Supreme Court’s asylum decision is a ‘recipe for chaos,’ experts say

Graciela Zamudio: I think the solution is that both countries comply with the law. The US is bound to international law — as well as Mexico — in terms of allowing people who have started an asylum process in their territory to remain there. And the fact that Mexico is allowing this also makes the country responsible for all the violations of human rights that people in this situation are suffering. Most of them don’t have access to legal representation, which in the US asylum-seeking process is basically the recipe to lose it.

Zamudio: Well that would definitely be something very good to do. Being such a powerful country and putting so much money in things like militarizing the border, it makes me feel that what we are facing is an unwillingness of the state to actually solve the problem. They can put all the money in making the system actually work the way the law says it should. Because in this situation in which we are, Mexico is basically like plastic bags on the street on a windy day. We’re just going from one side to the other without really establishing what we want to be our international policy on migration issues. 

Cris Ramon: We’re going to see a repeat of what happened in the European refugee crisis. Mexico is going to have to start taking on more migrants because of this regulation, and that can cause serious strains on social infrastructure, social safety nets, jobs, the economy and push a country that’s already starting to push back against the reception of migrants — Mexican polling shows that they’re very much in favor of a hardline position — push that Mexican public … to make a potentially larger [push]. And we saw this in Europe, especially in Greece and Italy where the Dublin III regulations — which is a first-entry agreement across the EU — pushed back migrants into Greece and Italy during the initial stages of that crisis. And what you saw is the same effects: understaffed, unresourced asylum agencies struggling to manage these flows, people becoming a lot more critical about the way it’s being managed, and the impact on civil society and social safety nets, and then eventually starting to embrace more hardline xenophobic positions. So that’s the concern I have with what’s going to happen in Mexico.

Ramon: I think that’s also what’s going to happen. I think we have two scenarios that we could potentially see happen. …Central American migrants are going to look at this and say, “You know what. I think it’s time for us to no longer apply for asylum but to actually just get past CBP entirely.” Up until this point we’ve been seeing these migrants arriving at ports of entry or presenting themselves to CBP officers between ports of entry to seek asylum regardless of whether they had an eligible claim or not. But now I think we might be seeing these individuals trying to just simply pay the smugglers to get them into the United States and which is what we saw prior to this recent wave of individuals arriving at the US-Mexico border. That’s always been the case historically.

Ramon: Exactly. There’s another riskier route. Right now it’s hypothetical, but I’m going be curious to see what happens. What happens if you want to take a boat from Guatemala and then go try to find it — you know, part of California, Texas — to try to find a way into that and then try to seek asylum? That’s a lot more hypothetical, but I think one of the things that we’ve seen with other large-scale migration crises is that if you shut off one way for individuals to enter a country to seek asylum, sometimes they will find other ways. We saw this in the European refugee crisis: Once the eastern flank of Europe was sort of closed off more individuals took riskier routes through the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy. And that’s the question here are people going to take even riskier routes than they already have because of this decision and because of this regulation?