Advocacy Update
November 2006

Barnacle Bills and the Migration-Asylum Nexus
By Matt Wilch, LIRS Senior Counsel for Policy and Advocacy

Amidst all the advocacy on comprehensive immigration reform this year, one of the most successful efforts has been the fight against enforcement-only legislation. Such legislation, including H.R. 4437, would have criminalized our services and volunteer works of mercy, allowed indefinite detention, barred at-risk youth from asylum, and reduced due process for noncitizens. The House pushed H.R. 4437, and some members packaged sections of it as amendments to attach to must-pass appropriation legislation, like barnacles on the bottom of a ship sailing into port.

H.R. 4437 would have made the immigration system even more broken for immigrants who have come here for a better life—for family, work or freedom. Even worse, its passage would have had a devastating impact on asylum seekers coming here for refuge. This potential impact illustrates the risk to asylum seekers posed by the “migration-asylum nexus”: the presence of asylum seekers mixed in with larger migrating groups. Yet as governments expand enforcement to control migration, they often fail to recognize refugees or to provide them with protection.

For example, both H.R. 4437 and one of the “barnacle” bills would have mandated expansion of expedited removal to extend across the entire U.S. northern and southern borders. Since current policies were enacted in 1996 LIRS has objected to expedited removal as unfair to all, especially to asylum seekers. Expedited removal is a process that U.S. immigration officials use at international airports and border ports of entry to determine whether someone without proper documents should be expelled. Most people subject to the process see only a low-level enforcement officer—no lawyer, no judge, no courtroom. Asylum seekers are disproportionately subject to the process since most need false documents to flee their homelands. Protections are supposed to be built into the system; those who express fear of returning home are supposed to get hearings to determine whether their claims to asylum are credible.

The congressional U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) concluded in a 2005 study that the expedited removal process has “serious and systemic problems in the implementation…. Some of these problems may result in the improper removal of refugees to countries where they may face persecution. In addition, asylum seekers are being detained in inappropriate conditions.” USCIRF recommended that the system not be expanded unless these flaws are fixed, that legal orientation programs be made available in all detention centers, that only nonprison facilities be used to hold asylum seekers when necessary, and that asylum seekers be released from detention unless they are a danger or flight risk.

With the help of the immigrant and faith-based communities H.R. 4437 was defeated along with most of its barnacle progeny, including the effort to expand the unfair and flawed expedited removal process. We thank you and ask for your continued partnership in defeating unfair and inhumane legislation such as this if it arises in the fall’s lame-duck session or in the new Congress.

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