When ideologues on the left and the right want to make a case for why the government really needs to crack down on something, they rhetorically elevate the offense. One example from the left is the desire to impose speech codes or hate speech laws. "Words are violence," some argue. After all, being rude can cause "stress" or "harm," just like wielding a knife or gun.
The same lame bombast also infects the right. "It is an invasion, that's not an overstatement," Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his viewers last month, referring to illegal migration. The purpose of these rhetorical maneuvers is clear. If words are violence, then we should treat insults like assaults. If illegal migration is an invasion, border crossers should be treated like an enemy in a war.
I don't care much for politically correct language. I avoid the euphemism treadmill. Whether you call people who violate immigration law "illegal aliens," "undocumented noncitizens," or "unauthorized immigrants" doesn't make much difference to me (or the law). But illegal migration is not an invasion any more than words are violence. The problem is the inaccuracy, not the politics.
The Constitution requires the federal government to protect against an "invasion"—what every court that has reviewed the question has interpreted to mean an "armed hostility from another political entity." James Madison labeled invasion a "foreign hostility" or attack by one state on another, and the Constitutional Convention debates connected the power to repel invasions with the power to raise armies. All the widely used English dictionaries from the Founding confirm this understanding, and of course, the other uses of invasion in the Constitution have the same meaning.
Using the word invasion as a substitute for illegal migration is both offensive to anyone who's lived through a real one and insulting to the intelligence of everyone else. If you can't tell the difference between 100,000 Germans arriving in Paris at the head of an army in 1940, and 100,000 Germans arriving in Paris today as tourists, it's time to crack open a history book, not opine on immigration policy. Perhaps because they know the comparison to an invasion is so weak, nativists like former President Donald Trump also promulgate the risible conspiracy theory that foreign governments are "sending" the immigrants here.
Migration across the border may involve violations of U.S. laws, but the comparison to an invasion ends there. Border crossers aren't coming to overthrow the government or take over the Capitol (unlike a few nativists this year). Indeed, it's the U.S. government that is attempting to assail the migrants, not the other way around. People crossing the border actively try to avoid conflict with U.S. authorities either by 1) evading detection and peacefully moving to their destinations, or 2) intentionally seeking out U.S. agents to submit to the government's legal procedures. Reporting from the frontlines of this supposed conquest, The Wall Street Journal described how some invaders were inquiring for directions to the closest "immigration office."
An "invasion" isn't just an overstatement. It's a completely unserious attempt to demand extraordinary, military-style measures to stop completely mundane actions like walking around a closed port of entry to file asylum paperwork or violating international labor market regulations in order to fill one of the 10 million job openings in this country. But the goal of this nativist language warfare is nothing less than the removal of immigrant rights. "We cannot allow all of these people to invade our country," Trump tweeted in 2018. "When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came."
The right labels leftists who shut down speech "snowflakes" because they cannot handle hearing certain words or ideas. But hysterically shouting "invasion" every time people seek safety or opportunity in this country reveals a similar fragility. Carlson apparently feels so threatened by these farmhands and families that he demands that they be met with military force. Citing the minuscule percentage of migrants who are actually violent criminals as a reason to treat them all as invaders doesn't change the absurdity of the argument—it demonstrates it.
But Carlson and Trump are not just wrong; they have it backward. Migration is the exact opposite of an invasion. Nearly all these so-called invaders are coming to serve Americans. This supposed invasion will contribute to the strength and prosperity of the United States, not undermine it. This isn't Santa Anna's soldiers crossing the Rio Grande. It's four kids with their mom reuniting with their dad at a farm outside of Atlanta. They're not coming to blow us up or take our stuff—they're coming to work with us, work for us, and buy our products. They want to be us, not conquer us. And that's the most important point: A crackdown on migration does not vindicate the rights of Americans to be free from foreign attackers. Rather, it is a violation of our rights to associate, contract, and trade with peaceful people born in other countries.
The fact that these actions are so often illegal is lamentable. But Congress could pass a law tomorrow to legalize migration (as it in fact did for the first century of American history). The illegal part of illegal immigration is a problem easily solved by Congress. It does not warrant the suspension of habeas corpus or calling up militias to shoot the "invaders."
Real invasions are met with violence, and so it's unsurprising to see this language repeated by a variety of different nativists who have gone on to commit terrorist attacks. To reject these attacks—as assuredly nearly all nativists do—is to reject the premise on which they were based. There is no invasion. It's just an overheated political analogy in pursuit of a policy outcome—if only the wielders of the word would admit that. If nativists have a good argument to make against liberalized immigration, let them make that argument instead of mangling the English language.
The post Illegal Immigration Isn't an 'Invasion' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During the final presidential debate last fall, Donald Trump touted what he considered his biggest immigration accomplishment. "We got rid of catch and release," he boasted. Joe Biden could have easily let the wonky phrase slide past him, focusing on poll-tested attacks of Trump's policy of punitively separating immigrant families at the border. But in a move that undoubtedly stunned the consultants who had carefully coached him on messaging, Biden took the bait.
The former vice president launched into an extended defense of "catch and release"—a policy of allowing vetted asylum seekers to remain at liberty in the U.S. while awaiting a hearing, rather than languishing in jail at the border. He even counterattacked, explaining that Trump had made the situation worse by forcing families to wait in Mexico. "They're sitting in squalor on the other side of the river," he said passionately.
This highly unexpected exchange was Biden's final pitch to Americans on immigration, and it was the culmination of 18 months in which Biden adopted the opposite position from Trump on nearly every immigration issue. But putting out a position paper for journalists is one thing. Volunteering a defense of a controversial policy on a national debate stage with the presidency at stake is another. It was as clear a statement as you could get: Here was a candidate who was ready to reopen the country to immigrants, especially to asylum seekers and legal applicants.
Or at least, that's what Biden was saying in 2020.
Biden has been in politics long enough to have been on every side of practically every immigration debate. In the 1970s, he was reticent about paying to evacuate and resettle South Vietnamese anti-communist refugees. But by 1980, he was a leading proponent of the Refugee Act, which led to a massive increase in refugee resettlement from Vietnam and around the world.
In 1986, Biden voted to legalize 3 million unauthorized immigrants. In 1996, he voted for the harshest crackdown on unauthorized immigrants in U.S. history. In 2006, he voted to build a fence along the southern border. In 2020, he campaigned to end funding for Trump's border wall.
Biden is the Democratic Party's rusty weathervane, and in 2020 he was following the prevailing winds. Not only did a supermajority of Democrats favor legalizing immigrants in the country illegally, Gallup also found that for the first time in its 65 years of asking the question most Democrats wanted to increase legal immigration from abroad. They even wanted more refugees and more asylum seekers.
Biden campaigned accordingly. His platform was probably as pro-immigrant as any winning candidate since Lincoln. No category of immigration wouldn't see a bump on his watch, he promised, and all of Trump's "shameful" policies would immediately end. He promised to send a comprehensive immigration bill to Congress on day one. He would accomplish what all Democratic presidents before him had failed to deliver: real change.
During Trump's four years in office, America saw more families, unaccompanied children, and other immigrants travel up through Mexico to cross the U.S. border than during all eight years under Obama combined. The vast majority came to request asylum, a legal status for those fleeing violent persecution in their home countries. They arrived primarily from Central America's Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—but also from Cuba, India, Africa, and dozens of other places.
Stopping this flow became the focus of Trump's immigration policy. Asylum seekers' first choice would be to apply at one of the ports of entry where hundreds of thousands of visitors cross from Mexico to the United States each day since U.S. law explicitly allows anyone arriving in the United States to apply for asylum. But in 2018, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) blockaded the legal crossings, stationing agents at the exact border line to push anyone who said they wished to apply for asylum back into Mexico. The policy (dubbed metering) allowed agents to accept only a token number to cross each day, but the goal was to deter people from coming at all.
Unable to reach family and jobs arranged north of the border, even immigrant families who arrived with a game plan suddenly faced homelessness, hunger, and crime in dangerous neighborhoods within eyeshot of U.S. inspectors. New York Times reporters described the "grim sight" of destitute families sleeping on pizza boxes in the doorways of public restrooms, surrounded by piles of donations of diapers and baby formula.
Human Rights First, a watchdog group, maintains a database on crimes committed against migrants who have been forced to wait in Mexico. As of December 2020, it contained 1,314 crimes since 2018, including assaults, rapes, and murders, against migrants blocked by U.S. agents. Jasson Ricardo Acuna Polanco and Jorge Alexander Ruiz Duban—two Honduran teenagers—were stabbed and choked to death by thieves in December 2018 while waiting to cross after port inspectors sent them away.
These dangers inevitably lead many immigrants to cross around the ports of entry. Pre-Trump, those who crossed illegally and requested asylum would be held in temporary Border Patrol facilities and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. Asylum officers would interview them to determine if they had a "credible" claim, evaluating whether their claims matched the legal requirements of the law, were internally consistent, and matched other known facts or evidence. If they failed to meet that threshold or had committed any serious crimes, they were placed on the next ICE plane home. If they did, they were usually released to await a final asylum hearing many months from then.
After briefly trying a policy of separating undocumented parents from their children, Trump officials settled on a more politically palatable backup for deterring comers: If immigrants fear being in Mexico so much that they'll risk crossing illegally and being arrested, why not send them back to Mexico to await their hearings? Given the dangers, they figured, people will abandon their applications and go home.
A "remain-in-Mexico" policy bearing the Orwellian name "Migrant Protection Protocols" (MPP) was born. It had an immediate effect.
Gangs murdered a Salvadoran man in Tijuana in December 2019 after DHS agents kicked him out of the United States to await his hearing in Mexico. Several dozen rapes of MPPers were reported to U.S. and Mexican authorities, including one that involved Mexican police. And as Trump hoped, many asylum seekers gave up, and nearly all of the 11,000 cases that reached a final resolution ended with orders of removal in absentia. But many continued to wait.
By March 2020, almost 70,000 asylum seekers had been dumped back into Mexico's border cities, and the number of crossings had fallen significantly. Nonetheless, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Trump's White House seized on the crisis to act. It forced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to overrule its senior medical staff and declare that it was medically justified to suspend the crossings of all undocumented migrants. The DHS then used this declaration to "expel" anyone from the United States who crossed the border from Mexico, to completely shut off even the token numbers admitted at ports under metering, and to suspend MPP hearings, so anyone already waiting in Mexico was just stuck.
These moves were a deathblow to America's asylum system. The U.S. government has now expelled hundreds of thousands of crossers. Usually it simply drops them back in Mexico. But the DHS is actually flying political dissidents back to Nicaragua, where there have been reports that the government is arresting and beating them.
In the debate, Trump understated his accomplishment. He didn't just get rid of catch and release. He got rid of asylum altogether.
Biden is intimately aware of this humanitarian disaster. Not only did he decry it in the debates, but he lamented in an October 2020 speech the nearly 10,000 Cubans "languishing in tent camps along the border." He guaranteed he would end the MPP on his first day in office. In a July 2020 piece for The Washington Post, future first lady Jill Biden issued a plea to bring the asylum seekers in Mexico back to the United States, arguing that America's identity was "on the ballot" in November.
The position was so clearly stated that migrants encamped at the border celebrated when Biden won. "This is not only a Biden victory. We migrants also won, and we are very happy," one asylum seeker in Mexico told BuzzFeed News in November. "Seeing Trump once again sit on his throne would have been fatal for us."
Trump may not be back on his "throne," but the king's policies outlived him.
In December, Biden's choice for Domestic Policy Council director, Susan Rice, told Spanish-language TV that no one should "believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on day one. It will not." At the time, it seemed strange that she would call her boss's campaign promises "peddling an idea," but Biden himself soon provided clarity.
"It will get done," Biden told reporters. "But it's not going to be able to be done on day one." During the campaign, Biden enthusiastically promised to welcome more asylum seekers, but now he characterizes the arrival of more applicants at the border as a "crisis" that would "complicate what we're trying to do." Biden might as well have been quoting Trump, who had constantly used the same specter of a "crisis" to eliminate asylum and impose other restrictions throughout his term.
In January, Biden signed his first immigration executive orders. He required a review of the country's current asylum policies, but the CDC's health declaration and the expulsion policy that came with it would persist. He attempted to freeze most new deportations of noncriminals, but not for recent border crossers and asylum seekers.
While ports remained completely closed to asylum applicants, advisers quietly leaked to reporters that they planned to include Trump's metering policy as part of Biden's grand plan to fix asylum after they reopened. When Biden called for "guardrails" for the asylum system in December after the election, those same advisers explained what he really meant were "limits being set on the number of people allowed through." Never mind that Congress never approved any caps on asylum.
Biden's DHS did exempt unaccompanied children from the immediate expulsion policy, so they are now transferred to shelters, foster care, or family members who are already in the United States. Mexico has started to refuse to accept some expulsions of non-Central American immigrants in certain places, so a few families who crossed to request asylum are now being released from custody into the United States to await hearings rather than immediately expelled.
Biden has announced a plan to slowly begin to let MPP participants wait for their hearings on U.S. soil. But the tentative plan—letting in a trickle of about 600 additional asylum seekers per day only after advanced screening and negative COVID-19 tests—stands in marked contrast to the bold policies proposed by candidate Biden in 2020. In June 2019, before MPP and the CDC expulsion policies, DHS encountered and processed more than 4,600 undocumented immigrants per day at or between the ports along the border.
In 2021, Biden has so far chosen to move slowly. Overall, his border policies resemble a slightly less strict version of Trump's policies. As White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in February, "The vast majority of people will be turned away."
What about legal immigration? During his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump told the nation that he wanted people to come here legally "in the largest numbers ever." Ironically, it would be the third straight year that legal immigration declined.
At first, Trump reduced the flow of legal immigration using a thousand little cuts. One of his first acts was "extreme vetting," which involved banning migrants from several majority-Muslim countries and massively increasing the length and complexity of the required immigration paperwork. In the name of "security," the new forms asked vague gotcha questions that often necessitated the involvement of an attorney, increasing the costs to obtain visas.
The State Department and DHS came out with new "public charge" rules that effectively created a presumption against approving immigrants with incomes below a certain threshold. In theory, the idea was to keep out immigrants who might use welfare at some point in the future, even though DHS's own statistics showed that most noncitizens near or below the poverty line received no welfare of any kind. Regardless, the rules are creating huge problems for all immigrants. These complicated data requirements force applicants to produce financial records and documentation on an almost unimaginable scale, requesting information that many immigrants don't even possess. Inability to produce the evidence results in a denial.
As soon as Trump took office, word came down that as many people as possible should be rejected, and denials spiked. DHS even started denying anyone who left anything on an application blank—including current addresses for deceased parents. Denials of U.S. citizens petitioning for family members or employees to receive immigrant visas and green cards doubled. And even if the family member's or employer's petition was approved, immigrants were twice as likely as they had been to be denied a visa by the consulates.
The number of new legal permanent residents entering from abroad was down by about a quarter by the end of 2019. Then the bottom fell out.
When the pandemic struck the United States, the State Department closed its consulates, meaning that it could issue virtually no new visas. Trump also added country-specific travel bans for almost anyone coming from China, Iran, Europe, or Brazil who wasn't a U.S. citizen. In April and June 2020, he issued proclamations suspending visas for almost all immigrants and guest workers—bans that have been extended until March 31, 2021.
These visa bans were not based on a concern about spreading COVID-19. Instead, Trump called new immigrants and guest workers a "threat" to the U.S. labor market. Never mind that the unemployment rate for the highest-skilled computer occupations, which dominate the employment-based visa system, barely budged despite the pandemic. And never mind that low-skilled jobs for guest workers have to be offered to U.S. workers before someone can be hired from abroad. That the ban applied even to little children and retirees gives insight into its real goal: fewer foreigners of all kinds.
Immigration plunged by about 90 percent—greater than any full year on record. In January, Trump extended the protectionist visa bans and left office with one of the lowest per-capita legal immigration rates in U.S. history.
The immigration plan that Biden released before the pandemic was designed to weave its way through America's complex legal immigration system, concluding at each juncture that more was better. More family reunification. More high-skilled visas. More seasonal workers. More refugees. More visas for participants in the diversity visa lottery program, which permits some immigration for nationalities that normally receive few visas under the family- and employer-sponsored system. He even wanted to create a new community-sponsored visa program to deal with "shrinking populations, an erosion of economic opportunity, and local businesses that face unique challenges."
Biden rarely hedged. His proposal outlined the most ambitious and expansive legal immigration strategy of any winning presidential candidate in at least 150 years. When the pandemic hit, and then when he won the nomination, commentators predicted a move to the middle that never came. Biden stuck by his plan. He called Trump's protectionist visa bans a distraction from dealing with COVID-19. "Immigrants help grow our economy and create jobs," he tweeted. "The President can't scapegoat his way out of this crisis."
Biden had even criticized Trump's decision to enact country bans supposedly to stop the spread of the virus. "Banning all travel from Europe—or any other part of the world—will not stop it," Biden tweeted in March 2020. Biden's view reflected the reasoned judgment of the academic literature on travel restrictions, and Trump's bans ultimately did not keep the pandemic away.
Yet five days into office, Biden underwent an unexplained 180. He extended travel bans on most noncitizens coming from Brazil and Europe, even though Trump had set them to expire the very next day, and expanded the ban to include South Africa. For the hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants awaiting visas abroad, it was a foreboding signal.
When Biden signed an executive order on February 2 that included in the title "Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems," hope surged that the new president would at least rescind Trump's visa bans on families and workers, reopen the consulates, and restart the legal immigration process in other countries. In the end, however, the order did little more than require agencies to review their current policies.
In February, America's largest trade and business associations wrote a public letter urging an end to the visa ban, detailing how it was separating families and harming their operations. Still, Biden remained silent. Meanwhile, his Justice Department has gone to court to defend his authority to keep the ban in place, even arguing that family separation doesn't necessarily constitute "irreparable harm" to U.S. citizens and their immigrant family members.
The visa bans are set to expire on March 31, but even if they do, administration officials have shown little willingness to reopen consulates and begin issuing visas again. Each day that passes, the backlog of hundreds of thousands of immigrants grows. Because the law limits the number of visas issued in a fiscal year, many of the visas they would have received will be lost if they aren't issued by September.
The only positive development on legal immigration is that Biden increased the refugee cap, albeit to a lower number than he initially promised. But his unwillingness to streamline Trump- and Bush-era "extreme vetting" means that the cap will likely not be filled this year anyway.
Democrats have unified control of Congress, the body that ultimately decides what the laws will be. Well, that's the grade-school theory anyway, and to his credit, Biden has attempted to follow it. On day one, he sent his requirements for a bill to Congress.
While it was not as sweeping as his campaign plan, it was still broad and included a path to citizenship for almost all 11 million unauthorized immigrants and more green cards for workers and families. Congressional Democrats threw together a bill in a month that met its requirements, but even they acknowledged the bill has little hope in the Senate, where Republicans and perhaps even some moderate Democrats oppose it. No effort was made to obtain bipartisan support for it.
Instead, Biden's party is focusing on a few narrow bills that it believes have crossover appeal: legalizations for Dreamers, farmworkers, and participants in the Temporary Protected Status program for those undocumented immigrants who have been granted temporary safety from instability at home.
What Biden will give up to get these discrete bills to his desk remains unclear. His immigration bill includes no new enforcement measures that would appease the GOP, and he hasn't so far been willing to mix immigration into negotiations over his other top priorities: the COVID-19 response and economic relief.
That's not new. Presidents Obama and Trump both campaigned promising immigration changes. Both had the advantage of a friendly Congress. But neither wanted immigration reforms to upset prospects for their other major priorities.
The stalemate leaves the executive branch as the most likely place for change. The Biden administration does have some ability to change policy without congressional involvement. But hopeful immigrants and employers would be wise to remember how conservative Biden has shown himself to be.
Biden personally understands immigration policy better than almost any president in history. For decades he has played a crucial role in making it, both during his time as a senator and during his time as vice president. This understanding is certainly an asset for good governance. Unfortunately, it also probably also makes him too committed to the current system to take the drastic actions that would be needed to make that system work better. He's also beholden to a complex interwoven system of partisan priorities that could cause him to turn his back on immigration—or enthusiastically embrace it—later in his presidency, depending on what else is going on.
Many advocates were hopeful that the wave of outrage against Trump's abuses would translate into more than just a reversal of those policies. He could streamline or remove onerous regulations and interpret ambiguous laws in the favor of approving applicants, rather than denying them. Maybe these things will happen eventually. The end of the pandemic will undoubtedly help. But so far, the Biden administration seems to have little appetite to wield the powers of the executive on behalf of immigrants as aggressively as Trump did against them.
Immigration law is a complicated, inhumane mess. But Congress has given the president vast authority to interpret and implement the law in simple and humane ways. Biden currently seems reluctant to use it, whether out of shortsighted political calculation or a lack of genuine belief in the goal.
But that's 2021 Biden. Who can predict what 2022 Biden will do, or any of the Bidens who will come after him.
The post Joe Biden Offers Bold Talk, Timid Action on Immigration appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration violated the law when it attempted to rescind the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli slammed the decision as a "double standard," asking: "Does anyone think they'd let @realDonaldTrump just make up 'laws' on sticky notes like @BarackObama?"
The answer is clear: Yes, they would. Indeed, just two days after Cuccinelli leveled this criticism, President Donald Trump announced that he will unilaterally impose new restrictions to block foreign workers from entering the country, despite decades-old laws allowing companies to hire foreign workers in certain circumstances.
Trump told Fox News Saturday that the restrictions would be "very tight" with "very little exclusion" for "a period of time." The president may not be writing the law on sticky notes in his office, but he's definitely making new laws from his Oval Office just the same—with zero congressional oversight and zero public debate and thrusting it on Americans with barely a day's notice.
This latest executive sticky note isn't unique. Trump has essentially rewritten all of U.S. immigration law to his liking. He is just two months removed from a ban on immigrant family members of Americans—a move he had proposed in legislation that failed in Congress. Like his latest restriction, this is supposedly going to "protect jobs."
Even before COVID-19, the president blocked asylum seekers at the southern border and sharply restricted refugees. He rewrote high-skilled immigration procedures in ways that courts found violated the law. And who could forget his late-night ban on immigrants from a grab bag of majority-Muslim countries, issued just days into his presidency, and the chaos it unleashed at America's airports?
That "Muslim ban" was a proving ground for all that followed. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in that case that "immigration, even for the President, is not a one-person show" and that Congress did not—and could not—have delegated the authority to the president to exclude anyone he wants. Yet the Supreme Court disagreed, and now, contrary to Cuccinelli, immigration is a one-man show.
A single man's vision laid out in secret is a far cry from the founders' vision of two branches of Congress robustly debating and carefully crafting laws in public.
Even the Supreme Court's latest ruling doesn't limit the president's authority to terminate DACA. It just requires him to follow the procedures laid out in the law—namely, that he fully explains why he wants to do it. That's about as low a bar for action as there can be.
But what about President Barack Obama? Did the Supreme Court let him "make up" immigration law too? No. DACA was never challenged in court under Obama, but a similar program was. When the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the program was illegal, an evenly divided Supreme Court affirmed that decision and the president backed off, immediately announcing that he would follow the ruling. We've seen no similar announcement from Cuccinelli or Trump about the Supreme Court's DACA ruling.
The president's latest action also puts to bed another common trope among immigration opponents: that they just want the laws on the books enforced. Turns out that many of them would prefer that laws allowing immigrants to come here not be enforced. Apparently, "enforcing the law" is fine only as long as it involves removing people from America.
The post Conservatives Embrace Presidents Making Laws on "Sticky Notes" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The war in Yemen has taken a devastating toll. More than 85,000 babies and toddlers have starved to death, according to a 2018 Save the Children report. Another roughly 80,000 people—civilians and combatants—have died in the war. The United States is a party to this carnage, because it has aided Saudi Arabia's military strikes against this small Middle Eastern country. Yet last week President Donald Trump vetoed a congressional resolution to end U.S. involvement in the war.
