Im-Politic: Trump Immigration Policy Caught Red-Handed – Working

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asylum seekers, border security, border wall, ICE, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mainstream Media, Michael Miller, MS-13, refugees, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Washington Post

Mirroring the broader, hysterical Never Trump-ism that’s overcome so much of America’s bipartisan political establishment and its grassroots supporters (along with their foreign counterparts), the Mainstream Media just keeps killing it in the Trump Derangement Syndrome Department. And hot on the heels of that Financial Times editorial I posted on yesterday that faulting a Trump nominee for lacking the leadership and intellectual “heft” of someone who should have been tried as a Vietnam War-related criminal comes a Washington Post article handling the President’s immigration policy record with equally clueless – and equally jaw-dropping – incompetence.

According to Post reporter Michael Miller (and his editors), Mr. Trump is way off-base targeting the murderous Hispanic criminal gang MS-13, and similar networks of thugs, to muster support for his restrictionist immigration policies. The reason? “[E]ven as [the President] warned again and again about the dangers posed by MS-13 members and the need for a wall to keep them out, killings connected to the gang were plummeting in many of the areas where MS-13 has been most active.”

In other words, what could be dumber? And/or more cynical?

But in the very same article, Miller told readers that “federal law enforcement officials say MS-13 violence fell last year as a result of intensified nationwide investigations.”

More specifically, the author writes, “While Trump’s attacks on the gang have been relentless, current and former immigration officials, law enforcement agencies and gang experts attributed the decline in MS-13 murders to an aggressive response by local and federal authorities.”

For good measure, accompanying the article is a photo with this caption: “Northern Virginia Gang Task Force officers partner with ICE [the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] officers to arrest an alleged MS-13 gang member in Manassas in 2017.”

Maybe Miller thinks the President has nothing to do with ICE and other federal authorities?

The author did present convincing evidence that President Trump has hardly been the first chief executive to crack down on MS-13. But he also presented evidence just as convincing that none of the success achieved by these campaigns has lasted. And if you think that the President’s insistence on more physical border barriers has been irrelevant to this crisis, consider this point made by the author: Following evidence of a reduction in gang activity, after 2014, “a surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America helped revitalize MS-13.”

And as made clear by a 2017 Post article linked in Miller’s piece, many of them made their way into the United States because inadequate border security enabled them to sneak in, or because, thanks to permissive federal policies for dealing with arrivals as a whole, “more than 150,000 such teens and children [to that point, two years ago] have been detained at the border, screened and placed in communities through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).”

And “Follow-up [for these resettlement efforts] is limited, and many youths fail to show up for immigration proceedings, a recent congressional investigation showed. At the same time, there are gaps in local efforts to reach vulnerable children and teens before the gang does.”

These problems could be greatly reduced by (1) better physical barriers that prevent would-be border crossers from setting foot in U.S. territory in the first place, and thereby automatically becoming eligible for the entire range of due-process protections to which citizens and other residents – legal and illegal – are entitled; and (2) related Trump administration proposals that would require refugee applicants and asylum-seekers to stay outside U.S. territory while their claims are examined.

In other words, Miller and his editors clearly thought they were serving up a classic Trump “gotcha” story. But even a minimally careful reading of the piece catches them red-handed in a disgraceful – as well as inept – example of media bias.

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Im-Politic: Elites’ Learning Curve on Populism is Still Largely MIA

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American Enterprise Institute, asylum seekers, Brookings Institution, chattering classes, David Brooks, establishment, Europe, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, migrants, migration, Open Borders, Populism, refugees, The Guardian, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, working class

While we’re still (I hope!) in a Thanksgiving frame of mind, let’s not forget to give thanks to America’s ever clueless bipartisan political establishment and chattering classes. As just made glaringly obvious by a Hillary Clinton interview and a New York Times pundit, these utterly intertwined – and indeed incestuous – elites not only mostly remain just as dumbfounded about the developments that have triggered the rise of populism in the Western world as they were the day after Donald Trump became president. They helpfully keep reminding us of how little they’ve learned – and therefore how completely undeserving they are of returning to power.

Clinton’s obliviousness (again) came through loud and clear in a lengthy sit-down earlier this week with the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper. According to the Democratic presidential nominee, whose inept campaign strategy and transparently canned messaging helped key Mr. Trump’s victory, Europe “needs to get a handle on migration.”

That contention’s hard to argue with. But Clinton’s main reason was anything but. According to the former Secretary of State, European leaders’ overly “generous and compassionate approaches” to migration “lit the flame” that have “roiled the body politic” and strengthened the positions of Trump-like populists who have used “immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity….”

In other words, Clinton apparently has no concerns that a massive influx of migrants – or refugees, or so-called asylum-seekers, or even economically motivated immigrants – could drive down wages for the working class or lower income cohorts of a country’s native-born population, or wind up admitting criminals and terrorists from violence-ridden regions, or swamp a country with newcomers either ignorant or actively contemptuous of its cultural values (e.g., its treatment of women).

She’s simply advocating that establishment politicians do the proverbial – but never well defined “something” – to keep on the fringes counterparts who are mindful of the above, and completely legitimate, concerns. In fact, Clinton’s continuing contempt for such leaders, and their followings, is made clear by her contention that populist voters are defined by

“a psychological as much as political yearning to be told what to do, and where to go, and how to live and have their press basically stifled and so be given one version of reality.

“The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and only given one version of reality.”

In other words, “deplorables,” anyone?

If anything, New York Times columnist David Brooks is even brain dead-er on the lessons of 2016. On Thanksgiving day, the paper posted a column of his contending that at least some of America’s establishment has been “chastened” by populism’s successes, and recently has been “working together across ideological lines” to “build the bipartisan governing coalitions” that “pay attention to actual Americans and actual solutions” to the problems that have so divided the nation.

