Tag: hit&run

Activists and senior government officials say the Pakistani government is pressuring law enforcement and the media not to investigate the trafficking of Christian girls and women to China. The families of the women sell them to what they believe are Chinese husbands, but many of the women say that once they arrived in China they were abused or forced into prostitution. Human rights workers say the government is trying to keep trafficking secret in order not to jeopardize ties with China.

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Like The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s descent into the grubby world of provincial grappling matches, Uncut Gems takes us into a rarely examined social arena—the Diamond District of Midtown Manhattan, here portrayed as a place of frenzy and menace. The directors, Josh and Benny Safdie, who wrote and edited the film with Ronald Bronstein, have created a vivid simulation of what it might be like to live inside a pinball machine, and they’ve given Adam Sandler his showiest role, which he embraces obvious appreciation.

The year is 2012, and Sandler’s Howard Ratner is a yappy gem dealer whose wares are especially prized by black athletes and other bling aficionados. Howard is also a far-gone gambling addict (basketball is his jones), whose life is one long desperate hustle conducted in a clamor of shouts and lies and nerve-stripping security buzzers. After much long-distance maneuvering, Howard has taken delivery of a big opal smuggled out of an Ethiopian mine. He is already deep in debt to various bookies and pawnbrokers, and he believes, with the unwarranted optimism of the perpetually deluded, that this chunk of glimmering stone will finally bail him out. Time is tight, though—there’s a pair of debt-collecting thugs on his case, and they never had a lot of patience to run out of in the first place. (One of these two bruisers is played by Keith Williams Richards, a non-actor recruited from real life, whose smoldering hostility is very scary).

Howard is short on redeeming qualities. He has a wife (Frozen belter Idina Menzel) and three kids out on Long Island and a girlfriend named Julia (instant star Julia Fox) stowed away in an apartment in the city. The wife is already well over Howard (she says he’s the most annoying person she’s ever known) and is looking forward to their divorce. Why the girlfriend puts up with him is more complicated: We see her doing blow in a nightclub bathroom with rising singer-songwriter The Weeknd (playing himself –”He’s gonna be major,” Julia predicts, “even though he’s from Canada”); but we also see her treating her much older and schlubbier boyfriend with what could pass for real affection. (“I know you wanna cuddle, Howard,” she says, lying amid a tangle of sheets and pillows. “Just come here.”)

The movie is an exercise in endless tension. Howard stupidly loans out his opal to basketball star Kevin Garnett (the man himself), who gives him a pricey championship ring as security. Howard promises to hold the ring, but then immediately pawns it and hands over the resulting cash to his bookie (longtime New York sportscaster Mike Francesa) to lay down on an imminent Lakers game. Things continue not going well. There’s a violent confrontation at a snooty auction house and a nerve-wracking side trip to the Mohegan Sun casino in faraway Connecticut, with a cute sexting scene thrown in for human interest.

As they demonstrated in their last film, the similarly breathless Good Time, with Robert Pattinson, the Safdie brothers have a rare gift for conveying the raw textures of life-at-the-bottom. Can Sandler’s rap-a-holic Howard pull his life together somehow? He would surely bet on it—but then he’d bet on anything. Considering the evidence, we’re inclined to be more circumspect.

Bombshell

Bombshell addresses the still-hot topic of sexual harassment in the media business, focusing on the fall of the late Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who was taken down by a group of Fox women who’d grown tired of muffling their fury about his unsavory come-ons and creepy innuendoes. The behavior we see taking place here seems primordial (although women may find it right up-to-date). Discussing a new female employee’s desire to become on-air talent, Ailes (John Lithgow in a fat suit) tells her to “stand up and give me a twirl,” and then asks her to hike up her skirt a bit. (“It’s a visual medium.”) But Ailes isn’t the only sexual primitive on the network’s premises—we watch another woman smiling helplessly through her exasperation as a male colleague, commenting on some random footage, says, “Tell me those lips haven’t sucked cock.”

At the center of the movie is a splendidly steely performance by Charlize Theron, who completely nails the character of Fox News star Megyn Kelly, a definitive tough cookie. After moderating a 2015 GOP presidential debate in which she gave candidate Donald Trump no quarter, Kelly is only moderately appalled to hear Trump on CNN saying, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her—wherever.” (“Did he just accuse me of anger-menstruating?” Theron’s Kelly wonders.)

Bombshell might have been a better movie if it were a full-on Megyn Kelly biopic—with her ambiguous relationship to Ailes, she’s a richly complex character. But the real star of this story—if not the movie that’s been made from it—is Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), a onetime Fox star who’s now on her way out. Carlson has been talking to other Fox women about their repulsive experiences with Ailes, and now, armed with their stories, she’s filing a crafty lawsuit against the celebrated news titan that will eventually drive him out of the business. There isn’t a lot more to Kidman’s character than this, though, so every time the movie cuts away to her from Theron’s Kelly it feels a little like a distraction.

