Western governments should “scrap” asylum laws and instead aid migrants closer to their home countries, says The Economist, a pro-globalist site for investors.
The scrapping of asylum is presented by the magazine’s London editors as a compassionate policy that ensures more aid to migrants close to their home countries:
Looking after refugees closer to home is often much cheaper. The UN refugee agency spends less than $1 a day on each refugee in Chad. Given limited budgets, rich countries would help far more people by funding [overseas] refugee agencies properly — which they currently do not — than by housing refugees in first-world hostels or paying armies of lawyers to argue over their cases.
However, the magazine’s concession is ultimately intended to divert voters’ rising anger away from legalized migration. “Fear of border chaos has fueled the rise of populism, from Brexit to Donald Trump, and poisoned the debate about legal migration,” the editors wrote in the cover story.
President Joe Biden welcomed 10 million migrants under the vague justification that they deserved asylum. But that policy helped elect Donald Trump — and has helped focus public opinion on the damage caused by legalized migration.
Hellbound and Down 