One of his prime examples? A joint effort by the establishment liberal Brookings Institution and the establishment conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to develop policies aimed at “Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class.”

On the one hand, it’s good to see that Brookings and AEI aren’t simply dismissing American populism’s main political base as racists and xenophobes. Even better: The report they’ve just issued recognizes job and income loss resulting from offshoring-friendly trade deals and other wrongheaded globalization-related policies as major sources of working Americans’ economic decline and political anger. And the recommendations for trade policy fixes are pretty good – even including an endorsement of unilateral U.S. tariffs in certain situations. In fact, combining these ideas with many of the more purely domestic policy proposals in the study could make a real difference.

On the other hand, the study’s authors decided to ignore the impacts of Open Borders-friendly immigration policies, because they regard “the perception that immigration is responsible for what ails the working class” as “mistaken.”

And some skepticism is warranted on the trade front as well. After all, experts from both think tanks have been among the strongest critics of Trump administration trade policies – no doubt because so many of their donors are businesses that profit from the trade status status quo, and (in Brookings’ case), many of the very foreign governments in the same category.

But what I found especially revealing was Brooks’ description of the report. It ignored the trade recommendations completely and zeroed in on the measures that, unless accompanied by trade and/or immigration policy overhauls (at least), would wind up as an approach that essentially substitutes various forms of welfare for work: “wage subsidies, improved parental leave, work requirements for some federal benefits, child care tax credits.”

And by the way, of course Brooks endorses the study’s calls for more government aid for education that reduces the current emphasis on sending all young Americans to four-year colleges and increases the emphasis on “career education and training.” That’s fine except that there’s little point to vocational type training if family wage jobs keep fleeing overseas or becoming ever lower-wage jobs because immigrants keep supercharging the labor supply.

Nor have any of the education boosters ever responded to two related points I made in my globalization book, The Race to the Bottom: First, people all over the world as just as capable of being retrained and reeducated as Americans; and second, governments all around the world know this, especially in countries with such immense labor surpluses that they’ll long be able to under-sell American workers.

Brooks closes his article by wondering whether the United States contains “enough chastened members of establishments, who have governing experience, who acknowledge past mistakes, who take the time to reconnect with the country and apply their expertise in new ways” to lead the nation successfully. The Brookings-AEI report provides some grounds for optimism. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Brooks himself.

Im-Politic: Caravans and Open Borders Grandstanding

Tags

asylum seekers, caravans, Central America, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, migrants, refugees, Trump

By now it’s become an article of faith among President Trump’s critics that his stated determination to prevent the caravans of Central American migrants from entering the United States represents a shameful, and possibly racist, break with America’s longstanding tradition of providing haven for victims of poverty, persecution, and numerous other hardships and outrages that remain all too common abroad.

In other words, in striking contrast to the Statue of Liberty’s message of welcome for the world’s “tired…poor…[and] huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Mr. Trump and his supporters are cruelly telling the Central Americans to return to their destitute and violence-wracked countries.

So what do the critics believe should be done instead? Specifics are often lacking, but let’s do a thought experiment and try to figure out how a policy that literally doesn’t “turn its back” on downtrodden foreign populations would like. That is, let’s try to imagine the gist of what a President Hillary Clinton would say about the caravans if she took seriously claims that the Trump approach to the problem is unforgivably callous and wrongheaded – claims that she’s made clear she agrees with via her strong condemnation of Trump administration policies that have resulted in frequent separation of migrant children from their parents:

“My fellow Americans:

“As you have seen in many news reports, several so-called caravans of Central Americans are heading north, through Mexico, filled with men, women, and children hoping to make new lives in the United States.

“Many politicians and news organizations in conservative and Republican ranks, along with out-and-out right-wing extremists, have portrayed this caravans as an impending ‘invasion’ of our country. They’ve urged my administration to deal with this ‘national security emergency’ by taking all necessary steps to turn the migrants back – including stationing the American military at the border.

“I come before you tonight to make clear that I will strongly reject such measures. They would represent a violation of our solemn international treaty obligations. They would amount to a betrayal of America’s long, proud history of welcoming immiserated populations from all corners of the world. And they would ignore simple human decency. In fact, some who urge a hard line toward the migrants are clearly playing on longstanding dark, but completely unjustifiable, fears about foreigners and even about racial and ethnic minorities.

“So I will not send regular military or even national guards units to the border. I will not beef up Border Patrol deployments. And I certainly will not begin building a Wall – as my chief opponent in the last election so foolishly and crudely recommended.

“Nor will I outsource my migrants policy to Mexico, or to the migrants’ home country governments. For none of these countries can guarantee the migrants the safety from crime and violence and the escape from poverty that they, like all members of the human family, deserve.

“In fact, I’m issuing an Executive Order that explicitly establishes gang and domestic violence as valid reasons for granting asylum. For aren’t these dangers just as appalling and inexcusable as the religious, political, and other forms of persecution to which grants of asylum have historically been restricted? Further, this new directive will abolish the artificial distinction between refugees from these horrors and refugees from joblessness, threadbare wages, hunger, homelessness, and other forms of economic privation. For if you’re being victimized for your political leanings or religion or nationality, you’re almost surely trapped in grinding, dehumanizing poverty as well.

“Of course, I’ll be directing that much more of the Justice Department’s budget be allotted to end the shortage of immigration judges that has produced immense backlogs in our immigration courts. Yet until the shortage ends, I will also mandate the construction of high quality accommodations for asylum applicants awaiting a hearing, including first-rate schooling for their children. And needless to say, applicants will enjoy the full come-and-go freedom to and from these facilities. Otherwise, we’d be putting them in cages, however gilded.

“Moreover, I will immediately put into effect my campaign promise to increase five-fold America’s admissions of refugees from Syria’s horrendous civil war. In fact, I apologize to these refugees for waiting so long to address their plight.

