USA: As the debate rages over immigration detainers, data on their efficacy is sparse

2018/07/06 Leave a comment

Always a sign of possible problems or issues when governments do not release data:

The debate over sanctuary cities has raged in Massachusetts for more than three years, and has only intensified since President Trump took office, as the governor, state courts, and legislators grapple with when — and even whether — local law enforcement should detain immigrants the federal government wants to deport.

But amid the disagreement, the Trump administration has clamped down on releasing information about the administrative requests from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, called detainers, which are at the heart of the debate. It is unclear how many have been issued over the past 16 months, how many are honored or rejected, and how many lead to deportations.

A February 2017 memo by John Kelly, who was head of the Department of Homeland Security at the time, ordered ICE to provide the public with a weekly report listing the name of the jurisdiction, the suspect’s citizenship and immigration status, the arresting charge, and “an explanation concerning why the detainer or similar request for custody was not honored.”

Three weekly Declined Detainer Outcome Reports were issued before the report was “temporarily suspended” so ICE could “analyze and refine its reporting methodologies,” according to a statement on the agency’s website.

But since then, ICE has failed to resume releasing the reports. Agency officials did not respond to e-mails asking why.

The information that is available shows the requests are not refused as often as critics say, and overall, detainers contribute to a small number of deportations by ICE, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University that has issued a series of reports exploring the role detainers play in deportations.

According to the center’s reports, about 1 million people were deported during President Obama’s second term, but detainers were used in only about 7 percent of those deportations.

“It was just shocking that it was such a small portion,” said Susan Long, the research center’s codirector and a professor of managerial statistics at Syracuse University. “If you’re measuring the effectiveness of detainers by how often does ICE deport people who had a detainer, they’re not.”

And law enforcement agencies don’t refuse to honor detainer requests in high volume, the center’s reports show.

According to a report released on April 30, ICE issued more than 142,000 detainers nationwide, including 1,213 in Massachusetts, during the 2017 fiscal year ending in September 2017. But only about 5 percent of the detainers nationwide, and about 8 percent in Massachusetts, were recorded by ICE as “refused” by law enforcement agencies.

However, the report cautioned that “the accuracy of ICE records on refusals is questionable,” as the field used to track which agency refused to honor a detainer is not required to be filled out.

The state’s highest court ruled last summer that Massachusetts law enforcement officers don’t have the authority under state law to comply with ICE detainers. Since then, a flurry of state legislators and the governor have tried to pass legislation that would allow, but not force, local law enforcement to comply.

ICE has long said detainers are a valuable tool for deporting dangerous criminals, and the Trump administration has aggressively pushed for cooperation from cities and towns that have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” and generally do not honor detainers.

“And every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants and drug dealers, traffickers, and gang members back into our communities,” President Trump said in March at Manchester Community College in New Hampshire, where he took aim at Lawrence’s and Boston’s sanctuary policies.

Widespread usage of detainers by ICE began in the waning years of President George W. Bush’s administration and increased rapidly when Barack Obama took office, peaking at the end of his first term, according to the center, which regularly collected data on detainers under both administrations.

But tracking the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s use of detainers has been problematic, as ICE has been “surprisingly reticent to reveal how detainers now are actually being used,” according to the center, which filed a federal lawsuit last summer asking the court to compel ICE to release this information.

“We ought to be getting that information,” said state Representative James Lyons, a Republican from Andover.

….

Source: As the debate rages over immigration detainers, data on their efficacy is sparse

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Citizenship application backlog ‘skyrocketed’ under Trump, report finds

2018/07/04 Leave a comment

Not surprising, whether deliberate or due to incompetence:

The backlog of pending applications for immigrants legally in the country trying to become U.S. citizens has “skyrocketed” under President Donald Trump, according to a new report from an immigrant rights organization.

There were nearly 730,000 pending naturalization applications as of the end of last year, a more than 87 percent increase since 2015 under President Barack Obama, according to the report from the National Partnership for New Americans, an alliance of immigrants’ rights groups.

“The Trump admin has built a second wall that prevents legal immigrants in the U.S. from becoming voting U.S. citizens,” Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the partnership, told NBC News.

He said the backlog at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services means processing rates have reached as high as 20 months, raising concerns in a critical mid-term election year that some people will be unable to vote. Last year, over 925,000 people applied for U.S. citizenship, according to the report.

“They may be waiting for as much of 20 months after submitting a 21-page application, paid the $730 fee, submitted their fingerprints for a security a check and then sat and waited to take an exam,” he said.

As of Dec. 31, 2015, under Obama, the backlog was 388,832, according to the report.

“This is either absolute gross incompetence affecting close to a million legal immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens, or it is an intentional second wall that is designed to slow the pace at which lawfully present immigrants can become voters,” he said.

The report also found that certain states saw “enormous spikes” in denials of citizenship applications in the last quarter, noting changes in Alabama, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Utah.

From Oct. 1, 2017, to the end of last December, the backlog increased in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands and several 19 states, including Alabama, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Utah, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin, according to the report.

The states with the largest increase in pending applications over the last fiscal year included Utah with an increase of more than 53 percent, Texas with an increase of over 50 percent and Washington with over 46 percent, according to the report.

A United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) spokesman strongly contested the reports findings Monday afternoon.

“The truth is that the total number of people the U.S. naturalizes each year has remained virtually unchanged. What we’re looking at is a dishonest and desperate attempt by open borders advocates to undermine the work of Homeland Security officials, law enforcement and the administration to protect the integrity of our immigration system and uphold the rule of law,” said spokesman Michael Bars in a statement. “The current pending workload does not equate to a backlog — it’s a statistic used in the USCIS report to include every application for naturalization filed including those filed in recent days and weeks — and is being inaccurately portrayed as evidence of delays”

“Many of these cases, which can remain pending from one quarter to the next, are well within the processing time goal established by the agency with variances being a direct result of geography and capacity. USCIS will continue to process all applications and petitions in a judicious and comprehensive manner and will do so as efficiently and expeditiously as possible in accordance with the law,” he added. “We reject the inaccurate claims of those fundamentally opposed to this effort.”