What has the United States done to relieve the humanitarian catastrophe that it has had a hand in causing? It has blocked Yemenis trying to escape to America.
The Trump administration has yet to accept any Yemeni refugees this year. It has banned nearly all permanent immigration from the country, including for immediate family members of U.S. citizens, and it has stopped issuing most temporary visas. For good measure, last year it decided to make many Yemenis subject to deportation when their temporary visas expire by withholding Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from them.
The United Nations Group of Regional and International Eminent Experts on Yemen has concluded that the "coalition air strikes have caused most direct civilian casualties" in Yemen and "hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats and even medical facilities." A 2018 Human Rights Watch report warns U.S. officials that they could face "legal liability for war crimes" if they continue indiscriminate support for the Saudi campaign, through refueling jets, providing military supplies, and other means.
Even as the war crimes proceed, the United States has resettled no refugees since January 1, 2019. In 2018, the State Department resettled two Yemeni refugees. While we might expect this from the notoriously anti-immigrant Trump administration, President Barack Obama was hardly better, resettling just 42 Yemenis from 2015 to 2016.
Moreover, Trump's travel ban has indefinitely suspended almost all legal immigration from Yemen, except in very exceptional cases.
Because of America's family-focused immigration system, the ban disproportionately affects immediate Yemeni relatives of U.S. citizens. As of January 2019, the administration had already barred more than 1,700 American citizens—American citizens—from bringing over their Yemeni spouses and minor children. About 3,500 Yemeni kids are thus being separated from their American parents. (Apparently, the administration's family separation policy isn't limited to migrants at the Mexican border.) Thousands of parents of adult U.S. citizens are also being denied green cards that could save their lives.
In 2015, then-Rep. Steve Russell (R–Okla.) related the story about a Syrian interpreter who had served with him in Iraq and become a U.S. citizen. The interpreter's mother died in that country's civil war while awaiting a visa. There must be countless tragedies just like this one that we don't hear about; this one only received attention because it personally affected a congressman.
The travel ban also prevents Yemenis from receiving temporary visas for business or tourism purposes. They thus cannot request asylum, because that requires being on American soil.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has refused to redesignate Yemen for TPS. This would provide temporary legal status and work authorization to people holding expiring or expired visas if going home would mean going to disaster zones. Haitians received TPS, for example, after a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010.
Yemen has been hit by a man-made disaster of even greater proportions. The Obama administration protected Yemenis who arrived during its time in office, making its final redesignation in January 2019. Yet the Trump administration has declined to allow Yemenis who have entered since then to apply for TPS, leaving them vulnerable to deportations to the war zone.
The United States doesn't have an obligation to put out fires everywhere in the world. But it shouldn't pour gas on them, as it has in Yemen by supporting the Saudi assaults. And it certainly shouldn't then slam shut the fire escapes, leaving the residents to burn.
The post The Trump Administration Seals the Escape Doors After Turning Yemen Into Hell appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Pot is bulky and pungent. That makes it difficult to conceal in, say, a suitcase or a truck. For that reason, marijuana traffickers tend to avoid legal ports or entrances, preferring instead to traverse the expanses of deserts and canyons where Border Patrol agents are often the only signs of human life. To the extent that other drugs cross outside normal entry points, they are most often hitchhikers along for the ride with the weed. In 2013, for example, Border Patrol agents seized 274 pounds of marijuana for every one pound of other drugs.
So for those familiar with the history of drug smuggling, there was a dog that didn't bark in Donald Trump's early January Oval Office address, which was intended to frighten Americans into supporting a border wall and give him leverage to end the shutdown. While Trump described the southern border as "a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs," he only specifically mentioned "meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl"—all drugs that typically come in through formal points of entry. He did not speak of what has been, for most of living memory, the most-smuggled item over the Mexican-American border: marijuana.
Pot, and the impoverished undocumented immigrants who often bring it, are no longer flowing across the border at the rate they once were. This decline has virtually nothing to do with expensive security innovations at the border and everything to do with legalization in the United States. If it were any other industry, one imagines the president would be delighted: When it comes to pot, customers prefer to buy American.
President Trump is far from the first politician to use drug smuggling to justify greater border security. During the 1920s, the "need" to combat smuggling served as a primary justification for the creation of the Border Patrol. In 1922, the commissioner general of immigration warned that "dope, liquor, Chinese, and alien smuggling has become a lucrative business and is being carried on by international gangs in which there have been found the hardest, most daring, and cleverest criminals." These nefarious forces, he added, were "backed by no limit of funds and possessed of the highest powered vehicles."
In 1924, Congress responded to these concerns and the need to enforce new restrictions on legal immigration by creating the Border Patrol. During alcohol Prohibition, the agency went on to confiscate millions of quarts of liquor. Year after year, the immigration commissioner's reports requested more agents, vehicles, and even airplanes to compete with the traffickers.
Then, in December 1933, national Prohibition was repealed. Though some states continued the pernicious policy, the illicit smuggling of booze immediately dropped by 90 percent. By 1935, liquor importation at the border, and the grave warnings over it, had disappeared entirely.
The calm, however, was short-lived.
Barely two years later, Congress enacted a nationwide ban on marijuana through the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Suddenly, the Border Patrol began touting the "drive against narcotics"—in particular, "Mexican marihuana"—as the justification for spending more money to "secure the border." With the official launch of the "war on drugs" under President Richard Nixon, when marijuana was classified as having "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse," the Border Patrol focused even more attention on drug smuggling. In 1972, the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that "because of known alien involvement in illicit drug traffic, Service officers have directed increased attention to the detection of possible drug violations."
Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spends billions of dollars a year on drug interdiction efforts. In addition to its 20,000 agents, the Border Patrol has constructed 650 miles of fencing and "vehicular barriers" designed to stop drug runners across the deserts. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has nearly 1,500 canine units and a coast-to-coast surveillance network that includes a fleet of Predator drones. Despite this costly effort, the DHS inspector general concluded in 2016 that the department "could not ensure its drug interdiction efforts met required national drug control outcomes nor accurately assess the impact of the approximately $4.2 billion it spends annually on drug control activities."
Foretelling the doom of Trump's wall, the Border Patrol discovered on average more than one drug smuggling tunnel from Mexico every month from 2007 to 2010, even as it built out hundreds of miles of security fences along the border. This was in addition to more than 300 holes per month that people were putting in the fences. When smugglers weren't going under or through the barriers, they were literally driving over them on ramps—a fact uncovered when an unlucky smuggler's SUV pinned itself on top of a fence. Even that hang-up didn't stop the innovative criminals from making off with the dope.
Drug smuggling moves in an underground economy, which necessarily means rigorous formal statistics are hard to come by. Importers understandably make no publicly available reports, so the true scale of the enterprise can only be estimated indirectly, when government agents bring portions of the invisible market to light. The absolute amount of drugs that smugglers bring into the country is many times greater than the amount seized, but drug seizures can serve as a proxy for changes in the flow of drugs. In the absence of other developments, a significant increase in drug seizures likely indicates an increase in the flow.
If the government cracks down on the border, seizures will increase even if the same quantity of drugs is being smuggled. But focusing on the amount seized per agent controls for the level of enforcement activity.
From 2003 to 2009, Congress made massive investments in border security. It nearly doubled the number of Border Patrol officers from 10,717 to 20,119, and nearly all of the existing border barriers were constructed during that period. But the amounts of marijuana seized per agent remained virtually constant, with the average agent confiscating about 115 pounds annually throughout.
In 2013, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) concluded that marijuana smuggling had "occurred at consistently high levels over the past 10 years, primarily across the US-Mexico border" and indicated no particular hope of halting the flow. From 2010 to 2018, enforcement remained roughly constant—no new hires or fences—but something strange happened in 2014: Seizures per agent began to decline. By the next year, they were down by a third. By 2018, the average Border Patrol agent was seizing just 25 pounds for the entire year, or less than half a pound per week—a drop of 78 percent from 2013. Even within 2018, monthly seizures during the first quarter of the fiscal year were a third higher than those in the remainder of the year.
Although it is the most important agency for interdicting marijuana, the Border Patrol isn't alone in witnessing the sudden disappearance of pot smugglers. Its sister agencies in the DHS—Air and Marine Operations, the Coast Guard, and ports of entry inspectors with the Office of Field Operations—saw similarly large drops in marijuana seizures. While full 2018 figures aren't yet available, all DHS agencies together seized 1.8 million fewer pounds of marijuana in 2017 than they did in 2013—a decrease valued by the department at about $1.5 billion.
The mysterious disappearance of illicit weed did not coincide with any significant changes in use of marijuana by Americans. Indeed, slightly more people told government surveyors that they had used marijuana during the prior year in 2017 than in 2013, continuing a trend that started before legalization. But the disappearance did coincide with a nearly sevenfold increase in legal sales, according to estimates from Arcview Market Research. A relatively small number of such transactions had gone on prior to 2014 under the auspices of medical use, but full legalization jump-started the industry.
It was in 2014 that Colorado and Washington state permitted the first legal sales of marijuana for recreational purposes. Oregon officially joined the pot party in 2015, Alaska in 2016, and Nevada in 2017. California opened fully legal dispensaries in January 2018. Massachusetts did the same in November. And Michigan and Maine have similar plans to be implemented in 2019 and 2020.
By September 2018, one in six Americans lived in states with legal marijuana sales. After Michigan and Maine open their dispensaries, nearly one in four will do so.
Some opponents of legalization doubted the black market would dry up. At least in Colorado, they were wrong. A study commissioned by the state's Department of Revenue found that a "comparison of inventory tracking data and consumption estimates signals that Colorado's preexisting illicit marijuana market for residents and visitors has been fully absorbed into the regulated market." States with more taxes and regulations have seen less success, but except in heavily regulated California, legalization has been accompanied by major increases in legal sales and moves away from the black market.
Within the year, two-thirds of Americans will live either in or next to states where marijuana is legal. Given the ease of travel, these legal sales can end up supplying places where pot prohibition is still the law of the land. The Colorado study noted that "legal in-state purchases that are consumed out of state" are likely occurring. How far these purchases travel is difficult to know, but even before Washington and Colorado implemented legalization, a study by the Mexican think tank IMCO predicted that U.S. domestic weed would quickly replace the imported stuff, since it would likely be more expensive to smuggle the plant from Mexico than to ship it from those two states to any other state except Texas.
Colorado authorities working with the DEA have made several high-profile busts of interstate smuggling rings. "Residents of Colorado, and people that I'll call 'transplants to Colorado,' are moving here, becoming involved in the marijuana industry with the expressed purpose of hiding their illicit proceeds and their illicit activities in plain sight under some of the laws that we have," said Barbra Roach, head of the DEA's Denver division, in March 2017 after breaking up a smuggling operation that involved shipments to Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and Minnesota. Oklahoma and Nebraska even sued Colorado in an attempt to stop legalization there, a case the Supreme Court declined to hear in 2016. But no one disputed that legally grown Colorado marijuana was making its way to other states.
The increased supply of U.S.-grown cannabis has undercut demand for the Mexican product and harmed marijuana farmers south of the border. Growers in Mexico have reported declines in wholesale prices of 50–70 percent in recent years. "If the U.S. continues to legalize pot, they'll run us into the ground," one marijuana producer in Mexico told NPR in 2014. "We're only getting $40 a kilo. The day we get $20 a kilo, it will get to the point that we just won't plant marijuana anymore."
That is exactly what has happened as the flood of higher-quality marijuana from the U.S. has begun competing with the illicit plants from Mexico. CBP itself has hypothesized that one explanation for the decline in pot seizures since 2014 could be that "legalization in the United States [h]as reduced demand" for imported cannabis.
Marijuana, thanks to its volume and odor, has traditionally been the primary drug smuggled into the U.S. between official points of entry. Those routes are risky and expensive; thousands of migrants have died in the deserts trying to use them. This is why drug cartels primarily rely on U.S. citizens to bring more easily concealable drugs, such as heroin, into the country in their baggage or on their person through normal ports of entry. They already have the right to enter, which reduces the reason for law enforcement to stop them.
Given this dynamic, the decline of marijuana smuggling has made the Border Patrol, which focuses on areas between ports, of much less use to drug warriors. In 2013—before the first state legalization laws took full effect—the average Border Patrol agent seized drugs that were more valuable than the average inspector at ports of entry, based on the agency's own valuations. With the disappearance of marijuana coming across the deserts, the value of all drugs seized by the Border Patrol declined 70 percent from 2013 to 2018. Today, the average port inspector seizes drugs three times more valuable than those seized by the average Border Patrol agent.
The difference is even more dramatic for "hard drugs": 87 percent of the meth, cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl seized by Border Patrol agents or port inspectors in 2018 came in through a point of entry. DHS valued its nonmarijuana drug seizures at official entrances at $1.5 billion, compared to just $216 million for those by Border Patrol. In other words, Trump's border wall won't touch the vast majority of hard drugs entering the country, despite him singling them out in his Oval Office speech. And even if it did, it would be no more likely to succeed than the fence, agents, or cameras were in combating marijuana or alcohol.
The cartels, reeling from the loss in marijuana income, have attempted to replace pot with other drugs, but that proved easier said than done. The total value of all drugs seized at the border—at ports or otherwise—has fallen by a third since 2013. So cartels that invested significant capital in the marijuana trade are attempting to make up the losses in another way: by using their drug tunnels to smuggle immigrants across the border. The profit margins for moving humans are so small, and the effort has such a large footprint, that only desperate times would justify using tunnels to bring them in.
"While subterranean tunnels are not a new occurrence along the California-Mexico border, they are more commonly utilized by transnational criminal organizations to smuggle narcotics," a CBP official stated after the agency busted a group of 30 immigrants emerging from underground in 2017. "However, as this case demonstrates, law enforcement has also identified instances where such tunnels were used to facilitate human smuggling."
This shift allows Trump to point to the other purpose of his proposed wall: to keep migrants out. But just as the fences failed to keep out drugs, there is no evidence that a wall would keep out people.
Indeed, the border brings together two failed government wars in one place: the war on illegal drugs and the war on illegal immigrants.
When Congress enacted the first draconian caps on legal immigration in the 1920s, illegal entries became a regular occurrence for the first time. Everyone understood what had created the problem—the ratcheting back of legal immigration—and immediately made the comparison to alcohol Prohibition. In 1926, the immigration commissioner wrote that "as a consequence of more recent numerical limitation of immigration, the bootlegging of aliens…has grown to be an industry second in importance only to the bootlegging of liquor."
While the war on booze has ended, the wars on drugs and illegal immigrants have continued at full speed. The origins of these efforts have long since receded from the national memory, and people view illegal immigration and drug smuggling like hurricanes: as natural phenomena that the government manages or mitigates rather than causes. But as the effects of marijuana legalization prove, smuggling is not caused by traffickers; it's caused by government.
The story of widespread pot legalization contains a clear lesson for immigration policy.
For nearly a century, Americans have been told that illegal immigrants ignore the law and bypass the legal options. But they aren't ignoring the law. They are acknowledging what it says: that they are barred from coming to this country. And they aren't bypassing legal options, because no such options exist for them.
Whenever aboveboard options do appear, the problem dissipates. The more unskilled guest workers that the United States allows in legally, the fewer illegal immigrants appear at the border to be caught. In the seven decades from 1949 to 2018, the average Border Patrol agent apprehended 86 people annually in years when guest worker entries were greater than 200,000. In other years, the average was 269 people per year—three times as many. Since 1986, thanks to the lack of a quota on agricultural workers, the total number of legal guest workers in the United States has increased twentyfold to 536,634; meanwhile, the average agent now apprehends 97 percent fewer people than he did 30 years ago.
Legalization works. More legal immigration, like more legal pot, means less illegal activity. The problem with America's immigration laws is that we make it almost impossible to come here while following the rules. While those guest worker admissions are impressive, nearly all of the increase has gone to Mexicans, because regulations require U.S. employers to pay for employees' round-trip travel, which incentivizes hiring the closest candidates. Central Americans therefore have a much harder time finding legal entry. No wonder they constituted the majority of apprehended migrants in 2018.
Even for Mexicans, lesser-skilled workers without U.S. citizen family members have no legal way to come to the country permanently or even to work in year-round positions. Businesses can't sponsor their lesser-skilled guest workers for permanent residence (lawmakers want them to have to leave), and since 1990, Congress has allocated just 5,000 green cards per year for employees of U.S. businesses who lack college degrees—a infinitesimal fraction of the nearly 11 million immigrants here illegally today.
For people fleeing violence south of the border, the situation is even bleaker. Their only legal option is to somehow get to the U.S. and request asylum. The government is supposed to process anyone who asserts a fear of returning to her home country at a legal port of entry, but the Trump administration is turning them away, saying it's prioritizing other travelers. The result is that most asylum seekers are now crossing illegally and turning themselves in. Even then, only people with a "well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion" can actually receive asylum. Reasonably believing that you're going to be murdered isn't enough.
The answer to these problems is the same as the answer we've stumbled upon to marijuana smuggling: Legalize it. Make it simple. Get rid of as many regulations as possible so that people truly have the option to "follow the rules." If peaceful people want to put their talents to work for Americans, let them. If someone is fleeing a fire somewhere in the world, America doesn't need to put it out—but we shouldn't block the fire escape. Until the government learns that its own policies are the causes of illegal immigration and drug smuggling, the problems will continue. Legal weed offers a blueprint for a better way forward.
Sources, Figure 1: U.S. Department of Homeland Security Ofce of Inspector General, "Independent Review of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Reporting of Drug Control Performance Summary Report," 2008, 2011; Customs and Border Protection, "Sector Profiles," 2012–2017; Customs and Border Protection, "Enforcement Statistics FY 2018," August 31, 2018; Border Patrol, "Staffing Statistics," December 12, 2017.
Sources, Figure 2: Arcview Market Research, The State of Legal Marijuana Markets, 1st–6th editions; author's calculations based on drug valuations and amounts from Customs and Border Protection, "Local Media Releases," 2013–2018; U.S. Department of State, "Narcotics Control Reports"; Customs and Border Protection, "Enforcement Statistics FY 2018," August 31, 2018; Air and Marine Operations, Reports and Testimony, 2013–2017.
Sources, Figure 3: author's calculations based on drug valuations and amounts from Customs and Border Protection, "Local Media Releases," 2013–2018; Customs and Border Protection, "Enforcement Statistics FY 2018," August 31, 2018.
Sources, Figure 4: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, "General Collection," 1949–1995; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "Yearbook of Immigration Statistics," 1996–2017; Immigration and Naturalization Service, "History: Border Patrol," 1985; TRAC Immigration, "Border Patrol Agents," 2006; Border Patrol, "Staffing Statistics," December 12, 2017.
The post The Wall Won't End Pot Smuggling at the Border. Legalization Will. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The White House outlined a proposal yesterday that would crack down on unauthorized immigrants and cut legal immigration in exchange for giving 1.5 million or so Dreamers—some of whom are beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—an eventual pathway to citizenship. It is a restrictionist effort masquerading as a fix. But for the nativists at the Center for Immigration Studies such as Mark Krikorian, it isn't mean enough. They are accusing the president of choking!
They much prefer Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte's Securing America's Future Act, a 414-page wish list of far-right demands with virtually no concessions on the other side. This bill, which has 77 cosponsors, has many similarities with the White House plan.
It would ban 38 percent of all legal immigrants coming to the country. In 2019 alone, it would exclude 423,000 legal immigrants—the largest single-year cut since the 1920s when Congress decided that Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews were destroying America.
By 2028, nearly half as many legal immigrants would be entering the United States as now, if Krikorian and his fellow congressional nativists have their way.
Like the White House plan, the bill would eliminate the right of Americans to sponsor most types of immediate family members—adult children, parents, and siblings—and end the diversity visa lottery. Attorney General Jeff Sessions labeled these immigrants "illiterates" last week. But the fact is that they are much more educated than Americans, and nearly half have college degrees.
Banning the employment of some 4.4 million people would be one of the largest labor shocks in history. An University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business analysis of a substantially similar proposal found that cutting immigration to this level would lower GDP by 2 percent between 2018 and 2040. This bill would basically nullify the economic growth projected from Donald Trump's tax cuts.
Moreover, according to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, the average recent immigrant will contribute, in net present value, between $92,000 and $173,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits over their lifetimes. Family-sponsored immigrants and diversity visa lottery winners are better educated than the average, so their tax contributions would be even higher.
But Goodlatte and his supporters, who otherwise masquerade as fiscal conservatives, evidently don't care much about depleting the federal fisc. Otherwise, they wouldn't require nearly twice as much spending on Border Patrol in the next five years than the agency has spent over the last five decades. Overall, they would require a funding increase of almost $130 billion over five years—virtually none of it paid for through fees or taxes—five times more than what the White House is demanding.
Some of this money would go toward building Donald Trump's worthless vanity wall. But much of it would also go toward implementing a biometric exit surveillance system that would track Americans and foreigners alike when they leave the country. This boondoggle won't improve security, but it will unleash a massive invasion of our privacy by basically turning our faces into our papers! Consider it a high-tech "Papers Please" policy.
To add insult to injury, the bill also mandates America's first electronic national ID system, E-Verify, for all workers—legal and illegal—in the United States, something that the Trump plan actually refrained from doing. The flawed E-Verify system doesn't prevent illegal employment. But its database errors would eliminate more than 430,000 jobs and delay 1.2 million jobs for legal workers.
Given how it treats legal workers, it is no surprise that it has some draconian notions on how to deal with unauthorized immigrants that might even make Trump blush. Currently, overstaying a visa is a civil offense. But for the first time in America's history, this bill would make that a federal crime punishable not just by deportation but jail! This will once again swell the federal prison population, reversing the gains of recent years.
But the thing that really warms the cockles of nativists is Goodlatte's designs for Dreamers. The bill would give a mere 10 percent of them permission to live in the United States—not permanent legal residency or citizenship, mind you. Then it would treat them like criminals on parole, not like free Americans.
On top of the normal fees, Dreamers would have to pay $1,000 in fine for the privilege of living in America. And if they wanted to travel abroad, they'd have to first take permission from Uncle Sam, just as Soviet citizens had to do from communist authorities. They couldn't be away for more than two weeks at a time. Every three years, they would have to pay another $1,000 in fees to undergo background checks and in-person interviews in order to receive another extension of their "parole."
Dreamers would also be required to maintain an income of 125 percent of the poverty line for the rest of the lives—no staying at home with their children and no retirement for people who grew up in this country. In other words, this bill would essentially criminalize Dreamer poverty.
The good news is that this exercise in nastiness has little chance of being enacted in its entirety. The bad news is that it's an aspirational document for nativists that offers a roadmap for a step-by-step march toward their vision. That many House Republicans are coalescing around it exposes the lie that they only object to "illegal" immigration. They are just anti-immigration. Period.
The post Republicans Who Think Trump Has Gone Soft Have a Plan: Criminalize Dreamers, Slash Legal Immigration, and Invade Americans' Privacy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The 45th president does not tend to elicit measured evaluations. Since even before his formal entry into national politics in 2015, Trump has acted as a powerful magnet on the body politic—attracting and repelling onlookers with equal force.
A year ago, as we prepared to see a former reality television star sworn into the highest office on Earth, predictions abounded regarding the effects he was about to have on the country and the world. On one side were confident assertions that he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, bring back manufacturing jobs, and end political correctness once and for all. On the other were fears that he was a racist and a dimwit who would certainly abuse the powers of his station and might well start a nuclear war.
On the Trump presidency's first birthday, the reality is less extreme than either set of prognosticators envisioned. The Republican Party under his leadership managed one major legislative accomplishment—tax reform that cut the corporate rate and is projected to add nearly $1.5 trillion to the debt—and failed after months of wrangling to enact an Obamacare replacement. Tensions with foreign governments from Iran to Russia to North Korea continue to simmer. The stock market has followed a dramatic upward trajectory, yet anger continues to grow over perceived wealth and income inequality. With the midterm elections now 10 months away, political polarization seems to hit new highs daily, but in many ways the checks and balances of our federalist system are working to keep even the current unscrupulous White House occupant from actualizing his most ambitious plans.
As the 365-day mark approaches, have we reached a milestone worth celebrating or taken just another step in our national descent to unthinkable places? Reason asked 11 experts to weigh in on Trump's record so far. From positive signs on transportation policy and regulatory rollback to a worrying rise in nationalist sentiments and redoubled efforts to cleanse the United States of undocumented immigrants, the answers were a mixed bag, highlighting just how much uncertainty awaits the country in the year to come.
—Stephanie Slade
TAXES AND HEALTH CARE:
Peter Suderman
At the beginning of 2017, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told GOP lawmakers that the new Congress would repeal Obamacare and pass deficit-neutral tax reform by August. At summer's end, Republicans, despite holding majorities in both chambers, had accomplished neither. But eventually they would accomplish parts of each.
In March, the House was set to hold a vote on legislation that would have repealed much of the Affordable Care Act while setting up a new system of related federal tax credits. Ryan was initially forced to pull the bill from the floor due to lack of support, but after making a series of tweaks intended to provide states with more flexibility, the body passed a health care bill in May.
GOP leaders congratulated themselves for making progress on the issue, but the plaudits were premature. The bill stalled out in the Senate. By September, the Obamacare repeal effort was dead and Republicans had moved on to more comfortable territory: rewriting the tax code.
At the center of the new effort was a significant cut to America's corporate tax rate, which at 35 percent was the highest in the developed world. Donald Trump had campaigned on slashing it to 15 percent. The GOP aimed for 20.
At first, the tax effort went much like the health care effort. There were disagreements between the House, which hoped to partially offset any revenue losses with spending cuts, and the Senate, which gave itself permission to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. Republican senators also disagreed among themselves: Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.) and Bob Corker (R–Tenn.) worried about sinking the country further into the red, for instance, while Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) and Mike Lee (R–Utah) wanted a potentially pricey increase in the child tax credit.
Moderates like Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) meanwhile reserved judgment for other reasons—such as concern over increasing the number of Americans without insurance.
That was an issue because the tax plan had become a sort of stealth health care bill. Recall that the Supreme Court in 2012 deemed Obamacare's individual mandate constitutionally permissible only if understood as a tax. So the GOP legislation offset some of the loss in revenue from its reduced tax rates by eliminating the mandate. According to the Congressional Budget Office, that repeal would save about $340 billion over a decade—by leaving 13 million fewer people with government-subsidized health coverage.
It came down to a drawn-out late-night vote, but at nearly 2 a.m. on December 2, Senate Republicans gave the plan the go-ahead. Less than three weeks later, the House passed an amended version and President Trump signed it into law.
The final bill permanently dropped the corporate tax rate to 21 percent. It also expanded the child tax credit, cut individual tax rates across all seven brackets, and doubled the standard deduction, meaning fewer people will file itemized returns. The individual cuts will expire within a decade, but for now they reduce taxes for every income group.
Although Republicans claimed the bill would pay for itself by spurring economic growth, no independent economic analysis agreed. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that it could raise the deficit by $2.2 trillion over a decade.
Obamacare's individual mandate was repealed, though its spending on subsidies and major regulations remained. By year's end, Trump's party could claim partial victory—imperfect as it might be—on both taxes and health care.
TRANSPORTATION POLICY:
Robert Poole Jr.
In its first year, the Donald Trump administration has appointed good people and enunciated market-oriented principles on transportation policy. But the acid test will come when we see how much congressional support can be won for the president's forthcoming infrastructure plan.
Since "people are policy," transportation-related appointments count as a positive. Elaine Chao as Department of Transportation (DOT) head and D.J. Gribbin as White House infrastructure sherpa are highly qualified choices with sound policy ideas. Other senior appointees also look good.
Early on, the White House endorsed an effort to "corporatize" the poorly run Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control system, which raised that reform's priority with House GOP leadership. But this further politicized the issue for Democrats in Congress, and if the lower chamber passes the bill, there is still no Senate counterpart.
In January, the administration is expected to release a 75-page infrastructure proposal. It is likely to build on a six-page fact sheet released in May—a document that made the radical suggestion that the federal government's current role is far out of proportion to the fact that most public-serving infrastructure is owned and operated by state and local governments and doesn't touch on national interests.
Four key principles were propounded in that sheet: The administration will make only targeted federal investments into transportation projects; it will encourage self-help by state and local governments; it will align infrastructure investments with the entities that can best operate and maintain those facilities; and it will leverage the private sector.
It seems clear that $200 billion (over 10 years) is now the plan's ceiling on federal transportation infrastructure spending. For the most part, that amount will be reallocated from existing federal programs. The rest of the $1 trillion in related expenditures will have to come from state, local, and private investment—which is, of course, as it should be.
While there will be bipartisan resistance in Congress to much of Trump's transportation agenda, this is the first time any administration has undertaken a serious rethinking of the role of the federal government in infrastructure projects. The move is sorely needed.
IMMIGRATION:
David Bier
From the beginning of his political career, Donald Trump has articulated a view of immigrants that could lead only in one direction: toward policies to rid the country of them.
The president started 2017 by ordering a "travel ban" that barred nationals of six majority-Muslim countries. By November, he had substantially reduced the number of people allowed in from all Muslim-majority countries and cut Muslim refugee admissions by 94 percent. (Christian refugees have not benefited either—he slashed their admissions by two-thirds.)
Trump's promises of a "merit-based" system haven't spared skilled immigrants. Administration officials are harassing employers of H-1B workers, redefining which occupations qualify as "skilled," and challenging an unprecedented number of applications. They also rescinded a rule that authorized 100,000 spouses of H-1B holders to find jobs in the country.
Unsurprisingly, the government issued fewer visas overall this year than last. Those trying to come legally faced an onslaught of new regulations that have doubled or tripled the length of required forms, forcing many to hire attorneys to help them answer opaque "extreme vetting" questions.
In January 2017, Trump stated his intention to deport "probably 2 million, could be even 3 million" immigrants. But his executive order went even further, declaring open season on virtually all unauthorized immigrants, a population of over 11 million. Though he hasn't broken records yet, arrests jumped on his watch. In September, he ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gave work authorizations to people who were illegally brought here as children.
The year laid the foundation for the president's long-term agenda. Facing legal challenges to his travel ban, he asserted the power to prohibit any group of immigrants for any reason at all. The Supreme Court apparently agrees: In December, it allowed the ban to take effect while the justices consider a final ruling. This power could prove useful if lawmakers fail to pass a Trump-endorsed bill to cut legal immigration in half.
The president also laid some literal foundations for his favorite vanity project: a border wall. But to get far, he'll need money from Congress. As the new year dawns, he's asked for a deal: less legal immigration plus funds for his wall and mass deportation ambitions, in exchange for giving citizenship to DACA recipients. It's a bargain policy makers are unlikely to take. He'll have to find other ways to advance his anti-immigration agenda.
LGBT ISSUES:
Walter Olson
Sometimes the big stories are the ones that don't happen.
Days after his election, Donald Trump went on 60 Minutes and said of the gay marriage legal cases: "They've been settled, and I'm fine with that." I predicted at Overlawyered that of the many reasons to worry about his incoming administration, "so far as I can see, anti-gay policies aren't in the top 25."
How'd that stand up? By and large, the "assault on LGBTQ equality" predicted by the Huffington Post and many others hasn't happened. True, Trump appointees pulled back from several controversial Obama positions. They withdrew an ill-considered plan to impose a nationwide school bathroom code. They refused to back the Democrats' Equality Act, which would nationalize public-accommodations law and minimize exemptions. They dis-endorsed an ambitious theory that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act already bans sexual orientation discrimination in the private workplace, and that courts simply didn't notice that fact until recently.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, they weighed in on the Christian baker's side—but not on religious liberty grounds, let alone with any urging of the Court to reconsider the Obergefell decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Instead, they offered careful and narrow First Amendment arguments based on the need to protect against forced expression.
Remember the enormous freakout last spring about a White House executive order that would give religious sentiments precedence over discrimination law? Presidents can't actually do that, but the reality didn't forestall a whole week of anticipatory #LicenseToDiscriminate rending of social justice garments.
When the actual executive order came out in May, it included almost none of the controversial ideas and mostly kicked future decisions down to the agency level. It didn't even roll back anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors.
The exception to all this caution and conciliation was Trump's impatient, imperious decree of a flat ban on military service by transgender people, which is currently stalled in court. Whatever the order's eventual fate, it serves as a reminder that the T track can diverge from the G and L.
Organized gay and anti-gay groups keep their respective bases in a constant state of alarm with crisis talk. But the actual course being steered is centrist.
EXECUTIVE OVERREACH:
Gene Healy
Before Election Day, I found the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency almost as ridiculous and terrifying as the idea of Charlie Sheen with nukes. Things haven't gone as badly as I feared: Our political system—on the home front, at least—has been surprisingly resistant to one-man rule.
In part, that's because being a successful autocrat requires a modicum of competence and self-restraint, qualities Trump lacks. A competent authoritarian wouldn't dare "so called judge[s]" to overturn his edicts; fantasize on Twitter about silencing critics and prosecuting political foes; or confess to obstruction of justice on national TV, as Trump practically did when he told NBC News that he fired former FBI Director James Comey over "the Russia thing." Imagine Dick Nixon being dumb enough to attach the Enemies List to a press release or deliver the juiciest selections from the Watergate tapes in a series of fireside chats. Imagine anyone else turning 3 percent growth and 4 percent unemployment into a sub-40 approval rating.
And yet abroad, the Imperial Presidency remains as unconstrained and menacing as ever. Who needs "the power to persuade" when a 16-year-old congressional military authorization can be used to wage war at will, almost anywhere in the world? Our "America First" president seems unperturbed by mission creep that's led to boots on the ground in places as far-flung as Tongo Tongo; instead, Trump has deepened entanglements on every battlefield Obama left him, ramping up airstrikes, kill-or-capture missions, and civilian casualties.
Hamstrung at home, the president has every incentive to overcompensate abroad. Washington elites have lauded Trump as "presidential" only twice: in March, when he followed his teleprompter during a congressional address, and in April, when he ordered a drive-by missile attack on Syria. He seems to find issuing orders easier than sticking to a script. Asked "will you attack North Korea?" in September, he responded: "We'll see."
So far, the Trump administration has delivered more farce than tragedy. But our luck can change at any time.
PARTY POLITICS:
Patrick Ruffini
In 2015–16, Donald Trump proved he understands that politics is about tribal allegiance. By seizing control of one of the two main parties, you can rise to power. In 2017, Trump smashed the remnants of Republican opposition and cemented his role as the tribal warlord chieftain of a MAGA-ified GOP. By this standard, he's had a successful year.
Trump's weakness in elite circles has bred a narrative that the Republican Party is coming apart. But 90 percent of Republicans voted for him in 2016, and if anything, the GOP is becoming more united—not around shared philosophical beliefs, but around Trump.
Unfortunately for Republicans, he has accomplished this in part by making the party smaller. In Gallup's daily tracking surveys, the share who self-identify with the GOP has fallen from 42 percent immediately after Election Day to 37 percent today.
The decline in Republican identification post-Trump is part of a sorting phenomenon that helped Republicans during the presidential contest but is hurting them now. According to an analysis of Voter Study Group data, Republicans in 2016 benefited from party switches from older voters and non-college-educated whites—the same groups that surged to Trump. At the same time, large numbers of nonwhites and millennials switched away, a trend we've seen accelerate since he took office. Those much-scrutinized Obama-Trump and Romney-Clinton voters were not just defying their party this one time. Many were in the process of changing their partisan allegiance to match their view of the GOP nominee.
The math here is not good for Republicans. In the 2017 Virginia governor's race, 97 percent of the results at the precinct level could be explained by the results of the 2016 election. The same places that had voted for Trump, in other words, went GOP again—yet the Republican lost by 9 points, because turnout surged so much in Democratic strongholds. While congressional Republicans outperformed Trump in 2016, many would be lucky to match his numbers today. The Alabama Senate race shows what can happen when a candidate stokes cultural divides even further: Roy Moore fell an astounding 50 points short of Trump's margins in highly educated GOP precincts.
For a year filled with record low poll numbers for a president in his first year, Trump has managed to solve one pesky problem: Those Republicans most resistant to his control of the party are largely headed for the exits.
THE REGULATORY STATE:
Matt Welch
On December 14, the president held a little ceremony in the White House Roosevelt Room to highlight his administration's efforts in slowing the growth of the regulatory state. This being Trump, he illustrated the point by cutting a red ribbon with a pair of giant golden scissors and making the absurdly undeliverable promise that "when we're finished, which won't be in too long a period of time, we will be less [regulatory] than where we were in 1960." The media being the media, most coverage focused on the crude props and inflated claims.
But somewhere between the bluster and the skepticism lies a humdinger of a story: Trump's first nine months in office, the Competitive Enterprise Institute concluded in October, qualified him as "the least regulatory president," with significant enacted regulations—those costing affected industries a combined $100 million or more—down 58 percent compared to the first nine months of 2016, and significant proposed rules down 77 percent.
The president picked free marketeers to head the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Education, the Federal Communications Commission, and many other agencies. He then appointed Neomi Rao—founder of the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School—as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the top slot in the regulation bureaucracy.
Two early executive orders that were initially greeted with some eye-rolling—insisting that two old regulations be killed for every new one created, and demanding that his administration's net new regulatory costs be zero—have also turned out to have teeth.
These personnel decisions and regulatory constraints are beginning to pay off. Some 15 Obama regulations were repealed via the Congressional Review Act, or 14 more than in the previous two decades. The FCC rolled back ill-considered net neutrality rules, while the Education Department rescinded bad guidance to colleges on adjudicating sexual assault disputes. If and when the federal government's process for approving drugs is improved, the impact on human lives will be measurable.
But there is only so much the administrative state can do to deconstruct itself. Real deregulation—as opposed to mere regulatory slowdown—requires Congress to change existing law, which it has historically been loath to do. Meanwhile, Trump's promises and at least some of his actions on trade, immigration, and crime are threatening to tarnish his otherwise laudable record with massive federal intrusions on individual liberty.
THE POLITICAL CULTURE:
Jesse Walker
Donald Trump's very first campaign speech fanned fears of foreign subversion: Mexico, he suggested, was deliberately dumping its criminals on our side of the border. A year after he became president, many Democrats have found it convenient to challenge him by…fanning fears of foreign subversion. It's a sign of the Trumpian times that so much of the "resistance" can't resist the rise of paranoid nationalism.
The problem here isn't that Democrats are investigating Trump and his cronies' possible conflicts of interest in the former Soviet Union. It's always good to keep an eye on any signs of public corruption, and the president's circle has certainly done business with more than its share of sleazy operators, from Russia to Turkey to New Jersey.
What's ugly is the narrative that's grown up around the investigation, one where Vladimir Putin is an omnipotent puppetmaster, where attempts to reduce tensions with the Kremlin are innately suspicious, where Moscow's low-budget propaganda ploys are not just one more set of signals in the cacophony of American politics but an alien force ripping the U.S. apart. It's one thing to look for ways officials may have broken the law; it's quite another to encourage a new cold war or to call for controls on online speech.
The right frets over its own gallery of demonic foreign forces, from MS-13 to the Islamic Brotherhood. But at the moment, it is arguably more focused on a domestic enemy. Antifa—a loose, decentralized, and not particularly large movement—has grown in the Fox News imagination into a boogeyman of spectacular proportions, with virtually every violent protest (and not a few nonviolent ones) folded into the alleged menace.
As liberals largely react by arguing that the real domestic threat is the far right, the weak-kneed centrist position appears to be anxiety about protests in general: Many city leaders and college administrators now see any event where left and right might clash as a threat to public order. Don't be surprised if enterprising officials craft policies designed to subdue the whole spectrum, shutting down crowds of peaceful demonstrators along with anyone with violence on his mind.
FOREIGN POLICY:
William Ruger
It was not unreasonable to hope that President Donald Trump might improve on the foreign policy performance of his predecessors. Sure, the hopeful were grading on a curve that included George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But what gave a sliver of hope to those who yearned for greater realism and restraint were candidate Trump's counter-establishment pronouncements about the "big, fat mistake" of Iraq and the problems posed by our wealthy, free-riding allies.
Unfortunately, Trump's first year has been full of missed opportunities and worrying signs that this presidency won't provide the change required to make American foreign policy great again. A huge whiff came on Afghanistan, where Trump had the chance to draw down U.S. commitments or even end the longest war in American history. Against his better instincts, the president sided with the generals who wanted more troops—but who don't appear to have a strategy to significantly change the outcome. He also could have appointed more realists to the administration to balance status quo voices in the White House and throughout the bureaucracy
Trump's approach to North Korea has been dangerously confrontational. Rather than stressing deterrence and diplomacy, his rhetoric has exacerbated tensions. Meanwhile, hawks in the administration insist on unrealistic denuclearization, thereby cranking up the likelihood of unnecessary war.
Middle East policy has been similarly troubling, with Trump de-certifying the Iran nuclear deal (but wisely not killing it). Rather than aim for a more balanced approach in the region, the president has favored Saudi Arabia, including offering support for its atrocious actions in Yemen. This war has resulted in excessive civilian casualties and contributed to outbreaks of famine and cholera. And a recently released national security strategy offers too much of the same old primacist thinking that relies on active, military-heavy deep engagement abroad and extensive foreign commitments.
There were some positive signs. Trump avoided a large footprint in Iraq and Syria. He hasn't yet delivered a debacle like Bush's Iraq or Obama's Libya. He also continued to call on the U.S.'s wealthy allies to meet their spending commitments. In a rebuke to foreign policy idealists, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson emphasized American national security interests and cautioned against policies based on the promotion of values. Until recently, Trump did not seem eager to tangle with Putin. But unfortunately, those in the administration who would like to see a more confrontational approach to Russia won permission for a $41.5 million arms deal with Ukraine.
APPOINTMENTS:
Katherine Mangu-Ward
A year ago, many conservatives and some libertarians held their noses and voted for Donald Trump on the theory that even if they didn't like the man himself, he'd likely make good appointments—or at least better appointments than his rival.
For some, Trump's early Supreme Court pick of Neil Gorsuch vindicated that voting strategy, which was particularly prevalent among constitutional conservatives. So pleased were these supporters with his choice that references to the jurist became a bit of a joke in Washington: "Sure, Trump's tweets are disconcerting. But Gorsuch!"
The president doesn't just appoint Supreme Court justices, however.
Several of Trump's high-level taps, including Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education and Ajit Pai at the Federal Communications Commission, have become liberal bugaboos for their deregulatory impulses. But the appointee with the greatest opportunity to change the direction of U.S. policy in a serious way is Trump's Justice Department selection: Jeff Sessions, a former senator from Alabama who has a long history of favoring prohibition and punishment.
Attorney General Sessions is less a criminal justice reformer than a criminal justice reactionary. During his confirmation hearing, he spoke approvingly of civil asset forfeiture, a practice in which money and other property are taken from people who have not been charged, let alone convicted, of any underlying crime.
A fair-weather federalist, Sessions supports states' rights right up until the moment that states legalize recreational or medicinal marijuana, at which point he thinks Washington should take precedence. He has had a similar response to the rise of sanctuary cities (and states), or jurisdictions that aren't always willing to cooperate with immigration authorities. He also supports strengthening and lengthening sentences for violent and nonviolent offenders alike, and he is skeptical of the idea that increased police oversight is needed.
He has already removed some of the strictures that Barack Obama's administration imposed in response to Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement, rolling back restrictions on combat gear the Department of Defense can offer to local police departments, clarifying that federal officials are welcome to go after cannabis even in states that have legalized it, and loosening up the standards for asset forfeiture.
Where Trump is a reactive pragmatist, Sessions is an authoritarian ideologue. And if he can survive the fast-paced game of musical chairs being played in the White House, he will push immigration, drug, and law enforcement in a more illiberal direction for years to come.
THE ECONOMY:
Veronique de Rugy
In the last year, both the stock market and the bitcoin world have been powerhouses. As of press time in January, the S&P 500 had seen a 35 percent increase since election night. Over that same period, the price of a bitcoin went up by more than 1,700 percent, from $721 to $13,310.
Trump has often said the stock market's performance should be viewed as a proxy for his administration's accomplishments. Is there anything to that?
Perhaps. One possibility is that the rally is a sign of a growing economy fueled by the promise of big corporate tax reductions and the regulatory diet Trump has put the federal government on. In addition, entrepreneurs are probably breathing a sigh of relief that the anti-business climate so palpable during the Obama years is over.
Of course, the rally is not unique to the United States, and we could just be riding the coattails of global growth. It's also possible we're in a bubble created by various governments' "easy money" policies of increasing their fiat currency supplies. According to Allen Gillespie, a partner at Fintrust Investment Advisors, "We are in the midst of the greatest asset inflation via quantitative easing" since the one that caused an economic collapse in France in 1720.
But what of bitcoin, the 8-year-old cryptocurrency that is suddenly the talk of the town? A single token that traded for pennies not long ago hit $19,000 in December, a jaw-dropping price spike that has since subsided slightly. And as the blockchain technology develops, new instruments—such as the recent introduction of bitcoin futures trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange—will allow institutional investors to take a position in the currency. This has in turn driven greater interest from retail investors. And even with the surge, only a tiny fraction of people are currently involved, which means there still could be a lot of room to grow.
Even as bitcoin is providing an alternative to traditional methods of financial speculation, other cryptocurrencies are emerging to give bitcoin a run for its money—and Trump has nothing to do with any of that. In the truly unregulated space that's opened up for techno-utopian experimentation, there's no telling what might come next. But if the history of permissionless innovation is our guide, the process itself will be a source of wealth for us all.
The post Trump Turns One appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Are there limits to nativism in the party of Trump? The latest indication from the House of Representatives is that the answer is "no." Yesterday, the
committee that controls immigration policy passed a bill to gut America's asylum process, dooming many thousands of desperate people to a U.S. taxpayer-funded flight back to violence and persecution.
The Asylum Reform and Border Protection Act would radically increase the evidentiary burden for asylum seekers simply to apply for asylum. Current law requires a minimal test: articulating a credible fear of persecution. If they do this, they get a hearing in immigration court to present their full asylum claim. At that point they have to offer copious proof of their claim before they are extended the right to live permanently in the United States.
The new bill would now require asylum seekers to prove when they are detained at the border that it is "more probable than not" that their claims are true in order to just get a hearing.
Under this heightened standard, words alone will generally no longer suffice. Asylum seekers will need to carry proof of persecution with them. This is absurd. Many asylees have to flee under cover of darkness or swim through streams to escape their persecutors. They often set out without any concept of where they will end up, let alone with documentary evidence in their pockets.
As the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project notes, "preparing an asylum application requires a lot of work." It necessitates gathering, if available, photographs, medical reports, written threats, witness statements, police reports, and reports on human rights in their country of origin. Many legitimate asylum seekers lose their cases because they cannot obtain such evidence even after months to prepare for their court appearance. It is a delusion to expect people to have it at the border.
In one asylum case, a Muslim woman fled Morocco due to abuse from her conservative Muslim father. She escaped to the United States and claimed a credible fear of persecution. The officer allowed her in. Only then was she able to document the claim with testimony from her aunt and the State Department's report on the inability of Moroccan women to seek protection from abusive male family members.