In a similarly awkward position is Margot Robbie, who plays a sweet composite character named Kayla, whose purpose is to help demonstrate how Ailes’s sleazy flirtations work. (She’s the “give me a twirl” girl.) Possibly just as important to director Jay Roach (Game Change), however, would be her function as a purveyor of the Hollywood view of Fox News. Early on, we see Kayla—a conservative Christian—getting the welcome-aboard lowdown from a staff producer named Jess (Kate McKinnon). In the Fox worldview, Jess tells Kayla, “People are lazy morons, minorities are criminals, sex is sick but interesting.”

It’s almost as if Matt Lauer never fielded a rape claim.

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It’s been a little more than 20 years since the California Legislature passed, and Gov. Gray Davis signed, Senate Bill 400, which granted 50-percent pension hikes to employees of the California Highway Patrol. The law’s clear intent was for every other California agency to follow its model. They mostly did. So, these pension deals spread across the state like a contagion—leaving a debilitating level of pension liabilities that threaten to obliterate city and county budgets and push some less affluent localities toward insolvency.

The legislation granted the pension increases retroactively, which meant that government employees didn’t just gain these additional benefits beginning on the day of its passage. The increases were granted back to the day the employee started on the job, even if it were 30 years ago or more. This was more than your garden-variety gift of public funds, but it passed overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis, and with virtually no public debate. Those few officials who raised red flags were derided, even though their warnings were prescient.

Lawmakers apparently gleaned a cynical—but useful—lesson from Orange County’s bankruptcy, which took place five years earlier. (Its 25th anniversary was last Friday.) In that debacle, Treasurer Bob Citron had brought in unbelievable returns for the county investment pool by leveraging assets to make investments tied to interest rates. He was betting on lower rates. It all worked perfectly, until it didn’t—and then the Fed’s rising rates led to what was, at the time, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. County officials had enjoyed the windfall and seemed angriest at the few voices who warned about the coming unpleasantness.

What’s the lesson? It’s best summarized by the great Baltimore journalist, H.L. Mencken, who wrote, “The men (Americans) detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” In other words, don’t level with the public, especially if you have plans for higher office. Tell everyone what they want to hear—or at least stick to the rosiest scenarios. Promise people something for nothing, and by no means take on the role of a Cassandra.

During the SB 400 debate, supporters said it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime because of ongoing boisterous stock-market returns. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) promised that “no increase over current employer contributions is needed for these benefit improvements.” It would mostly be funded from excess returns on retirement systems that were so awash in cash that they really – I swear – had no other choice but to give it away to their union friends.

Obviously, these predictions never panned out as the stock market fell. The state’s pension funds now struggle with troublingly low 70-percent funding levels, even after a long-running bull market. There are no excess returns, but insufficient ones to pay for growing membership in the “$100,000 Pension Club.” Once the market falls again—and it will fall, as former Gov. Brown frequently warned—these funds could hit the skids. On hindsight, who could have ever believed those ridiculous assurances?

Now, pension liabilities grow, but legislators have no appetite for reform. There have been plenty of warnings, from members of both major political parties, and from people with serious actuarial acumen. It doesn’t matter, though. Legislators rather think happy thoughts, lest the public-employee unions come gunning for them.

The latest ominous sign comes from a new CalPERS report showing that pension costs for California police officers and firefighters has hit 50 percent of their pay, as Ed Mendel explains in the Calpensions blog. It’s an astounding—and escalating—number. These amounts are “unsustainable,” according to the decade-old prediction of a CalPERS’ former chief actuary that he quotes. Consider this shocker: “A few safety plans have reached 100 percent of pay,” Mendel added, meaning that “for every $1 of base salary, the local government must pay another $1” to CalPERS. Dire predictions are coming true.

A California city manager told a newspaper that cities have become pension providers that offer a few services on the side. At this rate, cities won’t have the money to provide any services at all, let alone ones on the side. Good for CalPERS for providing useful data, but don’t expect the pension fund to lobby for changes to the pension plans or call for anything other than higher contributions from city and state taxpayers.

Seriously, why should politicians stick out their necks? Name any SB 400 backer (or Citron defender) who paid a political price. The bill’s principal co-author, Lou Correa of Orange County, has been promoted to member of Congress.  The sad lesson, from two of California’s biggest financial debacles, is there’s no point in politicians warning the public about impending fiscal crisis. Mencken probably was right. That doesn’t mean California lawmakers will never reform the pension system; it just means they won’t do it until the red ink hits the fan.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

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A new article in Science, “Evidence, alarm, and the debate over e-cigarettes,” warns that, when it comes to vaping, “prohibitionist measures threaten public health.” This may not be news to those that have followed the burgeoning medical and social science literature on e-cigarettes and vaping, but it is quite notable to see this message in a journal as prestigious as Science.

Written by researchers from the schools of public health at Ohio State, Emory, New York University and Columbia, the article explains the importance adopting prudent harm reduction strategies to address the health consequences of tobacco use and the risks of adopting unnecessarily prohibitionist or restrictive policies.