The agency naturalizes approximately 700,00 to 750,000 as citizens a year, according to USCIS, and naturalized 716,000 people in fiscal year 2017.

The partnership announced the report’s findings later Monday at a news teleconference with Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., and other immigrant rights groups.

The members of Congress also sent a congressional sign-on letter asking the director of USCIS to explain the backlogs and would call for congressional hearings and legal action to address the backlog,

The backlog was denying potential citizens the right to vote, and also left some at risk for potential deportation under Trump’s policies while their applications are pending, said Gutiérrez.

“The rules have changed — legal permanent residency does not protect you from deportation under Donald Trump,” he said. “People want to participate in the democratic process, they also want to protect themselves.”

Angelica Salas, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), said, “More and more every day you have a situation in which legal permanent residents, even for minor violations decades old, are being visited by ICE.”

Salas said during the teleconference that their naturalization campaign for 2018 was looking towards the 2020 elections to support legal residents seeking the right to vote, despite the “insurmountable hurdles they face.”

“If you want to vote in November of 2020, you’ve basically got to apply in the next 60 to 90 days. That is something unconscionable,” he said during the teleconference.

Hoyt said the advocates were also working with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, for a mayoral sign-on letter. Sign-on letters are used by lawmakers to come together and express a view on a policy or political matter. He added that the group was planning to file a Freedom of Information Act request looking for internal communications and numbers regarding the backlog.

USCIS did face a higher backlog after Obama was first elected, Hoyt said, but officials worked to curb that backlog to about 8 or 9 months.

Hoyt said his advocacy group has been tracking the backlog of citizenship applications for years and had never seen numbers like this.

He noted that while the backlog is ongoing, USCIS has launched an office focusing on identifying Americans suspected to have used fraudulent means to get their citizenship — and then strip them of it.

USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press the agency is hiring dozens of lawyers and immigration officers to review cases and look for immigrants who were ordered deported and then used fake identities to later obtain green cards and eventually citizenship.

“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”

Hoyt said the move was a poor use of resources considering the current backlog.

“They’re not paying attention to their core responsibility of processing people in a timely manner,” Hoyt said. “Instead they’re on a witch hunt to try to denaturalize citizens who have been here for over 20 years.”

Salas said denaturalizations were very uncommon in the past.

Authorities would have to “demonstrate high, high levels of violation of any type in order for a person to be denaturalized,” she said. “It was something that was very, very rare.”

Source: Citizenship application backlog ‘skyrocketed’ under Trump, report finds

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How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment – The New York Times

2018/07/03 Leave a comment

Good long read and analysis:

On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm.

The court’s five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public unions a devastating blow. The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California lawrequiring religiously oriented “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide women with information about abortion.

Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

The two decisions were the latest in a stunning run of victories for a conservative agenda that has increasingly been built on the foundation of free speech. Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.

“The right, which had for years been hostile to and very nervous about a strong First Amendment, has rediscovered it,” said Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University.

The Citizens United campaign finance case, for instance, was decided on free-speech grounds, with the five-justice conservative majority ruling that the First Amendment protects unlimited campaign spending by corporations. The government, the majority said, has no business regulating political speech.

The dissenters responded that the First Amendment did not require allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace and corrupt democracy.

“The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. “It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point. What’s now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech.”

And an increasingly conservative judiciary has been more than a little receptive to this argument. A new analysis prepared for The New York Times found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech. That is a sharp break from earlier eras.

As a result, liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them.

“The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.”

Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.

Take pornography and street protests. Liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship. Now many on the left see pornography as an assault on women’s rights.

In 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Far fewer supported the free-speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Va.

There was a certain naïveté in how liberals used to approach free speech, said Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

“Because so many free-speech claims of the 1950s and 1960s involved anti-obscenity claims, or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless,” he said. “But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that. The question, then, is why the left ever believed otherwise.”

Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo.

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

Changing Interpretations

In the great First Amendment cases in the middle of the 20th century, few conservatives spoke up for the protection of political dissenters, including communists and civil rights leaders, comedians using vulgar language on the airwaves or artists exploring sexuality in novels and on film.

In 1971, Robert H. Bork, then a prominent conservative law professor and later a federal judge and Supreme Court nominee, wrote that the First Amendment should be interpreted narrowly in a law-review article that remains one of the most-cited of all time.

“Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political,” he wrote. “There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”

But a transformative ruling by the Supreme Court five years later began to change that thinking. The case, a challenge to a state law that banned advertising the prices of prescription drugs, was filed by Public Citizen, a consumer rights group founded by Ralph Nader. The group argued that the law hurt consumers, and helped persuade the court, in Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, to protect advertising and other commercial speech.

The only dissent in the decision came from Justice William H. Rehnquist, the court’s most conservative member.

Kathleen M. Sullivan, a former dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that it did not take long for corporations to see the opportunities presented by the decision.

Conservatives in Charge, the Supreme Court Moved Right

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s last Supreme Court term contained hints of his retirement and foreshadowed a lasting rightward shift.

“While the case was litigated by consumer protection advocates,” she wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “corporate speakers soon became the principal beneficiaries of subsequent rulings that, for example, struck down restrictions on including alcohol content on beer can labels, limitations on outdoor tobacco advertising near schools and rules governing how compounded drugs may be advertised.”

That trend has continued, with businesses mounting First Amendment challenges to gun control laws, securities regulations, country-of-origin labels, graphic cigarette warnings and limits on off-label drug marketing.

“I was a bit queasy about it because I had the sense that we were unleashing something, but nowhere near what happened,” Mr. Nader said. “It was one of the biggest boomerangs in judicial cases ever.”