As the Tahiri Justice Center, which serves women fleeing violence, stated, "H.R. 391's heightened screening standard will, as intended, wrongfully prevent women and girls fleeing horrific violence from even presenting their cases in court." The bill's sponsor, now-former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, responded to these concerns last year by simply saying, "It is not too much to ask that the alien seeking refuge in the United States be required to tell the truth." But this response is neither here nor there: they already must tell the truth. The question is how and when to verify it.
For these reasons, when Congress created the "credible fear" process in 1996, it did so with the clear intent that it would not create an adversarial process that this bill now seeks to do. The initial draft of the 1996 legislation had included the "more probable than not" language, but when opponents noted these problems, the bill's Republican authors removed it. Those were more sensible times, apparently!
These asylum changes would not simply apply to the people fleeing gangs in Central America but also to Syrian Christians fleeing the Islamic State. A number of Syrian Christians showed up at the U.S.-Mexico border last year to apply for asylum after traveling across several continents. Despite the fact that the State Department has found that ISIS is carrying out a "genocide" of Christians in its territory, if this law had been in place then, they would either have been deported from the border or consigned to a stateless existence in the U.S.
"Genocide" appropriately brings to mind the Holocaust. The entire asylum system came out of America's complicity in that awful crime, via its systematic denial of visas to German Jews and particularly its monstrous decision to compel the M.S. St. Louis to return its cargo of 937 Jews. The Nazis killed 255 of them in death camps or elsewhere on their return, their fate heartbreakingly depicted in the movie the Voyage of the Damned.
The State Department used similar documentary requirements as a tool to keep out German Jews just as the Holocaust ramped up. Our failure then is now our moral compass. If our proposals today would have kept out those passengers, then they are unfit for discussion.
Against these considerations, the bill's authors offer only the fear that many people claim asylum simply to gain entrance, and "something must be done" (a favorite phrase in government). But the U.S. experienced an equally large surge of asylum seekers in the mid-1990s, and Congress adopted a much more moderate reform—"the credible fear process"—which Congress today wants to gut.
Moreover, while some asylum applicants are undoubtedly gaming the system, the best evidence indicates that it mostly works as intended, giving many legitimate claimants the opportunity to apply. Indeed, a majority of asylum applicants in immigration courts prove their claims, if they are able to obtain immigration counsel.
This draconian bill—which would deny safe haven in numerous other abhorrent ways—demonstrates the depths to which the party of Trump has fallen. For years, a level of bipartisan common decency protected those who sought refuge in America. Now we can only hope partisan gridlock offers the same level of protection.
David Bier is an immigration policy analyst at The Cato Institute
The post The Party of Trump Is Trying to Gut America's Asylum Process appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Donald Trump captured the imagination of many American voters with a single campaign promise. "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border," he boasted in June 2015. For good measure, he added, "And I will have Mexico pay for that wall." The twin pledges—which followed a tirade about Mexican rapists and drug dealers—neatly captured everything that was either attractive or repulsive to voters in the real estate mogul's presidential run: bravado, nationalism, and controversy.
Trump was often criticized for lacking precision in policy ideas, but he had bold and detailed requirements for his wall. It would be 1,000 miles long. (The other 1,500, he said, were covered by "natural barriers.") He gave various estimates of its height—between 30 and 50 feet, with the most common number being 35. His barrier would be an "impenetrable physical wall" composed of "precast [concrete] plank…30 feet long, 40 feet long." He also insisted that it would be aesthetically pleasing.
While he said after the election that a fence may be appropriate in "some areas," he added that a wall would be better, and he has since vigorously corrected reporters who describe the project as a "fence." Throughout the campaign, he described the current fences as a "joke," implying that he would not only build a superior barrier, but that he would replace the one that exists at some points now.
The History The president's proposal has a decadeslong history. After the 1986 "amnesty," when President Ronald Reagan traded increased border security for the legalization of 3 million unauthorized immigrants, the San Diego Border Patrol constructed a 10-foot welded steel fence along the 14-mile section of the border closest to the Pacific. In 1996, a new law provided funds for a second layer. Despite repeated requests from the Border Patrol for more, by the year 2000 just 60 miles of the southern border had fencing, almost all of which was in urban areas. Only San Diego had a second layer.
After 9/11, border hawks launched another push for fences, with little success. Most immigration enforcement funds were going to a surge in border agents. But President George W. Bush's push for comprehensive immigration reform, which would have legalized the unauthorized immigrants in the United States, gave the hawks their opportunity. In 2006, Congress approved the Secure Fence Act mandating nearly 700 miles of fencing on the border.
The president signed on to the bill hoping to placate the secure-the-border-first crowd and obtain the humane immigration changes that he wanted. This sales job enabled it to pass with bipartisan support from the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The immigration reform never materialized, but fence construction was nearly complete by 2009, and there are now 617 total miles of physical barriers, 36 miles of which have two layers.
Yet the hawks were not placated. They complained that there was no second layer in most places. They stewed that half the fence was just "vehicle barriers"—concrete posts that provide obstacles for drivers but not pedestrians. Moreover, the 317 miles of real pedestrian fences dramatically vary in height and quality. The Border Patrol uses half a dozen types of fencing materials—wire mesh, landing mats, chain-link, bollard, aesthetic, and sheet piling—just to control on-foot crossings. These barriers are mainly a combination of steel posts and bars supplemented in places with wire, ranging in height from 6 to 18 feet.
The Legal Obstacles Trump has been adamant that his wall will be built "ahead of schedule." For that to happen, he'll need to avoid the various legal issues that plagued earlier efforts. Entities other than the federal government—states, Indian tribes, private individuals—control over two-thirds of borderland property. Private parties own the vast majority of the border in Texas, and for this reason, roughly 70 percent of the existing border fence is located in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Almost all of it is on federally controlled land.
The Bush administration bullied property owners, threatening to sue them if they did not "voluntarily" hand over the rights to their land. It offered no compensation for doing so. Thinking that they had no recourse, some people signed off, but others refused. The government then attempted to use eminent domain, a procedure Trump has long defended, to seize their property, but the lawsuits imposed serious delays—seven years in one case.
In 2009, the Homeland Security inspector general concluded that the Border Patrol had "achieved [its] progress primarily in areas where environmental and real estate issues did not cause significant delay." One intransigent resident had owned his property since before the "Roosevelt easement," which gives the federal government a 60-foot right of way along the border. He fought the administration, so the fence had until recently a 1.2-mile gap on his land. Border residents fought more than a third of all land transfers, in fact. Because the Constitution promises just compensation for takings, Trump can do little to speed this process.
Native American tribes also have the capacity to stop construction of barriers. The Tohono O'odham Nation, which has land on both sides of the border, has already pledged to fight any efforts to build a wall there. In 2007, when the tribe allowed vehicle barriers to be constructed, the Bush administration ended up desecrating Indian burial grounds and digging up human remains. The new president would need a stand-alone bill from Congress to condemn their land. Senate Democrats can (and likely would) filibuster such an effort.
Even federal lands can be problematic. In 2010, two-thirds of patrol agents-in-charge told the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that land management laws had delayed or limited access to portions of federal lands, for fence building or repairs and other purposes, with more than half stating they did not get a timely response when they requested permission to use the lands. In one case, it took nearly eight months for the Border Patrol to get the OK to install a single underground sensor.
Water rights have also been a problem for the fence. A 1970 treaty requires that the floodplain of the Rio Grande remain open to both sides of the border. The Obama administration attempted to build fences along the river anyway, but the treaty and the river's floods forced the barrier to be placed so far into the interior of the United States that it has many holes to allow U.S. residents access to their property. These also provide an opportunity for border crossers.
At the same time, the fence can cause Mexico to receive too much water. Even when a fence has holes, which a wall would not, debris can turn the fence into a dam. Thanks to the barrier, some floods have fully covered the doors of Mexican buildings in Los Ebanos, across the Rio Grande, while producing little more than deep puddling on the U.S. side. The International Boundary and Water Commission that administers the treaty has rebuffed the Border Patrol's attempts to replicate this disaster in other areas of the Rio Grande Valley.
The Practical Considerations Fences or walls obstruct crossers' paths, cutting off a straight shot into the interior of the country. But a barrier is not the permanent object that some people imagine. Natural events can knock down parts of a border fence. One storm in Texas left a hole for months. Fences and walls can also erode near rivers or beaches, as the one in San Diego did. And they can be penetrated: Some fencing can be cut in minutes, and the Border Patrol reported repairing more than 4,000 holes in one year alone. They neglected to mention whether that number equaled that year's number of breaches.
Much of the current fencing can be easily mounted with a ladder or from the roof of a truck. In some cases, border crossers can scale the fence without any additional equipment. One viral video from 2010 shows two women easily climbing an 18-foot steel bollard-style pedestrian fence in less than 20 seconds. Smugglers can even drive over the fence using ramps, a fact that was discovered only when a couple of foolish drug entrepreneurs managed to get their SUV stuck on top. (They took the dope and split.)
A wall would probably be less easily damaged by man or nature. But in at least some areas, its impassibility could also become a maintenance liability. Border Patrol agents have told Fox News that a border wall would still "have to allow water to pass through, or the sheer force of raging water could damage its integrity, not to mention the legal rights of both the U.S. and Mexico to seasonal rains." In 2011, for example, a flood in Arizona washed away 40 feet of steel fence.
While not "impenetrable," a concrete wall would impede efforts to cut through it. Trump has also claimed that no one would ever use a ladder to go over his wall because "there's no way to get down." After pondering the question for a second, he then conceded, "maybe a rope." Nonetheless, the height might discourage some people from attempting to climb it, and it would certainly take them longer to do so, giving Border Patrol agents additional time to reach them.
If not over or through, some crossers may opt to go under. Tunnels are typically used more for drug smuggling, but they still create a significant vulnerability in any kind of physical barrier. From 2007 to 2010, the Border Patrol found more than one tunnel per month, on average. "For every tunnel we find, we feel they're building another one somewhere," Kevin Hecht, a Border Patrol tunnel expert, told The New York Times last year. A wall would likely increase the rewards for successful tunneling as other modes of transit grow more expensive.
Trump is unconcerned, asserting that "tunnel technology" will rule out any such subterfuge. Effective tunnel detection equipment is seen as the Holy Grail of Border Patrol enforcement, but the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate has so far concluded that no current technology for detecting tunnels beneath the border is "suited to Border Patrol agents' operational needs."
But the biggest practical problem with a wall is its opacity. In fact, many Border Patrol agents oppose a concrete wall for precisely this reason (albeit quietly, given that they were also some of Trump's biggest supporters during the election). "A cinder block or rock wall, in the traditional sense, isn't necessarily the most effective or desirable choice," Border Patrol agents told Fox News. "Seeing through a fence allows agents to anticipate and mobilize, prior to illegal immigrants actually climbing or cutting through the fence."
The agency is already desperate to switch out the nontransparent landing-mat fences in use in some places. These metal sheets were adapted from helicopter landing pads left over from Vietnam, and while inexpensive, they are ill-suited to their purpose. Popular Mechanics described these parts of the fence as "obsolete, in need of replacement," noting that they "can be easy to foil since Border Patrol agents can't see what's going on on the other side." If a wall slows down agents as much as it does smugglers and migrants, it provides no advantage on balance.
To put it most simply, border barriers will never stop illegal immigration, because a wall or fence cannot apprehend crossers. The agents that Fox News spoke to called a wall "meaningless" without agents and technology to back it up. Mayor Michael Gomez of Douglas, Arizona, labeled the fence a failure in 2010, saying "they jump right over it." Former Border Patrol spokesperson Mike Scioli has called the fence little more than "a speed bump in the desert."
The Efficacy of a Wall Trump speaks with absolute certainty of a wall's ability to repel entries, yet the efficacy of the existing barriers has gone largely unstudied. The president is proposing a project likely to cost tens of billions of dollars and to suck up many other resources, and he is doing so without a single evaluation of the barrier. Obviously, any obstacle to passage will reduce entries at the margin. But would other options work better?
