The legal question is not whether immigrants have a right of entry

The New Neo Posted on by

Cornhead writes:

Foreigners who reside outside of the USA, don’t have a green card or a visa don’t have any constitutional rights. And especially they have no right of entry to the USA.

If it were otherwise, expect about one billion people moving here tomorrow.

Others in the same thread yesterday made similar points—for example, Chester Draws:

People with no right to live in the US are not covered by the Constitution. It’s mental to say non-US citizens have any US rights.

I’m also going to quote Yankee, who writes:

If a nation cannot decide whom it will admit into its country to become a citizen, then it is not a sovereign nation. Period, end of discussion.

The First Amendment is not an issue. Congress, as the legislative body, and the President, as the executive with enforcement, have the final authority. If the people, under the law, have chosen not to admit anyone, or any group of people, for any reason whatsoever, then that is their choice, and there is nothing to appeal to.

I’ve not seen anyone claiming—in the legal sense, that is, rather than the moral sense—that everyone has a right of entry to this country. The more valid question (as Yankee implies) is what branch of the US government gets to decide who is eligible and under what statutes with what restrictions (if any), and also whether the Constitution itself contains any limitations on this power to decide who to admit. As I wrote in my post:

And I agree with Andrew McCarthy that””if we wanted to do so””immigrants of a certain religion could be banned under certain circumstances without violating the Constitution.

So I think the argument asserting that the Establishment Clause (the one I discussed in yesterday’s post) pertains to Trump’s EO is extremely weak, perhaps non-existent.

However, another argument, based on the wording of an immigration statue passed by Congress in 1965, is somewhat stronger. Andrew McCarthy deals with it in this manner:

…[L]et’s consider the claimed conflict between the president’s executive order and Congress’s statute. Mr. Bier asserts that Trump may not suspend the issuance of visas to nationals of specific countries because the 1965 immigration act “banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin.” And, indeed, a section of that act, now codified in Section 1152(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, states that…“no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence”…Even on its face, this provision is not as clearly in conflict with Trump’s executive order as Bier suggests. As he correctly points out, the purpose of the anti-discrimination provision…was to end the racially and ethnically discriminatory “national origins” immigration practice that was skewed in favor of Western Europe. Trump’s executive order, to the contrary, is in no way an effort to affect the racial or ethnic composition of the nation or its incoming immigrants. The directive is an effort to protect national security from a terrorist threat, which, as we shall see, Congress itself has found to have roots in specified Muslim-majority countries. Because of the national-security distinction between Trump’s 2017 order and Congress’s 1965 objective, it is not necessary to construe them as contradictory, and principles of constitutional interpretation counsel against doing so.

…Federal immigration law also includes Section 1182(f), which states: “Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate”…Section 1182(f) plainly and sweepingly authorizes the president to issue temporary bans on the entry of classes of aliens for national-security purposes. This is precisely what President Trump has done. In fact, in doing so, he expressly cites Section 1182(f), and his executive order tracks the language of the statute (finding the entry of aliens from these countries at this time “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”)…Trump’s executive order also expressly relies on an Obama-era provision of the immigration law, Section 1187(a)(12), which governs the Visa Waiver Program. This statute empowers the executive branch to waive the documentation requirements for certain aliens. In it, Congress itself expressly discriminates based on country of origin…So, not only has Congress never repealed the president’s sweeping statutory power to exclude classes of aliens from entry on national-security grounds; decades after the 1965 anti-discrimination provision touted by Bier, Congress expressly authorized discrimination on the basis of national origin when concerns over international terrorism are involved. Consequently, by Bier’s own logic, the 1965 statute must be deemed amended by the much more recent statute.

It takes a bit of patience to follow that. But the gist of it is that there are two statutes that appear to be relevant, although one appears to forbid Trump from barring people from certain countries while the other allows him to do so, especially if the ban is temporary and for national security reasons (Trump’s EO fulfills both of these criteria). McCarthy is arguing (very convincingly, I believe) that the section allowing Trump to do this controls. Those seeking to block Trump would argue that the prohibition listed in the 1965 statue controls.

But neither of these legal arguments is based on the assertion that everyone has a right to come here. They are based on settling a disagreement between statutes, and involve which branch of government has the power to do what, and what statute controls. The challenges as to whether the EO itself is unconstitutional involve a different issue.

The Constitution and Trump’s immigration EO: when is a religion not a religion?

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want some good discussions of the legal niceties of the restraining order issued on Trump immigration EO, there are a number of posts you can read: this and this at Legal Insurrection, this at Powerline, and this at Althouse.

Judge Robart’s original opinion was unusually laconic, and so we are in the dark on what legal basis (if any) he ruled, although we do have the legal briefs that show what arguments were advanced (I have not read them). Althouse mentions that a recent NY Times article’s author emphasizes the Establishment Clause primarily, so perhaps that was it.

The Establishment Clause refers to a section of the First Amendment regarding religion (which applies to states as well):

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Attorney Jonathan Turley has this to say about the immigration EO and the Establishment Clause:

… I’m still skeptical about whether you could make a successful establishment claim. There’s a lot of cases that have to be moved aside to get from here to there if you want to strike down this law.

It is true there’s establishment issues, but there’s also plenary power in the hands of a president…

I don’t see a court, any court saying that what a candidate said on the trail is going to be material in terms of whether this law is struck down. And I’m surprised that Neal even suggests that.

I have been in cases where those types of arguments have been raised, and courts have shot it down. For example, what if – I mean, Trump clearly said that. But he then gave this law to someone to draft, and they came back with a law that is not a Muslim ban.

Now, I don’t like the law, but I don’t think any court is going to look at this law and say it’s a Muslim ban, because it’s not. There’s plenty to object about this law without making it something it’s not. It doesn’t ban all Muslims.

I could go on and on and on with the legal questions involved, because they’re actually very interesting. But that would be an enormous post, and I’m not going to be writing that at the moment. What I will say is that this law obviously is not a Muslim ban; I’ve argued that before, and it’s obvious on the face (as Turley indicates), for the simple reason that plenty of Muslims can still enter the country under it.

The EO (under a more general law passed years ago by Congress) temporarily calls a halt to visas and immigration from certain countries where Islamic terrorism is rife. Islamic terrorists want to kill us (not just us, of course; but us among many others). That’s not anyone’s imagination; it’s a fact. If we are going to let people into this country from those countries, we’d better make very sure we have a good way to screen them. But one thing we also know is that Muslim terrorists in those countries also have as their major targets—for murder and mayhem—the Christians who live in those countries. A distinction is being made by the US government between those who among a pool of people who are the possible victimizers and those who are their proposed (or actual) victims.

If we cannot make such distinctions under the law, we are in trouble. Because this problem will not go away. It is as though, if we had wanted to, we could not have made exceptions during the Holocaust for Jews to come to this country, despite the fact that Jews were the Nazis’ central (although not only) targets.

The entire issue shines a spotlight on the question of what happens when a religion (let’s call it religion A) becomes a mechanism for a significant number of its adherents to murder members of another religion (let’s call it religion B) who live in their countries. Can we not offer the latter group some sort of preference under our immigration system? And what if those same murderous adherents of religion A want to kill us, too? Don’t we have a duty to examine a bit more closely anyone from religion A who might want to come here, through some sort of ideological vetting? And what of other adherents of religion A who might not be killers at all, but who support their cause?

This is not an easy problem to solve, when we also know that there are large numbers of adherents of religion A who also are fleeing persecution and strife and who would like to come here.

As far as Islam goes, I have already written a post on the subject of whether it is a religion. My answer: it is. I have also written about Islam’s vulnerability to interpretations that support terrorism. If you want to understand where I’m coming from on the subject, please read those two posts. But for the purposes of the present, I’ll just say that Islam is a religion—and it also is a religion that has most of the world’s terrorists claiming to be part of it, and has another much larger number of co-religionists who support the destructive activities of those terrorists around the world, as well as another very large group who do not approve of or share those activities.

Is it realistic to treat this religion as though these things were not true? Is it realistic to consider that because Christians—who do not represent a vector of terrorism in the world, and in Arab countries are among its most common victims—are also followers of a religion, that adherents of each religion pose equal risks? Is the Establishment Clause applicable? Is it even applicable to screening immigrants or visitors to this country at all?

Andrew C. McCarthy has this to say on the matter:

…[I]t is specious to claim that the Constitution forbids a religion test in matters of immigration. This is not merely because the Constitution has nothing to say on the matter (for, as we’ve also noted before, the original presumption was that immigration enforcement would be left to the states, with the federal government limited to prescribing the qualifications for citizenship). It is also because Congress has long expressly made inquiry into religion part of immigration law, specifically, in determining what aliens qualify as “refugees,” and whether aliens qualify for asylum…

Of course, the fact that the Constitution does not forbid a religious test for immigration does not mean the imposition of one would be prudent policy. We have Muslim friends and allies who embrace the West; who reject fundamentalist sharia-supremacism, resist Islamists, and help us fight jihadists. It would be costly to adopt a policy that slams our doors on them. Neither, however, can we remain willfully blind to the fact – and it is a fact – that as Muslim populations grow in Western societies, sharia supremacism and the formation of insular communities where jihadism flourishes grow with them…

Promotion of assimilation and fidelity to the Constitution have been historical bedrocks of immigration policy. Indeed, before immigrants are naturalized as citizens, they must swear what is pointedly called an “oath of allegiance.” It calls on them to renounce any foreign sovereigns by whom they have been ruled, and to honor our Constitution ”” principles that are inimical to sharia supremacism. We should resist a categorical ban on Muslim immigration; but nothing in the Constitution prohibits the commonsense vetting of immigrants for beliefs that are antithetical to our principles, regardless of whether the immigrant perceives such beliefs as religious or political in nature. We should welcome immigrants who embrace our principles, seek to assimilate into our society, and are value-added for – rather than a strain on – our economy. But if, in an era of jihadist violence, we cannot seriously vet immigrants to determine whether they fit this bill, it would be better to have a categorical ban. And if, based on an illiterate construction of the Constitution, the political class insists that its fictional “no religious test” rule forbids not only a categorical ban but the heightened scrutiny of Muslim aliens, it would be better to prohibit immigration across the board.

I don’t support an outright religious ban. I do support temporary differential scrutiny based on national origins, as well as a preference for those who are under direct and imminent threat (that would naturally be the Christians in Arab countries). I absolutely support a more long-term approach that features ideological screening for all (which I believe is the ultimate goal of Trump’s temporary EO, although time will tell). And I agree with Andrew McCarthy that—if we wanted to do so—immigrants of a certain religion could be banned under certain circumstances without violating the Constitution. But I don’t think that’s necessary or desirable, nor do I think it is what Trump’s EO is doing or his immigration policy is going.

We’ll see.

So, was it the best catch ever?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or just the best catch in Superbowl history?

The dog gets more excited here than the guy on the left of the screen. My reaction was more like the guy on the right:

Of course, these feats don’t matter so much if the timing isn’t right. This one had the right timing. In fact, I think it was the game’s turning point. And boy, did that game turn! 180 degrees.

In the comments last night, “GRA” asked the following:

Question about the New England Patriots. Do all (really in general) of New England actually support the Patriots as their football team? Say if Boston Red Sox or the Boston Bruins won their respective league would New England be celebrating or just mainly Boston, granted they don’t have the qualifier of “New England”?

My answer was that all of the Boston sports teams belong to New England, not just the Patriots. The Red Sox, the Bruins, the Celtics; everyone in New England roots for them.

There’s one exception, though. Hartford, Connecticut is the great sports dividing line. South of Hartford a lot of people are fans of the New York teams. But north of Hartford, it’s all Patriots, all Red Sox, all Bruins, all Celtics, all the time. Intensely so, rabidly so.

But “Gringo” pointed out that there’s also an east/west divide in Connecticut, with the Connecticut River being the dividing line. I agree that this divide exists, too. And in fact, I don’t think of Connecticut as part of New England at all. I think of it as New York North. And I think of Rhode Island as New York Northeast. To me, New England begins with Massachusetts.

If you look at a New England map you’ll see exactly why this sports divide exists:

Superbowl thread

The New Neo Posted on by

[See postgame UPDATE below.]

I can’t pretend I care all that much.

But the Patriots are playing, so I’m rooting for them. And I’m watching—sort of.

So here’s a thread for those of you who have something to say about this particular institution. There’s always the ads, too. And Lady Gaga—oh, whatever will Lady Gaga do or say?

Another thing I don’t much care about.

UPDATE 11:35 PM

I take it all back. It’s not so much that I suddenly care about football—but that, THAT was a game. Everyone says it was the greatest game in Superbowl history. Since I’m no Superbowl expert I don’t know, but I can easily imagine it. I think it was one of the greatest upsets, greatest performances by greatest number of people, greatest come-from-behind victory, and other superlatives too numerous to mention.

New England’s going crazy with joy.

For me, the turning point of the game was the catch by Julian Edelman. The terrible performance by the Patriots in the first half only made their stunningly great performance in the second half that much sweeter.

Funny comment from Ace’s: The Patriots won fewer quarters, therefore their victory is illegitimate.

Nepenthe

The New Neo Posted on by

Wordsworth wrote: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…”

Now researchers indicate that sleep itself is a forgetting:

In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise.

In the years since, Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli, along with other researchers, have found a great deal of indirect evidence to support the so-called synaptic homeostasis hypothesis…

Luisa de Vivo, an assistant scientist working in their lab, led a painstaking survey of tissue taken from mice, some awake and others asleep. She and her colleagues determined the size and shape of 6,920 synapses in total.

The synapses in the brains of sleeping mice, they found, were 18 percent smaller than in awake ones. “That there’s such a big change over all is surprising,” Dr. Tononi said.

The second study was led by Graham H. Diering, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Diering and his colleagues set out to explore the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis by studying the proteins in mouse brains. “I’m really coming at it from this nuts-and-bolts place,” Dr. Diering said.

In one experiment, Dr. Diering and his colleagues created a tiny window through which they could peer into mouse brains. Then he and his colleagues added a chemical that lit up a surface protein on brain synapses.

Looking through the window, they found that the number of surface proteins dropped during sleep. That decline is what you would expect if the synapses were shrinking.

(A window into mouse brains? Reminds me why I never became a medical researcher.)

Shakespeare described sleep well (he described most things well):

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,–

[NOTE: The title of this post isn’t just a restaurant in Big Sur with an astounding setting, it’s “a medicine for sorrow, literally an anti-depressant ”“ a ‘drug of forgetfulness’ mentioned in ancient Greek literature and Greek mythology, depicted as originating in Egypt.”]

Obama and the Australian deal

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Events move so quickly these days that I often do a whole bunch of research on something, but by the time I write the post the caravan moves on. This is one of those posts. But the issues remain important, even if our attention has shifted to other things.]

I have to say that until Thursday I had paid very little to attention to Australia’s immigration policy. But if you look at some of the history going back several decades, you’ll see that Australia’s struggles with the issues of illegal immigration and refugees highlight the problems faced by so many Western nations in the face of unwanted illegal immigration. Australia is somewhat atypical because it’s an island, but it exhibits the general tendency of a natural clash between a country’s desire to be magnanimous and to offer safe havens for the truly needy and the desire to protect itself from those who are perceived as a threat to overburden its resources and/or change its nature for the worse. There’s also the fear that letting in some people would unleash the floodgates to way too many others by providing an incentive for illegal immigration. And then there’s the difficulty of determining which arrivals really are true asylum seekers fleeing vicious persecution, and which are people one might call “economic refugees” who should be getting in line to be legal immigrants instead.

Which brings us to the deal Obama struck with Australia last November to accept some of the refugees that country holds in island camps administered by neighbor nations such as Papua New Guinea. Thursday the deal suddenly and belatedly became big news, but only because of reports of a supposedly contentious phone call between Trump and the Australian PM. That does not mean that the deal wasn’t reported on when it had first occurred; it was. It just wasn’t one of those viral stories everybody was talking about back then.

So what was the Obama/Australia deal? One of its peculiarities was that it was made after Trump’s election—in fact, right after his election (that’s another reason so many people were distracted at the time; so much attention was focused on the Trump win). One of the earliest articles I could find about the Obama deal was written on November 11, 2016, and was based on an unofficial report:

The refugees are primarily from the Middle East.

Coalition frontbencher Christopher Pyne said there is “plenty of time” to get an agreement in place before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January…

The refugees are currently placed in camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Australia has some of the harshest immigration laws in the world.

The government recently announced plans to put a lifetime ban on everyone trying to enter the country by sea.

So from the start it seems it was rather clear that this deal was made at that time in order to finesse Trump. Otherwise, the timing was just too too too coincidental.

Here’s how CBS reported the Obama deal on November 13, 2016, shortly after it became official:

The United States has agreed to resettle an unspecified number of refugees languishing in Pacific island camps in a deal that is expected to inspire more asylum seekers to attempt to reach Australia by boat, officials said on Sunday.

So, the deal was expected to encourage more refugees to come to Australia by boat, and Australia will refuse to take, them, too. More from the November 13 article:

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull would not say whether he had discussed the deal with President-elect Donald Trump during their telephone conversation on Thursday. The Obama administration had agreed to resettle refugees among almost 1,300 asylum seekers held at Australia’s expense on the island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Another 370 who came to Australia for medical treatment then refused to return to the islands would also be eligible.

“We deal with one administration at a time and there is only one president of the United States at a time,” Turnbull told reporters.

So everyone seems to have known at the time that this was a last-minute way to make a deal with Obama during the waning days of his presidency, and to get around president-elect Trump’s expected objections to the deal.

The refugees seem to have had pretty firm ideas about where they would prefer to go:

Australia pays Nauru and Papua New Guinea to house boat arrivals and has been searching for countries that will resettle them.

Few refugees have accepted offers to resettle in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia because most hope that Australia will eventually take them in.

Any refugee who refuses to go to the U.S. would be given a 20-year visa to stay on Nauru, a tiny impoverished atoll with a population of 10,000 people, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said.

It’s unclear from that article how many would have been allowed to go to Cambodia had they wanted to do so, or how many actually would have accepted Cambodia as a destination if offered. It seems from this article that Cambodian resettlement was planned to begin with only a very limited number of the refugees and then work up to a larger number.

And there’s this about the incentives created by the deal with Obama:

Refugees who arrive in the future would not be sent to the United States, [Turnbull] said.

“We anticipate that people smugglers will seek to use this agreement as a marketing opportunity to tempt vulnerable people onto these perilous sea journeys,” Turnbull said. “We have put in place the largest and most capable maritime surveillance and response fleet Australia has ever deployed.”

Australian Border Force Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg said ships had been positioned to turn boats back to Indonesia if asylum seekers attempt to reach Australia in the hope of being sent to the U.S.

We also learn from this NY Times article on November 12 that the majority of the refugees involved are men, as is often the case: “About 410 men, women and children are held on Nauru, and 823 men are held on Manus Island.” I was also trying to get some idea of where the majority of these people are really from, and I found this at the Guardian (an article from just a few days ago):

A specific breakdown of nationalities among those determinations is unavailable, but according to the Australian parliamentary library, by far the largest group of detainees in Australia’s offshore centres are from Iran ”“ one of the seven listed countries.

In figures from 2014 and 2015, Iranians were the dominant cohort on both Manus and Nauru. On Manus there was also a large portion from Iraq and a number from Somalia, both among the seven “countries of concern”.

Because the Manus group is all male, we can assume that the male contingent of the refugee population is largely from Iran, Iraq, and Somalia. I would imagine that the vast majority really are fleeing trouble in their home countries; after all, all three countries have got plenty of trouble. But there certainly could be terrorists among that group, as well. And it’s a population that definitely needs more ideological vetting than the Obama administration was prepared to give it, because there is an excellent chance that quite a few would be terrorism supporters, sharia advocates, and extremely intolerant of various human rights (for women and gay people, to name just two) that are part of Western society

In my quest to find out more about the refugees themselves—are they mostly economic refugees, for example?—I came across this rather amusing tidbit from the Guardian on November 13, 2016, shortly after the deal was first announced:

The Greens initially dismissed the idea [of Australia’s deal with Obama right after the election], concerned about sending people to “Donald Trump’s America”, and continued its demand that people be brought to Australia and settled here.

Better a refugee camp than “Donald Trump’s America,” apparently—although the Greens later changed their minds and decided that Trump’s America would do. As for other countries:

Many asylum seekers and refugees long ago stopped wanting to come to Australia and had written letters to various world leaders pleading for assistance, including to the US, Canada, New Zealand and the Vatican.

Yes, indeed; what about Trudeau’s Canada, where last week the young PM proclaimed the following?:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a jab at President Donald Trump’s executive order on refugees Saturday, tweeting that Canada will welcome all those fleeing war and terror, regardless of their faith.

“Diversity is our strength,” he wrote, following up by posting photo of himself greeting a young Syrian refugee.

At the time Obama struck his deal with Australia, Trudeau had been Canada’s Prime Minister for a full year. Somehow, in that year, he couldn’t seem to find the time to take in any of the Australian refugees. Or perhaps he couldn’t find the inclination, despite his lofty words.

I’ll close with a quote from Australian Prime Minister Turnbull in a press conference Thursday:

Turnbull reassured reporters that the United States remains a staunch ally.

“I can assure you the relationship is very strong,” he said. “The fact that we received the assurance that we did, the fact that it was confirmed, the very extensive engagement we have with the new administration underlines the closeness of the alliance.”

So, what was this all about, anyway? (That question was rhetorical.)

Why didn’t the Trump administration make it clear whether Iraqis who helped the US would be affected by his immigration EO?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve said before that Trump and his advisors should have ironed out a lot of things and clarified them before releasing his immigration executive order. Sloppiness is wrong on two scores: it leads to bad outcomes for many people, and it opens the administration up to valid criticism. It forces officials to play catch-up, scrambling to correct misperceptions and revising the order as originally written. A little bit of this is to be expected; nobody’s perfect. But there’s been an unacceptable and needless level of it this time.

For example, as I’ve written earlier, why not allow people already in transit on airplanes to arrive under the old rules? Why not make it crystal clear at the outset that it doesn’t affect green card holders? Both would not only have made the order more well-thought-out, but would have deprived Trump’s opponents of countless talking points and illustrations of hardship and outright stupidity. For an example of both hardship and stupidity: why, of why, couldn’t the administration have stated that people who helped the US military in Iraq—and to whom we promised a safe harbor here—were exempted from the ban?

These are not esoteric categories, either. That last one is in the nature of an obvious no-brainer. It doesn’t take nit-picking lawyers to figure out most of the exemptions that needed to be covered and communicated. Trump himself wouldn’t necessarily have been expected to think of these details (although it would have been nice if he had). But what about the teams of advisors and lawyers who ordinarily help with these things?

Initial reports claimed that Trump and his closest advisors didn’t run this by the Office of Legal Counsel at the DOJ. Allahpundit at Hot Air commented:

Dropping an EO of this magnitude on DHS at the last minute, with little notice and little regard for its legality, on the say-so of Bannon and Miller is…not something you’d do if your top priority is rolling out a clear, well-tailored reform to immigration policy. It’s something you’d do if your top priority is making a nationalist splash to show that “Trump means business” or whatever. If he gets sued over it ”” and he will, a lot ”” well, then, that only proves the depth of his commitment to nationalism. Trump’s politics has always been a politics of confrontation. Signing a vague, sloppy order over which the left was sure to go berserk is thus a feature, not a bug, of the new system.

A feature to many of Trump’s most fervent supporters, that is. But not to me. I’ve said I’m going to call them like I see them. I will give praise when I approve of what he does, and criticize him when I don’t. This is one of those latter times. And let me add once again that I am in favor of more rigorous vetting for immigrants, in particular the inclusion of some sort of ideological test, and I think visas should be somewhat more restrictive as well. But do it in a smarter way.

It doesn’t seem as though the situation of those Iraqis who helped us has been cleared up even now. These people would be very unlikely to need extra vetting; they are well known to those Americans who served there and whom they risked their lives to assist. However, one category of these immigrants seems to have been cleared up after initial confusion—those who already hold Special Immigrant Visas:

Department of Homeland Security officials initially did not respond to requests for comment on whether Trump’s executive order represents a blanket ban on Iraqi nationals with Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, who served as interpreters for the U.S. military; on U.S. service members who are citizens of the seven Muslim countries; and on Iraqi pilots and officials who come to the U.S. to train with the U.S. military.

DHS spokeswoman Gillian Christensen later told Foreign Policy that under the order, Iraqi SIV holders are to be treated essentially the same as legal permanent residents, such as green card holders.

But the exemption should not just apply to people holding visas at the moment (although that’s certainly important). It’s about the future, and keeping promises to people in the general category of helpers. And from the following statement, found in the same article as the Christensen quote, it appears that even those who had already been approved for SIVs remain somewhat uncertain of their status:

Fred Wellman, a retired Army officer who served for 22 years, including four combat tours, said the executive order blocking those who served with the U.S. military is “very personal to me.” One interpreter he worked with is struggling to get by in Erbil, Iraq, while another, who was approved for an SIV, was due to come to the United States this spring but is now in limbo.

“My first interpreter was murdered by Al Qaeda and we were able to get his family here very quietly in 2005,” Wellman told Foreign Policy Monday. “Now we have thousands stuck, and it will make it incredibly difficult to get local help now and in the future if we don’t keep our promises to those who risked their lives and now pay a price for it at home.”

This is a rare issue on which Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree. I can see no excuse for any delay on the matter. Prior to January 30, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mattis requested that the administration act on this, and a bipartisan letter from some members of Congress was sent as well:

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers have sent a letter urging President Donald Trump to honor a request by Secretary of Defense James Mattis to exempt Iraqis who served as “interpreters, aides and other allies who risked their lives alongside U.S. personnel in Iraq” from the recent national security executive order.

As far as I can see, members of Congress are still making the same request. Another letter has been sent, the content of which was announced yesterday. This one was signed by 15 Republicans and one Democrat.

One of Trump’s big selling points was his supposed devotion to the military. I doubt that most military people, particularly those who served in Iraq, would be in favor of this sort of unexplained foot-dragging. This was the time for Trump to have shown people that he could be tough and firm in protecting the American people and yet careful to also protect others to whom we promised protection, and clear about the intent of the EO towards all relevant classes of person it might have affected. He failed (rather dramatically) to do so, and the consequences have been to give the left a great deal of ammunition—not to mention sowing alarm and fear among people who don’t even fall under the rubric of the EO but have are needlessly panicked because of all the confusion.

Immigration was one of the main centerpieces of Trump’s platform. He began his presidency run about a year and a half ago. He’s got a lot on his plate, but the substance of the EO should have been well-chewed and digested before the announcement occurred.

[NOTE: There’s also the fallout from the temporary halt issued by a judge:

President Donald Trump’s government moved swiftly Saturday to comply with a federal judge’s order halting his immigration ban — even as Trump denounced the judge.

The Department of Homeland Security announced it has suspended all actions to implement the immigration order and will resume standard inspections of travelers as it did prior to the signing of the travel ban.

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has quite a bit to say on the matter of two court rulings on this; I recommend reading the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:

How can we have such different decisions out of two separate federal courts [in Seattle and one in Massachusetts that reached the opposite conclusion]? It’s because the people seeking to overturn the Executive Order only need to win once, the government needs to win in every district court. That is why an appellate court needs to weigh in on this.

The Seattle TRO is outrageous. As of this writing, there is no indication in the 9th Circuit electronic PACER docket that an application for relief has been filed by the government.

Hopefully the government will be in front of the 9th Circuit quickly to obtain a stay of the TRO, and if that fails, the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to the merits, there are serious issues of whether a state has “standing” to challenge the refusal of the federal government to allow entry into the U.S. of foreigners who themselves have no legitimate claims as to visa denials.

The issue is not whether the Executive Order is wise, it’s over who gets to make the decision on what constitutes necessary security procedures with regard to foreigners wanting to enter the U.S. That decision in the past always has been reserved to the executive branch.

I hope that the administration expected these court challenges. If not, they were incredibly naive. Again, this back-and-forth oscillation gives the impression—and probably rightly so—of a chaotic rollout (remember that phrase from Obamacare?), and of amateur hour.

I know people on the left who believe that the chaos was intentional, and the goal was to discourage travel and immigration to the US. I don’t happen to agree, but I admit that it’s a real possibility. And I’ll add my old mantra: we’ll see.]

Caroline Glick on Donald Trump and the Middle East

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Caroline Glick on Trump and the Middle East:

The PLO is disoriented, panicked and hysterical. Speaking to Newsweek this week, Saeb Erekat, PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s chief conduit to Israel and the Americans, complained that since President Donald Trump was sworn into office, no administration official had spoken to them…

Erekat’s statement reveals something that is generally obscured. Despite its deep support in Europe, the UN and the international Left, without US support, the PLO is irrelevant.

All the achievements the PLO racked up under Obama ”“ topped off with the former president’s facilitation of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 against Israel ”“ are suddenly irrelevant. Their impact dissipated the minute Trump took office.

Israel, in contrast, is more relevant than ever.

While Trump occasionally pays lip service to making peace in the Middle East, his real goal is to win the war against jihadist Islam. And he rightly views Israel as a woefully underutilized strategic ally that shares his goal and is well-placed to help him achieve it.

During the electoral campaign, Trump often spoke derisively of Obama’s nuclear pact with Tehran. And he repeatedly promised to eradicate Islamic State. But when asked to explain what he intended to do on these scores, Trump demurred. You don’t expect me to let the enemy know my plan, do you?

Trump’s critics dismissed his statements as empty talk. But since he came into office, each day signals that he does have a plan and that he is implementing it. The plan coming into focus involves a multidimensional campaign that if successful will both neutralize Iran as a strategic threat and obliterate ISIS.

Glick’s article is worth reading in full. I have no idea whether she’s correct, but Glick is always interesting.