“I couldn’t be Merlin,” he added. “We never thought the judiciary would be as conservative or corporate. This was an expansion that was not preordained by doctrine. It was preordained by the political philosophies of judges.”

Not all of the liberal scholars and lawyers who helped create modern First Amendment law are disappointed. Martin Redish, a law professor at Northwestern University, who wrote a seminal 1971 article proposing First Amendment protection for commercial speech, said he was pleased with the Roberts court’s decisions.

“Its most important contributions are in the commercial speech and corporate speech areas,” he said. “It’s a workmanlike, common sense approach.”

Liberals also played a key role in creating modern campaign finance law in Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 decision that struck down limits on political spending by individuals and was the basis for Citizens United, the 2010 decision that did away with similar limits for corporations and unions.

One plaintiff was Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, Democrat of Minnesota, who had challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1968 presidential primaries — from the left. Another was the American Civil Liberties Union’s New York affiliate.

Professor Neuborne, a former A.C.L.U. lawyer, said he now regrets the role he played in winning the case. “I signed the brief in Buckley,” he said. “I’m going to spend long amounts of time in purgatory.”

To Professor Seidman, cases like these were part of what he describes as a right-wing takeover of the First Amendment since the liberal victories in the years Chief Justice Earl Warren led the Supreme Court.

“With the receding of Warren court liberalism, free-speech law took a sharp right turn,” Professor Seidman wrote in a new article to be published in the Columbia Law Review. “Instead of providing a shield for the powerless, the First Amendment became a sword used by people at the apex of the American hierarchy of power. Among its victims: proponents of campaign finance reform, opponents of cigarette addiction, the L.B.G.T.Q. community, labor unions, animal rights advocates, environmentalists, targets of hate speech and abortion providers.”

The title of the article asked, “Can Free Speech Be Progressive?”

“The answer,” the article said, “is no.”

Shifting Right

The right turn has been even more pronounced under Chief Justice Roberts.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a larger share of First Amendment cases concerning conservative speech than earlier courts had, according to the study prepared for The Times. And it has ruled in favor of conservative speech at a higher rate than liberal speech as compared to earlier courts.

The court’s docket reflects something new and distinctive about the Roberts court, according to the study, which was conducted by Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis; Andrew D. Martin, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and the dean of its College of Literature, Science and the Arts; and Kevin Quinn, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.

“The Roberts court — more than any modern court — has trained its sights on speech promoting conservative values,” the study found. “Only the current court has resolved a higher fraction of disputes challenging the suppression of conservative rather than liberal expression.”

The court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969 was almost exclusively concerned with cases concerning liberal speech. Of its 60 free-expression cases, only five, or about 8 percent, challenged the suppression of conservative speech.

The proportion of challenges to restrictions on conservative speech has steadily increased. It rose to 22 percent in the court led by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1969 to 1986; to 42 percent in the court led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist from 1986 to 2005; and to 65 percent in the Roberts court.

The Roberts court does more than hear a larger proportion of cases concerning conservative expression. It is also far more likely than earlier courts to rule for conservative speech than for liberal speech. The result, the study found, has been “a fundamental transformation of the court’s free-expression agenda.”

In past decades, broad coalitions of justices have often been receptive to First Amendment arguments. The court has protected videos of animal cruelty, hateful protests at military funerals, violent video games and lies about military awards, often by lopsided margins.

But last week’s two First Amendment blockbusters were decided by 5-to-4 votes, with the conservatives in the majority ruling in favor of conservative plaintiffs.

On Tuesday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that requiring health clinics opposed to abortion to tell women how to obtain the procedure violated the clinics’ free-speech rights. In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that was a misuse of First Amendment principles.

“Using the First Amendment to strike down economic and social laws that legislatures long would have thought themselves free to enact will, for the American public, obscure, not clarify, the true value of protecting freedom of speech,” Justice Breyer wrote.

On Wednesday, in announcing the decision on public unions, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court was applying settled and neutral First Amendment principles to protect workers from being forced to say things at odds with their beliefs. He suggested that the decision on public unions should have been unanimous.

“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” he wrote. “Suppose, for example, that the State of Illinois required all residents to sign a document expressing support for a particular set of positions on controversial public issues — say, the platform of one of the major political parties. No one, we trust, would seriously argue that the First Amendment permits this.”

In response, Justice Kagan said the court’s conservatives had found a dangerous tool, “turning the First Amendment into a sword.” The United States, she said, should brace itself.

“Speech is everywhere — a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it),” she wrote. “For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.”

via How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment – The New York Times

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Shifting Public Views on Legal Immigration Into the US

2018/06/30 Leave a comment

Lots of good data here, suggesting more limited support for Trump administration policies:

Many unaware that most immigrants in the U.S. are here legally.

Since 2001, decline in the share saying legal immigration should be decreasedWhile there has been considerable attention on illegal immigration into the U.S. recently, opinions about legal immigration have undergone a long-term change. Support for increasing the level of legal immigration has risen, while the share saying legal immigration should decrease has fallen.

The survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 5-12 among 2,002 adults, finds that 38% say legal immigration into the United States should be kept at its present level, while 32% say it should be increased and 24% say it should be decreased.

Since 2001, the share of Americans who favor increased legal immigration into the U.S. has risen 22 percentage points (from 10% to 32%), while the share who support a decrease has declined 29 points (from 53% to 24%).

The shift is mostly driven by changing views among Democrats. The share of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who say legal immigration into the U.S. should be increased has doubled since 2006, from 20% to 40%.

Growing share of Democrats support increased legal immigration into the U.S.Republicans’ views also have changed, though more modestly. The share of Republicans and Republican leaners who say legal immigration should be decreased has fallen 10 percentage points since 2006, from 43% to 33%.

