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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Sure. I was just making the admittedly slightly pedantic point that the phrase "fake asylum claimant" is misleading and I hate it and it needs to die. Anyone claiming asylum is - by definition - a real asylum claimant, whether or not they actually deserve to have their claim recognized. They might very well be a spurious asylum claimant, but a spurious asylum claimant is still a real asylum claimant, in the same way that in a spurious lawsuit, a spurious plaintiff is still a plaintiff.

A "fake asylum claimant" properly defined would be someone who, say, faked paperwork about having recognized asylum-seeker status without actually submitting a request to the government. That kind of fraud might exist, for all I know. But it's not the same thing.

(Does this matter? I think so. A fake asylum claimant, in the proper sense of the phrase, would be willfully committing fraud. In contrast, many an asylum-seeker whose request should be turned down might, nonetheless, be acting in good faith; we can tell them no without lumping them in with the actual criminals. A toy example would be a guy suffering from pathological paranoia, who sincerely but irrationally thinks there are people after him. A serious example would be the scores of claimants who correctly believed their case met the criteria which have applied in recent years. It's not their fault our recent standards have been bullshit, and even if we start turning them away now, we shouldn't treat them like fraudsters.)