Biden Is Destroying the Immigration Courts
A possible solution by going back to the past
By Andrew R. Arthur on April 12, 2023
In a March 28 post, I explained that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently forced the Biden administration to amend the 18-year-old “Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement” (STCA) to protect Canada’s well-calibrated asylum system from third-country migrants pouring over the border via the United States. The Biden administration has no such concerns about the U.S. asylum system — and it’s destroying our immigration courts. Reinvigorating the old “special inquiry officer” process may fix the mess Biden has wrought.
The STCA and Canada’s Asylum System. As the Council on Foreign Affairs has noted:
Canada’s geography — bordered by three oceans and the United States, which is itself a magnet for immigrants — has helped Ottawa limit flows of undocumented people. Its highly regulated immigration system, including some of the world’s strictest visitor-visa requirements, is designed to further curb this phenomenon.
On paper, at least, the United States has a “highly regulated immigration system”, too. But more than two years into the current administration, that system is, like movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn’s description of an oral contract, “not worth the paper it’s written on”.
That said, the STCA is key to the orderliness of the Canadian immigration system. As originally written, it barred asylum claims by third-country nationals who arrived at Canada’s ports of entry from this country (subject to family exceptions) unless they first applied for and were denied asylum here (and vice versa).
https://cis.org/Arthur/Biden-Destroying-Immigration-Courts
