At this week’s Round Table, Kris, Collin, Kenisha, and Skyla spoke with Claire Thomas, attorney, consultant, professor and clinical director practicing immigration law and researching global migration, statelessness, human rights, and empowerment for women and girls facing poverty and gender-based violence. Claire recently returned from a Fulbright in Mexico, during which she interviewed asylum-seekers, government officials, and immigration experts to learn about and share cross-cultural best practices in asylum and refugee law. We talked about the challenges of immigration policy which, in Claire’s words, is “a big jumbled mess” and which Claire’s work focuses on the humanitarian side of. Much of today’s immigration policy stems from treaties signed after the horrors of WWII and is predicated in very outdated language and concepts—many other countries are more modern and inclusive. A toxic blend of Misinformation, racism, and outdated laws interferes with progress. We have a true humanitarian crisis because the Mexican border has been closed to asylum seekers since March 2020, making it impossible for anyone to come through and forced those in peril to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities for years. We talked about the dangers of the “close the door behind you” mentality, gender based violence and the deadly absence of gender-based grounds for asylum in the US, what to do about ICE, the hugely disparate treatment of black and brown refugees, what and how the Biden administration is doing on immigration, and what can teens our age do to actually facilitate change in the short and long term. Most importantly, we spoke about how we can open the eyes of those l who have a misconstrued view of what the immigration process is and who immigrants are. We hope this podcast can be part of that process. Thank you for listening!
