How Ukrainian Refugees Invaded the U.S. Southwest Border
- Edwin S. Rubenstein
- July 25, 2022
- Forum Papers
- Forum Paper
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How Ukrainian Refugees Invaded the U.S. Southwest Border
An NPG Forum Paper
by Edwin S. Rubenstein
July 2022
NPG, along with the vast majority of Americans, supports the Ukrainian people in their struggle to remain independent and free. This paper focuses on long-standing problems with U.S. refugee policy.
Refugees in general – Ukrainian or not – are accorded benefits not available to ordinary (legal) immigrants. For example: two years after being granted asylum, they can petition to have immediate family members join them as legal immigrants via the chain migration process. Legal immigrants must wait five years for this privilege.
Very few Americans are aware of this preferential treatment, or the troubling implications it has for U.S. population growth. Hopefully this paper will raise awareness of these issues.
INTRODUCTION
The U.S. has always been a safe haven for individuals fleeing persecution in their home country. In recent years, however, asylum has become a mass movement, available to any alien claiming persecution on account of race, religion, sexual identity, nationality, or political opinion.
Fear of persecution at the hands of an invading army is NOT, repeat, is NOT, among the legal pretexts for making a valid asylum claim in the U.S. The Biden administration refers to the 100,000 Ukrainians it wishes to resettle here as “humanitarian refugees,” a term denoting a moral, but not necessarily a legal, basis for entering the country.
There were 26.6 million refugees in the world in mid-2021, according to the U.N. The Russo-Ukrainian war has added about 7 million to that total, so we are looking at about 34 million refugees – each a potential asylee in the U.S. Under U.S. immigration law, a refugee is someone who requests protection while still overseas, while an asylee seeks protection when in the U.S. The difference is purely a matter of location.
Over the past decade an average of about 29,000 individuals per year have been granted asylum. That figure is trivial alongside the 1 million plus legal immigrants granted legal permanent resident (LPR) status annually, pre-COVID. Asylum grants, however, are the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Nearly 180,000 individuals apply for asylum each year, and a backlog of more than 330,000 asylum claims await adjudication. From 2010 to 2016, while the foreign-born population rose 9%, the asylum backlog more than doubled.
Compared to legal immigrants, asylees are on a fast track to citizenship. Two years after being granted asylum they can petition to have immediate family members – spouses, children, and parents – join them as legal immigrants via the chain migration process. Legal immigrants must wait five years for that privilege.
The inescapable conclusion: under current asylum laws asylees are on track to become the fastest growing segment of the foreign-born population.
Question: What do Ukrainian refugees know that the Russian army does not know?
Answer: How to exploit weaknesses in national border controls.
….Continue reading the full Forum paper by clicking here.
Ed Rubenstein, president of ESR Research, is an experienced business researcher, financial analyst, and economics journalist. He has written extensively on federal tax policy, government waste, the Reagan legacy, and – most recently – on immigration. He is the author of two books: The Right Data (1994) and From the Empire State to the Vampire State: New York in a Downward Transition (with Herbert London). His essays on public policy have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Newsday, and National Review. His TV appearances include Firing Line, Bill Moyers, McNeil-Lehr, CNBC, and Debates-Debates. Mr. Rubenstein has a B.A. from Johns Hopkins and a graduate degree in economics from Columbia University.
