And that's the crux of what I've been "fulminating" about: if the current level of influx at the border is a crisis and you're going to codify literally a million illegal aliens a year - what this bill does - then...how does codifying the crisis in law help?

Because you're not codifying the crisis into law.

Asylum seekers aren't illegal aliens. The U.S. is a signatory to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. People who are refugees - who meet the criteria under both the 1951 Convention and U.S. law - have a legal right to be free from being expelled or returned to their home countries. That obligation - and not the "safe third country" - is an obligation of the U.S. under international law. What we are allowed to do under international law is to provide a process for how we manage and assess the refugees we find within our borders. But we never will - and cannot and should not - ever get to the point where there are zero asylum-seekers in the U.S.

Right now, what's "codified" into law is that no one claiming asylum is eligible for exclusion or expulsion because they entered outside of a POE. What the new law would do is create a trigger situation where that would change, temporarily, in response to a surge in migrants. That mechanism doesn't "codify" anything that isn't codified already. What it does do is tighten the inflows when they're going to exceed the new capacities of the system to process.

It doesn't make things worse. You've been lied to on that point. The current law provides that no matter how many migrants are coming, you cannot prevent them from applying from asylum no matter where they cross. The proposed law would provide that in certain circumstances, you can prevent them from applying from asylum if the cross outside of a POE. How does that make things worse?

If the numbers don't go down to a level where we can process all the asylees, then the bar on applying for asylum kicks in and we start doing summary expulsions. Which is probably a violation of international law, but one we might be able to defend (maybe) by pointing to the limited circumstances that it kicks in and the need to balance flows and processing capacity.

Oh, and can you tell me how much money is there for an actual wall?

Very little. Because as we've discussed, an "actual wall" doesn't really solve any of the problems caused by asylum seekers. Only a portion of the border with Mexico is on land, and only a portion of that border has the geography where a wall could be constructed right on the border, and only a tiny portion of that area doesn't already have a physical barrier. The problems we're facing now aren't being caused by people that could be blocked by a wall.

en.wikipedia.org - Non refoulement