A federal courtroom in Philadelphia is offering up horrific tales of heart boiling and other African cannibalism from the Liberian civil war.

But it's not the war crimes per se that are being tried.

Mohammed Jabateh, 51, is on trial for asylum fraud. He was actually a warlord who killed indiscriminately, in a 20-year-old conflict have nothing to do with United States. Somehow, he ended up living in East Landsdowne, Pennsylvania.

Who approved that one?

I suppose I should applaud the U.S. Attorney for actually prosecuting asylum fraud. Even considering the staggering cost of flying in half a village for testimony.

But a bigger question is how we even got here to begin with.

If we had a sane immigration policy, we would eliminate asylum. While it might once have had a humanitarian function, it's now the site of rampant abuse, with many streaming in on the strength of completely fraudulent accounts of persecution.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions gets it. [U.S. Attorney General Sessions urges crackdown on asylum policies ]But even in cases that aren't necessarily fraudulent, do we need these people? By definition, asylum seekers are some of the most desperate people — poor, unskilled, completely dependent.

They typically come from locations where the native genetics offer up low IQs and never-ending violence.

If anyone in the world can seek asylum in the United States, meanwhile, that leaves little incentive to fix problems in other countries.

Which, in the case of an African country, you're never going to fix anyway.