The “Commentary Magazine” podcast discusses James Varney’s new article in RealClearInvestigations: “The Rule of Law: A Visit to Immigration Court” Varney visits an immigration court in New Orleans, where he finds that while the near-closing of the southern border could allow the justice system to reduce the backlog of some 3.6 million cases, many migrants display an ability to invoke the law to lengthen their stay in America.

CHRISTINE ROSEN: There’s a long reported piece in RealClearPolitics where someone just went and sat and hung out at an immigration court in New Orleans recently, and that asylum point is very important because one of the things this reporter found-and seemed a little surprised by-was how savvy a lot of these illegal immigrants are about working the system. Not just getting constant delays-years and years they’ll stay here in this country with an order to just come back and report. But the asylum-seeking process has been completely abused, thanks to often taxpayer-funded NGOs that come in and say, Here’s exactly what you need to say, here’s the story you need to say. That, of course, undermines genuine asylum claimants, which is horrifying, but it is something that’s true about our system: that for many, many decades now the system of asylum-seeking has been exploited. JOHN PODHORETZ: The asylum-seeking system says that a person can apply for asylum to the United States and become a resident of the United States if that person can demonstrate that their fear of persecution or loss of life in their home country is well-founded-a well-founded fear of persecution. So clearly Mexicans do not meet that standard; by which I mean there is no systematic effort to deny or deprive Mexican citizens of their civil rights or to hound them — the fear of persecution is not necessarily from gangsters-it’s government persecution that matters. The law was written largely to help bring in people who were dissidents in Communist countries, who basically believed that the minute they stepped on American soil-or anywhere-and said, I can’t go back to my home country because they’ll throw me in the gulag, they would be protected here. America had a national interest in hosting them because we wanted to make a larger moral argument about the superiority of Western democracy over Communist totalitarianism. This then spread, as it would, to places where the rule of law is broken down, where governments are getting more authoritarian-jailing opponents, torturing people from opposition parties, and all of that. Now we have millions of people claiming a fear of persecution in their home countries, and that is not what persecution means. But you go somewhere and you say it; just the act of saying it shifts your status. CHRISTINE ROSEN: You can even appeal it: if one immigration court judge in the U.S. denies your asylum claim, you can appeal it-years and years of these claims. JOHN PODHORETZ: This system has made America a beacon to people seeking freedom who are being jailed, tortured, and persecuted. Our large-heartedness is being abused by this gamesmanship, but it shows how the lack of seriousness about the issue by at least one American political party has contributed to this crisis. Clearly, reforms to the asylum laws or regulations are needed.

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