Tag: in-the-news

White House adviser Jared Kushner says he will present a plan to President Donald Trump making the case for a merit-based immigration system that prioritizes highly skilled immigrants over those with family ties to the United States.

Speaking at the TIME 100 Summit on Tuesday, Kushner said the U.S. should take a cue from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, all of which employ a complex points system to determine who is eligible for entry. This, he suggested, would “unify people” around strong American wages, a secure border, and humanitarian values.

“I do believe that the president’s position on immigration has been maybe defined by his opponents by what he’s against as opposed to what he’s for,” Kushner said.

That Trump’s opponents have been more instrumental in branding his views on immigration than Trump himself is a dubious claim, as the president has consistently cast migrants as “criminals” and “rapists.” He’s also flipped on the subject more than once—just this year he said that he wants immigrants to come “in the largest numbers ever,” but later claimed that “our country’s full.” (It isn’t.)

But just what would a merit-based system look like here in the States, and how would it accomplish Kushner’s ambitious end-game? The answer to that question is about as easy to pin down as is Trump’s immigration stance.

Take Canada, for instance, which utilizes a multifaceted 100-point selection factor grid that considers language skills, education, age, work experience, arranged employment in the country, and adaptability. The latter category is quite broad, accounting for spousal factors, professional experience in Canada, as well as family ties to the area. (Although Kushner’s plan has yet to be revealed, he seemed to imply that family ties and merit are mutually exclusive.)

That difference notwithstanding, it’s likely that Kushner’s proposal will look similar to Canada’s. But our northern neighbor’s approach is anything but a one-size fits all solution—it has one-tenth the population of the U.S., after all, with more people living in California than in all of Canada.

With a workforce that currently hovers around 130 million full-time employees—more than 300 percent of Canada’s total population—it’s impossible to expect the government to accurately predict a superlative economic balance, particularly if we’re using Canada as the gold standard. The country has toggled back and forth between emphasizing labor market needs (which, with ineffective models, led to immigrant underemployment) and demand-driven factors (which brought an influx of immigrants who were considered to be unskilled).

If anything, Canada’s experiment shows the unfeasibility of determining the optimal immigration level, particularly with varying interests at play. And these biases couldn’t be clearer with Kushner’s guest worker proposal, which he says will provide temporary visas to those seeking work in agriculture, hospitality, and a slew of other seasonal jobs (and which the Trump administration has already considered increasing in recent weeks). In other words, Kushner and Trump both tacitly acknowledge the economy’s dependence on low-skilled immigrants, particularly as the country adds more jobs than it can fill.

Kushner’s plan follows on the heels of the reintroduction of the RAISE Act, a plan spearheaded by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) and backed by Sens. David Perdue (R–Ga.) and Josh Hawley (R–Mo.). Also a merit-based proposal, it aims to cut legal immigrants in half. Kushner has called his bill “neutral” in closed-door meetings, per Axios, meaning that it will neither raise nor lower legal immigration levels overall.

Although comprehensive immigration reform is unlikely with a divided House and Senate, Kushner said at the TIME 100 Summit that he has the approval of both Stephen Miller, President Trump’s hawkish immigration adviser, and Kevin Hassett, the pro-immigration Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

“If I can get Stephen Miller and Kevin Hassett to agree on an immigration plan, then Middle East peace will be easy by comparison,” he said.

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I won’t spoil anything about Avengers: Endgame, except to say: It delivers.

There are superheroes—so many superheroes—acting both super and heroic. There are villains acting villainous. There are jokes and sacrifices, witty banter and inspiring speeches, moments that will give you chills and even, perhaps, a few that will bring tears to your eyes. At the end of the movie’s roughly three-hour running time, everyone in need of punching has been punched in exactly the amount they deserve to be punched. Cinematic justice is thus meted out with acute precision, as if calculated by some complex algorithm. Which, come to think of it, it probably was.