Still, about twice as many Republicans (33%) as Democrats (16%) support cutting legal immigration into the U.S.

The new survey, which was largely conducted before the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border involving immigrant children being separated from their parents, finds deep and persistent partisan divisions in a number of attitudes toward immigrants, as well as widespread misperceptions among the public overall about the share of the immigrant population in the U.S. that is in this country illegally:

Fewer than half of Americans know that most immigrants in the U.S. are here legally. Just 45% of Americans say that most immigrants living in the U.S. are here legally; 35% say most immigrants are in the country illegally, while 6% volunteer that about half are here legally and half illegally and 13% say they don’t know. In 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, lawful immigrants accounted for about three-quarters of the foreign-born population in the United States.

Republicans are split in their views of undocumented immigrantsMost feel sympathy toward unauthorized immigrants in the U.S.Nearly seven-in-ten (69%) are very or somewhat sympathetic toward immigrants who are in the United States illegally. That view has changed little since 2014, when a surge of unaccompanied children from Central America attempted to enter the U.S. at the border. An overwhelming share of Democrats (86%) say they are sympathetic toward immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, compared with about half of Republicans (48%) .

Fewer say granting legal status to unauthorized immigrants is a “reward.”Just 27% of Americans say that giving people who are in the U.S. illegally a way to gain legal status is like rewarding them for doing something wrong. More than twice as many (67%) say they don’t think of it this way. Since 2015, the share saying that providing legal status for those in the U.S. illegally is akin to a “reward” for doing something wrong has declined 9 percentage points. (Americans also broadly support granting legal status to immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children.)

Most Americans do not think undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit serious crimes. Large majorities of Americans say that undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. are not more likely than U.S. citizens to commit serious crimes (65% say this) and that undocumented immigrants mostly fill jobs citizens don’t want (71% say this). These opinions, which also are divided along partisan lines, are virtually unchanged since 2016.

Most people who encounter immigrants who do not speak English well aren’t bothered by this. Most Americans say they often (47%) or sometimes (27%) come into contact with immigrants who speak little or no English. Among those who say this, just 26% say it bothers them, while 73% say it does not. The share saying they are bothered by immigrants speaking little or no English has declined by 12 percentage points since 2006 (from 38% to 26%) and 19 points since 1993 (from 45%).

…

Source: Shifting Public Views on Legal Immigration Into the US

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Trump’s Travel Ban Puts America’s Brain Drain in Hyperdrive

2018/06/28 Leave a comment

While the headline overstates, there will be an ongoing and longer-term impact:

On Monday, for the first time ever, Tara Yasseri was turned down for a U.S. visa to attend the prestigious International Conference on Computational Social Science at Northwestern University.

Why? Because, he said, he’s Iranian.

A senior research fellow in computational social science at the University of Oxford, Yasseri’s work on big data and election predictions has brought him around the world, including to the U.S. just this past March. But American politics finally got in the way. He said that a consulate officer explained to him that President Donald Trump’s so-called travel ban had made his requests to get to the campus in Evanston, Illinois, more complicated than usual.

“I appreciated his honesty,” Yasseri told The Daily Beast. “To be honest, I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always been granted a [single-entry] visa.”

Stories of upended travel, aborted education plans, and stymied research projects are becoming more common in the world of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and academia. And they may soon become even more so.

On Tuesday, just one day after Yasseri’s visa request was denied, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Hawaii that the president’s travel ban—in place even while under legal challenge—was, indeed, constitutional. The decision meant the policy will remain in place. And it left academics and scientists fearful that the United States may witness a drain of intellectual talent in the coming years.

Handed down by a 5-4 majority, the ruling prohibits citizens from seven countries—Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen—from entering the country due to the “national security threat” they supposedly pose.

Scotus Ruling Will Embolden Trump to Expand the Ban

Critics had argued that the policy was fundamentally racist as it was built on the foundation of Trump’s campaign pledge to stop all Muslims from entering the United States. But over the course of his presidency, Trump narrowed down the policy, including by adding two non-Muslim majority countries to the list.

That proved enough to negate the constitutional concern. But those in the STEM fields say that the practical impact of the ban will be the same as the original incarnation.

“We’re deterring people from coming here,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Pratt School of Engineering at Stanford University. “America is now considered hostile to foreigners. Before they can even want to come, they’re turned away.”

The ripple effects of that hostility could be profound, Wadhwa predicted. In the 2012 paper he co-authored, titled “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now,” Wadhwa noted that more than a quarter of American engineering and technology startups were founded by immigrants and that in Silicon Valley, nearly half of startups are immigrant-founded. When it came to patents, more than 60 percent of filings were done by immigrants; over 40 percent of international patent applications on behalf of the American government included an author who wasn’t an American citizen.

The travel ban could fundamentally change the American economy by drying up that source of innovation.

“With this brain drain happening, we’re arming our competitors in China and South America with the greatest threat to American security,” said Wadhwa. In particular, there’s the fact that “we’ve been training the smartest students from China and sending them back home,” he said. “China is catching up to America in artificial intelligence and gene editing and robotics. We never thought China would be able to compete with the U.S. but China is on par with the U.S. right now.”

Even before the Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday, the effects of the ban were become evident in a variety of fields. Dr. Atul Grover, the executive vice president of Association of American Medical Colleges, said that over the preceding year, there had been about a 22 percent drop in the number of people requesting a student visa from the seven countries on the president’s list.

“For a one year difference that is pretty significant,” Grover said.

But, he added, the actual impact is likely to be even more severe. He expected prospective medical students from countries not on the current list to balk at applying to schools in the United States out of fear that their nations may be added by Trump at a later date. In addition, students with spouses from countries currently under the ban would have to weigh the possibility of splitting up their family if they choose to study in the United States.