[NOTE: And here’s a discussion of Trump’s recent statements on settlements, and how it was twisted by the MSM.]

Milo Yiannopoulos, Berkeley, free speech, riots, and Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Riots in Berkeley, California resulted in the university’s decision to cancel a scheduled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, and the incident has been characterized as a blow against freedom of speech and/or First Amendment rights. In a very technical sense it wasn’t, because the First Amendment isn’t really involved here [emphasis mine]:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In other words, “freedom of speech” does not guarantee a person the right to address a group as official speaker in a particular venue such as Berkeley. But Berkeley itself has a commitment to what we might instead call free speech—the presentation of speakers with a diversity of viewpoints, even controversial ones. But it is a mark of where universities are these days, ideologically speaking, that allowing someone with the viewpoints of Yiannopoulos to speak on the campus as an official speaker (he was invited there by the Berkeley College Republicans, a student group) represents a show of (relative) courage by the administration.

What happened next was the problem:

The event began as a peaceful protest. Some students reported on Facebook that things turned violent when masked individuals not affiliated with the school turned up, though the details of what happened are still unverified. Images on Twitter depicted violent protests with damage to local business.

So apparently there was some sort of peaceful protest by students, who were exercising their free speech rights to protest. There’s an inherent and ironic paradox there, of course, because they (at least, to the best of my knowledge) were advocating the banning of Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, not just protesting his policies or the content of his speech. In this manner, they were in line with recent trends displayed by students on many campuses all around the country to attempt shut down or ban speech they don’t like rather than merely argue with it on the merits. But at least they were doing this in a peaceful way initially, and the Berkeley administration seems to have intended to let Yiannopoulos speak.

Enter the “outside agitators.” They were certainly “agitators”; it’s not clear if they all were really “outside” or whether many were Berkeley students. Clearly, however, they meant to cause exactly the result that ensued: the cancellation of the Yiannopoulos talk at the university. Whether they were mainly leftists, anarchists, or some combination of the two, if one is inclined to throw around epithets such as “Nazis,” the “outside agitators” were the ones who fit the term the best of all the players in this incident.

Who was most at fault? The police (or rather, whoever gave them their orders), for not controlling the riot and violence with greater force and more arrests? To me, that is the answer. Why should law-breaking thugs get their way? I’m not the only one asking that question:

Police officers came prepared in riot gear and about 100 outside agitators aimed at causing chaos came armed with sticks and rocks. Some set off fireworks in the middle of Sproul Plaza. Others threw objects at UC police.

And as the violence escalated, officers pulled back.

Susan Walsh was stuck on the second floor of UC Berkeley’s student union building where she was waiting to hear Yiannopolous speak when protests outside turned violent.

“It was a riot. It felt like a war zone,” said Walsh. “Absolutely felt like a war zone.”

Police gathered on the balcony demanding that the crowd disperse, but made no moves against the protesters.

“They were equipped to shoot rubber bullets or what have you, and they really didn’t do anything. And, I thought, ”˜We are sitting ducks,’” said Walsh.

When asked why police didn’t move in and stop the rioters, UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof replied, “Police tactics are driven on a campus by need, the non-negotiable need to protect our students and ensure their well being.”

University officials said police decided to stay back to prevent injuring innocent protesters and bystanders who could have been hurt if officers waded into the crowd.

And what about who could have gotten hurt if they didn’t wade into the crowd? What about the danger of letting rioters have their way? What sort of message of weakness and chaos does that deliver?

Despite the destruction and violence, there was only one arrest by university police. City of Berkeley police, who monitored the demonstration once it left the university, said they made no arrests.

University police said that some members of the crowd were attacked by protesters and then rescued by police. UC police said there were six reports of minor injuries.

Berkeley police said once the protest moved into city streets, rioters vandalized 15 buildings. Again, police did not move to take the vandals into custody.

The article does not make it clear whether most of the policing was done by university or by city police, and who set the policy. Is this sort of thing standard operating procedure for policing riots in Berkeley? That wouldn’t be surprising, considering the politics of the city.

And then there was the reaction of President Trump, who tweeted:

If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

Well, Trump did write “if.” But U.C. Berkeley doesn’t seem to have done that. A few Berkeley students may have; we don’t even know whether students were involved in the violence (we would have known more if the police had made more arrests, but they didn’t). The university administration was planning to allow “free speech”. The talk by Yiannopolis was scheduled to go forward until safety issues arose, and that’s when the prospective speaker was ushered out of there—for his own safety and for the safety of students, not because the university wasn’t giving him a platform. Nor did the university “practice violence on innocent people with a different point of view.” So Trump’s threat is most likely mere theater, but if he really did cut off Berkeley’s funds for this particular incident (I don’t think he will) he would be abusing his power.

However, there is also no question that Berkeley (university and town) has one of the most extreme and unrelievedly leftist atmospheres of any college campus, and that’s saying something. University leftists these days are often advocates of shutting down speakers with whom they disagree, particularly speakers on the right. This is one of the many ways in which discourse in this country has degenerated in recent years.

The police let these riots get out of control, but the Berkeley administration wasn’t exactly a profile in courage, either. I don’t have enough information to say whether or not they really needed to cancel the talk or whether they caved prematurely. But I do know that their capitulation was in line with a process that’s been going on at universities for at least fifty years, and which Allan Bloom discussed in his book The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987.

I’ve written a great many posts on the subject of the universities’ cowardly responses to pressures of the mob (and about its devotion to PC thought), but I’ll just highlight this post right now, which I hope you’ll read. Again, what happened at Berkeley regarding Yiannopoulos was not the same, but it sends a similar message of university weakness and lack to resolve, a message received by thugs who would dearly love—and who definitely intend—to exploit those weaknesses to their own advantage.

Here’s a quote from my older post:

…Bloom describes the moral collapse of the faculty and administration of so many universities during the 60s, their abject and craven failure to defend their own principles, and their eager willingness to cave to threats and intimidation.

The Cornell incident that Bloom describes in the book was quite different in its details than what happened at Berkeley; it involved the administration’s capitulation to students’ threats of violence. But both incidents and others show that university administrators have become unable to defend their own supposed principles against the pressures of the mob.

A real feel-good story

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a great, great story:

When Roseann Sdoia was laid up with an amputated leg in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, love was the last thing on her mind.

But her mother, ever the matchmaker, saw a perfect opportunity as handsome firefighter Mike Materia hovered nearby.

“In the hospital, my mom tried to set me up with him,” Sdoia said.

“She was like, ”˜Oh, did you see that firefighter? He’s so cute.’ And I was like, ”˜Mom, I just got blown up.’”‰”

But Mom’s persistence paid off. The victim and her hero struck up a romance that will soon lead to marriage.

More background can be found here.

The French race

The New Neo Posted on by

The elections in France are described as a “roller-coaster”:

An already unpredictable contest has taken a new turn with mounting accusations that conservative candidate Francois Fillon had used public funds available to MPs to pay his wife and children hundreds of thousands of euros for “fake jobs”…

The main beneficiary of Fillon’s woes is centrist Emmanuel Macron, the photogenic 39-year-old former investment banker who served as economy minister in Hollande’s cabinet — and irritated some colleagues with his raw ambition.

Macron is rising fast, but his programme remains short on detail.

It is early days, but the survey published Wednesday, of 1,053 people by the Elabe group, showed Macron would reach the second round and face Le Pen in a runoff.

Le Pen, however, is the main reason that Europe is holding its breath ahead of May’s presidential result…

She senses her chance to seize power, riding a wave of suspicion of mainstream politics.

Le Pen wants to pull France out of the EU — a potentially mortal blow for the ailing bloc — and her proposals to give French nationals priority over housing, for example, still raise hackles for many.

France may have its own version of Brexit—Frexit? Whatever it’s called, I would imagine that people in France who oppose Le Pen are shaking in their boots, after what happened in Britain and the US.

Writing about the Trump administration

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not quite two weeks into the Trump administration and already I’m weary of a repetitive pattern: Trump says or does A, the MSM and the opposition responds B, and those of us who purport to write about these things have to scramble to quickly sort out the truth.

It’s tedious and time-consuming (witness today’s effort), and it’s beginning to get quite repetitive (but I repeat myself).

And it’s early yet.

I think the exercise has value, because I believe there’s a great deal of importance in attempting to get at the truth as best as humanly possible under the circumstances. But I don’t think I’ll be dealing with the Trump-was-awful story du jour every day for the next four years, or even for the next year. After a while it becomes not only repetitive (there I go again), but it reaches a point of diminishing returns. We get the picture; we get the pattern.

Blogging is sometimes like that. After all these years, what more do I have to say? So far, plenty.

[NOTE: Here’s a good piece by Piers Morgan (with a few caveats, such as a paragraph railing against Bush II):

…[T]he further away you get from the hysterical liberal elite conclaves of places like New York, Los Angeles and London, the more calmer common sense prevails.

Those people see a travel ban portrayed as a ”˜racist Muslim ban’, then work out for themselves that 85% of the world’s Muslims aren’t actually banned, and shrug their shoulders…

To date, Donald Trump’s most monstrous act is to enforce a campaign pledge to suspend travel for people from seven very dangerous countries until a new, stricter VISA system can be established.

I don’t personally agree with the way he’s gone about it, and I’m glad to see he’s already reined back on banning any green card holders, but I absolutely respect his right to do it given that is what he promised to do.

This is how democracy works. You listen to election campaign arguments, you vote, and the winner gets to do what he or she said they would do if it’s within the law.

Amid all the furore over the travel ban, Trump has also unleashed a blizzard of other executive orders and statements that deserve bigger headlines.

Yesterday, he said he was supporting an Obama EO protecting LGBTQ rights in the workplace…

Nobody’s talking about this today because it doesn’t suit the ”˜MONSTER!’ label…

In some respects, though, I accept that Trump IS a monster.

America has never seen someone like him bulldoze his way like this into the White House through sheer monstrous force of personality.

He’s done it with an undeniably monstrous ego, monstrous determination, monstrous chutzpah and monstrous doses of political incorrectness.

Now he’s applying the same tough, uncompromising strategy to his presidency.]