South Korea denies refugee status to Yemeni asylum seekers
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea has denied refugee status but granted temporary stay permits to hundreds of Yemeni asylum seekers who arrived on the southern island of Jeju this year, the Ministry of Justice announced on Wednesday.
More than 500 Yemenis sought refugee in South Korea between January and May, having fled the war that has engulfed their homeland.
Asian countries including China, Japan and South Korea grant very few asylum claims and take few refugees from the UN.
The influx of asylum seekers to South Korea – which has only granted refugee status to 839 of 40,470 applicants from various countries since 1994, not including defectors from North Korea – sparked a backlash and led to the government tightening immigration laws in June.
A total of 481 Yemenis have applied for asylum, with 362 granted temporary humanitarian stay permits, the ministry said in a statement.
Another 34 applications were rejected with no permits issued because officials determined they had criminal records or were seeking asylum for economic reasons, the ministry said.
A final 85 cases are still being processed.
Most of the Yemenis flew into the resort island of Jeju, where they have largely been blocked from leaving for mainland South Korea.
But get this:
Under the humanitarian stay permits, the refugees will be able to leave Jeju.
In an interview with Breitbart radio, Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies gives the President sound advice.
Honduran government begs the migrants to turn around. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/16/honduras-begs-migrant-caravan-turn-back/
I’m writing about this story again today because I noted how interested you are in it after my post yesterday, and because it is an opportunity to inform more of you about the other part of our US refugee system—namely the asylum process.
Just recently, here, I told you about asylum and how it is part and parcel of the Refugee Act of 1980, but is being scammed and abused by thousands in recent years.
Simply: refugees are selected abroad as supposedly persecuted people and flown here (that is what all this 30,000 cap business is all about). The Hondurans and others who ask for asylum are not part of that cap.
Asylum seekers get to America on their own steam and then claim they will be persecuted if returned home.
If granted asylum they are then considered refugees. However, most of those headed our way are what are called economic migrants in migration lingo.
Jessica Vaughan: Trump Should ‘Put Pressure on Mexico’ to Block Migrant Caravans
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, advised the Trump administration to pressure Mexico against allowing entry to caravans of migrants seeking passage to the U.S.
Vaughan offered her remarks in a Monday interview with Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.
Vaughan described existing U.S. refugee asylum policies as incentivizing foreigners to seek entry into the homeland via their humanitarian provisions, recalling previous analyses offered on an earlier migrant caravan’s access to America.
“It’s really our policy that is enticing them to come, and I am surprised it took this long,” said Vaughan. “This is not the choice of the Trump administration. It certainly does not want to entice people to take this dangerous journey, and when you look the pictures, it is a lot of young men, but it’s also some kids coming, too. It’s dangerous for them, but it now has this aura of an adventure that people are taking, like the gold rush or something.”
Vaughan said aspiring migrants are advised to travel to America by both smugglers and ostensibly humanitarian groups based in the U.S.
“[Migrants] are being told by the smugglers — who I’m sure are among them, or the organizers, I mean they’re really almost the same thing — to [travel to the U.S.].
Certainly they’re being egged on by the humanitarian groups and even by groups within the United States.”
In April, Left-wing American lawyers offered migrant caravan travelers “legal training sessions,” advising migrant what to say to improve their likelihood of obtaining entry to the U.S. in their dealing with immigration judges and asylum officers.
[….]
Vaughan added, “Why wouldn’t it [the caravan] grow? They are realistically optimistic that they will be let into the United States. At some point, the Trump administration, the best possible solution is for them to say, ‘No.’ Or put pressure on Mexico to not issue them transit visas. They have no basis to enter Mexico unless Mexico is going to give them asylum.”
Former Senator and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered asylum judges to stick to the legal definition of persecution when weighing asylum claims. Running from gang violence, abusive husbands or looking for work are not grounds for admission.
Vaughan described Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s new directives to immigration judges and asylum officers.
“Claiming to have witnessed violence or to have come from a violent place is not good enough to get you into the country to make an asylum claim, to pass your ‘credible fear’ test,” stated Vaughan. “They’re expected now to show that the persecution that they claim was carried out by the government, or with the government’s blessing. General violence is not going to cut it.”
[….]
Vaughan said, “The best possible solution is to not let [caravan migrants] enter,” adding that “it is obvious to everyone” that the caravan migrants’ motivations are “economically based.”
Vaughan explain, “The goal should be to have people not get across, at all, because then it’s a whole different story once they set foot in the United States, whether they’ve been admitted or paroled or whatever. As soon as we let them across, that’s when it becomes extremely difficult to remove them and return them to their home countries.”
I wouldn’t put it past the Open Borders activists to ultimately use this caravan PR campaign to try to get the Trump administration to reverse its decision to rescind the Temporary Protective Status for Hondurans already in the US. See here, and here.
How can the President be so mean as to return thousands of Hondurans already in the US to a country where so many are trying to escape, they might say.
