What’s essentially happening is how Biden Administration is applying asylum law. Here are the first key aspects of it:
i. A state’s right to offer asylum is well known in international law. It follows from the principle that each sovereign state is considered to have exclusive control over its territory and, consequently, over persons present in its territory. One of the implications of this widely accepted rule is that each sovereign state has the right to grant or deny asylum to individuals within its borders. In international law, therefore, the right of asylum has traditionally been seen as the right of a state, rather than the right of an individual.
ii. A second aspect of asylum law is an individual’s right to seek asylum. This is an individual right which an asylum seeker has in relation to his state of origin.? In essence, an individual has the right to leave his or her country of residence in pursuit of asylum. This right is based on the principle that “a State may not claim to ‘own’ its nationals or residents.” Several international and regional instruments enshrine the right. Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[5] states that, ‘everyone shall have the right to leave any country, including his own.’
The first key aspect of this is that NOTHING in asylum law trumps a nations sovereign rights. No country can dictate to any other country HOW they are to conduct the way they apply asylum. Many countries are looking at ways to shut down their borders. There’s examples here:
Notice that when countries do such things you don’t see other countries threatening to go to war with them if they don’t like it! No nation is in any position to force another nation to conduct asylum. In practicality so-called “asylum laws” are really just international agreements between nations with little to no enforcement “teeth” behind them. Nonetheless countries do have a genuine sense of obligation to these laws.
Essentially what the Biden Administration is doing is to ignore the first aspect of this (our national sovereignty) and simply apply the second aspect (the right of an individual to seek asylum). They don’t care how many people are showing up or how many countries they are coming from, how many other countries they are bypassing to show up at the US border or the legitimacy of them really fitting the narrow legal definition of asylum:
Asylum is a protection grantable to foreign nationals already in the United States or arriving at the border who meet the international law definition of a “refugee.” The United Nations 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol define a refugee as a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her home country, and cannot obtain protection in that country, due to past persecution or a well-founded fear of being persecuted in the future “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
We know what’s going on in all these countries and why these people are coming, as the saying goes “it’s not rocket science”:
