CHAOS AND MISUNDERSTANDING OF REFUGEE STATUS AT OUR SOUTHERN BORDER.

Like so many of our nation’s knotty problems our past governments simply swept them under the rug and waited until their term in office expired.  The problems grew and became more complex not less. A fine example is the immigration fiasco.

Now under Mr. Trump this problem has erupted like a giant carbuncle under our national saddle.  Something must be done.

One of the tangled knots is how do we handle “asylum seekers” and “refugees”.  There are international agreements in this regard.   We are a signatory nation to the 1951 UN protocol on refugees.

That agreement requires a nation to offer temporary asylum if refugees  are fleeing from persecution due to race, ethnicity, religion, etc. etc.  Theses folks rightly should not be turned away at the border of the nation from which they are fleeing so that they are forced to go right back into the circumstances from which they are attempting to escape.

But the circumstances at our Mexican border are different.  No one is fleeing from prosecution in Mexico.   Once these refugees from Panama, Equadoran, Honduras, Nicaragua, etc step over the border into Mexico...it is Mexico which has the legal responsibility to provide them with shelter and temporary refugee status.  Mexico shirks on that responsibility and permits (some say encourages) these folks to pass through their nation. They freely ride the national railways north.  They continue through Mexico and attempt to make illegal entry into the USA on our southern border.  When they appear at our border the vast majority  are no longer “refugees” from violence or persecution—requiring a legal hearing and adjudication.  They have made a decision about where they want to go—now they are simply economic migrants and have not rights to legal protection as refugees. .  We have no responsibility to take them in.

Mr. Trump is correct.  We can and should simply send them back to Mexico.

Say no to “open borders”..it is a prescription for chaos.