“We are already looking at a physician shortage,” Grover said. “While we have increased the number of graduates from U.S. medical schools, we are still reliant on international graduates to serve people, particularly in underserved areas. That will be harder and harder to fill these positions if we have fewer applicants. Or it may be that these applicants are as qualified as they are in the past. We’ve had our choice of the best and the brightest in the past. But now, people might look elsewhere.”

Under the travel ban, individuals from the seven targeted countries can still apply for, and be granted, student and exchange visas. But the incentives for requesting each are greatly diminished. Progress in STEM fields take an immense amount of work and time, from producing the research, to building a company, to seeking investment of capital. If a ban or the threat of deportation holds, that incentive to stay in the country is diminished.

This will impact both those here and those seeking to come. According to data provided by the Institute of International Education, there were 25,751 students from the seven banned countries who studied in the United States during the 2016-17 calendar year. Advocates expect that number to diminish and those students to look abroad for career opportunities.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice reported that the number of visas issued by the to students from Iran, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia in the first three months of this year was just 298. “This is less than a quarter of the volume needed to be on track for 2016 student visa levels,” the last full year before the ban took effect, Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his dissenting opinion.

Educators, likewise, will face diminished incentives to work at, or even collaborate with, U.S. institutions. In Yasseri’s case, the inability to attend the conference at Northwestern was a major professional setback, depriving him the opportunity to present groundbreaking research, network with others in the field, and participate in a conference that he helped coordinate and plan.

It’s one of the reasons why Yasseri—who is set to become a British citizen by the end of the year—said he has never entertained the United States as a potential research destination. He left for Europe 12 years ago from Iran, and while many of his friends went to the America, he found the single entry visas students had to deal with cumbersome. “If they left the country, they had to reapply for a visa,” he pointed out. “I didn’t want to be trapped in a single country.”

So Yasseri went around that. He earned his Ph.D. in Germany and is conducting research in the United Kingdom. With a British passport, he thinks traveling to the United States might become easier, and he might even look into doing a sabbatical in the U.S.

But settling in America permanently remains out of the question.

“Even if I got a visa, my family would not be able to visit,” Yasseri said.

Source: Trump’s Travel Ban Puts America’s Brain Drain in Hyperdrive

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Tim Cook speaks out at Fortune’s CEO Initiative on hot-button issues like immigration | TechCrunch

2018/06/27 Leave a comment

Immigration excerpt and their policy framework for intervening in public debates:

At Fortune’s CEO Initiative event today, Tim Cook shared his opinion on a number of contentious issues, including immigration, political news and smartphone addiction. Here are some highlights from his conversation with Fortune executive editor Adam Lashinsky.

On companies taking a stance on public policy and other politically charged issues, including the Trump administration’s separations of migrant families at United States-Mexico border, which Cook recently condemned as “inhumane”:

“Apple is about changing the world. It became clear to me some number of years ago that you don’t do that by staying quiet on things that matter. For us, that’s the driving issue,” he said.

Although there’s “no formula” dictating what Apple addresses publicly, Cook said the company considers “do we have a standing, do we have a right to talk about this issue?” For Apple, he said this means they “typically speak about education, privacy, about human rights, about immigration and the environment.”

When asked by Lashinsky why Apple has standing to speak about immigration and human rights, Cook replied that many immigrants work at Apple, including more than 300 people protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and “several thousand” employees on H1B visas.

“To me, too often in the case of immigration, people quickly get to numbers, but there are real people behind this, who have real feelings and they’re a core part of the United States, so we have significant standing there,” he added.

Cook also claimed that Apple doesn’t address politics directly as a company. “We stick to policy, how people are treated, what is immigration policy. We work with people from both parties or no party. Sometimes one party doesn’t like what we do, or the other one doesn’t, or both don’t.”

via Tim Cook speaks out at Fortune’s CEO Initiative on hot-button issues like immigration | TechCrunch

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Conservative Media Failed To Redefine Debate On Trump’s Immigration Policy – NPR

2018/06/23 Leave a comment

Some possible lessons here, or perhaps it is simply the power of children as victims to change the narrative (as Alan Kurdi’s did during the 2015 Canadian election):

As President Trump faced growing outrage over his child detention policy on the U.S.-Mexico border, conservative outlets like Fox News and Breitbart scrambled to his defense. They urged Trump to stand firm, describing the forced separation of migrant children from their families as part of a strategy to keep America’s borders safe.

But by Wednesday afternoon, that narrative began to unravel as national outrage grew and it became clear the president would reverse course. On Rush Limbaugh’s conservative talk radio program, one caller said that this time the fight might not be winnable.

“They’ve got Trump, they’ve blown Trump up,” Limbaugh said, voice rising in disappointment. “He’s got to reunite families or it’s over?”

“It’s these photographs [of children],” the caller said. “They finally got something that they can stick to him I think.”

During past scandals and debates over controversial policies, Trump and right-leaning media appeared to work closely together, pummeling the president’s critics while echoing arguments and developing themes. At the same time, the White House has aggressively dismissed mainstream media coverage as “fake news” designed to harm Trump.

This time, however, the administration and its media allies faced a different kind of pressure. Powerful audio and images of crying children held in federal detention facilities went viral. The country’s more liberal-leaning media amplified the indignation, with Rachel Maddow appearing to choke up during her show on MSNBC while attempting to read about “tender age shelters.”

“Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children,” Maddow said, shaking her head with emotion before deciding she could read no more. “I think I’m going to have to hand this off.”

In conservative media favored by Trump and many of his supporters, the story often looked and sounded starkly different: websites like Breitbart, The Daily Caller and Drudge Report worked to redefine the debate, describing the border crisis as a manufactured media event, concocted by Democrats and advocates of liberal immigration policies.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter said in an appearance on Fox News, “These child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks right now,” adding, “Do not fall for it, Mr. President.”