“And finally, because too many recent arrivals – from Central America and elsewhere – continue living precariously in the shadows, I will restrict the enforcement of domestic immigration law to finding and deporting dangerous criminals. For far too long taxpayers – including these many of these Aspiring Americans – have paid far too much money for the hounding of individuals and families whose only illegal behavior has been seeking better lives.

“We Americans need to remember: Except for our native American and native-born African-American populations, practically all of our ancestors came to this country for the exact same reasons motivating the Central Americans and so many others today. The Pilgrims were seeking freedom of religion. The Jamestown settlers were economic migrants. How can we deny caravan members and others like them the same opportunities that our nation has extended to our own forebears?

“The answer, it must be clear, is that we mustn’t and we can’t – if we want to be law-abiding global citizens, if we want to be true to our country’s best traditions, and if we want to be able to look ourselves squarely in the mirror.”

Pretty inspiring, isn’t it? But before you pick up the phone to call your Member of Congress (or the White House) to demand implementation of this agenda right now, ask yourself about the impact of an announcement like this. According to Gallup, as of last year, nearly 150 million people around the world would like to move to the United States. That includes 37 million Latin Americans.

Yet since the situation in Central American has clearly worsened over the last year, along with the crisis in Venezuela, that figure now is surely conservative. Additionally, the Trump administration’s current attitude towards migrants could well be depressing the number who consider migrating to the United States an option worth thinking about even idly. The kind of welcoming position Trump critics seem to want – i.e., one that further and greatly strengthens already powerful magnets that have attracting enormous foreign populations to this country – could well supercharge their ranks.

The lessons of this exercise couldn’t be clearer. If you believe that the United States could easily absorb anything close to this inflow in the near future, go right on lambasting the Trump administration and supporters of its immigration policies as modern day [INSERT YOUR FAVORITE ARCH-VILLAIN FROM HISTORY OR LITERATURE HERE]’s. But if you’re genuinely interested in devising an immigration and migrants and refugee policy that acceptably reflects your version of America’s values but recognizes the inevitable limits on such good intentions, you’ll start grandstanding less and thinking about the who, what, how, why, when, and where more.

Im-Politic: Before You Blame Trump for Pittsburgh….

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alt-right, anti-semitism, bigotry, FBI, Gab, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jews, letter bombs, Open Borders, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, political violence, refugees, Robert Bowers, Trump, xenophobia

Yesterday morning’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting hit home especially hard for me – and not just because many of the victims, and the clear targets, were fellow Jews. I also attended college with numerous students from the Squirrel Hill neighborhood where the atrocity took place, and recently learned that a professional friend hales from there as well. I’m no longer in touch with the folks from college, but for all I know some of the victims were their friends or loved ones. And although I’ve never visited the neighborhood itself, the descriptions I’ve heard suggest that other than being a little more urbanized, it’s not so different from the one I’m from on the north shore of Long Island.

Then there are the political and public policy angles: Apparent murderer Robert Bowers was an active participant on the alt-right and highly xenophobic social media platform Gab, and was especially infuriated by the activities of HIAS, (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) a Jewish group that seeks to assist immigrants, refugees, and other newcomers to the United States. I’m a strong supporter of President Trump’s efforts to reduce illegal immigration and control more tightly some forms of illegal immigration. But as I’ve written before, his words on immigration and other issues have too often been unnecessarily inflammatory or insensitive or simply clueless.

(I’m much less ambivalent about claims that Mr. Trump has singlehandedly pushed American politics in general into a more violent phase with his often harsh attacks on Democratic party and other political opponents. Yes, the accused sender of his week’s letter bombs sent to some of these figures over the last week is a Trump supporter. But it’s time for the Trump critics to start recognizing how their own over-the-top and often even harsher language has played a role in generating acts like the attempted mass shooting of Republican members of Congress in the Washington, D.C. area in June, 2017.)

But before anyone starts viewing the Pittsburgh shooting as a reason for fully embracing an Open Borders agenda for the Western Hemisphere, and for refugees from the Middle East, and making even louder calls demonize Mr. Trump as a Hitler-in-waiting, or white supremacist apologist, or dog-whistler to racists and fascists, and/or to impeach him for this supposed record, they should consider this newspaper paragraph:

“Stunned congregants rallied in prayer to a bullet-pocked, swastika-smeared synagogue today as police pursued a hate-crime motive in the [Pittsburgh-area] shooting rampage that left five people dead.”

No, this isn’t an early report of yesterday’s murders. It’s the lead from a newspaper account of a spree of anti-semitic (and racist and xenophobic) killings and vandalism in the Pittsburgh suburbs in April, 2000. That’s a decade-and-a-half before President Trump’s inauguration, and almost as long before he announced his White House run. To refresh your memory, the chief executive then was Bill Clinton. And the list of presidential primary candidates for Democrats and Republicans alike wasn’t exactly dominated by extremists, and those considered outside the mainstream of either party (like Patrick J. Buchanan) didn’t get very far. Yet according to FBI data, that year was actually tied for the highest number of annual anti-semitic hate crimes for the 1996-2016 period. (The Bureau’s 2017 data will probably be coming out a bit later this year.)

In other words, anti-semitism in the United States is nothing new, violent anti-semitism in the United States is nothing new (remember the attack at the Overland Park, Kansas Jewish Community Center of 2014 – also well before the Age of Trump – although none of the white supremacist’s victims was Jewish), and even violent anti-semitism in the Pittsburgh area is nothing new.

It’s completely appropriate to voice outrage at the killer and the mail-bomb sender, about anti-semitism, and about bigotry and unreasoning hatred, about politically motivated violence of all kinds (nothing new in American history, either – as presidential assassinations alone should make all too clear), and about incendiary speech from all manner of U.S. leaders. But those insisting that the nation would be free of such problems if only Mr. Trump had never run for president may have some unreasoning hatred issues of their own.

