If approved, the plan would direct the government to screen thousands of children and youths in Honduras to see if they can enter the United States as refugees or on emergency humanitarian grounds. It would be the first American refugee effort in a nation reachable by land to the United States, the White House said, putting the violence in Honduras on the level of humanitarian emergencies in Haiti and Vietnam, where such programs have been conducted in the past amid war and major crises.
Critics of the plan were quick to pounce, saying it appeared to redefine the legal definition of a refugee and would only increase the flow of migration to the United States. Administration officials said they believed the plan could be enacted through executive action, without congressional approval, as long as it did not increase the total number of refugees coming into the country.
(Snip)
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration, said that the proposal would increase, not stem, the flood of migrants from Central America trying to get into the United States.
“It’s clearly a bad idea,” Mr. Krikorian said. “Orders of magnitude more people will apply for refugee status if they can just do it from their home countries.”
He added that the proposal would allow people to claim to be refugees from their countries with “nothing more than a bus ride to the consulate. We’re talking about, down the road, an enormous additional flow of people from those countries.”
The preliminary plan could create a thorny challenge for the administration because the definition of a refugee is legally specific, and children fleeing street gangs could have a hard time qualifying.
Under American law, refugees are people fleeing their country of origin based on fears of persecution by reason of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
So, Obama’s “bizarro-land” solution to the surge of illegal “children” immigrants is to declare all the children in these nations as “possible refugees” while still in their home nations, so as to expedite them being shipped to the US. And have potential “refugees” verified, not by US authorities, but by international organizations like the International Organization for Migration. Taking the Constitutional power and authority to regulate immigrants to the US out of the hands of the Federal Government, and into the hands of an international body. (A plan similar to a recent bill introduced by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona.)
Americans need to light up the Congressional switchboards over this one.
