Western governments should “scrap” asylum laws and instead aid migrants closer to their home countries, says The Economist, a pro-globalist site for investors.
The scrapping of asylum is presented by the magazine’s London editors as a compassionate policy that ensures more aid to migrants close to their home countries:
Looking after refugees closer to home is often much cheaper. The UN refugee agency spends less than $1 a day on each refugee in Chad. Given limited budgets, rich countries would help far more people by funding [overseas] refugee agencies properly — which they currently do not — than by housing refugees in first-world hostels or paying armies of lawyers to argue over their cases.
However, the magazine’s concession is ultimately intended to divert voters’ rising anger away from legalized migration. “Fear of border chaos has fueled the rise of populism, from Brexit to Donald Trump, and poisoned the debate about legal migration,” the editors wrote in the cover story.
President Joe Biden welcomed 10 million migrants under the vague justification that they deserved asylum. But that policy helped elect Donald Trump — and has helped focus public opinion on the damage caused by legalized migration.
The magazine pleads for more white-collar and blue-collar legalized migrants in place of the rejected asylum seekers:
[Scrapping asylum] should restore order at the frontier, and so create political space for a calmer discussion of labour migration. Rich countries would benefit from more foreign brains. Many also want young hands to work on farms and in care homes, as Ms. Meloni proposes. An orderly influx of talent would make both host countries and the migrants themselves more prosperous.
“Public criticism of the postwar asylum system was tantamount to Holocaust denial… last year,” noted one online critic. “But then an article like this comes, and suddenly it’s normal.”
Voters in many countries are demanding curbs on their self-destructive, decades-old asylum systems.
The Economist editors’ plea for a greater inflow of legalized migrants is a tough sell to citizens asked to bear the social, public safety, and workforce impacts for the sake of inflated corporate balance sheets.
The smaller number of asylum migrants would be less destructive and more manageable than the far greater inflow of legalized migrants.
For example, legalized migration prevents the normal labor shortages that pressure employers to raise wages and to invest in labor-saving machinery. The result is a higher stock market and a bigger government ruling over a chaotic zone of lower wages, more diversity, shorter lifespans, fewer opportunities. and impoverished neighbors.
Pro-migration proposals normally hide the business demand for more legalized migrants. For example, Jason Houser, a former official in the Biden administration, simply ignored the numbers question as he offered a July 10 plan to greatly expand legal processing for migrants:
Democratic leaders in Congress must now take a firm stance in response to a [budget] law that is taking our country in the wrong direction. This is the moment to speak, legislate boldly, and lead with a vision of a functional and humane immigration system that meets America’s needs.
Similarly, on July 6, two DC advocates pushed a plan that would supposedly narrow asylum and lock up the border — and also invite millions of immigrant workers from India and other countries.
The plan was drafted by the president of the influential Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden, and the center’s senior director of immigration policy, Debu Gandhi. Tanden was a top advisor to Joe Biden, and Gandhi formerly worked for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il).
Their plan claims that it “Secures and controls the border to stop illegal immigration,” but then calls for many alternative legalized routes for migrants to help inflate the economy for the benefit of investors, government agencies, and tax collectors.
In contrast, leading GOP and business leaders are sketching plans to expand opportunities for Americans in a high-productivity, high-wage economy.
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