Following Up: Britain’s May is Moving – Though Too Slowly – to Define the Real Terrorism Problem

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Barack Obama, Following Up, Islam, Islamism, London Bridge attacks, Manchester bombing, multiculturalism, Muslims, Susan Rice, terrorism, terrorists, Theresa May, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, travel ban, Trump, United Kingdom

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s remarks following Saturday night’s London Bridge attacks include one of the most forthright, perceptive, and necessary statements from an international leader (excepting President Trump) about the difficulties free societies face in combating terrorist acts committed by Muslims.

Specifically, these comments appear to recognize that these abominations are not simply the product of individuals having nothing whatever to do with their co-religionists, or with the supposedly peaceful, law-abiding, thoroughly assimilated – in other words, utterly unexceptional – communities they comprise. That is, May has closely approached stating that something is decidedly, and often dangerously, abnormal in too many of the Islamic neighborhoods and congregations found in the non-Islamic world, and particularly in the United Kingdom and in the rest of Europe.

As the Prime Minister declared, “While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of [Islamist extremism] in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out – across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult and often embarrassing conversations, but the whole of our country needs to come together to take on this extremism – and we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities but as one truly United Kingdom.”

That last clause is extraordinarily important. As I wrote in the wake of last month’s suicide bombing in Manchester, the United Kingdom has officially glorified multiculturalism to such a degree that it has encouraged in many ways the emergence of Muslim population clusters with considerable degrees of autonomy from even the legal system – let alone the values – that holds in the rest of the country.  

May unmistakably has now attacked those policies, and by extension the assumption behind them:  that many of the core teachings of Islam are no better and no worse than those developed in the British Isles throughout their long history. They are simply different. As a result, if certain Muslims living in Britain wish, say, to govern family life with the precepts of their faith rather than British law, they should enjoy ample freedom to do so. Indeed, denying them these rights in the absence of clear and present dangers to – to what, it’s not entirely clear; certainly not the freedoms enjoyed in Britain by other individuals, like women – would be the antithesis of liberty and tolerance.

Yesterday, May strongly suggested that in practice, this segregation has created major dangers at least to national security and public order. And she deserves immense credit for recognizing that, however “difficult and embarrassing” pluralistic democracies like her country may find creating a more united United Kingdom, a concerted effort must not only be made – it must succeed.

Nevertheless, I worry that May herself is still a bit too embarrassed to identify the main problem. For along with describing the enemy belief system as “Islamist,” she also insisted that “It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam.” Which, if you view as legitimate her alarm at segregated Muslim communities, is a little too neat.

After all, if extremist Islamism indeed “perverts” Islam, presumably this offense would be readily apparent to the vast majority of Muslims themselves. And not only would these segregated communities refuse to tolerate it, and be joining with the national authorities in “identifying it and stamping it out” (May’s own words, as per above). An outraged Muslim majority would be taking the lead in these matters.

But nothing could be more obvious than the general failure of Muslims anywhere to fit this description. Instead, as the Prime Minister herself complains, there has been “too much tolerance,” and the most dangerous manifestations are in those communities whose segregated nature produces Islam in a form relatively un-polluted by British and other non-Islamic values (whatever you suppose them to be).

So May has a ways to go before the clarification of thought that necessarily precedes any course of action with a reasonable hope for success. But she’s clearly much further along than much of the American leadership class. Take Susan E. Rice, national security adviser to former President Obama. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, she was asked about President Trump’s proposal to suspend travel to the United States from a handful of majority Muslim countries that the Obama administration itself viewed as either overrun with terrorists or ruled by terrorist-sponsoring regimes. She explained her continued opposition (which is also shared by her former boss) in part this way:

“[I] think there’s a very real risk that by stigmatizing and isolating Muslims from particular countries and Muslims in general that we alienate the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent these homegrown extremists from being able to carry out the attacks.”

Leave aside your views on the travel ban proposal for or against. First of all, I’ve never been comfortable with the suggestion just made above (and by so many others) that there’s something fundamentally acceptable about residents of the United States (and especially citizens) conditioning their cooperation with law enforcement authorities that are combating violence on whether or not they feel stigmatized in some way by Washington, or any level of government. Are you? And remember – nearly all Muslims resident in the United States live here legally, so it’s not as if they need fear deportation like so many illegal Hispanic residents, or Hispanics here legally here with illegal friends or relatives.

