The utilization of asylum rights by otherwise illegal immigrants threatens to fundamentally erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigration and create a viable pathway for nearly anyone from an impoverished or troubled country to secure legal residence in the United States.

Data from U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services has revealed how asylum claims have increased exponentially since 2009- by the order of a massive 1,744%. Claiming asylum usually involves claiming a fear of persecution in one’s home country, providing a legal means to establish American residency.

A spokeswoman with the federal agency recently spoke to Conservative Review about the exponentially growing abuse of the American asylum system by migrants, many of whom have recently come from Central American countries like Nicaragua and Honduras.

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“The extremely low bar for establishing credible fear is ripe for fraud and abuse. This is because once an individual overcomes this low threshold, the vast majority are then referred to an immigration judge and most are released on a promise to appear for a court date weeks, months, or years down the line, regardless of whether they plan to show up. In other words, a credible fear referral doesn’t equal asylum status, but it does earn a free ticket into the U.S., allowing individuals to disappear into the interior to live and work illegally.”

The signifigance of the flawed asylum laws in creating the issue is hard to understate, as USCIS figures estimate there are more than 230,000 open asylum court cases, six times as many as there were in 2009.

Did political conditions in countries such as Nicaragua and Honduras worsen to the point where six times as many people have a need to flee genuine persecution there? Or did migrants discover an effective, albeit costly and less-than-honest, means to legally migrate to the United States through the back door?

The use of asylum claims is a major component of the recent surge of illegal immigration to the United States, most famously exhibited in the large ‘caravans.’ Illegal border crossings now threaten to surpass the records set under George W. Bush’s presidency, despite inaccurate claims (usually using data that ends in 2014) from mainstream media that border crossings are down.