The immigration deal is wrong. Asylum seekers aren’t bargaining chips for foreign aid | Opinion
This September, I met a young mother living in a migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico. She fled Russia with her daughter and traveled for months, landing in Tijuana to seek asylum in San Diego — the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. They lived in a simple but welcoming shelter for families of Muslim faith fleeing war and conflict.
Thinking about my own daughter of the same age, I choked back tears as she shared how they were coping: “We are good. I now have a place for my daughter to play and sleep. Here we have food and are finally safe.”
This mother is among the hundreds of thousands of migrants awaiting asylum proceedings in Mexico. But members of Congress want to turn away asylum seekers like her. On Dec. 6, Senate Republicans blocked President Biden’s emergency supplemental budget request, including billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, the Indo-Pacific, and border enforcement.
Republicans’ response tied the supplemental budget to concessions on border policy, including restrictions on asylum. For weeks now, a bipartisan group of Senators has been negotiating a deal that would drastically change U.S. immigration and asylum law.
No matter where we are from, we should be alarmed by these attempts to radically and permanently alter our immigration system — all while using asylum seekers as bargaining chips.
People fleeing persecution, violence, war, and human rights violations, like the mother I met in Mexico, have the right to seek asylum in the U.S. This right is embodied in the 1951 Refugee Convention and the U.S. 1980 Refugee Act stating that “the United States will not remove non-citizens on U.S. soil who fear return to their country due to likely loss of life or freedom for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political belief, or membership in a particular social group.”
Impeding this right will not only put migrants in danger, it will cost some their lives. It will also disproportionately impact those who are already marginalized globally, especially Black, Brown and Indigenous people.
Immigration is a personal issue for many in Washington state, where 30% of residents are immigrants themselves or have at least one parent who is an immigrant. Furthermore, immigrants fuel our economy – Washington state ranked 6th in the nation in a study comparing the economic impact of foreign-born populations.
This isn’t a distant crisis only affecting border communities near Mexico. Over the past year, nearly 500 asylum seekers including dozens of children and pregnant women, primarily from Angola, Venezuela, and Congo, have found refuge at the Riverton Park United Methodist Church in Tukwila. Reporting in 2019 found that Benton and Franklin counties welcomed more than 3,500 refugees over the past three decades. When President Trump slashed the amount of refugees permitted to enter the U.S., Tri-Cities governments boldly voted to keep their doors open for refugees to resettle in the region.
These immigrants are precisely the asylum seekers who would be turned away if Congress accepts the anti-immigrant concessions on the table.
Lawmakers holding the supplemental budget hostage claim these concessions will “protect our border” and uphold national security. My trip to Tijuana was part of an immigration workshop hosted by the Truman National Security Project. Our delegation to the border made clear: we have a moral and legal obligation to protect vulnerable people seeking asylum in the U.S. In fact, the right to seek asylum is supported by nearly 74% of Americans.
After significant delays, Senate negotiators are working swiftly to find a deal that would deliver vital aid to countries like Ukraine, punting the vote to 2024. Meanwhile, the world is watching while vulnerable migrants hang in the balance. As President Zelensky warned, “When the free world hesitates, that’s when dictatorships celebrate.”
I urge Washington state’s Congressional delegation to reject any proposal that would take away the right to seek asylum. We must stop using immigrants, like the mother and child I met in Tijuana, as bargaining chips in political deal-making. We must save asylum.
Michele Frix is a Richland High School graduate, and member of the Truman National Security Project — a national network promoting progressive national security solutions and policies for a more humane immigration system. She is also the executive vice president of a foundation based in Washington state.
