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Since he first announced that he was running for president, Donald Trump has argued that immigration is bad for American workers and businesses. Yet some of his toughest critics are small businessmen who voted for him but rely on guest workers.

Consider Eddie Devine, a Trump voter who runs a landscaping business in central Kentucky. In a recent story for the Lexington Herald-Leader, he says that it’s been years since he could find American workers willing to cut grass for $12 an hour and that he relies on low-skilled seasonal employees who enter the country legally under H2-B visas. That costs him an extra $18,000 a year, but that’s the cost of doing business. Now, though, his business is now on the chopping block:

Restrictions on guest-worker visas, which began during President Barack Obama’s second term as immigration became a hot issue for conservatives, have gotten worse under Trump. And it’s even more of a problem now that the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in years.

Devine says he lost a $100,000 account because he didn’t have enough men to do the job. He’s worried he may be out of business next year if things don’t improve.

Then there’s Ken Morin, who builds decks, garages, and room additions:

“Last year we about went bankrupt. The workers we were supposed to get in March didn’t show up until August because they couldn’t get visas.”

Monin applied for eight H-2B workers this year, but he isn’t optimistic he will get any. Employers seeking H-2B workers must prove they have advertised and tried unsuccessfully to hire local workers.

“Americans don’t want most of these jobs,” said Monin, who pays his workers about $17 an hour. “I’ve been in this business 20 years. It’s hard, hot work.”

The H-2 system has been in place since the early 1950s, with H-2A visas covering agricultural workers and H-2B visas covering non-ag workers. There are 66,000 visas allotted annually for the H-2B program and the government has received over 150,000 applications from potential employers. Without changing the law, the government could expand the number of annual H-2B visas to 130,000, but there’s no reason to expect that will happen. Businessmen like Devine and Morin are screwed if they can’t get visas for workers. They either have to make do with far fewer workers or raise their pay (and thus the price customers pay) to unsustainable levels. As a businessman himself, Trump knows this struggle—he’s used nearly 150 H-2B workers at his various businesses since 2016.

The Trump administration is also screwing over businesses that use highly educated or specialized “workers in short supply” who are covered by H-1B visas. As Stuart Anderson writes at Forbes, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a memo earlier this year that makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for companies to hire foreign professionals. That’s because the USCIS and the Department of Labor each have jurisdiction over the process and now have diametrically opposed definitions of what information a prospective employer needs to provide

A new lawsuit filed by a group representing small- and medium-sized business owners hopes to change that. The government gives out 65,000 H-1B visas a year, a total that was reached in early April. Unlike businesses that do agriculture, landscaping, and construction, many firms employing H-1B visa workers will likely outsource work to foreign countries when possible.

Other analysts find that Trump’s increasingly strident crackdowns on immigration—including the deportation of parents of “Dreamers” brought here illegally as children, and the tighter limits on immigrants here legally under “temporary protected status” laws—are squeezing low-margin, labor-intensive providers of assistance to elderly and disabled people.

Eddie Devine, the Kentucky landscaper, says “I feel like I’ve been tricked by the devil” and “I feel so stupid” for having voted for Trump. You don’t need to share those exact sentiments to appreciate how restrictive immigration policy, based on easy demarcations between Americans and foreign workers, really screws up domestic labor markets, punishing U.S. business owners and customers alike.

On Friday, I had the privilege of testifying at a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights briefing about whether the government needs to do more to prevent hate crimes. It was an informative, entertaining, and at times combative event, given that two of the eight commissioners—Gail Heriot (a Volokh Conspiracy contributor) and Peter Kirsanow—seemed to agree with me that the 2009 federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act was ill-advised.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is charged with investigating and compiling reports on various civil rights issues; it relies on 51 state-based advisory committees to make recommendations. (In addition to testifying at this briefing, I am a member of the D.C. advisory committee.) The commission’s current chair is Catherine Lhamon, whose Obama-era stint as an assistant secretary at the Education Department I have criticized for undermining due process on campus. (I should note that despite our disagreements, Lhamon has been incredibly friendly to me in person.)

The event—”In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in Responding to Hate Crimes“—began with Lhamon’s introductory remarks. Then she yielded the floor to Heriot, who took a few minutes to explain why she was dissenting from the day’s proceedings.

“Let me say that I am not really a fan of most hate crime laws, which I believe have a tendency to fuel identity politics at a time when the nation needs to come together,” said Heriot. “In particular I oppose the federal hate crime statute passed in 2009.”

The 2009 law added gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability status to the list of protected classes, and it established that a person no longer needed to be involved in a federally relevant activity (like voting) in order to be deemed a victim of a federal hate crime. This was a vast expansion of the federal government’s ability to prosecute people for hate crimes, and it poses significant “double jeopardy” concerns, because it gives federal officials the opportunity to re-try defendants who survived state-based prosecutions.

“The [double jeopardy] clause does not apply when both the state and the federal government seek to prosecute the same defendant,” Heriot explained.

