David Martin Saw the Asylum Crisis Taking Shape in the Early 1980s
By Jerry Kammer on June 24, 2019
Last July, in the midst of public uproar over the Trump administration's efforts to stem the tide of Central American asylum seekers, immigration scholar and former INS general counsel David Martin weighed in with a plea for reforms that would be humane, workable, and sustainable. Writing for Vox, Martin made the case that due process could be provided within a framework that would keep the system from being overwhelmed by the crush of troubled humanity from around the world.
Martin, now a law professor at the University of Virginia, is well grounded in the crisis besieging our system. In the 1990s he helped design badly needed reforms that set up a professionalized corps of asylum officers and buttressed the badly stressed immigration courts. As he wrote in a 2000 essay published by the Center that was an edited version of a speech he had given, those reforms deterred abuse and established a reassuring sense of order: "New asylum applications received by the INS declined from 150,000 in 1994 to 35,000 in 1999."
https://cis.org/Kammer/David-Martin-Saw-Asylum-Crisis-Taking-Shape-Early-1980s