But more important is Rice’s obliviousness to a glaringly obvious implication of her statement: Why, in the first place, are Muslim communities “the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent…homegrown extremists from being able to carry out the attacks”? It’s because so many of the actual attackers and attacker wanna-bes are coming from those communities. Obviously something about them has gone seriously wrong.

I’m not saying I know exactly what needs to be done domestically on top of existing efforts, and how new programs can be squared with essential Constitutional protections. It’s also clear that the United States doesn’t have the kind of related assimilation-segregated communities problems plaguing the United Kingdom and so much of Europe. But I do know that the more solidly the more extreme versions of multiculturalism take root in America, the larger these problems will grow. And the sooner the British more explicitly acknowledge major problems among their compatriots who practice mainstream Islam, the faster they’ll restore acceptable levels of safety to their concert halls, historic bridges, and the rest of their country.

Im-Politic: The Travel Industry’s Phony Trump Travel Ban Scare Stories

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Im-Politic, Muslims, September 11, terrorism, tourism, travel, travel ban, travel exports, Trump

The American travel industry clearly employs some great flacks (i.e., public relations specialists). We know this because they’ve sold two major global news organizations on the inane proposition that the Trump administration’s hostility to Muslims and foreigners in general is about to cripple their industry, and that – at least by implication – the U.S. economy will suffer grievously.

The first and perhaps most important failing in this Washington Post article and this Financial Times (FT) piece carrying this message was the glossing over of national security considerations. Both reports noted that the supposedly xenophobic impression was created by the president’s proposed temporary travel ban from six countries identified even by the Obama administration as major potential sources of terrorist threats, and by strengthened vetting procedures at the border. But neither mentioned the counter-argument (either from an administration official or from a non-government specialist supportive of Mr. Trump’s initiatives) that stronger protections for Americans quite naturally carry a price tag, or that any kinds of trade-offs between economic and national security goals are legitimate.

The closest that either piece came to communicating this kind of nuance was a statement in the FT article from Marriot’s CEO acknowledging the role that needs to be played by “some of these other issue [such as security risk]” in formulating policy. In fact, you need to read between the lines (specifically in the Post article) to get any sense that the nation has faced this kind of situation in the recent past – after the September 11 attacks – and that the losses incurred by the travel industry by no means came anywhere near derailing the economy.

One big reason is that the economic role of foreign travel and tourism in the United States simply isn’t very big. The industry itself says that it represented 8.10 percent of total American economic activity last year (a key context-setting fact that the Post completely ignored), when both its direct and indirect effects are included. Fair enough. The figure came out to about $1.5 trillion last year, but that total includes both foreign and domestic travel.

One way to back out the foreign portion of domestic travel and tourism is to use the trade statistics. They don’t provide perfectly apples to apples data, but they’re not way off, either, and show, according to the travel industry, that foreign tourists spent about $194 billion in the United States in 2014. These “travel exports” would have directly accounted for about 8.28 percent of the nation’s total goods and services exports that year, according to official U.S. trade data – and about 1.10 percent of the total economy. There are no statistics on the indirect effects and they of course deserve to be counted. But it’s inconceivable that they would justify even minor concern.

Further, the travel industry isn’t forecasting that all foreign travel to the United States will simply dry up, or even close. In fact, according to the industry, despite the Trump policies and intentions, travel and tourism in the United States (again, including purely domestic travel) will keep growing this year. It just won’t grow quite as fast (by 2.3 percent instead of 2.8 percent). In other words, the Trump effect would barely move the needle.

The implications couldn’t be more obvious. The Trump travel ban and related measures may be bad policy for any number of reasons, but damage to the economy – or even to the tourism industry – clearly isn’t one of them. It’s understandable that the industry itself is unhappy about the prospect of any losses – even moderately slower growth. But why is the media portraying this result as a catastrophe?

Im-Politic: Beyond Parody with Uber-Pundit Thomas Friedman

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China, corruption, foreign students, higher education, Im-Politic, Immigration, Muslims, Reuters, tech workers, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, travel ban, Trump

Last March, I took one look at a column by Thomas Friedman on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s trade policies and concluded that the multiple New York Times Pulitzer winner must have been hacked. Any other interpretation would have meant that Friedman was either stunningly ignorant about these subjects or (at best) willfully ignorant.

