Month: March 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin is carrying out a brutal invasion of Ukraine, and the international community has largely united to punish him for it. In addition to the sanctions on Moscow and the military aid to Kyiv that the United States has already approved, some American politicians are suggesting more pointed measures.

“Frankly, I think…kicking every Russian student out of the United States,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.) on CNN last week, should “be on the table.” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.) backed him up, tweeting, “These Russian students are the sons and daughters of the richest Russians. A strong message can be sent by sending them home.”

This is a misguided proposal that will drive a wedge between the U.S. and people who would be well-served by American values. Rather than expelling Russian nationals who are uninvolved in the sins of their government, we should be welcoming them with open arms and encouraging them to engage with our values.

Some 5,000 Russian students were studying at American universities in 2021, according to the Institute of International Education. Demand among young Russians to study abroad has grown steadily over the past several decades. In 2019, roughly 75,000 Russians were attending foreign universities, at least four times higher than the early 2000s level. As of 2015, the U.S. ranked only behind Germany as the top destination for Russian students completing their educations abroad.

Even during the days of the Soviet Union, the U.S. recognized the importance of maintaining cultural exposure. America welcomed “some fifty thousand…scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists,” and others from the Soviet Union under exchange programs between 1958 and 1988, per former U.S. diplomat Yale Richmond. Cold War–era exchange programs “fostered changes that prepared the way for [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War,” Richmond argued. President Dwight D. Eisenhower even “wanted to bring 10,000 Soviet students to the United States” at one point, according to Richmond.

It’s true that Russians from influential and wealthy families seek out an American education. But to claim that each of the 5,000 Russian students here is rich—and that sending them all home would hit Putin where it hurts—is simply incorrect. And if massive, debilitating sanctions meant to cut Russia off from the global economy haven’t yet convinced Putin to stop his assault on Ukraine, it’s hard to see how expelling Russian students would. “The more likely outcome,” Stuart Anderson of Forbes writes, “would seem to be ruined education plans and sympathetic coverage in Russian state media of young people, it would be argued, who were unfairly targeted by the U.S. government.”

Anderson points out, correctly, that a blanket expulsion policy would harm some Russian students fleeing persecution themselves. A stark example: the daughter of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who was poisoned, dubbed a terrorist, and imprisoned after becoming the face of the opposition. His daughter Daria is a student at Stanford University and would be caught in the dragnet of the punitive, ill-targeted policy Swalwell and Gallego have proposed. There is no earthly way that her expulsion would harm the regime intent on punishing her father.

Swalwell has softened his posture to a degree, calling more specifically for the expulsion of “oligarchs’ kids with student visas.” Still, the U.S. should be welcoming Russian students with open arms and allowing them to stay on American soil if they wish to do so. Russia is already in severe population decline, having lost 1 million people in 2021. Offering refuge to Russian nationals who wish to live away from the repressive regime is a prime way for the U.S. to bolster its own economy while depriving Putin of the brainpower that fuels Russia’s industries. Not every student will stay, and some may be connected to Russia’s oligarch class, but they should not be kept from an American education and the values it might instill.

U.S. history is replete with examples of the ill effects that result from punishing, expelling, or detaining people purely based on their ethnicities or governments. Beyond an American education, Swalwell and Gallego’s proposal would deprive Russian students of the opportunity to engage with American ideals and culture—and the opportunity to experience more openness and democracy than they may ever encounter under Putin.

The post Don't Kick Russian Students Out of the U.S. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Tonight in his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden is planning to discuss the skyrocketing prices of transporting goods to the U.S. across the ocean via shipping and what his administration is going to do about it.

Here’s how the White House has framed it in a memo sent out to the press this morning:

The President will explain that most traded goods—everything from the housewares you buy online to the agricultural products that American farmers market overseas—are transported by oceangoing vessels. However, the ocean shipping industry is now dominated by just a small number of giant, foreign-owned companies. Three global alliances—groups of ocean carriers that work together—now control 80% of global container ship capacity and 95% on the critical East-West trade lines. And, since the beginning of the pandemic, these carriers have been increasing shipping costs through higher rates and fees. The President will note that the foreign carriers are now seeing record profits, while prices for American consumers and businesses have risen.

Subsequently, the White House posted a much longer memo announcing that they’re getting the Department of Justice involved in antitrust enforcement actions with the intent of “lowering prices, improving quality of service, and strengthening the resilience of supply chains.”

While these memos are quick to point out how much money these shipping companies have been making off this crisis and to deem it unfair (during the pandemic, these shipping companies’ operating margins have jumped from 3.7 percent to 56 percent), the memos flat out refuse to consider how the federal government’s own protectionist laws have created a shipping marketplace that’s far from competitive.

Nowhere in these memos do the words Jones Act appear. The Jones Act, more formally known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, places extremely strict, deliberately protectionist rules in place that can help explain why shipping prices are high.

The Jones Act requires that goods traveling between U.S. ports be carried by ships constructed in the U.S. and owned and operated by U.S. companies and workers. The ostensible purpose of this old law was to give U.S. maritime companies a domestic advantage over foreign competitors. In reality, the law has backfired magnificently. The domestic shipbuilding industry has collapsed because it’s just cheaper to build ships in other countries, giving a handful of companies complete market dominance. This means that most new ships are not compliant with the Jones Act, and attempting to break into the domestic market is oppressively expensive. Only 2 percent of the United States’ own domestic freight is transported by sea due to this law.

It also means it’s incredibly costly to import goods to isolated parts of the U.S. like Hawaii, Alaska, and territories like Puerto Rico. Ships compliant with the Jones Act cost three times more to build and up to five times more to operate than foreign counterparts. These calculations, Cato Institute Policy Analyst Colin Grabow notes, originate from our own federal government’s analyses.

The Jones Act has essentially created the exact same noncompetitive domestic environment that the Biden administration is blaming on foreign companies. In response to the administration’s complaints, Grabow observes that just two domestic carriers are responsible for almost all Jones Act–compliant ocean shipping to Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam. And consumers there have to pay through the nose for goods.

Essentially, we’re all Alaskans these days. The skyrocketing prices we’re paying for foreign shipping to the continental U.S. are actually, comically, a twisted reflection of what certain parts of the country have faced for years thanks to the Jones Act.

Grabow tells Reason that the jump in overseas shipping prices during the pandemic is, in fact, a likely result of the various logistical challenges that happened when everything shut down, and it’s not simply greed.

“[It] seems to me the far more likely scenario is that a spike in demand combined with port delays (thus reducing the supply of ships) drove prices up,” Grabow tells Reason. “Pretty straightforward supply-demand stuff.”

It’s remarkable that the administration is discussing using antitrust tools to go after foreign shipping companies and finding ways to lower the prices of shipping goods across the ocean when Biden repeatedly declares his support for the Jones Act, which has driven up shipping prices and fueled noncompetitive behavior and gouging here within the U.S.

The White House memo (and presumably whatever Biden plans to say tonight about shipping costs) is an attempt to deflect away criticism over inflation and the massive and expensive inefficiencies in our ports that left cargo ships floating in the Pacific. Solving these issues would involve Biden having to actually address how the union resistance to the modernization and automation of our ports has gotten us to this point. He’s not going to do that.

“That the Biden administration accuses foreign shipping companies of excessive rates and market concentration while supporting the Jones Act’s severe limits on domestic shipping competition and resulting high rates is the height of hypocrisy,” Grabow says. “Any serious effort to promote efficient ocean shipping should start with repeal of this outdated law.”

The post Biden Administration Deflects Blame on America's Self-Inflicted Ocean Shipping Problems appeared first on Reason.com.

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From U.S. Navy Seals 1-26 v. Biden, decided yesterday by the Fifth Circuit (by Judges Edith Jones, Kyle Duncan, and Kurt Engelhardt):

The district court preliminarily enjoined the Department of Defense … from enforcing certain COVID-19 vaccination requirements against 35 Navy special warfare personnel and prohibited any adverse actions based on their religious accommodation requests. It later declined to stay the injunction. Defendants now seek a partial stay pending appeal insofar as the injunction precludes them from considering Plaintiffs’ vaccination statuses “in making deployment, assignment and other operational decisions.” The Navy has granted hundreds of medical exemptions from vaccination requirements, allowing those service members to seek medical waivers and become deployable. But it has not accommodated any religious objection to any vaccine in seven years, preventing those seeking such accommodations from even being considered for medical waivers. We DENY Defendants’ motion….

As the Supreme Court has noted, RFRA affords even “greater protection for religious exercise than is available under the First Amendment[]” and provides that the:

Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

“[T]he ‘exercise of religion’ often involves not only belief and profession but the performance of (or abstention from) physical acts[.]” And “a government action or regulation creates a ‘substantial burden’ on a religious exercise if it truly pressures the adherent to significantly modify his religious behavior and significantly violates his religious beliefs.” Once a plaintiff demonstrates a substantial burden on his exercise of religion, “RFRA requires the Government to demonstrate that the compelling interest test is satisfied through application of the challenged law ‘to the person’—the particular claimant whose sincere exercise of religion is being substantially burdened.” This already high bar is raised even higher “[w]here a regulation already provides an exception from the law for a particular group[.]”

The Navy does not even dispute that its COVID-19 vaccination requirements substantially burden each Plaintiff’s free exercise of religion, but the nature of the injury bears emphasis. Plaintiffs have thoughtfully articulated their sincere religious objections to taking the vaccine itself. Accepting the vaccine would directly burden their respective faiths by forcing them to inject an unremovable substance at odds with their most profound convictions. This injury would outlast their military service, making the decision whether to acquiesce far more difficult than just choosing between “their job(s) and their jab(s).” The vaccine requirements principally compete against their faiths and secondarily against their livelihoods. These circumstances impose a substantial burden on Plaintiffs.

In an attempt to subordinate Plaintiffs’ protected interest, the Navy focuses instead on its institutional interests. Defendants’ position is that:

The Navy has an extraordinarily compelling interest in requiring that service members generally—and these plaintiffs in particular—be vaccinated against COVID-19, both (1) to reduce the risk that they become seriously ill and jeopardize the success of critical missions and (2) to protect the health of their fellow service members.

The Navy has been extraordinarily successful in vaccinating service members, as at least 99.4% of whom are vaccinated. {As the district court explained in denying Defendants’ stay motion, statistically speaking, “vaccinated servicemembers are far more likely to encounter other unvaccinated individuals off-base among the general public than among their ranks.”} But that general interest is nevertheless insufficient under RFRA. The Navy must instead “scrutinize[] the asserted harm of granting specific exemptions to particular religious claimants.” “The question, then, is not whether [the Navy has] a compelling interest in enforcing its [vaccination] policies generally, but whether it has such an interest in denying an exception to [each Plaintiff].” And RFRA “demands much more[]” than deferring to “officials’ mere say-so that they could not accommodate [a plaintiff’s religious accommodation] request.” That is because “only the gravest abuses, endangering paramount interests, give occasion for permissible limitation[]” on the free exercise of religion.

Defendants have not demonstrated “paramount interests” that justify vaccinating these 35 Plaintiffs against COVID-19 in violation of their religious beliefs. They insist that “given the small units and remote locations in which special-operations forces typically operate, military commanders have determined that unvaccinated service members are at significantly higher risk of becoming severely ill from COVID-19 and are therefore medically unqualified to deploy.” But “[r]outine [Naval Special Warfare] mission risks include everything from gunshot wounds, blast injuries, parachute accidents, dive injuries, aircraft emergencies, and vehicle rollovers to animal bites, swimming or diving in polluted waters, and breathing toxic chemical fumes.” There is no evidence that the Navy has evacuated anyone from such missions due to COVID-19 since it instituted the vaccine mandate, but Plaintiffs engage in life-threatening actions that may create risks of equal or greater magnitude than the virus.

More specifically, multiple Plaintiffs successfully deployed overseas before and after the vaccine became available, and one even received a Joint Service Commendation Medal for “safely navigating restricted movement and distancing requirements” while deployed in South Korea between January and June 2020. {During this deployment, [Plaintiff] Navy EOD Technician 1 completed 76 joint service engagements with 21 U.S. and Korean partner forces, all while maintaining effective COVID-19 mitigation tactics in compliance with CDC guidelines.} Plaintiffs also trained other SEALs preparing for deployments at various points during the pandemic while remaining unvaccinated.

The Navy’s alleged compelling interest is further undermined by other salient facts. It has granted temporary medical exemptions to 17 Special Warfare members, yet no reason is given for differentiating those service members from Plaintiffs. That renders the vaccine requirements “underinclusive.” And “underinclusiveness … is often regarded as a telltale sign that the government’s interest in enacting a liberty-restraining pronouncement is not in fact ‘compelling.'” See also Holt v. Hobbs (2015) (a policy was substantially underinclusive where a prison “denied petitioner’s request to grow a ½-inch beard [for religious reasons] [while permitting] prisoners with a dermatological condition to grow ¼-inch beards.”). Moreover, in none of the letters denying religious accommodations to these Plaintiffs has the Navy articulated Plaintiff-specific reasons for its decisions. {On the contrary, some of the remarks uttered by superior officers to Plaintiffs could be regarded as outright hostile to their desire for religious accommodations.} Further evidencing that there is a pattern of disregard for RFRA rights rather than individualized consideration of Plaintiffs’ requests, the Navy admits it has not granted a single religious accommodation. Yet surely, had the Navy been conscientiously adhering to RFRA, it could have adopted least restrictive means to accommodate religious objections against forced vaccinations, for instance, to benefit personnel working from desks, warehouses, or remote locations.

Considering the record as a whole, we agree with the district court that Defendants have not shown a compelling interest to deny religious accommodations to each of these 35 Plaintiffs. Indeed, the “marginal interest” in vaccinating each Plaintiff appears to be negligible; consequently, Defendants lack a sufficiently compelling interest to vaccinate Plaintiffs….

The post Fifth Circuit Refuses to Let Navy Enforce Vaccination Rules Against Religious Objectors appeared first on Reason.com.

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