Imagine for a second that you are a young adult living in East Africa. You have a big and loving family and while things are not exactly going well, you and your family are managing the best that you could.
Now imagine that your country’s government is unstable and gets deposed by Marxist-Leninists, leading to a revolution and a civil war so violent and bloody that many tens and hundreds of thousands of people are permanently affected, many losing their lives, livelihoods and to a certain extent their national pride.
What do you do while all of this unfolds? What do you do when at the same time that this is happening, another war is raging on with a neighboring nation from the North and the people all around the country, from its main cities to small villages in rural areas are scared and losing hope? What do you do when crime skyrockets and militias terrorize the people? Where do you go when your nation is not looking out for you or the people you care about? You run?
That was just a glimpse of what life was like during the 1970’s in Ethiopia: our king was overthrown and a communist government was instituted. The person whom I was basing my story off of was my uncle, who at the ripe age of 17, left Ethiopia and ventured for the Americas. Several years later, he made it by walking south to South Africa, taking a plane from there to Brazil and walking the rest of the distance up to the United States.
I mention all of this to say that people immigrate for complex reasons and that asylum seekers don’t make this perilous journeys and leave everything they know behind for no reason. There are many people across developing nations of the world like my uncle, whose only viable option was to leave everything behind to survive.
As such, the asylum crisis in America is also a multifaceted issue. There is a loud minority of people who are staunchly against accepting in more asylum seekers, and many even go as far as saying that there should be no people admitted in. When one is within the golden gates of our country, it is hard to relate to or empathize with those who are not.
The United States is the land of opportunity, the land of the free and the land that accepts the tired and the poor. All that being said, it is important to evaluate the crisis from a very wide lens and address the many arguments and concerns surrounding it. The major ones tend to be arguments on legality, the economics and the change that accepting people brings to America.
An asylum seeker is loosely defined as a person either fleeing or forcefully displaced from their country. In the United States, the first thing that people do when they hear asylum seekers is that they conflate it to an immigrant, specifically from a Latin American nation. Whether this is through pure or malicious ignorance, that is not entirely the case. Much of the discourse surrounding the matter brings forth a lot of back and forth and devolves to a very narrow-minded approach to something that affects millions of lives.
That being said, let’s dispel two very common and key notions. First off, approaching the US-Mexico border and asking for asylum is the legal way to do so per the UN Refugee Convention. An asylum seeker can legally only apply for asylum once they have reached the country that they seek to apply to. Therein lies the Catch 22: to apply for asylum you must be at the country you want to apply to, but in the eyes of the many, crossing the border to do so is equated to sin.
Legality aside, another big concern surrounding the crisis and whether to let more people in is simply that there is a fear that jobs will start to go their way instead of the American people. Even more so, people tend to fear that by that being the case, wages will start to go down across the USA.
Addressing the first concern, the asylum seekers are not seeking to maliciously take people’s jobs and hurt their livelihoods. They are a diligent population who would do anything and everything to put food on the table for their families, and as such, tend to take the jobs that quite frankly we’re not going to be filled anyway. According to the Pew Research Center, this includes jobs like agricultural workers, ceiling tile installers, chauffeurs and other manual labor jobs. As for the second point, according to research done by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania finds that though “some policymakers have blamed immigration for slowing U.S. wage growth since the 1970s, most academic research finds little long-run effect on Americans’ wages.” The immigration rate has not had a bearing on the wage rates for the perceivable length of time within the asylum crisis that could have been conceived as a thing.
There will most likely never be a time when all the people that seek to live in the United States are allowed to, and there is no guarantee that the decades year-long waiting lines for people from places like Mexico and other Latin American countries will get any shorter within the coming years. The severity of the asylum crisis can be lessened by maintaining a better immigration system, especially at the border where so much strife is sprouting and by promoting the message of empathy across the nation on the lives of asylum seekers.
Article by MoCo Student staff writer Yeabsira Moges of Wheaton High School
Photo Courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol