This morning, Daniel Horowitz of Conservative Review tweeted out a highly revealing excerpt from a piece at the local CBS affiliate in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
The excerpt: “‘The whole world knows, it’s all over the news, everyone knows that if we come to the United States they’ll help us,’ said Mayra Aguilar, an immigrant from Honduras.”
“The whole world knows,” CBS quotes Mayra Aguilar as saying. Spreading the word to the globe about our asylum openness would not pose a problem for legitimate would-be asylum seekers — those who, under 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i), are persecuted in their native countries for “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” But it does pose a problem for economically motivated migrants who do not properly qualify for asylum under our current statutory law. Consider more of the CBS affiliate’s piece, and dubious qualification is what appears to be the case here:
[Aguilar] says the family migrated because they were being extorted by criminal organizations after refusing to cut gang members a portion of their taxi family business profit.
She decided to head to the United States after seeing advertisements on her local news outlets about free opportunities.
“We saw it on the news, television,” Aguilar said.
Our cameras found dozens of immigrants who said the same, they crossed because of Free American services and assistance being advertised in their home countries.
“We were told by the newspaper, that if a father brings his child they would help us here in the United States,” said a Guatemalan man who says he’s a pastor. …
One woman from Honduras said she needed to pay the smuggler in order to find a job in the United States to send money back to her family.
“For my family, to go further in life, we just want a better life.”
Furthermore, as The Daily Wire has previously reported, there is no positive correlation between homicide rates in the “Northern Triangle” that serves as the source for much of the current border crisis — the three nations of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — and U.S. border crossings emanating from those nations. The Daily Wire quoted the Center for Immigration Studies to note the following:
In Honduras, murder rates have fallen by over half since 2011 — from 86.5 per 100,000 to 42.8 per 100,000 in 2017. During that same time, the annual number of apprehensions of Hondurans at the U.S.-Mexico border quadrupled, albeit with fluctuations. …
Guatemala saw a very similar trend, with murder rates falling from 38.6 per 100,000 to 19.0 per 100,000 between 2011 and 2017. At the same time, the annual number of Guatemalan apprehensions more than tripled — from approximately 18,000 to 66,000. …
El Salvador’s murder rate has seen large annual year-to-year swings, as low as 40 per 100,000 in 2013 and then more than doubling to over 100 per 100,000 in 2015. Meanwhile, the number of Salvadoran border apprehensions has risen dramatically, peaking in 2016.
Alas, “the whole world” apparently “knows” about our porous asylum regime.