Donald Trump and the Supreme Court made it a lot more harder to seek asylum.
Donald Trump and the Supreme Court made it a lot more harder to seek asylum. Mario Tama/Getty Images

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to implement a policy that bars immigrants from applying for asylum at the southern border if they pass through another country before getting to the U.S.

Seven justices decided in favor of the policy and only two, Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg, dissented.

“Once again the Executive Branch has issued a rule that seeks to upend longstanding practices regarding refugees who seek shelter from persecution,” wrote Sotomayor in her dissent. “Although this Nation has long kept its doors open to refugees—and although the stakes for asylum seekers could not be higher—the Government implemented its rule without first providing the public notice and inviting the public input generally required by law.”

This impact of this cannot be overstated, especially on people who come to the U.S. from Central America. (Refugees who come through Canada or via plane will not be affected.) The majority of the asylum seekers from poverty- and crime-ridden countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, pass through Mexico first. They aren’t flying here. They’re walking or taking buses, and now they will be required to apply for asylum not in the U.S. but in Mexico, a country that cannot afford to take them in in the first place. This will severely limit the number of people eligible for refugee status, but it does nothing to address the reasons people flee their homelands in the first place, and so the result will likely be more illegal immigration, not less.

There are some exceptions. For instance, those who can prove that they've been trafficked. Or who applied for and were denied asylum in a third country. And restrictions will only apply to those who entered the entered after July 15 of this year. Still, Jorge Baron, the executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, calls the ruling “devastating.”

“This ruling will deprive thousands of people the opportunity to obtain or even seek humanitarian protection in the United States and will result in deaths and harm that could have been avoided,” Baron said. While this is not the end of this fight—the Court’s ruling is temporary and appeals will likely continue—this is just the latest effort by the Trump administration to vastly cut the numbers of immigrants welcome in the U.S.

In addition to implementing the Muslim ban, pushing for the border wall, and undermining the ability of authorities to process immigrant and refugee applications at the southern border, Trump cut the number of refugees resettled in the U.S. from nearly 100,000 in Obama’s last year to just 30,000 a year.

Many of Trump’s other anti-immigration policies have died in the courts, but this ruling is a clear victory of Trump. For humanity, and for the country, it’s anything but.

The United States needs immigrants, and it’s not just bleeding heart liberals who believe this. It’s economists, too. Birth rates are rapidly declining in the U.S, and as baby boomers age out of the workforce, there aren’t enough native-born workers to replace them. This will result in a shrinking of the economy, and while there are some good arguments to be made for managed degrowth—most of which have to do with the depletion of natural resources—immigrants, both legal and not, contribute far more to the economy than they take. In 2015, for instance, undocumented immigrants alone paid an estimated $23.6 billion in income taxes, and this goes to fund social services that they aren’t even eligible to use.

Not only do immigrants contribute to the economy, they do jobs that are so backbreaking and so poorly paid that no one else will do them. Right now, the U.S. is in the midst of a farm labor shortage—which hurts the agriculture industry as well as consumers—and the H-2A temporary visa program does not meet current labor needs. We need immigrants and refugees, especially those who are willing to do jobs that native-born Americans are not.

But instead of acknowledging this and crafting policy accordingly, the administration continues to make legal entry more difficult for those populations while they make it easier for high-skilled, English-speaking immigrants with degrees in engineering and medicine to relocate. Of course, those are the jobs that Americans actually do want, but Trump and his policy goons aren’t interested in protecting American jobs or even the economy as a whole. All they are interested in is riling up the base, and if it takes damaging the country and people’s lives, they’re more than happy to do it.