European law, the Dublin Regulation, requires that asylum seekers register their asylum claim in the first country they arrive in, and that the decision of the first EU country they apply in is the final decision in all EU countries. This is the international law on asylum seekers. Somehow a lot of the American news media has neglected to mention that. The migrant caravan currently making its way to America is from Honduras. America is not the first country they have arrived in. It should also be noted that Mexico has a vested interest in stopping this caravan–if the caravan causes America to build the wall and stop illegal immigration, the amount of money sent from America to Mexico will decrease drastically. Those are only two aspects of the problem.
Hot Air posted an article about the caravan today dealing with some of the actions the Mexican government has taken regarding the caravan.
The article reports:
If you had any doubts about the intentions of the migrants in the Honduran caravan you can put them to rest. Mexico continues to make good faith efforts to deal with the flood of humanity in a legal fashion, but the organizers of the caravan have no interest in the law. This week the Mexican government offered the travelers refuge, supplies and the opportunity for permanent residency in two southern states if they applied for asylum. While hundreds of the Hondurans took them up on the offer, thousands more took a vote and decided once again to reject the plan, insisting that they were heading to the United States.
…As we’re seeing in this story, Mexico is also trying to take on the role of a Safe Third Country Agreement participant, even though we haven’t formalized that deal with them yet. By offering the migrants asylum status and temporary food and lodging while their claims are processed, there’s no reason the vast majority of them couldn’t remain in Chiapas and Oaxaca. It represents a major drain on Mexico’s resources to make such an offer and they should be earning a lot of credit and support from the United States for doing so.
Unfortunately, as I noted at the top, most of the migrants have no interest in accepting the offer. They plan to march on the United States border uninvited. We have no more ability to process that many requests in a short period of time than Mexico does and the travelers have already demonstrated what they plan to do if their demands can’t be immediately accommodated. They jumped one border crossing over from Guatemala to Mexico and they will obviously do it again when they reach the United States.
The caravan has more than 1,000 miles to go before they reach Texas. That gives us some time to come up with a plan to stop what can only honestly be described as an invasion. But that time isn’t unlimited, so the state and federal governments need to be working together and preparing for their arrival.
This may get very ugly, and we can depend on the American media to report anything that happens as unfairly as possible. However, we need to remember that as a sovereign county we have the right and responsibility to protect our borders. We also need to remember that the federal government is charged with protecting our borders. When the sympathy stories come out about these poor people, remember that they had a legal chance to settle in Mexico, they were paid to be part of the invasion of America’s southern border, and that the majority of them are military-age young men, The caravan heading for America is a disaster on many levels,