“China has criticized Britain for opening its doors in this way, but the U.K. deserves praise for acting quickly and decisively in defense of freedom. Bloomberg’s reporting certainly suggests that demand is surging for this escape route.
It is shameful that America has not stepped up to do something similar.
Hongkongers currently have few options for coming to America. They can seek political asylum in the United States—and an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in July does reserve more spots on the refugee list for people fleeing Hong Kong—but to claim asylum one must be physically present in the United States. That, in turn, requires having another type of visa in order to get on a plane across the Pacific. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has slashed the number of political refugees the country will accept: just 15,000 during the current fiscal year, down from 85,000 in 2016.
Britain issued nearly four times as many BNOs to Hongkongers in October as the number of refugees America will accept from the entire world this year.
What could America do instead? Some members of Congress have proposed a bill to automatically grant asylum to any resident of Hong Kong who arrives in the United States and to exempt those numbers from the official refugee counts set by the White House. A more robust idea, proposed by Matt Yglesias in May, would be to grant a special visa allowing Hongkongers to settle in American counties where the population is shrinking, with permanent residency granted after five years.”
“The policy, colloquially known as the “Muslim ban,” first went into effect in January 2017 and became one of Trump’s signature immigration policies. The ban has slowed or altogether halted legal immigration from certain countries that the former administration deemed to be security threats, keeping families apart and even stymieing refugee resettlement.”
…
“The ban was amended several times in the face of numerous court challenges arguing that Trump did not have the legal authority to issue it and that it unlawfully discriminated against Muslims. The third version of the ban, ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, barred citizens of seven countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and North Korea — from obtaining any kind of visas, largely preventing them from entering the US. (Chad was taken off the list of countries subject to the ban in April 2019 after it met the Trump administration’s demands to share information with US authorities that could aid in efforts to vet foreigners.)
Trump expanded the ban last February to include additional restrictions on citizens of six more countries: Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania. While they could still visit the US, citizens of these countries were, for the most part, barred from settling in the US permanently.”
…
“The human cost of the travel ban has been devastating. Not only has the policy torn families apart, but it has also contributed to crises including doctor shortages in rural America and a dramatic drop in enrollment among foreign students from affected countries.
More than 41,000 people have been denied visas due to the ban. Citizens of any of the banned countries could qualify for a waiver that would grant them entry to the US if, for example, they needed urgent medical care or were trying to reunite with their immediate family in the US. But those waivers proved exceedingly difficult to obtain.
Data from the State Department suggests that fewer people have been applying for visas since the ban was enacted: In fiscal year 2019, immigration authorities granted about 39,000 visas to noncitizens from the original seven countries covered by the ban as compared to almost 338,000 just three years prior — about an 88 percent drop. Iran and Venezuela saw the biggest declines.”
…
“National security experts have argued that the suffering of those like Alghazzouli was largely in vain: The travel ban has not made America safer, despite the Trump administration’s arguments to the contrary.
The Trump administration claimed that all the affected countries pose threats to US national security based on the findings of multiple government agencies. But the agencies’ findings were never made public, meaning the nature of those threats remains unclear. The administration broadly cited terrorist activity, failure of the countries to properly document their own travelers, and insufficient efforts to cooperate and share information with US authorities as justification for the ban.
But dozens of former intelligence officials have opposed the ban. Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Homeland Security Department under the Trump administration, said in a press call earlier this month that the ban has hurt America’s relationships with foreign governments, which are critical to US national security interests. The US government should have worked with foreign governments to improve their own security procedures and information-sharing structures, without punishing them for not already being up to standard, she said.”
“The Department of Homeland Security announced Wednesday night that it would pause deportations of certain noncitizens for 100 days starting on January 22”
…
“Given that immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, presidents typically identify what classes of immigrants should be prioritized for deportation. Under former President Barack Obama, that included people who posed a threat to national security, immigrants convicted of serious crimes, and recent border crossers.
Trump essentially eliminated those priorities. The moratorium is supposed to give Biden a chance to reevaluate where the immigration agencies should dedicate their resources.”
…
“Noncitizens can still be deported if they have engaged in terrorism or espionage or are suspected of doing so, or if they otherwise pose a threat to national security. The head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement can also intervene in an individual case to order their deportation.”
“For all the differences between Barack Obama’s and Donald Trump’s approaches to immigration, both administrations tried to discourage immigration from Central America. Blinken appears poised to continue that under Biden: The reason he wants to restore aid to Northern Triangle nations is to encourage would-be migrants to stay home. As The New York Times puts it, the point is “to persuade migrants that they will be safer and better off remaining home.”
That was the Obama approach. In those days, then–Vice President Biden helped broker a bipartisan deal to send $750 million in aid to those countries, hoping to stem the outflow of migrants by spurring economic improvement, rooting out corruption, and cracking down on violent crime.
“Obviously, the problems in those countries when it comes to crime and gang violence, drugs, lack of economic opportunity, among other things, are huge drivers,” Blinken said in a July interview with the Hudson Institute. “The idea that someone wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be great fun today to give up everything I know, where I live, my family, my friends, my comfort and go to someplace that may not want me where I may not even know the language or have family or friends. Wouldn’t that be a great thing to do?'”
But did the aid package really change that calculation? According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama’s tenure saw the deportation of around 3 million people, outpacing the number under President George W. Bush. And a majority of those deportees came from the Northern Triangle.
“I doubt the Biden administration will try to make migration from Central America easier,” says Stephen Yale-Loehr, immigration law attorney and professor at Cornell University. “At most they hope to manage it better.””