The point is: If you are fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)—and, based on the box office returns, you probably are—you will almost certainly leave satisfied. Avengers: Endgame is, if nothing else, a masterpiece of Hollywood franchise administration. It is not a great movie, but it is often a rather good one, and its true genius lies in the deft and seamless way it manages and eventually fulfills more than a decade of superhero movie expectations.

And there are so very, very many expectations—more than 20 films’ worth, at this point. If you have watched every movie in the MCU just once, you have spent a little more than a full-time work week following the adventures of this gang of lovable super friends, which has sprawled and expanded to the point where it may sometimes feel like a spreadsheet would be handy.

That sprawl, and the need to at least acknowledge all those characters and stories and subplots, may explain the plot’s schematic, episodic nature. The story is self-referential in the extreme, less an end to a decade’s worth of movies than a summary and highlight reel of all that has come before. Narratively speaking, it sometimes plays more like a feature-length recap—a PowerPoint presentation intended to catch you up on the Avengers so far—than a conventionally structured story.

Like so much of today’s mass culture, Endgame is a movie that indulges in a fond nostalgia for its past. Yet unlike, say, Disney’s recent Star Wars sequels, it manages to be referential without being repetitive; this is a movie determined to end a chapter of a beloved story, not simply rehash and repeat it.

The individual scenes themselves, meanwhile, are executed with such verve and wit that I hardly cared whether or not they made much sense together. Endgame, like so many Marvel movies before it, works on the strength of strong characters and discrete moments, which have been honed and polished and workshopped into remarkably efficient delivery systems for pop pleasure. 

That goes for the inevitable climactic showdowns as well as the smaller bits. Indeed, for a superhero epic with a zillion-dollar budget, Endgame spends a surprising amount of its running time dwelling on the ordinary minutiae of extraordinary lives. Children and families play a significant role; Thor drinks beer and helps a friend play Fortnite (really); Captain America attends a low-key support group session; Hulk signs autographs for kids; and there’s a delightful mid-film disquisition on time travel movies and Back to the Future II. Even Thanos, the movie’s over-muscled purple villain, gets a brief moment to relax and pick giant berries from a sun-dappled countryside. No doubt he makes a delicious fruit smoothie.

Much of Marvel’s success over the last decade can be credited to its emphasis on crafting clearly defined, broadly appealing characters. These characters may not be complex in a deep, literary sense, but they are endlessly charming. You want to spend time with them, you want them to fight, and, in the end, you want them to win.

So when the fighting eventually begins in earnest, as it inevitably does, you find yourself thoroughly primed to root for victory. Endgame culminates in perhaps the grandest superhero battle ever put on screen, a spectacle that somehow manages to make effective and coherent use of nearly all of the main and supporting characters that have passed through the MCU over the past decade. It is the payoff to 11 years and 22 movies worth of build up—and somehow, it’s worth it.

I have sometimes been critical of Marvel’s formulaic approach to filmmaking, of the studio’s too-standardized action scenes and overreliance on weightless computer-generated effects; most of those criticisms still apply here.  

Yet I have also found more than a small amount of genuine enjoyment in the MCU over the years, in the franchise’s blend of jocular wit, lavish action bombast, and serialized twists and turns. The pleasures of a top-tier Marvel movie are the much the same as the pleasures of the Marvel comic books they are based on; the best ones have the capacity to inspire an innocent, childlike glee, or at least an exceptionally well-rendered, corporate-funded simulacra of the same. A good Marvel movie reminds my cynical adult self of the un-cynical excitement I once had coming home from school and finding a new issue of a comic book in the mail. Marvel offers escapism not only into its own imaginary world, but into the even more addictive nostalgia of one’s personal past.

Endgame did more than remind me of those pleasures. It amplified them, focused them, gave them an almost talismanic power, as if MCU mastermind Kevin Feige had somehow made the movie with the help of the Soul Stone. It was everything I wanted a Marvel movie to be.

And if there’s a problem with the movie, that’s it. Marvel, in combination with its owner, Disney, and its recent streaming partner, Netflix, has helped usher in a world in which the vast resources of our pop culture overlords—and especially those in Hollywood—are largely devoted to the precise and methodical setting and meeting of expectations. One of the principal objectives, in other words, is to never challenge or upset viewers, who are now understood as fan-stakeholders. The goal instead is to survey and train the desires of those viewers, and then find a way to consistently deliver. These properties may be owned by billion dollar corporations, but their use has been, at least partially, given over to the will and taste of the collective, with predictably bland results.

There is nothing wrong with this sort of cinematic comfort food, per se, and there are real benefits to a cinema that is more responsive to fandom—among them that it is often far more respectful to the original properties, because it understands their essential appeal. But a decade into Marvel’s reign, it’s clear there are downsides, too, most notably in the lack of novelty or surprise. A movie like Endgame is merely as good as I hoped it would be; truly great movies offer something viewers could never imagine on their own.

A year ago, when Endgame‘s perfectly tolerable but notably inferior predecessor, Infinity War, hit theaters, I wondered if Hollywood would settle for devoting the largest share of its resources to merely competent, pretty good, superhero blockbusters that aimed only to please crowds in familiar ways.

Endgame, sure to be one of the year’s most successful box-office draws, seems to answer that question with an enthusiastic yes: It might be the very best pretty good movie I have ever seen. The fan service in Endgame is exquisite and masterful, almost an art unto itself—but it’s still fan service. And even though I am personally a fan, and enjoy being served as such, some small part of me was still hoping for something more.

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You may have seen a wacky-sounding story about a bird trained by Brazilian drug traffickers to warn them when police were approaching. But this appears to be based off little more than the police’s version of events, and there are reasons to doubt their account.

Here’s what police say happened: As officers approached a house in northern Brazil on Monday, the parrot warned the home’s residents, saying: “Mamãe, polícia!” (Mom, police!). Officers had been doing rounds in the area, and it’s not clear whether they had particular suspicions about that house or just happened to be passing it. (The original news reports are in Portuguese, which I admittedly do not speak.)

“He must have been trained for this,” an officer involved in the operation said, according to The Guardian. “As soon as the police got close he started shouting.” The cops eventually entered the home and arrested two suspects they believe to be crack cocaine dealers. The bird, which they also took into custody, was reportedly given to a zoo, where it will be trained to fly for several months and then freed. Police eventually released video footage of officers finding what appeared to be bags of cocaine in the house.

It was a weird story, and press outlets were quick to parrot it. “Police seize ‘super obedient’ lookout parrot trained by Brazilian drug dealers,” The Guardian declares. Fox News’ headline is almost identical: “Brazilian police seize ‘super obedient’ parrot trained as lookout for drug dealers.”

“Parrot would warn drug dealers when cops came near,” says the New York Daily News. The U.K. Daily Mail went with “‘Mom, the cops are here!’ Narco parrot is set to do time—at a zoo in Brazil—after it alerted its owners to police before drugs bust.”

But here’s the thing: Ever since the bust, the bird hasn’t said a whole lot. By some accounts, it hasn’t talked at all. “The police said that when they arrived the parrot started shouting ‘the police arrived, the police arrived.’ But here in the [police station], he was quiet and silent,” Salma Barros, an attorney for the arrested suspects, tells the Brazilian newspaper Meio Norte.

“So far it hasn’t made a sound…completely silent,” a reporter for the Brazilian broadcaster Globo adds, according to The Guardian.

“Lots of police officers have come by and he’s said nothing,” Alexandre Clark, a local veterinarian, tells Globo.

It’s certainly possible the bird was trained to warn its owners of approaching police. This kind of thing has happened before. But it’s also possible(as my Reason colleague Scott Shackford pointed out on Twitter) that police made it all up in order to justify a drug raid after the fact. Without proof that the police are telling the truth, it’s at least worth considering the possibility they’re not.

Brazil, after all, has a long history of police abuse, in large part due to the country’s yearslong war on drugs. Take their word with a grain of salt.

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The Clean Slate Act, reintroduced this week by Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D–Del.), should help advance the conversation about what the government owes to victims of marijuana prohibition, who face long-lasting burdens even after they have completed their sentences. In that respect, Blunt Rochester’s bill goes further than the Marijuana Justice Act, which Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a presidential contender, reintroduced in February.

While Booker’s bill requires expungement of records related to “marijuana use or possession offense[s],” Blunt Rochester’s applies to “any Federal nonviolent offense involving marijuana.” That’s an important difference, because almost all simple possession cases are prosecuted at the state level, while federal cases typically involve manufacture or distribution.

The Clean Slate Act requires sentencing courts to issue record-sealing orders that take effect one year after “the covered individual fulfills each requirement of the sentence.” For cases that predate the law, the bill requires the attorney general to create a process for sealing records of nonviolent marijuana offenses.

Once sealed, the records would not be available to the general public, although they could still be accessed by courts and by law enforcement agencies “for investigatory or prosecutorial purposes.” Under the bill, people with federal marijuana convictions “shall not be required to disclose such information” and will not be subject to civil or federal penalties for failing to do so, except when testifying in court, when interviewed by law enforcement agencies in connection with new criminal investigations, or as part of background checks for law enforcement or national security jobs or other “high-risk, public trust” positions. Otherwise “a sealed record of a covered individual shall not be included in any background check conducted on the covered individual.”

In addition to requiring automatic sealing of marijuana records, the Clean Slate Act would create a process for sealing records related to other nonviolent federal offenses. People convicted of nonviolent offenses could petition a court to seal their records if at least one year has passed since they completed their sentences. The burden would be on the government to convince the judge that the public interest in keeping the records open outweigh the petitioner’s interest in having them sealed. People convicted of sexual offenses, more than two nonviolent felonies, or crimes “related to treason, terrorism, access and transmission of sensitive defense information, or other national security related convictions” would not be eligible.

That provision is also a big deal, because under current federal law there is no way to seal or expunge criminal records. Even a presidential pardon does not seal or expunge records, although it can restore certain rights, such as the right to own a gun.

The 2018 version of the Clean Slate Act attracted 20 cosponsors, all of them Democrats, and never got a hearing. This time around, Blunt Rochester has a Republican cosponsor, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, and Democrats are in control of the House, so the bill’s chances of advancing should be better.

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Almost six years after Edward Snowden revealed to the American public that the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting millions upon millions of telephone records without warrants or cause, the agency itself is calling for an end to the practice.

Officials loudly defended the practice at the time, insisting it all was necessary to keep America safe from terrorists. After a political fight, compromise legislation known as the USA Freedom Act allowed the data collection to continue but kept the information in the hands of the telecom companies and put restrictions on NSA agents’ ability to access Americans’ phone metadata (essentially everything except the actual content of their conversations).

But the NSA reportedly stopped trying to access these phone records earlier in the year, and now The Wall Street Journal reports that the agency says it doesn’t want the program any more. That’s a big deal, as the powers granted by the USA Freedom Act are up for renewal this year.

There are a few likely reasons why this is happening. First: Though officials kept insisting that the authority to collect these records was vital to tracking down terrorism, it has yet to be credited for catching any terrorists or stopping any terrorist acts. Second: The NSA has found itself collecting massive amounts of private data that it acknowledges it’s not allowed to have, forcing it to purge its records. Third: In the time since the NSA first launched this surveillance—back in 2001, when the PATRIOT Act was passed—smartphone users have shifted away from communicating through voice conversations and are more likely to use apps (particularly encrypted ones) to communicate via texting.

If the USA Freedom Act goes away, that doesn’t mean that the federal government will lose all its authority to snoop on Americans. Just last year, Congress and President Donald Trump renewed and expanded the feds’ powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to secretly surveil Americans for wholly domestic criminal matters.

Should the White House accept the NSA’s recommendation here and let the USA Freedom Act expire, that makes it all the more important that we pay attention to governments’ efforts across the world to force social media platforms and app makers to introduce backdoors to encryption or some other form of structural weakness that would allow government spies to access our private communications without our knowledge.

This fight is heating up now that Australia has passed expansive, intrusive legislation that essentially forces people who work at or run private communication platforms or apps to assist Australian officials in secretly bypassing encryption. Australia has an intelligence-sharing agreement with the United States, so anything it gathers could be passed along to the feds. Microsoft has warned that it may stop storing data in Australia entirely to keep officials there from forcing the company’s employees to give them access to private data.

One avenue of secret, unwarranted surveillance appears to be closing. But the struggle to protect our privacy from government snoops is far from over.

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I don’t myself have any expertise on the Census citizenship question case (which has mostly been litigated as an administrative law case), but I thought Prof. Blackman’s query was intriguing, and wanted to post it:

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, provided that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified two years earlier in 1868, provided another mechanism to prevent states from disenfranchising the freedmen: states that abridged the right to vote would lose representation in Congress.

Section 2 has three relevant clauses (emphasis added):

1. “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
2. “But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime,
3. “the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”

First, representation is allocated based on the “whole number of persons.” This provision expressly repudiated the three-fifths clause, which allocated representation based on “three fifths of all other Persons,” that is, slaves. Indeed, the census is now responsible for counting the “whole number of persons,” that is the “actual enumeration.”

Second, the Fourteenth Amendment asks if male citizens over the age of twenty-one are denied the right to vote in state or federal positions. If so, there is a penalty.

Third, the Fourteenth Amendment mandates that offending states will lose representation in Congress in “proportion” to “the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”

While the census counts the “whole number of persons” to establish the “actual enumeration,” Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment requires an additional piece of information: “the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.” (I will table for now whether subsequent amendments—the Nineteenth Amendment and Twenty-Sixth—impliedly modified that clause to also require a count of the number of female citizens over the age of eighteen.)

If this argument is correct, then the government would not only be justified in counting the number of citizens in a given state; Section 2 would require the government to have this information available, in the event that a state deprived males (and females) of the right to vote. This is an obligation: the representation “shall be reduced.” And Congress would not be able to enforce Section 2 without an additional enumeration based on citizenship. An estimate would not suffice.

Moreover, the number of citizens must be counted in advance. It would subvert the operation of Section 2 to wait until the next decennial census to count citizens. The waiting period could be as long as ten years. This information need not be collected in conjunction with the census. But it would be reasonable for the government to utilize the census process to collect this additional information. And once the government knows the total number of citizens, it can then discount minor citizens.

Professor Kurt Lash, who compiled an exhaustive two-volume set about the Reconstruction Amendments, tells me that certain documents in the historical record seem to anticipate using the census to enforce section 2. See The Reconstruction Amendments: Essential Documents” (2 vols) (Kurt T. Lash, ed.) (forthcoming U. Chicago Press). For example, in December 1865, Rep. Thaddeus Stevens discussed proposed text of what would become Section 2. He said, “A true census of the legal voters shall be taken at the same time with the regular census.” In May 1866, Senator Jacob Howard gave a famous speech introducing the Fourteenth Amendment. He stated that “where a State excludes any part of its male citizens from the elective franchise, it shall lose Representatives in proportion to the number so excluded.” Howard’s speech makes several references to the role that the census plays in enforcing this requirement.

This research is quite cursory. I did not see this issue briefed anywhere in the census litigation. I raise the question here, and welcome any feedback.

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Speaking at the National Press Club this week, White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow touted one of the promised benefits of the newly rewritten trade deal between the United States, Mexico, and Canada: more American jobs.

“They came out with about $68 billion increase in [gross domestic product] and I think seven or 800,000 jobs,” Kudlow said, referring to the U.S. International Trade Commission’s recent analysis of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). “I’ll call it a million just to round it up,” Kudlow added, according to Politico.