A year later, it’s painfully obvious that either some impostor is still publishing pieces with The Times, or that Friedman is still reality-challenged. His March 29 offering contains the same kinds of trade fakeonomics and crackpot geopolitics as that piece I spotlighted last March. But even worse this time around are some out-and-out howlers about major implications of the Trump administration’s travel ban proposals.

According to Friedman, President Trump wants to “make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This…signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in America. “

As evidence, Friedman writes that “NBC News reported last week that applications from foreign students, notably from China, India and the Middle East, ‘are down this year at nearly 40 percent of schools that answered a recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.’”

In other words, could any Trump policy be more catastrophically dumb, especially over the long-term? The trouble is, when you look at these matters in any depth whatever, you realize how deeply silly these claims and fears are. In the first place, the idea that foreign students on U.S. college campuses are all or mainly or even disproportionately academic superstars is completely fallacious. And nowhere is it more fallacious than in the case of Chinese students.

For anyone knowing anything about contemporary China knows that it’s become one of the world’s leading plutocracies. The wealthy generally either make (or keep or lose) their fortunes depending on their connections with or via help from the Chinese government, or are comprised of political leaders themselves who have exploited their power and contacts to become millionaires many times over. Given the astronomical costs of American higher education (especially by the standards of even the typical Chinese urban – meaning relatively well-off – family), it could not be clearer that the main distinguishing characteristic of Chinese students on U.S. campuses is family money, not brains.

The money angle is further strengthened by admissions practices of so many American colleges and universities. After all, even well-endowed schools prize foreign students to a great extent because they’re wealthy enough to pay “full freight.” That is, they don’t need financial aid. Indeed, they’re profit centers. In fact, as I reported last October, a Reuters investigation found out that many Chinese students have gained access to American colleges and universities through payments to these institutions that can only be called corruption. In other words, their parents have bought their way in. Would most of this bribery be necessary if the kids were such geniuses?

Moreover, if you think that the money issue is confined to China, think again. For an expensive American college education is also far beyond the reach of most families in most of the rest of the world, too – especially the developing world.

As for the world’s math and science whizzes, especially from the Muslim world, avoiding the United States and choosing other regions and countries to open up businesses, ask yourself the simple question, “Like where?” Economically speaking, America’s growth prospects continue looking brighter – as they have for most of the current global recovery – than those of other major economies. The United States also offers among the world’s best levels of intellectual property protection.

And as for tech whizzes from the Muslim world, does Friedman really think they’re going to be increasingly welcome in, say, Europe, given its understandable anxieties about Islamic extremism and global terrorism? Japan and South Korea, it’s widely known, aren’t welcoming to any immigrants. And the idea that China, which has long battled Muslim separatists in its western regions, is going to open its doors wider just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Canada and Australia are unmistakably examples of national economies that are both successful and immigration- (and refugee-) friendly. But I’ll take my chances on America retaining its competitive edge over them for many decades to come.

These kinds of gargantuan goofs and omissions would be bad enough coming from a run-of-the-mill journalist or even pundits. Coming from Friedman, they are nothing less than appalling. For his almost uniquely lofty status stems for the most part from his (supposedly) unique knowledge of how the world works in the most fundamental senses. Indeed, he’s especially well known for writing books purporting to know what the world’s becoming in the same fundamental senses. Columns like his latest indicate that Friedman at best should spend more time learning about the present than predicting the future.

Im-Politic: An Immigration (and Assimilation) Tale

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assimilation, diversity, Im-Politic, Immigration, Open Borders, same-sex marriage, Somalia, tolerance, travel ban, Trump

I’ve long been wary of even using anecdotes in my writing – much less suggesting that they tell us anything useful about trends and developments worth writing about. But my conversation last night with a Somali-born cab driver in Washington, D.C. so strikingly reflected so many of my concerns about immigration and assimilation in America that I can’t help but describe it.

As regulars on this blog know, I’ve long been concerned with the nation’s recent failure to assimilate adequately huge cohorts of immigrants it’s welcomed from countries with dramatically different political, social, and cultural values and practices. As often noted by restrictionists on the political right in particular, many of these newcomers are arriving from societies that either don’t acknowledge or that actively reject the goals of diversity, tolerance, and gender equality that inevitably form much of the framework of the democracy we all cherish.