Trump seemed committed to holding the line. He tweeted defiantly that critics of his tough border policies want undocumented immigrants to “infest” the United States. On Fox News, hosts echoed the argument, claiming Trump was defending the border from waves of impoverished and dangerous refugees.

“Their goal is to change your country forever,” argued Fox host Tucker Carlson Tuesday, referring to those who favor liberal immigration policies. “They’re succeeding by the way.”

Another Fox host, Laura Ingraham, said Tuesday, “The American people are footing a really big bill for what is tantamount to a slow-rolling invasion of the United States.” Ingraham also suggested that detention facilities being built for children resemble “summer camps.”

But this time, conservative media failed to shift the conversation. National anger grew as more images of children being detained emerged. Influential Republicans broke ranks with Trump. “We don’t think families should be separated, period,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Wednesday. “We’ve seen the videos, heard the audio.”

Meanwhile, White House arguments defending the child detention policy continued to shift and conservative media struggled to keep up. But their narrative began to splinter. In an emotional appearance on Sean Hannity’s popular program on Fox News Tuesday night, commentator Geraldo Rivera described the administration’s border policy as “child abuse.”

It’s unclear how much this back and forth in the media influenced Trump. As he prepared to sign his executive order on Wednesday, some conservative outlets pivoted and began voicing dismay at what they described as a major capitulation. Breitbart News ran a headline on its homepage claiming Trump had “buckled.” The influential website that often cheerleads Trump argued bluntly that he had caved to “left-wing hate.”

Limbaugh, meanwhile, warned that any retreat from tough immigration policies might divide Trump from his base. “The only person who can blow up this relationship [with conservative voters] is Trump himself,” the radio host told his audience Wednesday. “The media is attempting to force Trump to do things to make you start doubting, to make you start questioning.”

Source: Conservative Media Failed To Redefine Debate On Trump’s Immigration Policy

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What the Bible Really Says About Trump’s Zero-Tolerance Immigration Policy

2018/06/23 Leave a comment

On scapegoating:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions invokes the Bible to justify the heinous zero-tolerance immigration policy, which incarcerates children. Sarah Huckabee Sanders calls the policy “very Biblical.” Pushback from religious figures comes quickly: from Catholic bishops and the Pope, “immoral”; from rabbis and Jewish groups, “unconscionable”; from nuns, “travesty”; and, from Jesuits, “close to obscene.” A Protestant leader cites Jesus: “Let the little children come to me” (Matthew 19:14). Then Stephen Colbert, as usual, nails it: “Hey, don’t bring God into this.”

Yet, by bringing the Bible’s God into it, Sessions has actually done the country a service. It seems obvious that separating thousands of children, including babies, from their parents, secretly scattering them across the nation, and caging them in camps and pens offends against the compassion and the love that are hallmarks of Biblical exhortation. As of yesterday, President Trump has apparently retreated on the policy, with a new executive order that ends the separating of families but doesn’t release from limbo the thousands of children already taken. This traumatizing of legions of the very young stands as an epiphany—a climactic American moment of truth.

When Sessions invited the world to measure the government’s approach to immigration against the Bible, he exposed the deeper meaning of the “illegal-aliens” trashing that has defined Donald Trump’s politics from the start. The President’s endless demagoguery about the border with Mexico, and those who flee there, is a classic instance of scapegoating, a deeply human malevolence that is rarely recognized for what it is. Groups at the mercy of free-floating negative energy—resentment, greed, fear, or, say, racial anxiety—find relief by projecting their hateful passions onto powerless figures who are blamed for discord they had nothing to do with. The marginalized victims are made to suffer, which perversely frees members of the dominant, victimizing group from its negative energy, sparking a “collective effervescence,” which in turn convinces them that the victims were deserving of the punishment they got. This is the “scapegoat mechanism” identified by the anthropologist René Girard.

Sessions accidentally invoked this analysis when he brought up the Bible, because the word “scapegoat” originates there. The scapegoat is the animal that is driven out into the wilderness (“escaped”), carrying the people’s sins, in Leviticus 16. Sessions’s mistake was less in his blatant misuse of a verse from St. Paul than in his failure to understand that the whole point of the Bible is to reverse the usual way of telling the story of abusive power.

The foundational myth of Rome relates the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus, whom the gods then valorize as the namesake of the city. The foundational myth of the Bible, by contrast, tells, in Genesis, of the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, who is forever marked with shame, and rebuked by God. (“The voice of your brother’s blood cries to me from the ground.”) From the get-go, the Bible’s God, as I have written before, stands with the victims, not the victimizers.

Instead of seeing events from the point of view of those who do the scapegoating, the Bible insists on seeing everything from the point of view of the ones driven out. This is literally what happens in Exodus, which tells the story of a people expelled into the wilderness, but does so from the side of the beleaguered Hebrews rather than from that of the all-powerful Pharaoh. It is not incidental to the American moment that the originating mythology of scapegoating is all about borders. As demarcations of contempt, the Bible is against them. This radical shift in point of view means that the Biblical critique of Trump’s policy, and his minions’ defense of it, is far more consequential than a failure of warm feelings like empathy and compassion. God does not just “feel” for victims; God sides with them, period. This is the whole point of Biblical faith.

The fact that self-affirming Christians such as Sessions and Sanders are apparently unaware of this meaning suggests how deeply into the human psyche the scapegoating impulse goes. After all, Christianity was born in a cauldron of scapegoating, when the wickedness of the impulse was fully exposed in the story of Jesus, the paradigmatic innocent victim. But what should have been the ultimate takedown of scapegoating was itself reversed when some of his traumatized supporters again, very humanly, told his anti-scapegoating story in a way that immediately scapegoated “the Jews,” who were falsely blamed for his death, and became labelled as “Christ-killers.” This scapegoating mistake sanctified the positive-negative bipolarity of the Western imagination, a holy hatred that inflamed anti-Semitism, and has shown up lately in white supremacy.

