BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MI – Presidents have always made news. But you could argue that Donald Trump dominates the news daily like no president has before, from his first predawn tweets to his latest moves on North Korea and the Mueller report.
But while some things he does get an immense amount of attention, many of his policy moves get less, possibly precisely because his oversized personality demands so much attention.
As a result, few noticed last week when the President announced new restrictions on those seeking asylum in this nation — or at least those on our Southern, or Mexican border.
He wants them to be charged a fee — how much we don’t yet know — and he wants to put new restrictions on their ability to work while waiting to see if their asylum applications are granted.
Exactly how this would all work isn’t clear; he gave administration officials till the end of July to draw up regulations.
That may sound reasonable to many of his supporters, if they believe the President’s assertions that the nation is about to be overrun by hordes of immigrants surging across the border.
But allowing unrestricted immigration, or even immigration for people who want a better life, isn’t what asylum means.
In the United States, asylum means granting entry only to people who can show they have a reasonable fear of persecution in their own country because of their religion, race, nationality, social group or political opinion – whatever their opinions may be.
Americans have always recognized a right of asylum, in part for reasons that have to do with the founding of America. Those who came over on the Mayflower in 1620 weren’t doing so for their health or to get rich in real estate. They were escaping religious persecution.
And when he heard about President Trump’s new proposed restrictions on asylum, Dr. Stanley Levy, an elderly internist in the Detroit suburbs, got very mad. When he was at Princeton University during World War II, he was befriended by an elderly refugee.
The man had come to America a few years ago, fearing for his life after he had been persecuted and his books burned at his home.
That refugee was also from an ethnic group that was then looked down on by many upper-class Americans.
But we allowed him to stay. You may have even heard of him.
His name was Albert Einstein.
When World War II began in Europe, he wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt which led to the United States developing the atom bomb first, ahead of the Nazis.
“What Trump wants to do about asylum is an outrage,” said Levy, who now has a vast library, much of it devoted to Einstein.
“FDR had the four freedoms, and Trump is trying to take them away from us,” Levy fumed. To be fair, when it comes to the right of asylum, the United States hasn’t always lived up to its ideals.
Even President Roosevelt didn’t always do the right thing when it came to asylum; in 1939, his administration refused to allow entry to more than 900 Jewish refugees aboard the German ocean liner St. Louis. They were forced to return to Europe, where many died in the Holocaust, a blot on the record of FDR and the United States.
While there is no legal limit on the number of people who can be granted asylum in America, in recent years it has been relatively small – around 20,000 a year.
Detroit, perhaps surprisingly, has long been a place where many refugees have come to seek asylum. That may be partly because it shares an international border with Canada, and is an international city in its own right, thanks to the St. Lawrence Seaway.
But since the early 1980’s, hundreds of asylum seekers have been helped by a non-profit group called Freedom House (originally the Detroit-Windsor Refugee Coalition) which gives refugees food, shelter, counseling and helps them apply for asylum in the United States, and occasionally Canada.
In recent years, they’ve never had one of their refugees denied asylum, though it sometimes takes well over a year for their cases to come before the immigration court in Chicago.
Deborah Drennan, Freedom House’s CEO, told me that most of her refugees arrive virtually penniless, with little more than the clothes on their back and the address of her shelter in Detroit.
The group’s chief operating officer, Elizabeth Vasquez, said that the Trump administration’s proposal to charge fees for asylum seekers and make it harder for them to work “is yet another attempt to create unwanted barriers for individuals in the United States lawfully seeking asylum.” This, she added, “goes against our values as a nation and our obligations under international law.”
The United Nations long ago recognized the right to asylum and the duty of nations to grant it, in an agreement – the 1951 Refugee Convention — the United States signed.
Refugees, study after study has found, tend in the long run to be job creators, rather than those who take jobs from the native born.
Instead of making it harder for asylum seekers, Vasquez said we should recognize that many are potential citizens “who should be given the opportunity to being building their own lives in the United States and contributing economically to our communities.”
Clearly, the President disagrees.
What happens when and if his new regulations appear may tell us a good bit about the kind of country we are.