Today, I won’t be arguing about how these values should or shouldn’t be balanced against other important bases of a free society, but simply relaying the details of last night’s discussion of these matters with my cabbie. Because unless his views are unique in the recent immigrant community, they strongly back the claim that current immigration policies have greatly increased the number of inhabitants of this country who either know nothing of its major organizing principles, or don’t believe them. This fellow’s opinions also indicate that proposals to admit even more immigrants from regions like Latin America and the Middle East, or to legalize those here illegally and thus inevitably attract even bigger numbers, will further magnify the problem.

My ride started uneventfully enough as we pulled out of Union Station in D.C. and I looked forward to getting home after a long day doing business in New York. But soon after I recommended the best route to my neighborhood and he ended a brief phone call, he announced suddenly, “Well, because of this fellow Trump, I’ve decided I’m going home” – which turns out to be Somalia. “Trump just said he doesn’t like Somalia.” I’m sure he was referring to the president’s inclusion of Somalia in his travel ban proposals, but I didn’t want to get into a debate about that (i.e., Somalia’s longstanding lack of a government strong enough to enable satisfactory vetting). And I didn’t want to come right out and ask him if his presence here is legal (in which case, he would have no legitimate fears of any Trump-ian immigration policies). So I just replied that “If your status is OK, then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

We made some non-political small talk for the next few minutes and then out of the blue, he asked me, “What about this man together with man?” After a few moments, I realized that he was talking about same sex marriage. I told him that Americans apparently have decided that such marriages are acceptable – and that this conclusion held for women as well. He expressed surprise that “This just faded from the news” and I responded that it seems to have become very quickly and very widely accepted – save for some regions (like the South) and for many traditionally minded Americans elsewhere. The cab driver repeated his surprise that “All of a sudden, nobody talks about this any more” and I added that the change had indeed been both rapid and dramatic in recent years. Even former President Obama, I observed, had opposed same sex marriage ten years ago.

I added that what’s been more controversial has been the issue of whether Americans’ biological gender or gender identity should determine which restrooms they can access. His reaction was complete disbelief, and I confirmed that the situation is novel and puzzling even to many who broadly accept equal gay and lesbian rights. But I ventured that this debate, too, will likely be decided in favor of chosen gender identity, largely because so many large businesses believe that public opinion has sided with change.

We spent much of the rest of the conversation discussing where he should go if he decides to leave the country. His preference seems to be returning to Somalia, but I suggested that places like Canada and Australia are safer, more promising economically, and overall more welcoming to immigrants than the United States seems at present (after repeating that no one with “the right status” needs to leave the country).

Again, this is only an anecdote. Last night’s cab driver is only a single individual. I didn’t explore other such issues with him (or he with me). As suggested above, obviously many native-born Americans hold socially conservative positions that are as strong or even stronger. More important, I’m sure there are immigrants from these regions that either came here believing in these American-style values.

But the cab driver clearly had been here for quite a few years. It’s reasonable to suppose that his views on, for example, women’s role in society and in families is just as increasingly out of the mainstream as on same sex issues – and perhaps even more dangerously backward. It’s also certain that no systematic effort has been made to introduce him to more inclusive and egalitarian thinking. And it’s just as certain that the numbers of those utterly unfamiliar with or repelled by a critical mass of the civic religion that’s evolved in America – and that continues to evolve – will keep mushrooming unless the blithely come-one-come-all immigration and (non-) assimilation policies of recent decades are reversed.

The greatest irony, of course, is that the more America’s social and cultural identity is reshaped by these newcomers, the further it will move from the kinds of tolerance so dear to so much of the left wing of the Open Borders crowd. How much longer before they recognize that (1) everyone indeed is capable of becoming an American in the only sense that reflects the best of this nation’s history – and that’s still broadly enough supported to justify optimism about its fate; but that (2) to achieve this form of (fundamentally tolerant) assimilation, it’s still necessary to try.

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?

Im-Politic: The Public is Out-Thinking the Chattering Class on Ebola, Too

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chattering class, competence, ebola, Im-Politic, Obama, public opinion, travel ban

I wasn’t planning to post anything about ebola today, but some new polling data strongly indicates how misleading — and self-serving — the conventional wisdom pushed by the Mainstream Media can be.

