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But even if we admitted that asylum claimants do indeed attempt to claim asylum and that the asylum-claim process should indeed process asylum claims, we could still pretend that the motive behind an asylum claim is revealed by its outcome. We would accomplish this feat of imagination by fantasizing that the perfect synonym for “failure” is “fraud.”

Of course, if this were true, everyone who applied unsuccessfully for a job, a mortgage, or credit card might feel not only disappointed, but guilty, and we wouldn’t call them unlucky, misguided or incorrect, but imposters, liars and scoundrels.

We’d also have to say all sorts of other mad little things: That criteria used to assess claims are perfectly fair; that claimants know perfectly well whether or not their circumstances fit the perfectly fair criteria even before making their claims; and that merely by breaking border regulations, asylum seekers make it perfectly clear that they have no legitimate need for asylum.

This is a strange world of make-believe we’ve created. But let’s entertain the dangerous fiction that failing to obtain something is necessarily morally reprehensible — precisely as morally reprehensible, in fact, as deliberately conspiring to obtain something under false pretences. (After all, in this fantastical land of leprechauns and refugee impersonators, these sins are one and the same.)

If we’re to convincingly act as if we believe that the moral character of asylum seekers can be judged solely by whether or not we give them asylum, we mustn’t merely pretend to expect universal fairness from and knowledge about the individual processes used to determine whether individual people fit the bill. We must pretend that the concept of asylum itself isn’t subject to rational moral debate by even asylum experts.