Congressional GOP’s Immigrant ‘Outreach’ Is With a Fist

Eleanor Clift

Now, Republicans want to tighten asylum standards for Central American kids—but loosen them for one home-schooling German family. Surprised?

Granting political asylum to homeschoolers while making it harder for kids fleeing gang violence in Central America to find refuge in the United States is the latest in a wave of little noticed anti-immigrant proposals emerging from the Republican Congress. GOP lawmakers want to tighten laws that allow unaccompanied minors, often running away from violent and dangerous situations, to remain in the United States. But at the same time, they are seeking to protect a German homeschooling family with six children whose appeal for asylum was turned down by a federal appeals court judge who ruled that fleeing compulsory education in Germany did not qualify as credible persecution.

A petition to grant the devoutly Christian Romeike family, who arrived in the United States in 2008, permanent legal status got 127,258 signatures on a White House “We the People” petition, an online forum to persuade the Obama administration to take action. Last year the Department of Homeland Security declined to deport them, extending the family’s “deferred action” indefinitely, mirroring President Obama’s executive orders on immigration that have so angered the GOP.

The family, with their now seven children (the last was born after they arrived), are happily settled in Morristown, Tennessee, but that victory was not sufficient for Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz, who sponsored the Asylum Reform and Border Protection Act, which seeks to define homeschoolers as a group eligible for federal protection. Under current law, asylum is granted to people persecuted because of their race, religion, or membership in a distinct group.

“I don’t recall any other three-month period where more aggressive anti-immigrant legislation has been introduced and debated,” says Fitz.
“This is a far-fetched, unprecedented claim to define a social group and an act of persecution,” says Marshall Fitz, an immigration expert at the liberal Center for American Progress. “It’s silly to try to bootstrap a prohibition on homeschooling into a recognized claim of persecution.”

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/29/congressional-gop-s-immigrant-outreach-is-with-a-fist.html