Emma Lazarus and Donald Trump: Solving the Border Crisis By Stephen B. Presser
On the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor are the famous lines from poet Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me . . .” The United States is a signatory to the United Nations 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Article 33 of the Convention provides: “No Contracting State shall expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
Article 33 appears to implement a bit of Emma Lazarus’s poem, but it’s also clear from the U.S. Constitution that the sovereign people have delegated to their representatives the power of determining who can gain entry to this country. Article I, Section 8 provides that Congress is given the power “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Congress has also passed legislation seeking to implement asylum for the kind of refugees contemplated by Article 33.
But in a recent statement about the deluge of undocumented foreign nationals from Central America now seeking admission at our southern border, President Trump observed:, “They come up. In many cases, they are rough gang members. In many cases, they are people with crime records. And they are given a statement to read by lawyers standing there waiting. It says, ‘I have great fear for my life. I have great fear for being in my country.’ Even though in some cases, some of these people are holding their country’s flags and waving their country’s flags . . .”
Similarly, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, in a December 20 press release, announced a new administration policy to prevent aliens “trying to game the system” by asserting groundless asylum claims and then “disappear[ing] into the United States, where many skip their court dates . . .”
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