Donald Trump’s description of undocumented immigrants as people, he tweeted, who would “pour into and infest our Country,” and his rally-energizing claims that “They’re not sending their finest. We’re sending them the hell back,” are a classic display of the power of the “collective effervescence” of the victimizer, seemingly providing the most fervent of his supporters with relief from their own anguish, whatever its source. That Trump’s organizing symbol is the Wall, however impossibly impractical, perfectly expresses the depth of this malign impulse. A fantasy enemy requires an imagined boundary behind which to hide. The way to resist Trump’s exploitation of the marginal and the powerless—including, now, children—is to call it by its proper name. Immigrants, undocumented or not, are not America’s problem. They are America’s scapegoat.

Source: What the Bible Really Says About Trump’s Zero-Tolerance Immigration Policy

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If Moderate Muslims Are Asked to Condemn Extremists, Where Are Moderate Christians on Jeff Sessions?

2018/06/22 Leave a comment

Valid points – and has happened but mainly in the context of child separations:

“Dear moderate Christian Republicans, as a Muslim always asked to defend my alleged moderation for the past 16 years, here’s a sincere opportunity for you to step up and reclaim the Bible, Jesus and your religion from men and women using it to separate kids from their parents.”

I tweeted this invitation and request upon hearing Attorney General Jeff Sessions cite the Bible, Romans 13, to defend the administration’s zero tolerance, deterrence policy that detains and separates undocumented minors from their parents at the U.S. border. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders supported his biblical justification by saying: “I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law…It’s a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.”

On an ordinary day in America, it would be a great scandal when the nation’s top lawyer and the president’s liaison to the press both seem to be blissfully unaware that the United States is a pluralistic democracy that advocates separation of church and state and is bound by the Constitution which features the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion by the government. But in the ever decaying, deepening, moral abyss that is the Trump administration, this is just another forgettable warm up act before the new horror show of the week.

In defense of Jeff Sessions, Romans 13 has been used in the past, but often to justify slaveryand apartheid. That it was used to defend a policy of detaining 2,500 children, some of them living in cages and detention centers, shouldn’t surprise anyone. People of self-professed faith often find their way to molding religion around their political objectives.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who is moved by the Christian Holy Spirit, insisted that these children were merely experiencing a “summer camp.” Ann Coulter, another conservative Christian, said we should give these kids Oscars because they’re “child actors.” Not to be outdone, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, asked America to hold his beer while he mocked an undocumented minor with Down Syndrome who was separated from her mother. This is the same man who once said that Christian “faith played a big part in the [Trump] campaign.”

Trump himself never directly cited the bible to justify his policy. Instead, he blamed Democrats for wanting illegal immigrants to “infest” the United States and claimed his hands were tied to do anything else. On Wednesday afternoon, he finally reversed course and said he would sign an Executive Order ending family separation at the border.

But his new order only shifts the cruelty of his previous policy by seeking to detain undocumented minors and their parents indefinitely in “facilities” which are essentially modern day internment camps.  He seeks to undo the Flores settlement, which prohibits minors from being detained more than 20 days. He’s deliberately manufacturing a crisis and conflict with the courts —just to detain and punish migrants and their children.

We Must Not Let Trump and Sessions Break Us

In Isaiah 61:1, Jesus says God sent him “to bring good to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.”

I ask: Will the moderate Christian Republicans please stand up?

I ask because, as a Muslim, I don’t recognize Trump’s Jesus or Christianity. I first encountered the Christian version of Jesus while reading the Bible at my all boys, Catholic high school. To the anguish of Father Allender, my religious studies teacher, I had the highest grade every semester, followed by Kalyan, a Hindu, and Naveed, a non practicing Muslim. I was attracted to the stories and the Jesuit motto of service: “men for others.” To me, the heart of the New Testament is Agape, which refers to God’s unconditional love. This is the love that fueled Jesus’s entire mission and is clearly articulated in Matthew 25:40, where he preached, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

I empathize with the frustration of millions of Christians horrified that their religious values and Holy Book have been hijacked by an extremist minority in power to rationalize bigotry and hateful policies. Ever since the 9-11 terror attacks, I’ve been asked to be a walking Wikipedia entry on all things Islam and Muslim-y and engage in an endless “condemnathon,”apologizing for criminal acts done by radicalized men and women I’ve never met in countries I’ve never visited. All robust condemnations, eloquent refutations, and sincere attempts at education fall on deaf ears to those who keep asking me to prove my alleged moderation. For many Republican politicians, conservative pundits, Christian leaders and their “Values Voters,” the fear persists that somehow Muslims, one percent of America’s population, will take over America, replace the Constitution and put a burqa on the Statue of Liberty.

But what if it’s the Trump administration and its supporters that represent extremism that moderate Christians and Republicans should be pressed to condemn? Perhaps it’s their absolutism that will subvert democratic norms, freedoms and institutions, which to them are merely tools for their divisive and hateful agendas?

We know that the religious minded have flocked to Trump.  Nearly 81% of white evangelical christians voted for him in 2016 , along with 60% of white Catholics. This also is the group most likely to be dogmatic about immigration policy. In a January Washington Post-ABC poll, 75% of white evangelical Christians rated the “federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants” as a positive.

What’s the appeal of Donald Trump, a racist, lying adulterer who said he should be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for avoiding STDs and never attends church? Well, he promised these “values voters” that under his administration “our Christian heritage will be cherished, protected, defended, like you’ve never seen before.”

But religion under the Trump administration has not been protected and defended. Instead, it has been invoked and unsheathed as a malicious sword against innocent, undocumented children, who have been used as pawns to enact a cruel immigration policy and a border wall. A sword is a fitting weapon for Trump considering he said his favorite Bible verse is “eye for an eye,” featured in Exodus 21. The irony is that Jesus singled out and rejected that old Mosaic law in his Sermon on the Mount. Jesus never said the Kingdom of Heaven would include a border wall paid for by the Romans and enforced by beefed up Praetorian Guardsmen who would keep out refugees, immigrants fleeing persecution, children and foreigners.

