GOP Grants Asylum to White "Home Schoolers," Turns Away Hispanic and Latino Refugees

Republicans know the Latino and Hispanic community doesn't trust them on immigration issues. After all, the leading GOP voice on immigration has been Steven King (R. IA) who has characterized all undocumented immigrants as "drug mules" with "calves the size of cantaloupes" from hauling illicit drugs over the U.S./Mexican border, or simply compared them to dogs.  The Party's 2012 Presidential contender weighed in on the debate by urging a policy of "self-deportation" for Latino and Hispanic immigrants.

So the GOP knows they have a problem. And now they've responded with a comprehensive bill favoring immigrants' rights to asylum and protection from persecution.  

There's just one small catch. In order to be welcomed with open arms by the Republican Party, it really helps to be be the right color:

Republicans in Congress are advancing a bill to grant asylum to families who want to home school their children. But the same bill would also restrict granting asylum to migrant children fleeing violence and poverty in Central America.

Lawrence Downs puts it tellingly in a related article from The New York Times,"The Easiest Quiz You Will Take Today,"  depicting two photographs of "undocumented immigrants"--one white, and one Hispanic, and asking the reader to guess which "undocumented" immigrants the Republicans would rather protect. The implication, while unstated, is obvious.

The Republican Bill, sponsored by rabidly anti-immigrant Congressman Jason Chaffetz from Utah, was prompted at the behest of the "Home School Legal Defense Organization" and follows an "expose" by ABC News regarding a "devoutly Christian" (and very white) home-schooling German family who racked up $9,000 in fines before moving to the U.S.and settling in Tennessee. (The Department of Homeland Security ultimately permitted them to remain in the country). Families in Germany can face stiff fines or even jail sentences for failing to attend public or state-approved private schools. This has been the law in Germany since 1918, and is the law in several European countries such as Sweden. The Bill specifically refers to home-schoolers as a "particular social group."

A new bill, the Asylum Reform and Border Protection Act of 2015, opens a path for people “fleeing home school persecution,” like the Romeike family (A). But it sharply limits the ability of Central Americans, particularly children, to seek similar refuge. It imposes a harsher burden of proof on asylum seekers who claim to fear persecution, prohibits asylum for unaccompanied children if they can be taken safely to a third country, and increases the number of immigration judges and Immigration and Customs Enforcement lawyers handling deportation cases.

This, then, is "immigration reform," Republican-style.  Permit "asylum" to a tiny minority of (about 500) largely white European Christians essentially breaking hundred-year old laws established by their home countries, while throwing up more barriers against people whose skin color the Republican Party doesn't embrace, people who are often facing death when the U.S. turns them away:

Honduras is the murder capital of the world, Guatemalan girls are especially prone to a culture desensitized by rape, and homicide victims in El Salvador are predominantly male teens.

A Center for American Progress study found that violence is the primary factor that is driving children to flee Central America, notably that there are positive correlations between increasing violence and greater numbers of kids crossing the border alone.

Not surprisingly, the disconnect between the situation of German home-schoolers and refugees from Central American countries wracked by gangland murders, rape and crime has made no impression on its Republican sponsors.

“The Republicans have put home-schooling as a priority for asylum in the United States ahead of murder, rape, child abuse,” Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) said. Gutierrez doesn’t “object to the provision in Chaffetz’s bill but thinks it’s unfair to help home-school families without aiding children fleeing drug and gang violence and abuse in countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador,” USA Today reported after the bill’s passage in committee.

If the impetus for this Bill was simply the protection of white, European home-schoolers it would simply be another instance of the GOP's blinkered mentality towards immigration reform. The fact that it also deliberately punishes, penalizes and excludes far more deserving and terrorized Hispanic and Latino asylum-seekers could scarcely provide a clearer demonstration of cynical Republican priorities.