Im-Politic: Some European Immigration Lessons for Americans

Tags

assimilation, asylum seekers, Daniel Gros, Europe, European Union, Germany, Im-Politic, Immigration, Lily Hindy, migrants, Open Borders, refugees, The Century Foundation

With all the hubbub lately about supposed insiders writing and speaking about the Trump administration’s supposed dangerous dysfunction, the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the ongoing American pro football national anthem controversy, Big Tech’s growing power over our lives and politics, and approaching hurricanes, it’s hard to remember that the nation still has a major unsolved illegal immigration problem –  and that the longstanding, often emotional debate about how to fix it (including its migrants and refugees dimensions) could re-erupt at any time.

When it does, all participants would do well to consider some important points contained in some recent research and writing about Europe’s struggles with borders-related issues. Here are a few that stick out especially prominently in my mind.

Two stunners come from a recent post by leading French economist Daniel Gros. First, he contends:

“The rate at which migrants are arriving has diminished considerably almost everywhere in Europe since the huge inflows seen in 2015….It is largely the result of EU [European Union} efforts, such as the agreement with Turkey to prevent Syrians from crossing into Greece, its cooperation with Libyan militias, and the massive pressure it has placed on the Sahara transit states to close their borders. Thanks to these measures, Europe has become a de facto fortress against migration.”

Yes, the migrants situations facing the United States and Europe differ considerably. But could you come up with any more convincing evidence that tough and smart border enforcement measures can work even when the underlying political and social “sending” pressures remain intact?

It seems that once European leaders mustered the political will – mainly to keep themselves in office – intractable problems got a lot more tractable. And P.S.: I’d argue that Europe’s immigration and refugee challenges are far more difficult than America’s, as it’s located near or relatively near both the economically failed states of North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and conflict-ridden Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Add Libya to that second list, too.

Gros also notes that “In the last three years, men – many of whom are aged 18-35 – comprised more than two-thirds of all people seeking protection in Germany.” Moreover, this lopsided gender ratio seems to hold throughout Europe. Such figures make it awfully difficult to claim that migrants flows are triggered mainly by humanitarian catastrophes befalling so many developing countries. If these worries were the case, wouldn’t women and children be much more prominently represented? Even if picking up stakes while single (or individually) is much easier to do than making these journeys as families? Instead, the disproportionate representation of men, and especially younger men, among migrants signals that economics is a major motivator as well – which is a much less compelling justification for liberal admissions policies.

Some other key insights have been provided by a recent Century Foundation study of Germany’s efforts to assimilate the enormous populations of migrants it’s let in from the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. According to author Lily Hindy, her research on “what a determined government can accomplish if it commits to a policy of welcoming a massive influx of refugees” found that

“While Germany’s experience so far is checkered, on the most important counts, it has been a success. Fears that refugees would spur an increase in terrorism proved unwarranted. So did worries that the refugee influx would derail Germany’s economy. Despite the tensions and setbacks detailed in this report, Germany has managed to reap national benefits from a welcoming policy, implemented despite major political, economic, and social risks.”

All the same, many of those “checkers” look pretty sobering. For example, Hindy reports that the German government pegs the refugee unemployment rate as roughly 40 percent and estimate that, by 2020, only “half of the refugee population that arrived in 2015 would be working.” And this in a country with a world-renowned system of vocational training.

Further, however welcoming it’s been, Germany’s government doesn’t seem big on promoting multi-culturalism. Since 2005, the country has legally required “all immigrants from non-European Union countries to participate” in cost-free (at least to the refugees) “integration courses” that “include 600 hours of German language instruction and a sixty-hour ‘orientation course’ including information on German law, history, culture, and values.”

What if refugee vocational students don’t show up? If they miss these integration classes without valid excuses, or who simply rack up too many absences, they face curtailed government benefits, including in their monthly educational subsidies and food vouchers. And it’s clear from Hindy’s report that many Syrian newcomers in Germany aren’t entirely happy with these assimilationist efforts, charging that they require too much surrendering of their culture and their religion – including keeping women in clearly subordinate positions.

Perhaps most important to keep in mind: Germany has engaged in this massive effort at integration, and achieved what Hindy calls “impressive” successes, at a time when its economy has performed strongly. And even so, in response to political protests, Germany has dramatically reduced refugee admissions over the last two years.

Hindy is surely correct in writing that “barring a reopening of large-scale conflict in Syria, there should be some less chaotic years ahead in which the communities will more easily be able to settle” in Germany. But I wonder how many open and closet, diversity-happy Open Borders enthusiasts in the United States – who tend to pillory calls for any restrictions, or concerns about national identity, as racist and xenophobic – will recognize the loud “proceed with caution” message inherent in her observation.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Afghanistan Opportunity Trump Has Missed

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Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Barry Posen, border security, George W. Bush, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Middle East, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, refugees, Russia, September 11, Syria, Taliban, terrorism, The Atlantic, travel ban, Trump

Although I usually oppose U.S. overseas military interventions, I can understand President Trump’s decision this week to keep significant numbers of American troops in Afghanistan and even expand the presence (to some unannounced extent). What I do find disappointing is Mr. Trump’s apparent neglect of more promising alternatives that couldn’t possibly be called “defeat” or “retreat,” and his failure to describe realistically what may be the biggest fundamental choice the nation still faces in Afghanistan.

I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that Afghanistan under Taliban rule provided the base for the Al Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11 attack and so many other atrocities (on top of those that they have inspired by supportive groups and individuals). So clearly conditions inside that country (a problematic term, to be sure, as will be explained below) matter for U.S. national security. And it’s hard to imagine that even most Americans who are terribly – and understandably – frustrated with the sixteen-year U.S.-dominated military operation that has followed would disagree. The main question has always been how best to defend American interests.

After the Taliban were overthrown by a (highly successful) U.S.-led military campaign in the fall of 2001, Presidents Bush and Obama tragically opted for a standard American counter-insurgency effort to keep the Taliban out of power that combined continued military pressure on their remaining forces and strongholds with programs to promote Afghan economic, social, and political reform.

As critics (including me) predicted, this strategy of “nation-building” failed mainly because Afghanistan lacked the crucial prerequisites for nation-hood to begin with. So several years ago, as the Taliban began mounting a comeback largely as a result, I began supporting a fundamentally different approach: abandoning reform efforts and focusing on securing the United States’ essential aim in Afghanistan – preventing the Taliban or similar groups from consolidating control in enough territory to reestablish a safe haven capable of generating more terrorism.

This strategy would still involve U.S. military forces. But their top priority by far would not be supporting whatever Afghan government military exists, or training such forces (unless some especially promising units can be identified). Instead, the main American mission would be harassing the Taliban and its allies sufficiently to prevent that territorial consolidation, and the main instruments would be special forces and air strikes. And I argued that such operations could prevent ISIS in Iraq and Syria from posing a similar threat. Finally, I recommended that this approach be supplemented – and eventually superseded – by strengthening the security of America’s borders, to reduce greatly the likelihood that terrorists that still might originate from Afghanistan or anywhere else could actually reach the U.S. homeland.

The main advantages of this approach were, initially, concentrating American efforts on overseas goals that seemed both vital and attainable, as opposed to desirable for non-essential; and recognizing that the U.S. government ultimately is much likelier to succeed in controlling access to the United States than in comprehensively manipulating events in far-off lands.

In his speech this week, President Trump did a good job in describing the urgency of continuing to deny terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan. But although he (once again) disparaged nation-building, he also paid it enough lip service to make clear that the basic goal remains in place. For example, he argued that “Military power alone will not bring peace to Afghanistan or stop the terrorist threat arising in that country” and asked India (and possibly America’s European allies) to “help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development.” Surprisingly, moreover, he never connected his Afghanistan strategy with his so-far successful efforts to control American borders more effectively. Indeed, Mr. Trump didn’t even mention his proposed suspension of travel from terrorist-wracked countries (a list that, oddly, never included Afghanistan itself).

And the picture drawn by the President of his ultimate objective(s) was confusing, at best. Notably, on the one hand, he insisted that “From now on, victory will have a clear definition:  attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.” On the other, he stated that the “strategically applied force” his administration will apply in Afghanistan “aims to create the conditions for a political process to achieve a lasting peace.” Still more puzzlingly, he allowed that a political settlement could include “elements of the Taliban.” To be sure, in a technical sense, these objectives aren’t mutually exclusive. But they sure don’t coexist easily, at least not at this point.

One especially worrisome consequence of this Presidential rhetoric is its suggestion, however cautious, that there’s an ultimate, satisfactory solution in Afghanistan that results from continuing U.S. involvement, at least in the foreseeable future. Much skepticism is warranted, mainly because the chances of Afghanistan becoming something politically cohesive enough to “take ownership of their future, to govern their society,” in Mr. Trump’s words, flies in the face of so much of this area’s history.

But that doesn’t mean that the United States should simply pull up stakes, either now, or somewhere down the road – because of that safe haven threat. My own preferred strategy would have resulted in America’s leaders acknowledging that Afghanistan is not a problem to be solved but, as if often true in world affairs, a condition that requires continual management – and then explaining that some forms of management are vastly more realistic, and cheaper, than others.

Nonetheless, an even more appealing alternative has emerged over the last week. In an August 18 article in The Atlantic, MIT political scientist Barry Posen made the case for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan based on the intriguing observation that the countries neighbors, Russia and Iran, both have compelling interests in ensuring that the Taliban and similar groups don’t return to power. In the words of the piece’s title, the aim would be “to make Afghanistan someone else’s problem.”

Of course, I couldn’t help but notice that this proposal strongly resembles my recommendation for handling the challenge of increasingly powerful North Korean nuclear weapons. I’m also impressed, though, by Posen’s observation that both Russia (which is vulnerable to Islamic extremism infecting its own sizable Muslim population) and Iran (a Shia Muslim-dominated country theologically opposed to Sunni groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda) have compelling reasons to frustrate America’s enemies in Afghanistan.

Posen also intriguingly responds to fears that a combined Russian-Iranian success would strengthen those anti-American countries’ efforts to dominate the entire Middle East. As he points out, Pakistan and China both would find this prospect alarming, too, and would seek to check Russian and Iranian influence.

Is Posen’s scheme fool-proof? Of course not. But it looks at least as promising as Mr. Trump’s plan, and it’s discouraging that this supremely, if Machiavellian, America-First strategy apparently wasn’t even considered by the Trump administration in its efforts to fix a badly broken U.S. Afghanistan policy.

Im-Politic: Trump’s Victory Lap after Supreme Court Travel Ban Ruling Looks Premature

Tags

border security, Constitution, Im-Politic, Muslims, refugees, Supreme Court, travel ban, Trump

President Trump has called the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday on the second version of his travel ban a major triumph for his anti-terrorism and homeland security policies. Having read the decision, I’m a lot less sure. Moreover, it looks like the administration’s policymakers might have undercut some important principles that their lawyers had originally asserted.

First of all, it needs to be remembered that the Court specified that its reasoning in this decision was not based on the same criteria that would be used for a final ruling. Why not? Because, as it explained, it was being asked by the Trump administration to stay an injunction from lower courts preventing enforcement of the key ban provisions. In plain English, the Supremes were responding to an administration request to suspend temporarily lower court orders (injunctions) that blocked the federal government from putting into effect the revised Executive Order on the subject, and a majority of the justices agreed to do so – in part.

According to the majority, this ruling was tailored precisely to standards it considered appropriate for stay orders. It further explained that these standards were close to the already relatively low bar it found needed to be met for granting plaintiffs’ requests for injunctions. When the Court decides the final case, these Justices explained, it will rely on somewhat different legal standards and considerations.

That sounds reasonable enough. But I fear that an especially dangerous conclusion the Court arrived at could well find its way into that final ruling, and it has to do with the President’s ability to keep out of the country travelers or refugees (whose applications were also suspended by the Executive Order, and whose entry quotas were reduced) who are judged to have some significant connection with persons or institutions in the United States.

Simply put – and again, by the standards it set forth for stay decisions – the Justices held that the government has great authority (it didn’t specify how much) to control entry into the United States when the traveler or the applicant “lacks any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.” But when the traveler or applicant has such a “bona fide some connection to this country,” the government’s control over the border is significantly qualified.

The Court didn’t define “bona fide” either, but the examples it used from the lower court decisions (on whose behalf the travel ban legal challenges were pursued) include the mother-in-law of a citizen, the wife of a legal permanent resident, and students from the six countries covered by the proposed ban who were admitted to the University of Hawaii. The Court’s rationale? Barring the admission of such would-be travelers or refugees even temporarily (remember – the Trump proposals call for 90-day suspensions for travel from the six, and a 120-day suspension of refugee admissions) would “harm” the interests of the plaintiffs (the son-in-law, the husband, the students, the university) to such a degree that this harm outweighs both the government’s right to control the country’ borders and “the overall public interest” (the decision-making framework it specified for stay orders in this field).

Again, the Justices said they would use different standards, and weigh the competing considerations, in a different way in their final ruling. But the above certainly suggests that at least some of those in the majority aren’t terribly receptive to the idea, originally advanced by the administration, that the president – as the relevant statute says – without exception can “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” to the United States “whenever [he or she] finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens…would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Now it may seem entirely understandable to ask how admitting into the country someone’s wife or mother-in-law could endanger national security. Let’s leave aside the question of when in U.S. history judges won the right to question what are inevitably judgment calls in the conduct of foreign and defense policy (which the Court’s ruling didn’t broach directly). Let’s also remember that the final decision will reflect a different set of legal and other factors.

What’s still odd, however, about this argument is that one of the seminal justifications for a U.S.-style legal system is that prioritizing process in considered the best way to ensure the greatest number of just outcomes. In this stay ruling, the majority seems to be saying that the Executive Order’s legitimacy could be in jeopardy because it has simply he has “burdened” certain individuals. Further, we’re not talking about lawsuits that affect mere handfuls of people on either side. Although it’s “only” a stay decision, an anti-travel ban ruling could endanger the entire country (precisely because national security is involved). Don’t such stakes deserve special attention?

And here’s the kicker: In arguing for their focus on specific individuals and their misfortunes, the majority was able to cite the Trump administration’s own decision to mollify critics of the original travel ban by including in the second version “a case-by-case waiver system pri­marily for the benefit of individuals” who do claim “bona fide connections to Americans or American entities.” So that train could well have left the station legally.

How much better for the administration to have held firm at least for the brief durations of their travel ban and refugee suspension, and then having its unfettered authority to regulate these flows affirmed, voluntarily included a review or appeals process in its longer-term programs.

Presumably because issuing a stay order depends on such a specific set of criteria, and because judges generally prefer to decide cases on the narrowest possible grounds, this latest travel ban judicial decision failed to deal in explicitly and in detail not only with several major issues raised by the Executive Order and the challenges it has generated.

As indicated above, the ruling did not address the extent to which (if any) courts can challenge presidential foreign policy judgments where expressly Constitutional questions over defined governmental responsibilities (such as war-making power) do not arise. It also only glancingly referred to claims that the second Executive Order unconstitutionally discriminates against Muslims as such (violating their religious freedoms), and the related issue of whether a politicians’ campaign statements, including those made as a private citizens, represent valid evidence of a policy’s intent.

But when it comes to immigration- and refugee-related issues, some Justices in at least one recent case has acted in a disturbingly political and frankly ditzy way – equating lying on an immigration form about a spouse’s involvement in war crimes with lying on that form about a speeding ticket. (This case is still up in the air.) Sadly, given the rancor and division that’s infected so much of America’s public life, there’s no guarantee that the Court will keep its head any better. on the Trump Executive Orders.

Im-Politic: Trump Derangement Syndrome Breaking Out on the Supreme Court?

Tags

Balkan wars, Bosnia, citizenship, deportation, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Citizenship Services, John Roberts, Muslims, naturalization, refugees, Reuters, Serbs, Srebrenica, Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court, Trump

Question: When is serving in a military unit that’s committed horrendous war crimes the legal equivalent of getting a speeding ticket? Or absentmindedly bringing a key-chain pen knife into a government office building? Or maybe even jaywalking? Answer: When the U.S. Supreme Court nowadays is evaluating an immigration case.

Think I’m kidding? Then check out this Reuters account of a hearing held by the high court that dealt with an immigrant from Bosnia who was deported and stripped of her citizenship last October. The reason? She had lied on her application to enter the country as a refugee. Now, Divna Maslenjak is seeking to restore the status quo ante. And according to the Reuters piece, several Justices are concerned that in defending the U.S. government’s previous decision (made, mind you, under the Obama administration), President Trump’s Justice Department is laying the groundwork for revoking citizenship for false statements that had no significant influence on the original refugee decision.

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Everyone, for example, forgets things or gets details confused. These lapses are particularly understandable in the chaotic conditions with which most refugees struggle. Nor could any reasonable person quibble with Chief Justice John Roberts concern that the Trump administration position (even though it’s drawn straight from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ naturalization form) could enable the government to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans for lying or for omitting information about minor legal infractions that even the most scrupulously law-abiding folks everywhere are hard-pressed to avoid completely.