And yet, everything Trump corrupts is forgiven, because he is a “modern-day Cyrus” according to Evangelical pastors. Cyrus was the ancient, pagan, Persian King who welcomed exiled Jews back to Israel. Like Cyrus, Trump is apparently a flawed instrument with divine legitimacy chosen by God to “navigate in chaos” and fulfill a greater plan. But unlike Cyrus, Trump can’t welcome foreigners — undocumented immigrants and refugees — to America. Alas, nobody’s perfect, especially a flawed king.

Other prominent Christian personalities, such as Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron, absolve Trump by comparing his sexual discretions to King David, who impregnated another man’s wife and then sent him to die in battle. Although King David atoned for his sins and asked forgiveness, Trump has publicly said he doesn’t need to ask God forgiveness.

To his credit, Evangelical pastor Franklin Graham, who according to Trump was “instrumental” in helping him win over evangelical Christians, condemned Trump’s border separation policy as “disgraceful.” But, Graham still believes that God put Trump in the White House. Listening to these religious leaders, I’m reminded of a verse from the Bible, 2 Corinthians 11:13: “For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.”

Will the moderate Christian Republicans please stand up?

Thankfully, several Christian leaders did stand up, and spoke out loudly against Trump’s “zero tolerance policy.” Earlier this week in Washington D.C., ahead of the President’s meeting with House Republicans on immigration, many evangelical leaders asked Congress and the administration to immediately end his policy of family separation. Citing the Bible, Kent Annan, Senior Fellow at the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, said, “As evangelical Christians, we’re committed to the Bible as our top authority, and the Scriptures speak clearly and repeatedly about God’s concern for vulnerable foreigners, including refugees…as Christians who believe that all people bear God’s image, as well as people committed to religious liberty for all, this is very troubling.”

I pray leaders in Trump’s administration listen to their fellow Christians who are invoking Jesus, the Bible and Christian morality to denounce their hateful immigration policy. I pray Attorney General Jeff Sessions listens to over 640 members of his own United Methodist church, who condemned his defense of the border policy and are seeking church law charges against him for alleged “child abuse.”

I pray that Vice President Mike Pence, perhaps the most devout member of Trump’s administration, is listening as well. Allegedly, Pence believes Jesus talks to him. I pray Jesus does. I pray he asks him to read Matthew 18: 4-5, where Jesus tells his disciples: “Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” I pray Mike Pence understands the words and the spirit behind them and then counsels President Trump to act accordingly, like a proper Christian.

Mostly, I hope and pray for the moderate Christian Republicans to please stand up and finally denounce this administration and its cruelty.

Source: If Moderate Muslims Are Asked to Condemn Extremists, Where Are Moderate Christians on Jeff Sessions?

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Contrasting opinions on whether Trudeau should condemn Trump separation of children policy (in end, he did)

2018/06/21 Leave a comment

David Moscrop arguing he should:

…In his 1961 inaugural address, John F. Kennedy warned, in a different context, that “those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger, ended up inside.” More than 50 years later, here is Canada—beacon of hope, moral exemplar to the world, shiny liberal Valhalla—mounted squarely on the raging cat, trying to manage a relationship with an addled and unpredictable authoritarian south of the border while human rights abuses occur right in front of our faces.

There are countless grim moments throughout human history that we subject our after-the-fact moral certainty and judgment upon today, adding for good measure that “We would never have let that happen.” We’re better than our barbarous forebears, naturally. We’ve learned our lessons. We’re cosmopolitan. Forward-thinking. Smarter. Kinder. Better.

And yet today, we are silently staring down a morally outrageous and unacceptable policy, hedging toward protecting our “interests” on the backs of helpless children and their terrified families while the American president echoes poet W.H. Auden’s Epitaph on a Tyrant: “When he laughed, respected senators burst with laughter/And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”

Like it or not, we’re living history right now. We’re in the midst of a moment that future generations will look back and judge us on, scrutinizing what we did or didn’t do at the pivotal moment when our moral mettle was put to the test. If we fail to do the right thing—to call out abuses, to demand better, to require decency as a basic term of doing business—then we will rightly be condemned just as we condemn our own antecedents for their failures.

There’s still time for Canada to do the right thing. There’s still time for us to criticize human rights abuses abroad and then to turn our gaze back on ourselves and our shortcomings at home. Today, standing up for human rights is not only the right thing to do, but the necessary thing to do if we wish for a future in which a stable, just, and inclusive democracy is possible.

Source: Trudeau won’t condemn Trump’s migrant policy. That’s duplicitous and irresponsible.

L. Ian MacDonald argues the reverse (more persuasive in my view):

…From a Canadian perspective, the U.S. illegal migrant crisis offers an opportunity to assess where we have come since Trudeau posted his famous #“WelcomeToCanada” tweet in January 2017, on the heels of Trump’s order banning travel from seven majority-Islamic countries, including Syria, from which Canada had recently welcomed 25,000 refugees.

It can take over a year for asylum claims to be ruled upon by Ottawa. And admission is by no means a given. Of the 20,000 people who entered Canada illegally last year, 8,200 has since been deported, more than half of them involuntarily, with the government footing the bill for their flights home.

Another 30,000 asylum claimants crossed the border at regular points of entry, though under the Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S., most of them were apparently sent back.

The question some are asking is whether the U.S., under Trump, is still a safe third country. But don’t expect Trudeau to make such a case. He’s got quite enough to do with the NAFTA renegotiation, without trying to score political points on the U.S. border migrant crisis.

Source: Trudeau wisely chooses high road in Trump’s immigration debacle

 

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