Let them all in? Laying a thought experiment on top of a thought experiment

Jeff Spross of ThinkProgress thinks we should give all kids who arrive on our borders immediate legal status. Josiah Neeley of the Texas Public Policy Foundation responds (on Twitter) by dangling a bit of bait: "why not let in anyone who wants come? Spross suggests that the U.S. could handle the influx if it had to or wanted to. Neeley then asks, "How many do you think would come if we accepted anyone who wanted to come?"

This recalled me to a thought experiment that seems apropos, though I'm not sure why -- maybe because it suggests, indirectly, how much running room we have. Courtesy of James Fallows:

I mentioned yesterday that Thomas Barnett had given a realistic brief appraisal of China's strengths and weaknesses in an NPR interview. A point I particularly liked was this tip for comparing American and Chinese scale:

If Americans wanted to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, he said, all we'd have to do is think of moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians. China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.

Winning asylum in the U.S.: imminent danger of death is not enough

Reading about the flood of children now arriving on U.S. shores from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, those of us not well versed in immigration law might assume that children who can demonstrate that they will be in imminent danger of death from gangs terrorizing their home towns if deported will be granted asylum. That is probably not so.

Determinations of refugee status or asylum in the U.S. are governed by the Refugee Act of 1980, which derives its criteria from the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees approved by the U.N. in 1951. To be granted asylum, an applicant

"must prove that he or she would be persecuted on account of one of five protected grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and social group."  

If the gangs in question are equal opportunity terrorizers, it's hard to see at first glance how those criteria would be met.