As Roberts noted, “in the past he has exceeded the speed limit while driving. If immigrants failed to disclose that on a citizenship application form asking them to list any instances of breaking the law, they could later lose their citizenship, the conservative chief justice said. ‘Now you say that if I answer that question ‘no,’ 20 years after I was naturalized as a citizen, you can knock on my door and say, ‘Guess what, you’re not an American citizen after all?'”

Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who is viewed as considerably more liberal than Roberts, agreed, “noting he had once walked into a government building with a pocketknife on his key chain in violation of the law.”

Added Breyer: “It’s, to me, rather surprising that the government of the United States thinks that Congress is interpreting this statute and wanted it interpreted in a way that would throw Into doubt the citizenship of vast percentages of all naturalized citizens.”

Fair enough. But the lie in question did not concern a speeding ticket or an innocent failure to check the contents of one’s pockets. Nor did it concern an intrinsically legal but possibly questionable act that had no important bearing on Maslenjak’s application for refugee status. In fact, it concerned a subject central to her request: Despite telling the government that, as ethnic Serbs, she and her family feared ethnic persecution by Bosnia’s Muslims, she never mentioned that, as the Reuters article reports, her husband (who had received refugee status when she did) served “in a Bosnian Serb Army brigade that participated in the notorious 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.” And P.S.: He lied about the matter as well.

Now it’s possible that the husband was completely uninvolved in this, or any other, atrocity (another subject about which the naturalization form inquires). It’s also possible that, whether he was complicit or not, that’s what Divna, his wife, believed. Or he simply could have lied to her. If he was innocent, he might have been afraid that the relevant American authorities simply would not have believed him. Certainly, no one could blame inhabitants of countries ruled by oppressive and/or corrupt governments for not trusting U.S. officials right off the bat.

But apparently, neither spouse has offered any such excuses. Nor did any of the Justices apparently mention them. Both the Maslenjaks and Roberts and Breyer (and possibly some of their colleagues) seem to be focused on technicalities – and perhaps the former and their lawyers are counting on the Trump administration’s “anti-immigrant” reputation and the resulting backlash to help sway the Court.

The Justices’ final decision isn’t due until late June. It could be a great test of whether they, like so much of the rest of the country, have succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Following Up: That Latest (Disgraceful) Court Decision on Trump’s Immigration Order

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Congress, Constitution, due process, Elena Kagan, executive order, Following Up, Immigration, Muslim ban, national security, presidency, refugees, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court, terrorism, travel ban, Trump, U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit, visas, Washington State

The decision last Thursday by a federal appeals court to uphold blockage of President Trump’s recent Executive Order on immigration and refugee policy exemplified the challenge I noted when I started blogging here at RealityChek: “So much nonsense out there, so little time….” Just as I often struggle each day to decide which outrage in the public policy world against fact-based, adult thinking should be addressed, I’ve struggled to decide which sad excuses for a legal argument made by three appellate judges in the Ninth Circuit to focus on in this post.

But two groups of contentions stand out as especially dangerous and disingenuous. Both decisively influenced the judges’ determination to keep the Executive Order from being enforced on procedural grounds pending a further judicial decision on the merits of the case.

The first is the panel’s unanimous ruling on how much due process to protect Constitutionally guaranteed rights is legally deserved by foreigners outside America’s borders who have not been awarded legal resident status. That is, how many boxes do the relevant U.S. officials need to check in order to reach a legally valid decision to deny a refugee applicant admission? In these refugee cases, the Supreme Court has held that the only such obligation is providing a “facially legitimate and bona fide” reason for a judgment reached by a State Department consular officer.

The Ninth Circuit panel, however, claims that this standard (and the already established appeals process) is insufficient when refugee applicants “have a relationship with a U.S. resident or an institution that might have rights of its own to assert.” And it has ruled that the Trump Executive Order failed to meet this standard.

Even leaving aside the convincing argument that existing law denies judges jurisdiction over immigration policy (which the panel rejected in a “preliminary” sense), just consider the precedent this conclusion would set. It would mean that unless a terrorist connection could be proved conclusively, a suspected ISIS fighter or adherent who applies for refugee or other immigration status from Iraq or Yemen or wherever could be entitled to enter the United States if he or she was a relative of a non-citizen legal U.S. resident. What would conclusive proof be? Heaven knows, since the case referenced by the Ninth Circuit panel only alleged that the rejection in question wasn’t sufficiently “detailed.” And who would decide how much detail is enough? Perhaps a U.S. court? Perhaps after looking over intelligence findings that are often unavoidably judgment calls? It’s hard to imagine a better way to start turning making a sieve of screening procedures vital in an age of transnational terrorism for protecting national security.

Think I’m kidding? Here are the actual circumstances of the immigration denial decision that the Ninth Circuit apparently finds so objectionable (and which was upheld in 2014 by the Supreme Court): An Afghan-born legal resident of the United States petitioned for her husband’s entry from Afghanistan, and asserted he deserved “priority (and judicially reviewable) status” like other “immediate relatives.”

And the basis for her claim that this application was unjustly turned down – i.e., that her petition was denied due process because the rationale wasn’t sufficiently detailed? A consular official told her husband that he would be kept out of America because by his own admission, he had been an official in Afghanistan’s former Taliban government, and that U.S. law aims to exclude foreigners who have engaged in “terrorist activities” – a description that certainly applies to the Taliban.

It gets better: The federal court that did decide that a former admitted Taliban official’s application deserved (unspecified) further consideration, which resulted in the case being appealed to the Supreme Court? It was the Ninth Circuit. And four Supreme Court Justices (Stephen Breyer, who wrote a dissent, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, who joined with him) agreed.

The second especially disturbing aspect of the appellate court’s decision was the panel’s claim that it had, in accordance with “an uncontroversial principle that is well-grounded in our jurisprudence,” paid “substantial deference to the immigration and national security policy determinations of the political branches” – that is, the presidency and the Congress. The only such deference apparent in this decision is at the level of brazen tokenism.

