"Our first responsibility is to protect the American people and we cannot put on blinders to expect that everyone who seeks asylum does so in good faith"
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Security comes first, and the rest is framed as sentimentality. Bill Shuster’s line is built to sound like common sense while quietly narrowing the moral space around asylum. “Our first responsibility” invokes the civic oath-politics: government as shield, not sanctuary. Once that hierarchy is asserted, everything after it is positioned as a concession to reality rather than a choice.
The key move is the metaphor of “blinders.” It paints skepticism as clear-eyed pragmatism and casts humanitarian concern as willful naivete. Nobody wants to be the person “expecting” good faith from strangers in a dangerous world; the sentence rigs the emotional stakes so that caution reads as maturity. The phrase “everyone who seeks asylum” is another rhetorical sleight: it implies a broad pattern of bad actors without naming numbers, cases, or evidence. “Good faith” works similarly, a legal-sounding term that sidesteps the messier truth that asylum claims are adjudicated under standards of “credible fear” and documented persecution, not a purity test of motives.
Contextually, this is a familiar post-9/11 and post-2014 border-politics script, sharpened during spikes in Central American migration and later the Trump-era crackdown. It’s less a policy argument than a preemptive rebuttal to empathy: if you oppose tighter screening or restrictions, you’re accused of putting on “blinders.” The intent is to legitimize tougher enforcement while keeping the speaker on the side of responsibility, not hostility. The subtext: doubt first, compassion later, and maybe not at all.
The key move is the metaphor of “blinders.” It paints skepticism as clear-eyed pragmatism and casts humanitarian concern as willful naivete. Nobody wants to be the person “expecting” good faith from strangers in a dangerous world; the sentence rigs the emotional stakes so that caution reads as maturity. The phrase “everyone who seeks asylum” is another rhetorical sleight: it implies a broad pattern of bad actors without naming numbers, cases, or evidence. “Good faith” works similarly, a legal-sounding term that sidesteps the messier truth that asylum claims are adjudicated under standards of “credible fear” and documented persecution, not a purity test of motives.
Contextually, this is a familiar post-9/11 and post-2014 border-politics script, sharpened during spikes in Central American migration and later the Trump-era crackdown. It’s less a policy argument than a preemptive rebuttal to empathy: if you oppose tighter screening or restrictions, you’re accused of putting on “blinders.” The intent is to legitimize tougher enforcement while keeping the speaker on the side of responsibility, not hostility. The subtext: doubt first, compassion later, and maybe not at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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