I want to commend this analysis by George Fishman at the Center for Immigration Studies to your attention. After reading the summary I was prepared to do a complete fisking of the piece but after reading the whole thing I am much more favorably impressed.
The analysis considers “why asylum grant rates have been plummeting”, providing a number of plausible explanations including Mr. Dooley’s (translating from the transcribed Irish brogue): “The Supreme Court justices may hold tenure for life but they do read the election returns”.
My explanation, as is frequently the case, is the simplest: when the numerator remains about the same but you increase the size of the denominator sharply, ratios will “plummet”.
I learned something of which I was unaware in reading the article: the adjudication of asylum requests is not handled on a “first come first served” basis. Here’s an interesting quote:
So what is the average wait time for all asylum decisions by IJs — on the regular docket and on the dedicated docket, colloquially known as the “rocket” docket? TRAC reported that for asylum cases decided by IJs in fiscal year 2022, the average time to completion for dedicated docket cases was 276 days vs. 1,594 days for regular cases. Overall, TRAC provided data that indicated that 56 percent of all decisions involved a period from NTA to closure of over three years, 14 percent more than a year and a half to less than three years, 26 percent more than three months to less than 18 months, and 5 percent up to three months.
If wait times do not occur in a normal distribution, “average” and “median” assume different roles than they would if the distribution were normal. Basically, “average wait time” has no referent.
Some of the revelations in the analysis are shocking if not horrifying. For example:
Starting on May 11, 2023, asylum seekers who entered at the U.S.-Mexico border and who did not make an appointment using the CBP-One app are barred from asylum. Though there are some narrow exceptions, many migrants are being denied asylum because they failed to use the app, and I expect this contributes to the higher denial rate in court.
or this:
Simply put: the Biden administration’s parole policy allowed a lot of weak cases into the immigration court system. This is not the same as saying that these cases are fraudulent, nor does it imply that asylum applicants or their attorneys are acting in anything other than good faith. But it does mean that a lot of migrants were promised a bite at an apple that almost certainly was far out of reach.
If you hold a low opinion of the Biden Administration’s handling of immigration, the analysis should confirm your opinion. If you approve of the Biden Administration’s handling of immigration, the analysis may change your mind.
Just for the record I think we should admit more immigrants legally and with due consideration and that we should accept more asylum-seekers. I think that far fewer low=skill migrant workers with limited command of English should be allowed into the country illegally and that the causes for asylum are limited to those described in the statute. That doesn’t include poverty, low-paying jobs, or generalized crime and violence. As the analysis points out
The Biden administration stated that its goal to “was create additional safe and orderly processes for people fleeing humanitarian crises to lawfully come to the United States”. Well then, why didn’t his administration admit them as refugees? Because it well knew that they wouldn’t qualify — they simply did not face persecution. What they certainly faced were low wages and scarce job opportunities (compared to the U.S.) in their home or adopted countries. What they may have faced were gangs or generalized violence at home. But these are not grounds for refugee status. Ironically, many ended up in gang-infested U.S. cities with far higher murder rates than in their communities abroad.