The article begins:

This is a moment for legitimate alarm at the intersection of two distressing but distinct epidemiological patterns involving e-cigarettes (“vaping”): an increase in vaping among youth and a sudden outbreak of acute lung injuries and deaths in the United States, associated most strongly with vaping tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive compound in cannabis. Discussions of vaping, however, often neglect distinctions between nicotine and THC; between adults and youth; and between products obtained through the retail and black markets. As we move to confront these challenges, we face the danger that justifiable alarm will turn alarmist, short-circuiting careful analysis of the full range of evidence and focusing attention on the most frightening, thus enhancing the prospect of adopting counterproductive policy. We suggest that the evidence warns against prohibitionist measures. Restricting access and appeal among less harmful vaping products out of an abundance of caution while leaving deadly combustible products on the market does not protect public health. It threatens to derail a trend that could hasten the demise of cigarettes, poised to take a billion lives this century.

Surveying the relevant literature, the article notes that there is widespread support for the proposition that “vaping nicotine is much safer than smoking” and that “Careful analysis of all the data in context indicates that the net benefits of vaped nicotine products outweigh the feared harms to youth.” Among other things, the authors note, is that e-cigarettes have been shown to be “more effective than medicinal NRTs [nicotine replacement therapies] at helping smokers quite” and that the availability of flavors often play a key role in helping smokers quit.

They write:

The most conservative estimates suggest that were vaping nicotine to replace most smoking over the next 10 years, 1.6 million premature deaths would be avoided and 20.8 million quality adjusted years of life would be saved in the United States alone. The greatest gains would be among younger cohorts.

Despite the growing body of research supporting the role of e-cigarettes as part of a broader tobacco harm reduction strategy, regulatory measures threatening to squelch the e-cigarette market and curtail the usefulness of vaping as a smoking cessation tool proliferate at all levels of government. Perhaps this article will help turn the tide and lead to more effective—and more life-saving—approach to tobacco.

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Even in the midst of a divisive and angry impeachment proceeding, Republicans and Democrats somehow find a way to make common cause when it comes to spending and borrowing more and more money. The Washington Post reports that “top congressional negotiators said Thursday they had reached a deal in principle to approve $1.3 trillion in federal spending for 2020, likely averting a government shutdown next week.” This is the bipartisanship that so many high-minded politicos and journalists call for, and it’s killing our economic future (more on that in a moment).

The House of Representatives, controlled by the Democrats, just passed a “progressive” defense spending bill that totals $738 billion, or “$120 billion more than what President Obama left us with,” in the words of Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.). Is America under $120 billion more military threats since January 2017? Of course not, but why live in reality when make-believe is so much more fun? The bill is considered progressive only because it includes “paid parental leave for federal workers,” a long-sought goal of liberal Democrats and, not unimportantly, President Trump, who is urging “don’t delay this anymore! I will sign this historic defense legislation immediately!” Next week, the Republican-controlled Senate is expected to pass similar legislation that includes the family leave plan along with money to establish Trump’s new Space Force and “the largest pay increase for uniformed service members in 10 years.”

So, despite impeachment proceedings and other disagreements, Congress and the president are pulling in the same direction and digging deep into the pockets and couch cushions of current and future taxpayers. Such bipartisanship doesn’t come cheap, of course. The deficit for fiscal 2019, which ended in September, was $984 billion. Total outlays clocked in at $4.447 trillion, with revenues reaching $3.462 trillion, both record amounts. For the first two months of fiscal 2020, deficits came in at $342 billion, a 12 percent increase over the same period in a previous year despite revenues climbing by 3 percent. Like GM before it was bailed out, America is losing money despite bringing in more cash than ever before.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is now projecting annual deficits in excess of $1 trillion in each of the next 10 years:

Just a few years ago, such a scenario seemed unimaginable, at least rhetorically. Even while Democrats were often identified as the party of out-of-control deficit spending (fact check: both parties are terrible on this score), they at least paid lip service to the need to rein in the national debt. During its 2008 national convention, for instance, virtually every major figure in the party inveighed against “dangerous fiscal irresponsibility” (to quote Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana). The party’s official platform promised:

We will maintain fiscal responsibility, so that we do not mortgage our children’s future on a mountain of debt.

Barack Obama even openly campaigned on a “net spending cut”:

“What I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut,” Obama said in his final pre-election debate with McCain [in 2008]. “I have been a strong proponent of pay as you go. Every dollar [in spending] that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.”

Of course, once Obama and the Democrats took power, they stopped talking about fiscal responsibility and all that. The Republicans took up the slack and constantly criticized deficit spending, right up until the moment they regained control of the purse strings.

For most of the 21st century, one of the two major parties could be counted on to mount at least a half-hearted attack on profligate spending. The critics of deficit spending would also explain why constantly spending more than you take in is a bad idea. The short version is that persistent high levels of government debt reduce long-term economic growth. Consider:

In a 2012 paper, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff define a “debt overhang” as a situation in which the debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 90 percent for five or more consecutive years. After looking at 26 debt overhangs in 22 advanced economies since 1800, they conclude that “on average, debt levels above 90 percent are associated with growth that is 1.2 percent lower than in other periods (2.3 percent versus 3.5 percent).” These overhangs last a long time—in their sample, the average lasted 23 years—creating a cumulative loss in economic growth that’s “nearly a quarter below that predicted by the trend in lower-debt periods.”

That work has been validated by left-wing economists associated with the University of Massachusetts, who were critiquing an earlier version of Rinehart and Rogoff’s work that had mistakenly found that debt overhangs reduced growth below zero. The critics conclude that “the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent.”

We crossed that Rubicon back in 2010, folks. The only difference is that these days, nobody seems to care anymore. You don’t have to believe there’s something magical about a 90 percent threshold to grok the idea that unpayable government debt has a negative effect on growth. The people who comprise markets recognize that a day of reckoning will eventually come and government will do some combination of raising taxes, reducing services, or inflating currency. None of those outcomes, and especially the unpredictability they promise, is good for economic growth. Which helps explain why the CBO predicts that average annual growth between 2019 and 2029 will be 1.9 percent. That figure compares to 3.2 percent average annual growth between 1950 and 2018.

But weak growth isn’t everything, right? Before we enter a decade of sluggish economic activity, let’s at least feel good for a few days that Republicans and Democrats can pull together to spend money we don’t have on programs that we don’t need.

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What’s the best way to streamline government bureaucracy? In San Francisco, the answer is to create another government department.

On Tuesday, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to create the Office of Emerging Technology (OET). The new office will act as a regulator of first-resort by requiring companies looking to test out new technology “upon, above, or below” city property or public rights-of-way to first obtain a permit from OET.

The past few years have seen any number of new technologies, from sidewalk delivery robots to dockless electric scooters, put out on San Francisco streets by innovating companies, each time irritating a vocal minority of residents and forcing city regulators and elected officials to play catch-up.

The hope is that the new OET will allow city officials to vet technologies before they’re rolled out en masse in public places. The new office is also supposed to give companies a “front door” to city bureaucracies, helping them to understand all the different government permissions and permits they’ll need.

“If you have a company that is offering an interesting and new technology that does not put our residents’ safety at risk or have a negative impact to our public infrastructure then this office will welcome you,” said Supervisor Norman Yee, who sponsored the OET legislation, at a Tuesday hearing. “If a technology offers a net common good there is now a path for approval through this office.”

The new OET legislation tracks pretty closely with recommendations made by the city’s Emerging Technologies Open Working Group, which was helmed by City Administrator Naomi Kelly, and included representatives from tech companies and various technology trade associations.

The San Francisco Examiner reports that both sf.citi, a tech trade association, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce have come out in support of the OET, each expressing their hopes that the new office will facilitate a more collaborative relationship between innovators and regulators, and help streamline the regulatory process.

That’s understandable given the antagonistic relationship startups have had with city regulators when they’ve tried to test out new ideas.

When dockless e-scooters were first deployed in San Francisco without permits (because it was a new technology for which no permit existed), officials took a pretty heavy-handed approach, impounding hundreds of scooters, and forcing their owners to cease operations while the city crafted new regulations for the vehicles. The creation of an OET offers the chance to avoid all that drama.

But there’s still plenty of reasons to think the new office will actually make things worse, not better.

For starters, Tuesday’s legislation gives the OET sweeping discretionary powers. Companies looking to test out new technology will have to submit a pilot project proposal before they can get a permit. OET will evaluate these pilot projects based on criteria it itself will come up with. It then has the power to reject permit applications, or impose on them any conditions it deems necessary to protect “public peace, safety, health, and welfare.”

On top of that, the law also gives members of the public a right to request a public hearing on individual emerging technology permits, allowing opponents of new tech, or change generally, to delay or derail pilot projects they don’t like.

Indeed, we really don’t have to speculate what this new regulatory regime for emerging tech will look like in practice.

The city already has a very similar set up for building permits, which require people looking to build a home or set up a business to obtain permits from city hall first. Members of the public are then empowered to demand public hearings on any individual project. The city’s planning commission has the authority to reject or condition approval of most projects.

The system has generally served to frustrate, not facilitate, business formation (not to mention housing construction) by making even the most minute permit applications the subject of intense public debate.

Obviously, emerging technologies in public spaces can be disruptive and cause safety hazards or other issues that might require government regulation. The best way to do that, however, is to write the broadest possible rules aimed at mitigating specific harms. This is an approach that can protect public safety without unduly burdening entrepreneurs.

With San Francisco’s new emerging tech regulator, all that isn’t explicitly allowed is now forbidden. The end result will be a patchwork of politicized and arbitrary regulations that will kill off the innovation the city says it’s trying to accommodate.

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced two weeks ago that the arrest tally for the foreign students caught by its sting operation against pay-to-stay visa mills—fake universities that handle transcripts and paperwork so that foreign students can maintain their visa status without attending school—has risen to 250. 

But sources connected to the students tell Reason the operation, which involved ICE setting up its own fake university, lured in some students who had done nothing wrong. Some of those students were even tricked into quitting legitimate schools in favor of the feds’ fake visa mill. Meanwhile, the operation’s real target, the visa mills, remain unaffected.

The latest chapter in the story begins when ICE decided to crack down on visa mills in 2015. What exactly triggered this effort is unclear. That year, ICE created the University of Northern New Jersey, a fake college that held no classes and offered no instruction. If students paid recruiters between $3,000 and $12,000, they could enroll and show that they were taking the required course load to satisfy the requirements of their F-1 student visas and, more importantly, obtain CPT (Curricular Practical Training) status.

Usually, F-1 students are limited to 20 hours of employment on-campus. But CPT status allows those who have completed one year of academic work to take jobs off campus if the work is integral to their area of study. For instance, nursing students who need practical training to complete the requirements for their diplomas can work in a hospital and get paid for it, or computer science majors can do real-life programming at a company. It’s like a paid internship for foreign students.

The New York Times reported at the time that some students genuinely didn’t know what they were getting into. The university repeatedly canceled scheduled classes last minute via Twitter for all kinds of reasons including bad weather. When one frustrated Chinese student drove up to the university to find out what was going on, an ICE agent impersonating the university president met him and reassured him that everything was fine, even handing him a fake T-shirt with the university logo and an American flag.

But many students enrolled out of desperation. They had obtained jobs but didn’t win an H-1B visa in the annual lottery, given that there are twice as many applicants as visas handed every year. So the CPT became a stopgap way of obtaining work status until they could try again for an H-1B the following year.

The sensible policy response to the shortage would be to raise or scrap the annual H-1B cap—set before the internet revolution—so that foreign students with a job offers could be assured work authorization. This would instantly throw all the visa mills out of business. Instead, ICE launched elaborate operations to play detective.

The New Jersey sting resulted in over 1,000 students losing their visa status and being thrown out of the country. But according to Rahul Reddy, a Texas-based attorney and founding partner of a 23-year-old firm that specializes in employment-based immigration law, those students were actually just collateral damage. The primary targets were professional recruiters acting as middlemen between students and fraudulent universities.

But the latest sting is different. This one went to elaborate lengths to target students themselves, insists Reddy, who has been offering legal services to many of them.

This time, ICE created the University of Farmington, which was physically located on Northwestern Highway in Southeast Michigan—a major commercial thoroughfare with doctor’s offices, real estate companies, restaurants, and more. Its website billed the now-disbanded university as a STEM school offering various graduate degrees. It pretended that the university was founded in the 1950s to offer returning soldiers from World War II a “quality and marketable education” to help turn Detroit into a “center of innovation” for manufacturing, the website also claimed to maintain a 10:1 student-teacher ratio. It even invented a fake seal with the motto “Scientia et Labor,” meaning “Knowledge and Work.” 

Notably, it also claimed that the school was SEVP approved. SEVP refers to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Students and Exchange Visitor Program, which lists all the certified schools that immigration authorities recognize. Separately, ICE enlisted an accreditation agency to list the school as legitimate on its website, according to Detroit Free Press’ Niraj Warikoo, who also found that the university was incorporated by Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs in January 2016.

All this meant that any foreign student who looked at the university website would have no reason to suspect that it was an illicit visa mill. But to dispel any remaining suspicion, ICE coordinated with DHS to ensure that the enrolled students would show up on DHS’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). 

SEVIS is akin to an E-verify program for universities, a federal database that lists all foreign students in good standing with immigration authorities. Students not enrolled in a federally recognized university aren’t listed on SEVIS. For foreign students looking for American education, this is the ultimate seal of official approval.

With this architecture in place, ICE agents impersonating university officials started recruiting students by offering them cheaper courses and quicker processing of CPT, says Jay Talluri, president of the Telugu Association of North America, the oldest and biggest Indo-American organization in North America that caters to the special issues of the people in their community. They also offered a hefty commission to students, mostly from India, who recruited their friends. In all, it managed to enroll 600 students.

Accepting the commission was clearly illegal because the terms of the F-1 visa bar foreign students from working off-campus for pay, especially in areas unrelated to their studies. So ICE dubbed the students who took the kickback as “recruiters” and went after them the same way it targeted professional recruiters in 2015. It charged eight of them with a “conspiracy to commit visa fraud and harbor aliens and profit from them.” Seven of them have already started prison sentences of a year or more pending deportation.

But ICE didn’t spare students either. It terminated the SEVIS authorization of everyone enrolled in the University of Farmington on the evening of January 29. Early the next morning, it started making house arrests. It arrested 90 University of Farmington students right off the bat in January. That number rose to 161 by March and has now reached 250.

The rest have all likely fled the country to avoid arrest. Reddy says he started getting calls from panicked students when the raids started, and that’s what he advised them to do. That’s why ICE’s arrest count is not even bigger.

About 80 percent of the 250 that ICE snagged were granted “voluntary” departure and banned from the country for many years. Another 10 percent are being deported and the rest are contesting their removal orders.

ICE claimed in its indictment that “each of the foreign citizens who ‘enrolled’ and made ‘tuition’ payments to the University” knew that the program was “not approved by the DHS” and was “illegal.” 

This is simply not true. The university was listed as accredited on state and federal sites. Moreover, students also had no reason to believe that the university was fake given that the DHS handed them SEVIS authorization, which would not have been possible if it weren’t an approved school.

Indeed, Warikoo notes that some of the students jumped to the University of Farmington from universities that lost their accreditation. They likely thought that switching would allow them to fulfill their visa requirements (none of the students are talking to the press). Others actually tried to transfer out of the University of Farmington when they realized that the university was not holding classes and they were making no progress toward their diplomas. But ICE has not spared them either.

But the even more troubling aspect mentioned by Reddy and Talluri, both of whom know many of the students caught in the dragnet, is that ICE actually lured some of the students from legitimate universities by offering them cheaper courses. “Some of the students were going to good public and private schools when ICE tempted them with lower prices at University of Farmington,” says Talluri. He and his organization have raised concerns about ICE’s tactics with senators, and India has launched a formal diplomatic protest. Neither Talluri nor Reddy were willing to provide names of students who had been lured from legitimate universities, suggesting that such students are afraid of attracting law enforcement attention. 

Foreign students are particularly vulnerable to pitches for cheaper classes because their options to work and pay for their education are severely restricted by visa rules. Hence, many rely on families back home for support and are always on the lookout for reducing the burden on their loved ones. ICE collected millions of dollars in fees from them, Warikoo reported, but it won’t say if it has any intention of reimbursing the students. (ICE did not respond to requests for comment.)

If these students had been left to their own devices, Talluri says, it may not have occurred to them to switch. One reason they did so was because ICE paid their fellow students up to $20,000 to aggressively recruit them, per its January indictment.

Entrapment requires ensnaring someone who did not have a predisposition to commit an illegal act by misleading or lying to them. It’s unclear whether what ICE did falls under that definition because the students aren’t talking to the press. But even if it were, they couldn’t sue ICE because the loss of visa and deportation aren’t considered criminal penalties requiring any kind of due process.

The fundamental question, however, is what the government hoped to accomplish with this elaborate scheme. Even from a pure enforcement standpoint, to the extent that ICE considers visa mills a problem, it would make more sense for it to go after existing visa mills rather than launching additional fake ones of its own. Instead of turning students into recruiters by throwing temptation in their way, ICE could have gone after professional recruiters. Nothing ICE has done so far has put a single university or recruiter out of business. 

“If ICE investigated these universities,” notes Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy, a pro-immigration think tank, “we would at least understand the true extent and nature of this problem.” 

This would help protect foreign students from being scammed too. Very often, those accused of being visa mills or diploma mills aren’t totally fake. They skirt the law, doing the bare minimum in terms of holding classes and fulfilling other requirements to get their SEVP certification so that they can hand foreign students the necessary paperwork for their student visas and cough up money to enroll. However, if the federal government subsequently rescinds the accreditation of these universities or even just becomes suspicious of them, their students run into big trouble. If they travel abroad, they can have difficulty re-entering the country. Many face difficulties upgrading their student visas to H-1Bs when they land jobs. 

Reddy says he gets calls from foreign students in such situations seeking advice “practically every day.” He has started hosting weekly video calls offering free consultations and scores of foreign students sign up. These universities victimize foreign students, he laments. And instead of rescuing them, ICE is victimizing them too.

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When it comes to refuting dubious allegations of anti-Semitism, Donald Trump cannot win, a point dramatically illustrated by the reaction to the executive order he signed yesterday. The order, which is aimed at fighting “anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses,” raises serious First Amendment concerns, which I’ll get to in a minute. But much of the initial backlash against the order focused on its purported anti-Semitism. That’s right: An order targeting anti-Jewish prejudice somehow became yet another example of Trump’s anti-Jewish prejudice. On Twitter, the president’s reflexive critics described his order as reminiscent of Nazi racial ideology, “fascist,” and “as antisemetic [sic] as it gets.”

Those comments were based on a New York Times story that erroneously claimed the order “will declare that Judaism may be considered a national origin.” That phrase has since been stricken from the article, without any indication of a correction. But the story still says “the order will effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion,” which is not accurate either.

Here is what the order actually says:

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI), 42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq., prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance. While Title VI does not cover discrimination based on religion, individuals who face discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin do not lose protection under Title VI for also being a member of a group that shares common religious practices. Discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual’s race, color, or national origin.

As George Mason University law professor David Bernstein noted yesterday in a Volokh Conspiracy post, that understanding of Title VI is consistent with the policies of the last two administrations. The Justice Department during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations took the position that Title VI “provides protection to Jews, Arab Muslims, Sikhs, and/or members of other religious groups” when “discrimination is based on the group’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, rather than its members’ religious practice.”

The Trump administration’s take on Title VI is not new, and it does not reflect a belief that Jewishness resides in one’s blood or DNA. “The executive order does not mean that the Trump administration is declaring that Jews are, objectively speaking, a nation or a race,” Bernstein writes. “Rather, it’s that Jews are protected as a nationality or race if discrimination against them is motivated by the perception that they are a nationality or race. Consider Hispanics. Hispanics are not a ‘race,’ and indeed can be from any racial group. But no one would raise an eyebrow to discover that Hispanics are protected from discrimination based on race or national origin if subject to discrimination by someone who hates Hispanics as a group.”

A Times editorial avoids the mischaracterization of Trump’s order presented in the paper’s news coverage, saying the administration is trying to “combat anti-Semitism on college campuses by using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to withhold federal money from schools that fail to counter discrimination against Jews.” The Times generously concedes that “Mr. Trump’s action might seem like a gesture of real concern” but complains that “it does little to target the larger source of violent anti-Semitism.” In other words, Trump is targeting left-wing anti-Semites when he should be targeting right-wing anti-Semites.

The Times compounds its churlishness by averring that “the president himself has trafficked in anti-Semitic stereotypes, frequently endorsing crude, negative caricatures about Jews.” To back up that claim, the editorial cites a speech that Trump delivered on Saturday at the Israeli American National Council Summit in Hollywood, Florida. After bragging about his efforts to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem at a reasonable cost, Trump said this:

So we [were] going to spend 2 billion, and one of the [proposed expenditures] was going to buy a lousy location. A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers. (Laughter.) Not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me; you have no choice. You’re not going to vote for Pocahontas [i.e., Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren], I can tell you that. (Laughter and applause.) You’re not going to vote for the wealth tax. “Yeah, let’s take 100 percent of your wealth away.” No, no. Even if you don’t like me; some of you don’t. Some of you I don’t like at all, actually. (Laughter.) And you’re going to be my biggest supporters because you’ll be out of business in about 15 minutes, if they get it. So I don’t have to spend a lot of time on that.

In case you doubt that the audience actually greeted Trump’s remarks with laughter and applause, you can watch the video here. Although the Jews who listened to Trump’s speech evidently were not offended by what he said, the Times is offended on their behalf. But that reaction hinges on an uncharitable interpretation of Trump’s comments, colored by the presumption that he “traffick[s] in anti-Semitic stereotypes, frequently endorsing crude, negative caricatures about Jews.” Trump may or may not be right that the rich developers who heard his speech will vote their pocketbooks next November (regardless of how they feel about him), but that suggestion is hardly proof of anti-Jewish bias.

The real problem with Trump’s executive order is not that it incorporates a Nazi-esque definition of Jewishness, or that the president’s sincerity is questionable in light of things he has said that the New York Times editorial board considers anti-Semitic. The real problem (one the Times also notes) is the order’s potential impact on freedom of speech.

The order says federal agencies enforcing Title VI should “consider…the non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism” adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). That definition, which is also used by the State Department, cites “contemporary examples of anti-Semitism” that include “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” “blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions,” “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” “focusing on Israel only for peace or human rights investigations,” and “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” or “denying Israel the right to exist.”

These positions strike many Jews (including me) as grossly unfair, but they are not necessarily motivated by anti-Semitism, let alone synonymous with it. They raise important questions about the justice of Israeli policies, the sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, collective vs. individual rights, and the legitimacy of nation-states. A college campus is precisely the sort of place where issues like these should be hashed out. But if allowing students, faculty members, and outside speakers to express views like these can be construed as a Title VI violation, and therefore a threat to federal funding, universities may be inclined to err on the side of censorship.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is committed to defending freedom of speech for people across the political spectrum, notes that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism “may apply to core political speech protected by the First Amendment.” FIRE rightly worries that the executive order’s “ambiguous directive and fundamental reliance on the IHRA definition and its examples will cause institutions to investigate and censor protected speech on their campuses.”

There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about Trump’s executive order, but they have nothing to do with his purported anti-Semitism or any other special characteristic of this particular president, his party, or his administration. To the contrary, the order  reflects a bipartisan tendency to battle bigotry by suppressing controversial speech.

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A bipartisan bill that would provide a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants who work in agriculture passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday, providing a glimmer of stability to America’s farmers in the midst of an ongoing trade war and an immigrant labor crackdown.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act passed the House in a vote of 260-165, with 34 Republicans voting in favor. In its current form, the bill would permit undocumented aliens to obtain permanent residence if they have worked in domestic agriculture for at least 10 years and are willing to continue working in the industry for an additional four years. After that period, they would be eligible for a green card and could seek employment in another industry. Immigrants with less than 10 years of experience would need to commit to working in agriculture for an additional 8 years to be eligible for permanent residence. 

