Migrants arriving at border soar 10-fold under Obama

By Leo Hohmann

 

asylum cases2

The number of migrants arriving at the U.S. border seeking asylum has soared dramatically in 2016 and is now about 10 times higher than it was in 2009, according to statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

That’s no coincidence, according to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies, but a direct result of a policy change that came from President Obama’s pen.

Asylum seekers must show a “credible fear” of returning to their home country for reasons of ethnic, religious or political persecution. But what’s changed is the way they are treated when they arrive at the U.S. border.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for CIS and author of the new report, says the reason for the surging asylum claims is clear, and it has nothing to do with persecution in Central and South America or India or Haiti for that matter.

It was in 2009 that Obama took executive action calling for asylum seekers to receive a grant of parole, meaning they would be welcomed across the border by waiting Border Patrol agents and encouraged to pursue their asylum claim, a policy commonly referred to as “catch and release.”

Before the 2009 edict, asylum seekers were detained and kept in custody pending a full review of their qualifications, as required by U.S. law.

Obama ignored U.S. law and chose instead to comply with U.N. rules, which will be explored later in this article.

asylum cases by year

A false facade of humanitarianism

Yet, if one listens to the explanations for the surge in asylum applications given by the administration and the many pro-immigrant advocacy groups, they will hear an emotional pitch for “compassion” on the poor refugees who are fleeing persecution in their homelands.

Nothing could be further from the truth, Vaughan says.

“If you read the statements from DHS and certainly from many of the advocacy groups working on immigration, the impression you get is that this phenomenon of more people arriving at the border seeking asylum is kind of a spontaneous phenomenon, more less a random phenomenon that’s occurring because of events in these migrants’ home countries that are driving them here, that they are fleeing oppression, when in fact this is not a random or spontaneous phenomenon at all,” says Vaughan.

“It is an organized process that is happening, facilitated in large part by criminal smuggling organizations, and in particular the policies that our government has, that enable people who reach our borders to succeed in being able to stay here for some indefinite period of time under the guise of seeking asylum.”

Watch Jessica Vaughan explain what’s driving the record influx of asylum seekers:

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Vaughan characterized the upward stream of asylum seekers as part of and “organized process.”

Rockefeller to the rescue

There have been many reports linking the increasing migrant flow into the U.S. and Europe to billionaire philanthropists such as George Soros and the Rockefeller family, both of whom run multiple foundations funding the globalist agenda of open borders.

David Rockefeller, age 101, is still at the forefront of funding globalist policies that encourage open borders. When these policies inevitably cause "shock" to cities, his family foundation stands at the ready to help mitigate the problem under the banner of the "resilient cities" program.
David Rockefeller, 101, is still at the forefront of funding globalist policies that encourage open borders. When these policies inevitably cause “shock” to cities, his family foundation stands ready to help mitigate the problem under the banner of the “resilient cities” program.

The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, is funding a project called the 100 Resilient Cities Network, which encourages cities to implement the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda. This agenda was approved last week at the Housing and Sustainable Urban Development conference, also called Habitat III, in Quito, Ecuador.

A total of 23 U.S. cities have already signed on to the Rockefeller-funded program, including Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Louisville, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, and smaller cities such as Berkeley, California; El Paso, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Nashville, Tennessee; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

See the full list of cities working with Rockefeller Foundation to implement the U.N.’s New Urban Agenda.

It is also of note that the United Nations in its 2030 Agenda calls for a “well organized” migration to aid “human mobility” across open borders. This agenda includes for the first time migrant rights to relocate to the country of their choice, as endorsed at Habitat III, attended last week by some 50,000 globalists seeking to advance the U.N.’s “New Urban Agenda.”

See WND’s previous report on the U.N.’s New Urban Agenda.

As Vaughan notes, the globalist strategy pushed by Obama and the Soros-funded, Rockefeller-funded immigrant-rights groups is to couch the rush of asylum seekers across borders as part of a humanitarian crisis. In reality, they are merely economic migrants seeking a better life in a wealthier country, whether that be Germany, France, England or America.

Read President Obama’s salute to the U.N. on “United Nations Day.”

This strategy is ingrained in the U.N.’s New Urban Agenda. Article 28 of that document states:

“We commit to ensure the full respect for human rights and humane treatment of refugees, internally displaced persons, and migrants, regardless of migration status, and support their host cities in the spirit of international cooperation, taking into account national circumstances, and recognizing that, although the movement of large populations into towns and cities poses a variety of challenges, it can also bring significant social, economic, and cultural contributions to urban life. We further commit to strengthen synergies between international migration and development, at the global, regional, national, sub-national, and local levels by ensuring safe, orderly, and regular migration through planned and well-managed migration policies and to support local authorities in establishing frameworks that enable the positive contribution of migrants to cities and strengthened urban-rural linkages.”