As you know if you follow me on Twitter (hint! @AlanTonelson!), I report each day on the data put out by the Gallup poll every day tracking President Obama’s popularity. Such very short-term fluctuations don’t matter much, but monitoring them this closely can sensitize you to important developments.  Today’s numbers prompted me to examine how the president’s job approval ratings have changed since concerns about ebola broke out in earnest. And here’s the stunning answer: Not much!

On September 29, according to Gallup, the day before the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that a patient diagnosed with ebola was in America (the late Thomas Eric Duncan), Mr. Obama’s job approval stood at 43 percent. (This number is actually the three-day rolling average between September 27 and September 29.) His disapproval stood at 52 percent.

The latest figures (for October 25-27)? The president’s job approval is 42 percent, and those disapproving represented 53 percent of the sample. In other words, virtually no net change.

The numbers moved somewhat against Mr. Obama earlier this month. His worst three-day period was October 8-10. Perhaps not coincidentally, Duncan died on the eighth. But the Obama approval rating fell only to 39 percent, and the disapproval rating rose to 57 percent. That latter number set a new record for this gauge during Mr. Obama’s presidency, but only by one percentage point. The approval number was one point above the all-time low.

So it may be that the government’s handling of the ebola threat has greatly worsened Americans’ confidence in Washington (although as recent Gallup and CNN readings show, they’re still pretty confident in the feds’ ability to handle the disease itself). It’s also noteworthy that the number of ebola-related ads run by national political candidates this election year have jumped significantly. But even though many observers believe that the vote will be in large measure a referendum on the president’s policies, Mr. Obama’s reputation for confidence has barely been affected.

At the same time, more than three quarters of those surveyed for National Public Radio about a week ago support an ebola travel ban.

So it seems clear that, despite the claims of many on the Right, the nation still believes its government can protect them from this clearly serious threat. And despite the claims of many on the Left, it seems equally obvious that strong popular backing for a travel ban does not spring from outright and unreasoning ebola panic. The public’s apparent focus? An eminently sensible demand that their leaders err on the side of caution to protection health – and lives. Now if only some of this prudence and pragmatism could find its way into the various wings of the chattering class.’

Im-Politic: Why the Mainstream Media is an Ebola Lapdog, Not a Watchdog

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ebola, globalization, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, Obama, Open Borders, political correctness, travel ban

Although I’m neither a doctor nor a biologist nor a public health expert, I keep writing on Obama administration’s response to the ebola outbreak. For the president’s continued opposition to a travel ban to fight the disease speaks volumes about the political and governing establishments’ devotion to dogma about the virtues of completely Open Borders, economic globalization, and political correctness, and about the evils of any kind of nationalism, at the expense of public safety. I return to the subject today to deal with another angle – the mainstream media’s (MSM) role in upholding this establishment line.

No doubt many of you have already come up with reasons why: e.g., the reflexive internationalism and political liberalism of the MSM, along with its close social ties with these ruling elites – ties which have only intensified as journalists, public officials, and other political figures increasingly move back and forth among these occupations.

But recent commentaries have revealed another source of the MSM’s determination to banish support for an anti-ebola travel ban from the realm of respectable opinion: an uncritical worship of credentialed expertise.

At first blush, this claim sounds absurd. Doesn’t the MSM make its living by exposing official wrongdoing and ineptitude, as well as pretensions of public spiritedness, competence, and omniscience? Isn’t skepticism about authority practically the sine qua non of the journalistic personality, and of any reporting worth its salt?

Yes and No – but arguably for the most part No. There’s the aforementioned blurring of occupational lines reflecting the MSM’s growing tendency to come from the same backgrounds of affluence and elite schools as members of other sectors of the American establishment. As a result, they inevitably tend to marry one another, live in the same neighborhoods or the same kinds of neighborhoods, and/move in the same overlapping professional and social circles. Thus it’s not surprising that they share many of the same social and cultural norms and perspectives, even though their party politics often differs.

One natural result is the MSM’s strong support of the most important elements of the status quo – the existing structures, systems, and values that organize society, politics, and the economy, and give them purpose. And one of the most popular values (or myths – take your pick) in the United States entails the existence and superiority of a meritocracy.

