Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

The huge flow of illegal migrants into the United States was lubricated by a 2014 Bureau of Immigration decision which claimed that Guatemalan women experiencing domestic violence “can constitute a cognizable particular social group that forms the basis of a claim for asylum.”

That decision was clearly legally wrong and the opposite of how asylum is supposed to work.

And that allowed many illegal migrants to show up and claim asylum because domestic violence is ubiquitous around the world. And, in many countries, documentation doesn’t even exist. That makes it impossible to know whether the asylum claims are even based on anything at all.

In a PAHO survey, 1 in 5 Guatemalan women reported experiencing domestic violence. That’s over 1 million women (and their children and families) from just one country eligible for asylum in America.

Attorney General Sessions reversed the BIA decision, pointing out that domestic violence isn’t government persecution. And that “vulnerability to private criminal activity” isn’t a basis for asylum. The usual judicial suspects began running interference leading to an extended political battle. And they haven’t given up because the domestic violence loophole is the perfect open borders magnet.

The World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 4 women in the Western Pacific region, 1 in 3 women in the South-East Asia region, and 1 in 3 women in the Eastern Mediterranean region suffer from domestic violence. The Eastern Mediterranean region alone holds 538 million people.

One study claimed that 67.4% of women in El Salvador experienced abuse. That’s almost 1.5 million women (and their children and families) eligible for asylum from a small country. That small country has nevertheless produced a horrifying number of migrants trying to illegally enter the United States.

In Ecuador, a PAHO survey claims that 40% of women have experienced domestic violence. That’s 2.4 million women (and their children and families) eligible to apply for asylum in the United States.

Across the border in Mexico, 46.7% of women claimed to have experienced abuse. That’s 21,995,105 women (and their families and children) who are eligible to come to the border and claim asylum.

Can the United States absorb almost 22 million asylum requests from abused Mexican women?

In Brazil, surveys and statistics suggest that 23,825,952 women would be eligible for asylum.

In Bolivia, where more than half the female population claims to have suffered domestic abuse, over 2 million women would be eligible to apply for asylum in the United States of America.

That’s over 50 million women from just 6 countries south of the border eligible for asylum.

But why stick to this particular continent when a flood of illegal migrants from all across the world has been showing up on our border and demanding to be let in, or just sneaking across the border anyway?

Chinese government statistics say that 1 in 4 women has experienced domestic violence. That’s 140 million women (and their children and dependents) eligible for political asylum in the United States.

India, where estimates also point to 1 in 4, would add another 113 million women to the asylum toll.

Pakistan, where it’s as high as 1 in 3, would throw in another 22 million.

Indonesia, where it’s 2 in 5, would contribute over 40 million asylum requests.

That’s 365 million asylum requests. That’s far more than the population of the United States.

That would bankrupt and destroy the country. And yet it’s the cause that Democrat politicians and leftist organizations, from Amnesty to Human Rights Watch to CAIR, have been assiduously fighting for.

Asylum was created to enable people fleeing political and religious persecution. It was meant for refugees escaping Nazis or Communists, not people coping with personal problems.

America can provide asylum from religious and political persecution. But according to some of these same surveys, between a third and a quarter of American women have experienced domestic violence.

Those are potentially higher numbers than some of the countries fueling asylum requests here.

There’s every reason to suspect some of these statistics, which vary and clash with each other, and which suffer from all sorts of reliability problems, but taking them at face value, America is no safer, when it comes to domestic violence than the countries that asylum migrants are coming from.

The domestic violence loophole created by the Bureau of Immigration under Obama is a gimmick for endless asylum requests which are almost impossible to verify and which would break the system.

And that is exactly what happened.

Immigration might be a solution to political and religious persecution by foreign governments, but we have our own crime and domestic violence issues. Asylum requests just import more of them here.

Latin American countries have been swamped by the scale and scope of domestic criminal activity. The United States is not any better able to cope with the culture of lawlessness and abuse than they are.

Even the UN’s CEDAW blamed Guatemala’s domestic violence rate on “social and cultural attitudes which are the root causes of most forms of violence targeting women”. Migration imports those “social and cultural attitudes” to this country and the collapse of a common culture means we have no defense.

1 in 3 Hispanic women reported being the victims of domestic violence in the United States.

Those numbers are higher than they are in Guatemala, where it’s only 1 in 5, and demonstrates quite clearly that the country that served as the BIA’s test case for asylum, is safer for Hispanic women.

If Guatemala is safer for Guatemalan women than America, asylum makes no sense whatsoever.

The United States cannot handle the impossible scale of asylum requests that leaving in the domestic violence loophole risks setting off. Asylum was never designed for criminal activity. And, in any case, we don’t even have the ability to provide asylum since the problem is social and cultural, not national.

Closing the domestic violence loophole and sealing it shut is the only sensible thing to do.

It’s either that or handle more asylum requests than the entire population of the United States.