Immigration Reform in NY Chinatown

In the middle of the second month of 2014, John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, made it known that there would be no major legislation passed for the remainder of the year. This includes immigration reform, one of Obama's announced major goals of his second term. 

Many immigrants are trying to game the system with claims of persecution, and an entire industry is springing up to respond to the desire for permanent immigration status. 

In New York, asylum appears to be the most straightforward and expeditious path to permanent immigration status. Once granted, asylum allows the applicant to work legally immediately, and to apply for the coveted green card in one year. In order to receive asylum, an immigrant historically must have a valid, substantiable cause to flee their country. Recently, and on a large scale, immigrants from China seeking asylum in Manhattan, are employing lawyers to fabricate a case of persecution for them. Lawyers in Manhattan's Chinatown, both authentic and false, are now charging an initial price of $1000 to take a case, followed by 'incremental fees that might total more than $10,000' (NYT). For this price, applicants can be coached on Christian values in churches or how to describe a forced abortion that never occurred, or have newspaper pictures of crowd beatings Photoshopped to include their face. Fraud is blamed for at least part of the two-year backlog of petitions clogging the New York Asylum Office.

This manipulation of the asylum system isn't an infrequent occurrence: it's an industry, with thousands of people receiving asylum through the 'loophole in the system that cannot be closed because of politics' (NYT). Having abandoned any pretense of accomplishing anything whatsoever, whether it be job bills or immigration reform, the House Republicans are returning to their districts in a 'desperate attempt to save their seats' (PoliticsUSA). Will the Republicans get it together and act in order to close the loophole of asylum claims? Or, if they continue not to act, how will that affect run-arounds of the system like the one in Manhattan's Chinatown? America cannot, of course, take the entirety of the planet's population who would prefer to live here. Would immigration reform result in a more enlightened or restrictive policy? Is the failure to address needed reform to immigration policy the cause or the effect of the gaming of the system?

NYT Fraud in Chinatown article

NYT Gridlock article

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