Of course, the privileged lives led by most of the MSM powerfully incline its members toward meritocratism. A more conveniently self-serving way to explain its evident success – which consists not only of wealth but prominence and influence – is hard to imagine. Why, then, shouldn’t the MSM assume the same excellence in those anointed as experts by society in other fields of endeavor? Even those that are not personal friends neighbors of MSM members have passed the same test and been vetted by the same kinds of institutions.

In fact – and here I’m revealing one of its dirtiest, most important secrets – the MSM is even more inclined even than other successful Americans to lionize credentials in other occupations and especially professions. The reason? Despite the degrees conferred by schools of journalism, the professional-like societies they have created, and the multitude of awards they hand out to each other, journalists generally recognize, at least subconsciously, that theirs is not a genuine profession. Excelling requires the mastery of no body of technical knowledge – at least none that can’t be achieved in literally 15 minutes, like the standard form for writing a hard news story.

Hence the MSM’s built-in respect for those whose titles do require long years of study of famously complicated subjects, like the workings of the human body or centuries-old, constantly growing masses of statutes and jurisprudence. But it’s important to note the MSM’s inordinate regard for other pseudo-professions as well (like “public affairs”) and for pseudo-sciences (like economics).

Not that the MSM is incapable of skepticism. But the record seems to show that it usually reaches critical mass only after a group of experts has brought on disaster. Thus very few MSM members questioned the conventional wisdom among national security experts that a light was visible at the end of the Vietnam tunnel, or economists who insisted that the unprecedented indebtedness of American households and the equally unprecedented surge in home prices were signs that This Time It Was Different, not that dangerous bubbles were inflating. In other words, the MSM watchdog too often barks only after the break-in has succeeded.

Indeed, although skepticism skyrockets for a time after disaster strikes, MSM idolatry of expertise is so strong that, once the rubble clearing begins, reporters and commentators as a rule return to relying overwhelmingly on these proven failures as sources of information and analysis.

Thankfully, the United States so far has escaped an ebola disaster – so the MSM has energetically denounced anyone dissenting from the judgment of physicians and public health officials that a ban on visitors from West African hot zone countries would be not only ineffective, but counterproductive. Typical has been this lead from NBC News: “There are reasons the U.S. hasn’t enacted a travel ban on countries where Ebola has broken out: It wouldn’t work and could actually make things worse, health officials say. Still, that’s done little to quell the calls for a ban.”

And this lead from Politico: “The political momentum for a travel ban on West African nations continued to swell Thursday, but health and transportation experts were uniform in saying it wouldn’t stem the spread of Ebola — and could do more harm than good. That hasn’t stopped politicians and pundits — ranging from House Speaker John Boehner to former Obama press secretary Jay Carney— from calling for a travel ban.” And this headline from HuffingtonPost: Lawmakers Ignore Experts, Push For Ebola Travel Ban.”

Indeed, so strong is the MSM’s expertise worship that it’s even overcome Ana Marie Cox, a Daily Beast contributor who first gained fame through reporting on a sex scandal that titillating the publicly prurient Washington, D.C. branch of the chattering class. This proudly sauciest of wenches sternly admonished viewers of Fox News’ Media Buzz program, “There is an empirical answer to that question – there is an empirical, scientific answer as to what we should do to prevent the spread of ebola. If you have an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ after your name, you should not be talking about this. If you have an ‘MD’ after your name, you should be talking about this.”

Apparently Cox has never heard of a doctor blowing a diagnosis. Or of practitioners of the far softer art of “public health” mishandling an epidemic. Which perhaps points to additional problems with the MSM’s deference to authority: First, nothing could be clearer in recent weeks than the fallibility of so-called medical experts leading the fight against ebola. Whether neglecting the virus’ latest outbreak in West Africa or creating “protocols” for treatment that were in some cases not only flawed but fatally flawed, the experts themselves have acknowledged the kinds of mistakes that haven’t induced much humility on their part, but that rightly have cost them the confidence of many Americans.

Second, the ebola consensus in the healthcare community is not nearly as solid as the MSM typically suggests. Support for a travel ban is anything but nonexistent, and some researchers have even cautioned that knowledge about ebola’s transmission mechanisms could be substantially incomplete. Put differently, the science surrounding a disease discovered 40 years ago is anything but “settled.”