He should have rounded down.

Shortly after Kudlow finished speaking, the White House’s National Economic Council had to issue an embarrassing statement correcting the record. The trade commission’s analysis of the USMCA estimated that the new deal would create 170,000 jobs—not 700,000 or 800,000 or 1 million.

Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, and 170,000 new jobs are nothing to sneeze at. But the incident was another reminder of how reality is starting to puncture the Trump administration’s fantasy world in which tariffs are paid by other countries and “Trade Is Bad.” Roughly a year after Trump gleefully launched a trade war with the promise that it would be “good and easy to win,” it is now increasingly obvious that the president and many of his top economic advisors oversold the benefits and underestimated the costs of trade policies that have caused America to clash with not just Canada and Mexico, but China, Japan, Europe, and other major trading partners.

We may get some job growth if the USMCA, which rewrites the decades-old North American Free Trade Agreement, gets approved by Congress, but most studies of Trump’s other trade policies have found economic damage. Tariffs are draining $1.4 billion out of the U.S. economy every month, according to a comprehensive review published in March by a trio of economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. New jobs created in steel and aluminum manufacturing have come at a steep price, and the trade deficit that Trump vowed to reduce has continued growing.

Facing that mounting pile of evidence, the Trump administration is now quietly pivoting away from the “easy to win” framing. Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, tells Bloomberg that the economic pain caused by tariffs is the bitter pill that must be swallowed to improve the economy in the long run.

“We’ve had these very bad trade deals, and we are taking the medicine to improve them,” he says.

That’s a far cry from how the Trump administration represented the trade barriers when they were first implemented. In the weeks after Trump slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross made the rounds on cable news with a prop can of Campbell’s Soup, which he showed while laughing off concerns about how the tariffs would affect American businesses. If tariffs increased the price of steel by 25 percent, that would amount to “a tiny fraction of one penny” in the price of a can of soup, he argued.

Kudlow’s flub of the USMCA jobs numbers might have been an honest mistake, but Ross was deliberately trying to mislead viewers about basic economics. He wasn’t reassuring Americans that they would have to endure bitter medicine—he was promising, literally, that the economy would feel no pain.

What has the administration gotten in return for all that disinformation? Not a whole lot. The USMCA has been yet to be approved by Congress, and the fact that it delivers significantly less of an economic boost than the Trump administration originally promised—along with more protectionism and a sunset clause that provides an uncertain future for North American trade—may make it a difficult sell even to members of the president’s own party.

Meanwhile, this week has brought more indications that Trump’s bellicose trade stance has failed to improve America’s relationships with Europe and Japan. A new study found that tariffs on European-made steel and aluminum have had a smaller impact than expected on producers there, mostly because “they simply wind up paying the tariffs of 10 percent on aluminum and 25 percent on steel and passing the extra cost on to American consumers,” The New York Times reports.

And the Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador to Japan got egg on his face after complaining that Japan has not done more to lower import barriers for agricultural goods from the United States—even though the Asian nation has recently completed a new trade deal with several of its neighbors. The problem? That trade deal Japan signed was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). America had been a member of the TPP until Trump abruptly yanked the country out, but the 11 other countries continued negotiating and inked the deal last year.

In other words, America agriculture was offered better access to Japan, but Trump turned it down.

Finally, there’s the news this week that Trump’s first volley in the trade war—a tariff on imported washing machines, imposed in January 2018—backfired spectacularly. Not only had the tariff increased the price of washing machines for U.S. consumers, but American-made washers increased in price as well (despite not being subject to the tariff), as did clothes dryers (which were also not subject to the tariff).

The washing machine tariff is credited with raising a paltry $82 million for the U.S. Treasury and creating about 1,800 jobs—at a cost of $1.2 billion for consumers.

“Had the Trump admin simply left washing machines alone & raised taxes on consumers by $1.5 billion, it could have poured that money into a federally funded initiative creating nearly 50,000 jobs, or 27 times the number created by washing-machine tariffs.” (h/t @scottlincicome) pic.twitter.com/QsKXci6ew7

— Julie Laumann (@Otpor17) April 24, 2019

Is all this merely a long series of bitter pills that must be swallowed, or is it an indication of a failing set of trade policies? It’s unclear how much longer the administration will maintain the charade of pretending that tariffs are helping American businesses and consumers, but this week seemed to show that the mask is starting to slip.

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You can see the story about the lawsuit, together with a link to the complaint, at Courthouse News Service; here’s my analysis from when the ordinance was enacted (in February), which I still think is correct:

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The war in Yemen has taken a devastating toll. More than 85,000 babies and toddlers have starved to death, according to a 2018 Save the Children report. Another roughly 80,000 people—civilians and combatants—have died in the war. The United States is a party to this carnage, because it has aided Saudi Arabia’s military strikes against this small Middle Eastern country. Yet last week President Donald Trump vetoed a congressional resolution to end U.S. involvement in the war.

What has the United States done to relieve the humanitarian catastrophe that it has had a hand in causing? It has blocked Yemenis trying to escape to America.

The Trump administration has yet to accept any Yemeni refugees this year. It has banned nearly all permanent immigration from the country, including for immediate family members of U.S. citizens, and it has stopped issuing most temporary visas. For good measure, last year it decided to make many Yemenis subject to deportation when their temporary visas expire by withholding Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from them.

The United Nations Group of Regional and International Eminent Experts on Yemen has concluded that the “coalition air strikes have caused most direct civilian casualties” in Yemen and “hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats and even medical facilities.” A 2018 Human Rights Watch report warns U.S. officials that they could face “legal liability for war crimes” if they continue indiscriminate support for the Saudi campaign, through refueling jets, providing military supplies, and other means.

Even as the war crimes proceed, the United States has resettled no refugees since January 1, 2019. In 2018, the State Department resettled two Yemeni refugees. While we might expect this from the notoriously anti-immigrant Trump administration, President Barack Obama was hardly better, resettling just 42 Yemenis from 2015 to 2016.

Moreover, Trump’s travel ban has indefinitely suspended almost all legal immigration from Yemen, except in very exceptional cases.

Because of America’s family-focused immigration system, the ban disproportionately affects immediate Yemeni relatives of U.S. citizens. As of January 2019, the administration had already barred more than 1,700 American citizens—American citizens—from bringing over their Yemeni spouses and minor children. About 3,500 Yemeni kids are thus being separated from their American parents. (Apparently, the administration’s family separation policy isn’t limited to migrants at the Mexican border.) Thousands of parents of adult U.S. citizens are also being denied green cards that could save their lives.

In 2015, then-Rep. Steve Russell (R–Okla.) related the story about a Syrian interpreter who had served with him in Iraq and become a U.S. citizen. The interpeter’s mother died in that country’s civil war while awaiting a visa. There must be countless tragedies just like this one that we don’t hear about; this one only received attention because it personally affected a congressman.

The travel ban also prevents Yemenis from receiving temporary visas for business or tourism purposes. They thus cannot request asylum, because that requires being on American soil.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has refused to redesignate Yemen for TPS. This would provide temporary legal status and work authorization to people holding expiring or expired visas if going home would mean going to disaster zones. Haitians received TPS, for example, after a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010.

Yemen has been hit by a man-made disaster of even greater proportions. The Obama administration protected Yemenis who arrived during its time in office, making its final redesignation in January 2019. Yet the Trump administration has declined to allow Yemenis who have entered since then to apply for TPS, leaving them vulnerable to deportations to the war zone.

The United States doesn’t have an obligation to put out fires everywhere in the world. But it shouldn’t pour gas on them, as it has in Yemen by supporting the Saudi assaults. And it certainly shouldn’t then slam shut the fire escapes, leaving the residents to burn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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