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D–Texas) of the House Homeland Security Committee failed to obtain an answer to this exact question from the Obama administration. Chairman Michael McCaul (R–Texas) concluded in 2013 that "it would be an inefficient use of taxpayer money to complete the fence," but he gave no indication of how he evaluated the costs and benefits. A 2016 Migration Policy Institute review of the impact of walls and fences around the world turned up no academic literature specifically on the deterrent effect of physical barriers relative to other technologies or strategies, and concluded somewhat vaguely that walls appear to be "relatively ineffective."
Trump claimed no one would ever use a ladder to go over his wall because "there's no way to get down." He pondered, then conceded, "maybe a rope."
Fences can have strong local effects, and the case for more fencing often relies completely on these regional outcomes. Take the San Diego border sector, probably the most commonly cited success story in this debate.
From 1990 to 1993, it replaced a "totally ineffective" fence with a taller, opaque landing mat fence along 14 miles of the border. This had little impact on the number of border crossers. "The primary fence, by itself, did not have a discernible impact on the influx of unauthorized aliens coming across the border in San Diego," the Congressional Research Service concluded.
From 1994 to 1996, Operation Gatekeeper doubled the number of agents in the sector to reinforce the fence, but this too had little effect on the number of apprehended migrants. (Researchers use apprehensions as a proxy for illegal immigration because they usually track closely to the number of total entries.) Instead, the apprehensions shifted dramatically away from the areas guarded by western stations at Imperial Beach and Chula Vista, where fences were built, and toward eastern stations. The net flow remained the same.
From 1997 to 1999, when the San Diego sector was reinforced with nine miles of secondary fencing and even more agents were added, the numbers did finally slow. But looking at the apprehension figures, it appears that San Diego simply pushed its problem even further east, to the El Centro, Yuma, and Tucson sectors. Each agent in those places ended up apprehending more people after the fence was built than before.
Ideally, we would perform the same type of before-and-after analysis of the impact of the Secure Fence Act of 2006. The problem is that those barriers were rolled out at the same time that Congress almost doubled the size of the Border Patrol, increasing it from 12,000 to 21,000 agents. Moreover, fences went up in many different sectors, making it difficult to isolate the effects. To complicate matters further, this period saw the collapse of the housing bubble, which caused a huge exodus of unauthorized workers back to Mexico.
The Unintended Consequences The numbers from this period also suggest that counting "reduced crossings" as a victory may be misleading. As the amount of fencing and the number of agents grew, the share of unauthorized immigrants entering illegally fell, but the number entering legally (and then staying illegally) rose.
In 2006, the Pew Research Center calculated that more than a third of all unauthorized immigrants entered lawfully and then simply overstayed their visas. People who come to the U.S. as tourists or temporary business travelers are forbidden from working, so a small number remain after their visa expires to work under the table. For every three border crossers in 1992, there was one overstay. But by 2012, visa overstays accounted for 58 percent of all new unauthorized immigrants. A wall not only will do nothing to stop these people from entering, but it may actually incentivize more people to stick around without authorization.
Using reduced border crossings as the standard of success also obscures the wall's effect on the total population of undocumented residents in the country.
Until the first fence was built in 1990, workers could circulate freely across the border, coming to harvest crops during the summer and then returning home in the winter. They crossed with a goal of bettering their lives south of the border. The 1980s had more total crossings than the 1990s, but because as many people left each year as arrived, the total number of unauthorized immigrants remained roughly constant at about 3 million. The true measure of of a barrier's efficacy should be not the gross flow but the net flow, taking into account both entries and exits.
Increased enforcement in the 1990s raised the cost to cross the border, which obviously prevented some migrants from crossing at the margin. In fact, the cost of a single border crossing exploded from $500 in 1995 to $3,000 in 2009. Increasing the price of illegal activity is law enforcement's main measurement of success. The Drug Enforcement Administration would be thrilled to claim it had driven up illicit drug prices 600 percent in a decade and a half.
But this strategy backfired. The increased costs and risks disincentivized people from returning home. In 1996, just as the secondary fencing was going up in San Diego, a majority of new unauthorized entrants left within one year, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Douglas Massey. By 2009—with three times as many agents, 650 miles of barriers, and constant surveillance along the border—an illegal immigrant's likelihood of leaving within one year had dropped to a statistically insignificant level. Border security had essentially trapped them in.
The illegal population grew in tandem with the increases in smuggling prices, which in turn paralleled the growth in the number of border officers. This process continued from 1990 to 2007, when the housing collapse finally set Mexican migration into reverse.
Massey calculates that as of 2009, 5.3 million fewer immigrants would have been residing in the United States illegally had enforcement remained at the same levels as in the 1980s. He argues that a large guest worker program, similar to the one that the United States last had in the early 1960s, would reduce not just border crossings but the population of immigrants living in this country—seemingly a nationalist two-for-one.
The Price Tag Congress set aside $1.2 billion for the 700-mile border fence in 2006. It ended up spending $3.5 billion for construction of the current combination of pedestrian fences and vehicle impediments. In 2009, the Border Patrol estimated it would need to spend an average of $325 million per year for 20 years to maintain these barriers. The Congressional Research Service found that by 2015, Congress had already spent $7 billion on the project, more than $11.3 million per mile per decade.
Of course, it hardly makes sense to look at averages, given that half the fence is inexpensive vehicle-only barriers. Of the 317 miles of true pedestrian fencing, the GAO found that construction alone for the first 70 miles cost $2.8 million per mile on average. In the more difficult, non-urban areas, costs grew dramatically: For the next 225 miles, they rose to $5 million per mile on average. In a mountainous region east of San Diego, they hit $16 million per mile. After about 290 miles, the GAO assumed the average cost for the final 26 miles would be $6.5 million.
If Trump backs away from his promise or if Congress ignores his requests for new funding, he may choose to simply build out the existing pedestrian fence for the remaining 683 miles to reach his 1,000-mile goal. Using the $6.5-million-per-mile figure, Congress will still need to front at least $10 billion over 10 years. The entire fence would price out at $18 billion, accounting for inflation. Add in the costs associated with acquiring private land and building in less accessible areas and the price tag goes even higher.
Trump, who still insists that his wall will be not a fence but an "impenetrable physical wall" of concrete, claims that it will cost between $10 billion and $12 billion. In early 2017, House Speaker Paul Ryan suggested that a similar amount of appropriations would be needed for the wall. Neither the president nor the speaker has revealed his methodology. But since we know that just building out the existing fence would cost at least that much, the wall will undoubtedly cost far more.
Not only that, but the existing fences were relatively inexpensive to build because they were constructed from materials such as old metal from helicopter landing pads and built low to the ground in some places. Trump has criticized them for, among other things, their inability to prevent tunneling, their materials, their height, and their aesthetics. Trump's wall would use, according to one engineer's estimate, more than 1.5 times as much concrete as the Hoover Dam.
For the full 1,000 miles, Trump's 30-foot wall (with a 10-foot tunnel barrier) would cost $31.2 billion, or $31.2 million per mile, according to the best estimate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers. Two other estimates placed the construction cost of the wall in the $25 billion range. An internal Department of Homeland Security report from February 2017 concluded the project would cost $21.6 billion for "a series of fences and walls" along 1,250 miles of the border. And these are solely upfront construction costs. They don't include ongoing maintenance, which has accounted for roughly half of the price of the existing barriers over a decade.
The Economic Downside Donald Trump has insisted from the start of his campaign that Mexico will pay for the wall. When he presented a proposal to Congress to fund the wall's construction in January, he continued to insist that Mexico would repay the United States. For his part, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has said that he would refuse to pay for any portion of the wall, and the back-and-forth became so heated in January that he canceled a meeting with Trump.
The U.S. president has remained vague about how this reimbursement will happen without Mexico's cooperation, and his total lack of understanding of basic economic concepts may be contributing to his erroneous belief. "The wall is a fraction of the kind of money…that Mexico takes in from the United States," he told CNN in April 2016. "You're talking about a trade deficit with Mexico of $58 billion." In other words, he seems to be saying that if the Mexican government does not give him the $31 billion or more that it will take to build the wall, Trump will tax America's business with Mexico. White House Spokesman Sean Spicer intimated something similar in January 2017.
Even if that were to happen, it is simply inaccurate to claim that America's southern neighbor would be paying for the wall, since the revenue would be coming from U.S. consumers. If the United States imposes a tax on Mexican imports, then people in America buying Mexican goods, from beer to cars, will cover it. Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) said as much to Trump during a presidential primary debate in January 2016, explaining that the Mexican government "doesn't pay the tariff—the buyer pays the tariff." Evidently, the lesson failed to stick.
Trump has also floated the idea of cutting off remittances to Mexico of unauthorized immigrants if the Mexican government refuses to pay up. His proposed regulatory method of doing this (claiming that cash wire transfers are actually bank accounts) is legally suspect, but even if it were licit, it would not cover the cost of the wall. Although Mexican immigrants annually send $26 billion to their families in Mexico, only half of the Mexican immigrants in the United States are here illegally, and the majority of the remittances from unauthorized immigrants would likely find a way home through means other than wire transfers.
The Reason President Trump's wall would be a mammoth expenditure that would have little impact on illegal immigration. But perhaps that's not the point. The campaign's goal was to plant an image in voters' minds of what making America great again would look like. The president's goal may now be to create a symbol, an illustration of a nationalism that says to the world that although people of all kinds may want to come here, America was created by and for Americans.
For those who are not nationalists, the wall is a problem. The direct harms are easy to document: the spending, the taxes, the eminent domain abuse, and the decrease in immigrants' freedom of movement.
Even if the wall fails to reduce illegal entries significantly overall, one byproduct of making it harder to enter is that people will choose to cross in increasingly dangerous points along the border (the president's "natural barriers"). This objective was a purposeful Border Patrol strategy in the 1990s, and it caused the number of deaths to skyrocket as people perished in mountains or deserts. From 1993 to 2005, the number of lives lost in crossing rose from 23 to 500 per year. Since the border fence was built, the number has declined, but the death rate per crossing had more than tripled by 2012.
Wasteful security has always been the compromise that non-nationalists give to nationalists to obtain a better immigration system, one that treats people humanely and allows more of them to enter and live here legally. The most optimistic case is that the president builds some kind of barrier and takes credit for the drop in illegal immigration that began a decade ago. Seizing victory, he allows some form of immigration reform palatable to moderate Republicans to pass.
But agreeing to the symbol could be seen as conceding the principle behind it. If Trump understands the costs and the limited benefits of the wall, his true purpose may be to force his opponents to give in to the nationalist viewpoint and spend the ensuing decades building and maintaining its outward sign. Many Republicans, including the president, have adopted a "border security first" philosophy that requires certain metrics to be met before other humane reforms take effect, so the wall could simply be an attempt to move the goalposts for security so far that they can never be reached (especially if Mexico's reimbursement is a criterion).
Another possibility is that the wall serves as a grand red herring, forcing Trump's opponents to focus on the symbol while he enforces his true vision in other areas. The president's executive order mandating the construction of a wall also requires a crackdown on asylum seekers coming to the border from Central America. His order on interior enforcement renders nearly all unauthorized immigrants priorities for removal. He has still further orders planned to undermine the legal immigration system for foreign workers. And of course, he has tried to ban all people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering at all. As his opponents focus on the wall, the Trump administration targets immigrants from every direction.
In a sense, the wall merely represents the Trump administration's worst instincts and desires. It is harmful, wasteful, and offensive, but an ineffective wall is nonetheless better than the surge of 5,000 new Border Patrol agents and 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to round up and deport people that the president also wants. No wall has ever arrested, robbed, battered, or murdered nonviolent people, as immigration enforcement has. A wall will not create an interest group to lobby for itself, endorse nationalist presidential candidates, and demand more power and funding, as the Border Patrol union does.
The wall is more than a symbol. It will harm the lives of thousands of border residents and immigrants while wasting billions of tax dollars. But in a world run by nationalists, the one small source of comfort for non-nationalists over the next four years may be the knowledge that it could be worse.
The post Why the Wall Won't Work appeared first on Reason.com.
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