing persecution and violence often have nowhere to go. As a result of the European Union’s border closures and suspensions of rescue operations in the Mediterranean, asylum applications in Europe have dropped to their lowest level in at least twelve years. Refugees are stranded outside Europe’s borders. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States has been leading the global pushback against displaced persons even more aggressively. The current administration has taken steps to “effectively abolish asylum as we know it,” as the Washington Post has written.
The recent restrictions on the right to asylum come as the culmination of a concerted effort on behalf of the Trump administration to cement its legacy of unbridled nationalism and immigration restrictions. In every year between the creation of the US Refugee Resettlement Program in 1980 and the inauguration of the current president in 2017, the US had resettled more refugees than the rest of the world combined. Since taking office, however, President Trump has lowered the ceiling for admitted refugees year after year. By 2018, the U.S. was no longer the world’s leading country in refugee resettlement. By 2019, the President limited annual refugee admissions to a meager 18,000 – down from the 110,000 target in the last year of the Obama administration.
At the same time, the government started hollowing out the country’s long-standing asylum system. In 2018, the US implemented a policy of “metering,” putting strict limits on the number of people allowed to apply for asylum on a given day. As a consequence, displaced persons stuck on the Mexican side of the border have at times had to wait as long as nine months only to submit their asylum claim. There, they often lack shelter, health care, and access to education and are frequently victims of violence and crime.
When the pandemic hit, the administration saw its chance to go one step further. Starting in March, it has used the public health emergency to enforce swift expulsions of asylum-seekers at the border without processing their claim to asylum. Acting Secretary Chad Wolf boasted that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now returns the majority of arrivals within only two hours. Ignoring existing laws protecting underage and unaccompanied migrants from speedy deportations, officials have expelled 96% of unaccompanied minors along the Mexican border. These deportations aggravate the humanitarian crises faced by displaced persons in northern Mexico and have potentially accelerated the spread of coronavirus to Central America. On July 16th, the DHS announced it would continue its policy of border expulsions and extended its suspension of asylum proceedings, once again citing public health concerns. Under international and domestic law, any person arriving in the United States is entitled to apply for asylum. Human rights organizations have argued that the government could keep strict public health regulations while upholding its legal and moral responsibilities towards refugees and asylum-seekers.
In an effort to extend these supposedly temporary restrictions on asylum access, the administration now wants to make lasting changes to the way asylum claims are processed in the United States. A new order proposed by Homeland Security on June 15th, if implemented, would lead to sweeping changes to the US asylum system. It would narrow the definition of “political opinion” and “persecution” as a basis of asylum to exclude certain political dissidents and people suffering persecution from non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations, from being granted asylum. It would also make it next to impossible for torture victims or people persecuted on the basis of gender or sexual orientation to claim asylum in the US. Perhaps most crucially, it deprives asylum-seekers of their right to have their case heard in court.
Over the past four years, the Trump administration has slowly but steadily worked to undermine the basic rights of asylum-seekers and refugees seeking protection in the United States. More recently, the government has quietly sought to remove the last remnants of the country’s legacy as a home for immigrants and refugees just as the pandemic imperils the lives and livelihoods of refugees around the world. From Greek camps and Libyan detention centers to temporary dwellings in northern Mexico, conditions for displaced persons around the world have gone from bad to worse. Now, more than ever, America must realize its promise as a beacon of hope and opportunity for people fleeing persecution – before it is too late.
Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/migrant-children-expelled-under-coranavirus-policy/
https://globalnews.ca/news/7163810/migrants-us-border-patrol-coronavirus/
https://www.hias.org/take-action-new-proposed-asylum-regulations
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/policy-brief-covid-19-and-people-move-june-2020
https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/76748
https://theconversation.com/why-refugees-are-an-asset-in-the-fight-against-coronavirus-136099