The Current Migrant Crisis Was Created by US Foreign Policy, Not Trump

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : These included free public education, an increased minimum wage, low-interest loans for small farmers, the inclusion of domestic workers in the social security system, and a number of important environmental regulations.
51% : Its most recent ploy: to require refugees to apply for asylum in the first country they come to after leaving their own.
48% : For now (at least theoretically), migrants from the Northern Triangle should still be able to apply for asylum in the United States.
44% : Meanwhile, it has come up with yet another way to prevent people from claiming asylum.
43% : International law mandates that some, but not all, push factors can confer "refugee" status on migrants, entitling them to seek asylum in other countries.
43% : In the 1980s, for instance, Salvadorans fleeing US-supported death squads had almost no hope of getting asylum here.
43% : Under international law, however, if they head for the United States in an attempt to save their lives and livelihoods, they don't qualify as refugees, because they are fleeing not physical but economic violence and so are not eligible for asylum.
42% : These days, even immigrants with a well-founded fear of persecution who perfectly fit the Geneva Convention's definition of "refugee" may no longer get asylum here.
36% : President Trump even used the threat of new tariffs against Guatemalan goods to negotiate such an agreement with that country's outgoing President Jimmy Morales to secretly designate his nation a "safe third country" where migrants could apply for asylum.
25% : Trump's solution to that problem has been to use the threat of tariffs to force Mexico to militarize its own border with Guatemala, in the process frustrating the new administration of President Andres Manuel López Obrador.
23% : At the end of July, Attorney General William Barr announced that "immigrants fearing persecution because of threats against their family members are no longer eligible for asylum.

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