After Heriot voiced her objections, the first panel began. The participants were several members of local law enforcement departments from around the country, an assistant attorney general, and me. In my remarks, I urged public officials and the media to avoid blurring the distinction between hate crime­—leveling additional penalties against people whose criminal actions impugned a special class—and hate speech, which is protected expression under the First Amendment. I also stressed that while we hear many pundits asserting that hate crimes are on the rise, this fact is not clearly supported by the available data. The hate crime rate has remained essentially unchanged over the last decade; moreover, the purported “Trump effect” in American schools is difficult to parse and possibly overstated. (Consider, for instance, the number of unsolved or outright hoax bias incidents on college campuses.) As I said in my remarks:

I do not suppose that a large percentage of hate crimes are hoaxes, but since perpetrators on campuses are seldom apprehended, it’s difficult to know what proportion of the incidents were exactly what they seemed to be. That makes life difficult for the authorities who are trying to compile and publicize relevant, accurate information.

In conclusion, I would urge policymakers, law enforcement, and other authorities to resist media pressure to characterize the current atmosphere in the U.S. as one of increasing hatefulness. While the government can and should continue to track and prosecute criminal activity, we must remember that our cherished First Amendment freedoms are often the first casualty of government-led efforts to crack down on undesirable behavior. There are vastly fewer protections for free expression in other countries, and we see the costs of that every time. Scotland, for instance, recently arrested and fined YouTube comedian Mark Meechan for committing a hate crime. What was this crime? The man made a joke video of his girlfriend’s dog performing a Nazi salute. He concludes the video by noting, “I’m not a racist, by the way.” He just really wanted to tick off his girlfriend.

And in Liverpool, a young woman named Chelsea Russell was reported to a hate crime unit for posting the lyrics to a rap song by the musical artist Snap Dogg on her Instagram page. She was doing this in tribute to a young man who had been struck and killed by a car and had enjoyed the song. The authorities never charged anyone in connection with the young man’s death, but they did arrest Russell. She was convicted at trial. The judge said, “There is no place in civil society for language like that.” She will have to wear an ankle monitor for eight weeks.

These hate crime arrests in the U.K. underscore the need for officials in our own country to remain cognizant of the line between hate speech and hate crime, and to avoid fatalism and pessimism when considering whether the reach of hate is growing.

While the other panelists seemed more enthusiastic about involving federal authorities in hate crimes prevention, they provided ample reason to doubt everything we think we know about the prevalence of hate crimes. Several panelists conceded that 88 percent of the police departments that bothered to submit hate crime information to the feds in 2016 reported zero hate crimes. Four municipalities that include more than 250,000 people apiece didn’t report any information whatsoever. Baltimore County—population: 831,000—reported just one hate crime.

Assuming that there was probably more than one hate crime in Baltimore County last year, this suggests there’s massive room for improvement when it comes to local hate crime reporting—and that better reporting might very well make it look like hate crimes are spiking. For instance, if the same county reported five hate crimes next year, it would seem like hate crimes had increased by 500 percent.

Some of the panelists conceded that they are often dealing with very low numbers, and with degrees of subjectivity. Chief Marc Green of the Seattle Police Department said that both “non-criminal bias incidents” and “crimes with bias elements” had risen substantially in the past year, but under questioning from Heriot he eventually admitted that non-bias crimes had risen as well.

There’s an important distinction, of course, between “non-criminal bias incidents” and “crimes with bias elements,” in that the former category includes things that are not actually crimes, though the authorities may track them anyway. And though the briefing was ostensibly aimed at combatting hate crimes, some latter participants did indeed discuss the work their organizations were doing to track and counter hate-filled speech—which is fine if you’re an advocacy group, but constitutionally suspect if you’re the government. During the panel that took place after mine, Melissa Garlick of the Anti-Defamation League said the following:

Over the past few years we’ve seen hate-filled language, memes, stereotyping, and scapegoating injected into the mainstream of America’s political and policy debate, especially through traditional and social media. Over the course of the 2017 election we saw a level of anti-Semitism and the normalization of bigotry that deeply concerned us at ADL. And now we see rhetoric which involves stereotyping and attacks based on national origin, religion, and physical appearance cemented into federal policies and executive actions that marginalize communities already vulnerable to hate crimes and deter these individuals from reporting such crimes to local police. Our recent audit on anti-Semitic incidents showed that the number of incidents remained significantly higher in 2017 compared to 2016, with an increase of 57 percent. Now, these incidents include both criminal and noncriminal acts of harassment, but they provide an important snapshot into trends of anti-Semitism in our society.

Probably the best argument against strengthening federal hate crime prevention efforts was articulated by Commissioner Kirsanow, who asked just two questions during my panel. He directed his questions to all of us, and invited anyone who possessed the information to answer.

“Are you aware of any data, studies, or other evidence, that shows designating a crime a hate crime deters, prevents, or reduces that crime, and second, whether designating a crime a federal hate crime reduces, deters, or prevents incidents of that crime?” he asked.

Neither I nor any of the other panelists were aware of such information, and so the panel fell silent.

Kirsanow continued. “Then, one other question: are you aware of any databases, study, or other evidence that shows designating a crime a hate crime, whether a municipal, federal, or state crime, assists in the resolution of that crime or the apprehension of the perpetrator?” he asked.

Again, silence.

“Thank you, Madame Chair,” he said, yielding the floor.

The entire briefing was streamed on C-Span. To watch the first part, which includes my panel, go here. Video of the rest of the briefing is available under the “More Videos from USCCR Hate Crimes” heading, midway down the page.

Fourth Amendment advocates scored a limited though still important victory today when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that non-authorized drivers of rental cars do not automatically forfeit their Fourth Amendment rights to a reasonable expectation of privacy inside such vehicles.

The case is Byrd v. United States. In 2014 a woman named Natasha Reed rented a car in New Jersey. She then gave the keys to her fiancé, Terrence Byrd. While driving the rental car in Pennsylvania, Byrd was pulled over for a possible traffic infraction. The officers on the scene asserted that because Byrd was not listed as an authorized driver on the rental agreement, they did not need to obtain his permission before searching the car—which is something that they would have needed to do had he been the authorized driver. Their subsequent search of the trunk turned up body armor and 49 bricks of heroin.

Under the federal government’s theory of the case, explained Justice Anthony Kennedy in his ruling today, “drivers who are not listed on rental agreements always lack an expectation of privacy in the automobile based on the rental company’s lack of authorization alone.” But that position, Kennedy insisted, “rests on too restrictive a view of the Fourth Amendment’s protections.”

As Kennedy pointed out, “car-rental agreements are filled with long lists of restrictions. Examples include prohibitions on driving the car on unpaved roads or driving while using a handheld cellphone. Few would contend that violating provisions like these has anything to do with a driver’s reasonable expectation of privacy in the rental car.” Yet that contention would seem to follow naturally if the Court adopted the federal government’s sweeping argument and followed it to its natural conclusion.

The Supreme Court unanimously refused to adopt the federal government’s sweeping argument. “As a general rule,” the Court declared, “someone in otherwise lawful possession and control of a rental car has a reasonable expectation of privacy in it even if the rental agreement does not list him or her as an authorized driver.”

This counts as a win for Byrd and his lawyers. But it does not count as total victory. That’s because Kennedy’s ruling concluded by remanding the case back down to the lower court, which was instructed to consider two additional arguments raised by the government: first, whether the search might still be ruled legal on grounds of probable cause; and second, whether “one who intentionally uses a third party to procure a rental car by a fraudulent scheme for the purpose of committing a crime is no better situated than a car thief.” In other words, Byrd still faces the real possibility of losing in his ultimate quest to have the evidence against him thrown out.

Fourth Amendment advocates, however, should generally be pleased. The upshot of today’s decision is that the Supreme Court has made it a little bit more difficult for law enforcement officials to search certain vehicles without a warrant.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Byrd v. United States is available here.

Efforts to reduce opioid-related deaths by restricting access to pain medication seem to be backfiring by driving people toward more dangerous drugs. Two analyses published today provide more reason to be skeptical of this approach, showing there is no clear relationship between pain pill prescriptions and drug poisoning.

In a short piece published by the American Council on Science and Health, pain treatment activist Richard Lawhern compares opioid prescriptions per 100 people and opioid-related deaths per 100,000 people in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. He includes deaths involving both legal and illegal opioids. Based on data for 2016, Lawhern plots the two rates against each other, with prescriptions on the x-axis and deaths on the y-axis, and calculates a trend very close to zero. “Opioid OD death rates had no apparent relationship to opioid prescription rates from state to state,” he writes. “Any effect of medical prescribing on OD deaths was literally ‘lost in the noise’ of other factors.”

A new WalletHub post by John Kiernan reinforces the point that states with high opioid death rates do not necessarily have high opioid prescription rates, or vice versa. In 2016, Kiernan reports, the jurisdictions with “the most overdose deaths per capita” were West Virginia, Ohio, New Hampshire, D.C., and Pennsylvania, in that order. The states with “the most opioid prescriptions per 100 people” were Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Although D.C. had the lowest prescription rate, it had the fourth highest death rate. Alabama had the highest prescription rate, but its death rate was middling. Arkansas had the second highest prescription rate but ranked around 40 in opioid-related deaths. Pennsylvania had a higher death rate than many states with higher prescription rates.

Despite that messy picture, Kiernan counts a state’s opioid prescription rate as a component of its “Drug Use & Addiction” score, meaning it automatically counts as part of the problem. “These state to state outcomes suggest that the US is dealing with not one national opioid crisis but many local crises,” Lawhern concludes. “In 2016, medical prescribing contributed almost nothing to these crises.”