Specifically, the three judges claimed to agree that “the Government’s interest in combating terrorism is an urgent objective of the highest order.” But they also stated that the judiciary has a responsibility to balance this interest with other legitimate considerations, namely the public’s interest in “free flow of travel, in avoiding separation of families, and in freedom from discrimination.”

The “freedom from discrimination” threat of course pertains to repeated charges – also made in court by plaintiff Washington State – that the Executive Order’s refugee provisions create a “Muslim ban.” The Order’s failure to include most countries with Muslim majorities renders that charge inexplicable. Moreover, as my previous post observed, religious persecution is one of the forms of persecution that must be demonstrated by successful refugee applicants. But what’s simply jaw-dropping is the nature of the specific balancing act the appellate court identified involving national security concerns on the one hand, and freedom of travel and keeping families together on the other.

Because here’s what the three-judge panel asserted could nullify national security judgments made by the president and Congress (in the 2015 law identifying the seven countries subjected to the travel ban as “countries of concern” requiring special screening). And P.S.: It’s also what the judges agreed (in line with claims by Washington State and Minnesota) constituted enough “damage” to the State’s “economy and public universities” even to rise to the level of adjudicability in the context of immigration policy:

>”two visiting scholars who had planned to spend time at Washington State University were not permitted to enter the United States”:

>”three prospective employees from countries covered by the Executive Order for visas [for whom the University of Washington] had made plans [to arrive] beginning in February 2017”;

>”two medicine and science interns who have been prevented by the Executive Order from coming to the University of Washington”; and

>”an unspecified number of “students and faculty at Minnesota’s public universities [who] were similarly restricted from traveling for academic and personal reasons.”

If this is a balancing act, it’s one with a heavy Ninth Circuit thumb giving critical mass to laughably marginal considerations – even assuming that any of these temporarily inconvenienced students and teachers have any preexisting right to crossing American borders.

It’s true that lawyers and judges often insist that “no issue is decided finally until it is decided correctly.” But the Trump Executive Order’s treatment so far in the judiciary, and the current make-up of the Supreme Court, tell me that national security could suffer greatly until this result is finally reached.

Im-Politic: Of Course Trump’s Immigration Order is Legal

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Charles Dickens, Constitution, executive order, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration Act of 1924, Immigration Act of 1965, Middle East, Muslims, refugees, terrorism, travel ban, Trump

Charles Dickens famously observed that the law can be an “ass” and an “idiot.” A slightly different conclusion is warranted from the blowup over the legality and Constitutionality of the ban imposed by President Trump via Executive Order (EO) on travel from seven Middle Eastern countries The real asses and idiots are those who are turning logical and common-sensical cartwheels trying to show that the courts should overturn the ban – along with the suspension of refugee admissions.

The proceedings generated so far by the Trump EO have revolved mainly around procedural questions – like whether states like Washington are entitled to bring suits challenging actions in areas like immigration that are federal government preserves, and whether the administration should have taken matters to an appellate court rather than staying in the district court that issued the restraining order blocking implementation of the ban. And these questions are all important. (This New York Times analysis of the oral arguments before the appellate court yesterday, however, could not make clearer the judges’ interest in substantive issues like whether the countries in question really do pose threats to U.S. national security).

Still, it’s altogether possible that the fate of the ban – and future such measures – ultimately will turn on an apparent contradiction in U.S. immigration law. On the one hand, the 1952 modification of the 1924 Immigration Act holds that:

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

On the other hand, a 1965 amendment to the law prohibits barring immigration on the basis of race, sex, nationality or place of birth. So that would seem to prevent the Trump administration from blocking entry by inhabitants of designated countries.

But resolving the conflict requires nothing more than engaging in thought. For obviously, the aim of the 1965 amendment was to remove the stain of racial, religious, and other forms of prejudice from American immigration policy. Until then, inflows had been governed by a series of quotas based on the national origins of the U.S. population as of 1890 – which of course was overwhelmingly from the white northern and western European countries. For good measure, immigration from Asia was completely eliminated.

Just as obviously, the Trump EO in question has nothing to do with such irrational – and intrinsically noxious – discrimination. It’s based on a national security judgment – the seven countries affected by the (temporary) travel ban have been classified by the previous administration and by Congress as lands where a “foreign terrorist organization has a significant presence,” where terrorists enjoy a “safe haven,” or where the government “has repeatedly provided support of acts of international terrorism.”

The seven countries singled out are Muslim majority countries – one reason evidently leading opponents to describe the ban as a “Muslim ban.” But the travel ban’s strikingly limited purview easily debunks that claim. As many of these opponents have also noted, travel from dozens of Muslim majority countries is completely unaffected. It’s true that these (massive) exceptions may make the EO either inconsistent or incompetent. Or both. But judges are not supposed to rule on such grounds, especially where foreign policy is concerned. The large number of un-banned Muslim majority countries is also plainly much more important in determining the administration’s intent than statements made by the president, or by his advisers, during his campaign for the White House.

Moreover, Mr. Trump’s immigration critics seem to have forgotten that, when refugee admissions are resumed (after 120 days), the relevant U.S. law will not only permit but require an explicitly religious test in part. For persecution based on religion is one of the forms of persecution refugee applicants must demonstrate to gain entry.

Finally, as noted in the TIME article linked above, even the 1965 immigration policy change contains a provision that could justify the Trump administration measures. It “allows the president to deny anybody entry to the U.S. under special circumstances.” Sure, anyone can question whether current circumstances qualify. And Congress has every right to propose and pass amendments that would describe these circumstances more precisely. But for the time being, they are the law of the land, and by definition the President has used his judgment to craft a response. If the judiciary can challenge judgments like this willy nilly, why on earth do we bother holding elections for president?