So, according to the U.N.’s new agenda for cities, migrants, regardless of their legal status, now have a right to asylum in the nation of their choice.

And, once they show up in the nation of their choice, they have a right to affordable housing and other services. This is made clear in Article 34 of the New Urban Agenda, which states:

“We commit to promote equitable and affordable access to sustainable basic physical and social infrastructure for all, without discrimination, including affordable serviced land, housing, modern and renewable energy, safe drinking water and sanitation, safe, nutritious and adequate food, waste disposal, sustainable mobility, healthcare and family planning, education, culture, and information and communication technologies. We further commit to ensure that these services are responsive to the rights and needs of women, children and youth, older persons and persons with disabilities, migrants, indigenous peoples and local communities as appropriate, and others that are in vulnerable situations. In this regard, we encourage the elimination of legal, institutional, socio-economic, or physical barriers.”

Migrants pay criminal smuggling organizations large sums to facilitate their passage through numerous safe countries in order to reach the U.S. border to claim a fear of return, according to Vaughan.

“Judging by current approval statistics from the immigration courts, ultimately few will be found qualified for asylum, but nearly all are allowed into the country, and they are not considered a priority for deportation under current policy,” she writes.

‘Credible Fear’ applications soaring

Late in 2013, Department of Homeland Security officials and members of Congress raised concerns that the number of aliens caught crossing the southwest U.S. border illegally or arriving at the ports of entry without a visa and seeking asylum had increased dramatically over the prior year.

Many came from Ecuador, host of the Habitat III conference and home to one of the world’s most permissive laws on migrants – it does not require them to have a visa.

The House Judiciary committee held a hearing in February 2014 to explore these concerns. At the hearing, it was noted that approval rates for the so-called “credible fear” reviews – the first step in the asylum process – had increased dramatically in the prior five years, reportedly to the point where about 90 percent of all applicants were approved.

It was further noted that USCIS had documented high rates of fraud in the asylum application pool; specifically, an internal audit found that only 30 percent of the audited asylum applications were fraud-free.

Although the law provides for arriving asylum applicants to be detained while awaiting a full review of their case, in reality most are released after their initial credible fear claim is approved. One of the first of many executive actions on immigration taken by the Obama administration was to institute a policy stipulating that, despite the law, newly arrived aliens whose credible fear claims were approved should be released on a grant of parole, even before the full review of their asylum applications. Prior to this time, grants of parole were reserved mainly for those with medical emergencies or those needed for law enforcement purposes.

Once released, asylum applicants are allowed to apply for a work permit after their asylum application has been pending 150 days, Vaughan said. In most cases, applicants wait several years for an asylum hearing before an immigration judge, and many ultimately skip out on that hearing.

Well-worn path from India, Haiti

asylum top countries of origin3

India is the only non-Latin American country to rank in the top five nationalities of asylum seekers reported by USCIS.

Vaughan found that the influx of Indians heated up in 2013 along the Arizona border, and shows signs of being organized or facilitated by smuggling organizations, with some paying as much as $35,000 to be guided to the Nogales area. In 2015, the number of Indian asylum seekers began to exceed the number arriving from Ecuador, long a source of illegal migration through Mexico.

The number of Haitians is also on the rise.

The number of Haitians arriving to seek asylum at the port of entry south of San Diego could soon surpass many of the other nationalities, Vaughan noted. According to one report, the Mexican government says more than 11,000 non-Mexicans, of which the majority are Haitians, arrived in the state of Baja California in recent months on their way to seek asylum in the United States. Of these, more than half have already gone to the United States, and 4,000 to 5,000 remain in Mexico waiting for their turn in a process now coordinated between the U.S. and Mexican governments.

Congress fails to act on legislation

In 2014, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would have addressed a number of the problems believed to be fueling the asylum surge, including strengthening the credible fear approval standards and addressing fraud problems. These reforms are constructive, but approval by both chambers of Congress appears unlikely in the near future.

The executive branch could act without Congress to stem the tide, but that would require enforcing U.S. law over U.N. law.

Leo Hohmann

Leo Hohmann has been a reporter and news editor at WND as well as several suburban newspapers in the Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, areas. He also served as managing editor of Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina. His latest book is "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration And Resettlement Jihad." Read more of Leo Hohmann's articles here.


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