The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration National Research Council. 1997. The National Academies Press. https://www.nap.edu/read/5779/chapter/6#138 Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers George J. Borjas. 9/10 2016. Politico. The Impact of IllegalImmigrationon the Wagesand EmploymentOpportunitiesof Black Workers The United States
“Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Zapata County’s vote in a hundred years. But it wasn’t its turn from a deep-blue history that seemed to be the source of such fascination but rather that, according to the census, more than 94 percent of Zapata’s population is Hispanic or Latino.
Zapata (population less than 15,000) was the only county in South Texas that flipped red, but it was by no means an anomaly: To the north, in more than 95-percent Hispanic Webb County, Republicans doubled their turnout. To the south, Starr County, which is more than 96-percent Hispanic, experienced the single biggest tilt right of any place in the country; Republicans gained by 55 percentage points compared with 2016. The results across a region that most politicos ignored in their preelection forecasts ended up helping to dash any hopes Democrats had of taking Texas.”
…
“The shift, residents and scholars of the region say, shouldn’t be surprising if, instead of thinking in terms of ethnic identity, you consider the economic and cultural issues that are specific to the people who live there. Although the vast majority of people in these counties mark “Hispanic or Latino” on paper, very few long-term residents have ever used the word “Latino” to describe themselves. Ascribing Trump’s success in South Texas to his campaign winning more of “the Latino vote” makes the same mistake as the Democrats did in this election: Treating Latinos as a monolith.
Ross Barrera, a retired U.S. Army colonel and chair of the Starr County Republican Party, put it this way: “It’s the national media that uses ‘Latino.’ It bundles us up with Florida, Doral, Miami. But those places are different than South Texas, and South Texas is different than Los Angeles. Here, people don’t say we’re Mexican American. We say we’re Tejanos.””
…
“Nearly everyone speaks Spanish, but many regard themselves as red-blooded Americans above anything else. And exceedingly few identify as people of color. (Even while 94 percent of Zapata residents count their ethnicity as Hispanic/Latino on the census, 98 percent of the population marks their race as white.) Their Hispanicness is almost beside the point to their daily lives.
In the end, Trump’s success in peeling off Latino votes in South Texas had everything to do with not talking to them as Latinos. His campaign spoke to them as Tejanos, who may be traditionally Democratic but have a set of specific concerns—among them, the oil and gas industry, gun rights and even abortion—amenable to the Republican Party’s positions, and it resonated. To be sure, it didn’t work with all of Texas’ Latinos; Trump still lost that vote by more than double digits statewide, and Joe Biden won more of the nationwide Latino vote than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. But Trump proved that seeing specific communities as persuadable voters and offering targeted messaging to match—fear of socialism in Miami-Dade’s Venezuelan and Cuban communities, for example—can be more effective than a blanket campaign that treats people as census categories. And in the end, it was enough to keep Florida and Texas in his column.”
…
“by pursuing the coveted “Latino vote” nationally, the Biden campaign created a massive blind spot for itself in South Texas, where criticizing Trump’s immigration regime and championing diversity just does not play well among a Hispanic population where many neither see themselves as immigrant or diverse.”
“Miller’s record is full of freedom-impinging stains that, in theory, should unite just about everyone—conservatives, progressives, libertarians, and those in-between—in opposition. He is perhaps best known for his role in implementing a “zero tolerance” policy at the Mexican border, in which migrant parents were systematically separated from their children as part of a deterrence strategy. (Hundreds are yet to be reunited.) But while that may be the administration’s most infamous immigration controversy, Miller also worked to orchestrate Trump’s broader restrictionist policy. Some of those attempts came to fruition; others they didn’t. Some attempts were legal; others, perhaps not.
For example: Miller sought to embed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government group charged with safely assimilating migrant refugees into the United States. Miller reportedly hoped to ramp up deportations of the adults who came forward to sponsor migrant children. Unfortunately for Miller, it is against the law for the Department of Homeland Security to use federal funds in service of holding or deporting potential sponsors for unaccompanied alien minors, so they rejected the proposal. But the department did allow ICE to collect biometric data on those adults, potentially giving them the opportunity to track and deport them over minor offenses.
Similarly, Miller attempted to transfer an employee from the Treasury Department to an advisory role at the Social Security Administration in order to more easily track down personally identifiable information for deportations.
As special adviser, Miller pushed for the government shutdown at the end of 2018, which bled into 2019, lasting 35 days and becoming the longest shutdown in U.S. history—all to try to get $5.7 billion for a border wall. (The Republican-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House did not deliver, and Trump eventually declared a national emergency.)
Unsurprisingly, Miller opposed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program giving immigrants who came to this country as children temporary protection from deportation. Seventy-four percent of Americans—and 68 percent of Republicans—support the program. In leaked emails between Miller and Breitbart, he railed against DACA and birthright citizenship, and likened immigrants to terrorists. After all, Miller is the man who reportedly said he “would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.” Though Trump promised during his campaign to protect DACA recipients, he weaponized their precarious status for political capital; when the courts declined to strike down the program, Trump moved to limit who can apply for such protections.”
“The Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement has been aggressive and deliberately punitive in a way that Obama’s was not. Beyond the appalling family separation policy, Trump’s sought to restrict both legal and illegal immigration in ways that no president in recent history has. He’s shifted one of America’s two major parties in a nationalist, xenophobic direction—or perhaps he owes his success to the fact that it had already shifted that direction, but that’s no better—and elevated people like Stephen Miller to places where they can set policy. That’s all horrifically bad.
But he was only able to do most of that because previous presidential administrations—not just Obama and Biden, but plenty of others before it—built a powerful leviathan dedicated to preventing the free movement of people.”