The bill would also expand the H-2A visa program, which allows farmers to legally hire foreign guest workers. Farmers could employee guest workers year-round, rather than just seasonally. Although the former would be subject to an initial 20,000 visa cap per year for the first three years, it could expand after that period. The reform provides for 40,000 additional green cards for those working in agricultural, permits H-2A recipients to be sponsored for a green card, and allows them to apply for that legal status directly, all of which encourage them not to overstay their visas in violation of immigration law. It also cuts some of the red tape and bureaucratic overview processes that slow down such applications, decreasing time in processing and cutting the associated costs. A pilot program would increase flexibility to a small degree, allowing H-2A recipients to switch jobs if they are able to secure employment in their first two months in the U.S., provided that they continue to work in the agricultural sector.

“I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally,” said President Donald Trump during his 2019 State of the Union address. But migrants need a way to do that. At present, those opportunities are few and far between: A low-skilled immigrant from Mexico would have to wait an average of 131 years to successfully immigrate to the U.S. 

“If we want illegal immigration to end, Congress has to guarantee farmers a better way to follow the law,” writes Daniel Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

While some worry that these visas displace American workers, U.S. farmers are required by law to offer H-2A positions first to people who can already legally work in the U.S. They seldom find enough takers. The Cornell Farmworker Program found that dairy farmers rely on undocumented workers because they cannot identify a sufficient amount of U.S.-born employees to fill the positions. This might explain why approximately 50 percent of all farmworkers are undocumented immigrants, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Immigration enforcement against agricultural businesses has thrown the industry into disarray. Farmers have seen large portions of their workforce deported unexpectedly. When farmers can find American-born workers to replace immigrant labor, they face serious retention problems. These staffing problems have been made exponentially worse by the agricultural tariffs China imposed on U.S. products in response to Trump’s trade war, which resulted in a bailout of $10 billion for just this year. 

Unfortunately, the House bill also includes an E-Verify requirement, which raises serious civil liberties issues. But the permanent residency opportunity is a welcome reprieve for American farmers and immigrant laborers alike. 

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It strikes me that the best criticism of the order is that the executive branch is expanding the reach of Title VI, and has been since the Bush II administration, without either Congressional action or at least a formal rulemaking process that would allow public objections during the notice-and-comment period and also litigation against whatever winds up being published in the Federal Register. As someone who was strongly critical of the Obama administration for governing through executive order and informal guidance, I’d need some persuading as to why the same criticisms don’t apply here.

As for measured substantive criticism, David Schraub in The Atlantic provides a useful and thoughtful summary of criticism from the left. Here are some of the prominent criticisms, and my response.

(1) While there is nothing inherently wrong with the Trump executive order, Schraub suggests that Jews and others rightly don’t trust the Trump administration regarding antisemitism, and therefore don’t trust the administration to properly and fairly enforce the order on college campuses. Whatever one thinks of Trump and his administration–and I have knowledgeable Jewish friends who think everything from ‘the Trump administration is institutionally antisemitic’ to ‘the Trump administration is the most philo-semitic in history’–it’s not the “Trump administration” that enforces Title VI, it’s the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights. There’s no reason to think that the civil servants at OCR have gone Trumpian. Ken Marcus, the political appointee who runs OCR, has made a career out of fighting antisemitism; it’s ridiculous to think that Ken deserves Jews’ mistrust.

(2) Shraub references the “more legitimately controversial aspect of the Executive Order: its misappropriation of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism for use in assigning civil liability.” Schraub fails to make it clear that this definition is only to be used as possible evidence of discriminatory intent when otherwise potentially illegal discrimination is going on. No one is going to be civilly liable for saying something that violates IHRA by itself. True, aggressive bureaucrats can blur this distinction under hostile environment law, and ignore relevant First Amendment constraints. But that’s a problem with hostile environment law and aggressive bureaucrats, not in using the IHRA definition as one factor in assessing discriminatory intent. I’m all for constraining hostile environment law with strong First Amendment protections, but I’m not in favor of the position that hostile environment law should be applied vigorously to protect other minority groups, but not Jews.

(3) Finally, Schraub suggests that the Trump administration has proven itself all-too-willing to crack down on speech on campus related to the Middle East it doesn’t like. In particular he objects that the Trump administration has violated freedom of speech and academic freedom by starting to monitor academic balance in Middle East Studies programs that receive federal funds. I certainly agree, as a general matter, that the federal government has no business monitoring academic programs for balance. But the particular funding program at issue provides funding for Mideast studies to promote knowledge of the Middle East to serve U.S. foreign policy objectives. As a result of this mandate, the relevant funding law requires universities to pledge that their programs will be balanced. In other words, monitoring balance is not some bizarre or aggressive anti-academic freedom initiative, but just enforcing the law–a law, admittedly, that previous administrations failed to enforce. But aren’t we having an impeachment right now in part over the notion that the executive branch is supposed to follow Congressional mandates with regard to appropriations? Universities should not accept money with such strings, especially when the money is not, as it is not in the Mideast Studies funding context, remotely crucial to their fiscal stability. But if they do accept federal money with such strings, they, and critics like Schraub, can hardly object that their academic freedom is being denied.

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