Combine the MSM’s pro-credentialed-expertise instincts with its clear political leanings on globalization- and political correctness-related issues and you have the scandal that constitutes its ebola travel ban coverage. Thanks to the emergence of alternative media, the public interest is increasingly likely to survive this dereliction of duty. But its declining audiences and worsening financial fortunes indicate that may not be true for the MSM.

Im-Politic: Obama’s Dangerous Allergy to an Ebola Travel Ban

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CDC, ebola, Im-Politic, Obama, travel ban, West Africa

One again, the Washington, D.C. talk show-verse has performed a major public service – not by exposing serious governing wrongdoing or even seriously questioning the typically outrageous spin public officials try to put on their decisions or event, but by simply parroting that spin and at least (often unwittingly) helping vigilant citizens play a watchdog role.

In this case, the vital information was provided by the reliably establishmentarian Washington Week, and specifically by Alexis Simendinger. Discussing the Obama administration’s response to the ebola outbreak, the White House correspondent for the RealClearPolitics website made clear that the Obama administration’s strategy has prioritized not taking all reasonable steps to protect the American people, but keeping U.S. borders open to travelers from disease-stricken West Africa.

According to Simendinger, the only reason the president agreed to any airport screening of airline passengers from that region (measures that were also opposed by the World Health Organization) was to defuse pressure “from Congress and elsewhere” for “rolling the drawbidges up, to put the travel ban in place.”

That slight arch you could see Simendinger’s eyebrows taking while she made the point strongly suggests she’s all in with viewing travel ban supporters as yahoos. Certainly she gave no indication of disapproving the president’s preoccupation with PR. But her account nonetheless has shown the American people how ideology, not prudence, is driving government decisions that could affect their very lives.

If you still doubt how inexcusable this politically correct approach is, check out this new Washington Post account of screening procedures and their inherent shortcomings, and of travel statistics.

The Post report reminded readers once again that ebola’s presence can’t be detected by modern medicine until symptoms begin to appear. The 21-day incubation period means that a victim can harbor the disease for three weeks before its presence is discovered. So once out of a U.S. airport, West African visitors are able to travel unrestricted around the United States for nearly a month. It’s true that, based on current knowledge, ebola can only be transmitted once symptoms appear. But “appearance” can easily come on gradually, creating the risk of infections during this travel before the carrier seeks medical help.

The U.S. government is trying to deal with this issue through mandatory screenings of any inbound passengers from the three countries most heavily affected – Guinea , Liberia, and Sierra Leone – even if they are not displaying symptoms. But of course, if they are not symptomatic, then it’s entirely likely that in many cases, their infection will not be detected. As a safeguard, the Centers for Disease Control will require all such passengers to fill out questionnaires asking whether they have (knowingly) been in contact with ebola victims. Assuming they tell the truth (unlike the now-deceased victim from Liberia), and assuming they have any incentive whatever to tell the truth (and where do you think the best treatment will be given – West Africa? Or the United States?), it’s still anything but clear how American officials will be able to tell whether these travelers have had contact with ebola-infected surfaces.

What is making zero impression on President Obama or on his supporters on this issue is that these uncertainties, and all of the costs of domestic screening, can be completely eliminated with a travel ban. By refusing to admit anyone holding a passport from one of the affected countries – and arguably other African countries where the disease has been spotted recently – and anyone who has visited these countries recently, virtually all of the ebola threat can be kept safely away from American territory, and from the American people.

Moreover, the Post article demonstrates that the effect on global travel will be minimal. Only about 150 passengers from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone total arrive each day at the five U.S. airports where screening operations have been set up — because they receive 94 percent of the visitors from those countries. Extending the travel ban to other affected African countries would add only slightly to these totals. As I’ve written, inconvenience for travelers can be further reduced by giving those who have visited these countries recently, but who don’t hold their passports, a short grace period before extending the ban to this group.

Because deception can never always be caught, and because procedures put in place by human beings will never work perfectly, ebola could still arrive in the United States. The U.S. southern border’s porosity remains a threat as well. But there can be no question that the above travel ban would dramatically reduce the odds.

The preamble to the Constitution specifies that two prime duties of the U.S. government are to “provide for the common defense” and to “promote the general Welfare.” A president who won’t ban travelers from West Africa from entering the United States, and possibly spreading a deadly virus, is a president guilty of the worst form of on-the-job negligence,