.. we've read so many places it was illegal it had to be blocked ..
By DAVID J. BIERJAN. 27, 2017
President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that purports to bar for at least 90 days almost all permanent immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Syria and Iraq, and asserts the power to extend the ban indefinitely.
But the order is illegal. More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin.
Mr. Trump appears to want to reinstate a new type of Asiatic Barred Zone by executive order, but there is just one problem: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 banned .. http://library.uwb.edu/Static/USimmigration/1965_immigration_and_nationality_act.html .. all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin, replacing the old prejudicial system and giving each country an equal shot at the quotas. In signing the new law, President Lyndon B. Johnson said .. http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-baines-johnson/timeline/lbj-on-immigration .. that “the harsh injustice” of the national-origins quota system had been “abolished.”
Protesters near the White House on Wednesday. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump asserts that he still has the power to discriminate, pointing to a 1952 law .. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182 .. that allows the president the ability to “suspend the entry” of “any class of aliens” that he finds are detrimental to the interest of the United States.
But the president ignores the fact that Congress then restricted this power in 1965, stating .. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1152 .. plainly that no person could be “discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence.” The only exceptions are those provided for by Congress (such as the preference for Cuban asylum seekers).
When Congress passed the 1965 law, it wished to protect not just immigrants, but also American citizens, who should have the right to sponsor their family members or to marry a foreign-born spouse without being subject to pointless discrimination.
Mr. Trump may want to revive discrimination based on national origin by asserting a distinction between “the issuance of a visa” and the “entry” of the immigrant. But this is nonsense. Immigrants cannot legally .. https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-processes-and-procedures/green-card-eligibility .. be issued a visa if they are barred from entry. Thus, all orders under the 1952 law apply equally to entry and visa issuance, as his executive order acknowledges.
Note that the discrimination ban applies only to immigrants. Legally speaking, immigrants are those who are given permanent United States residency. By contrast, temporary visitors like guest workers, students and tourists, as well as refugees, could still be barred. The 1965 law does not ban discrimination based on religion — which was .. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration .. Mr. Trump’s original proposal.
While courts rarely interfere in immigration matters, they have affirmed the discrimination ban. In the 1990s, for example, the government created a policy that required Vietnamese who had fled to Hong Kong to return to Vietnam if they wanted to apply for United States immigrant visas, while it allowed applicants from other countries to apply for visas wherever they wanted. A federal appeals court blocked .. http://openjurist.org/45/f3d/469/legal-assistance-for-vietnamese-asylum-seekers-v-department-of-state-bureau-of-consular-affairs .. the policy.
The government in that case did not even bother arguing that the 1952 law permitted discrimination. The court rejected its defense that a “rational link” with a temporary foreign policy measure could justify ignoring the law — an argument the Trump administration is sure to make. The court wrote, “We cannot rewrite a statutory provision which by its own terms provides no exceptions or qualifications.”
To resolve this case, Congress amended the law in 1996 to state .. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1152 .. that “procedures” and “locations” for processing immigration applications cannot count as discrimination. While there is plenty of room for executive mischief there, the amendment made clear that Congress still wanted the discrimination ban to hold some force. A blanket immigration prohibition on a nationality by the president would still be illegal.
Even if courts do find wiggle room here, discretion can be taken too far. If Mr. Trump can legally ban an entire region of the world, he would render Congress’s vision of unbiased legal immigration a dead letter. An appeals court stopped .. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1668197-hanen-opinion.html .. President Barack Obama’s executive actions to spare millions of undocumented immigrants from deportations for the similar reason that he was circumventing Congress. Some discretion? Sure. Discretion to rewrite the law? Not in America’s constitutional system.
David J. Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge blocked part of President Trump’s executive order on immigration on Saturday evening, ordering that refugees and others trapped at airports across the United States should not be sent back to their home countries. But the judge stopped short of letting them into the country or issuing a broader ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s actions.
[...]
“We’ve gotten reports of people being detained all over the country,” said Becca Heller, the director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’re literally pouring in by the minute.”
There were numerous reports of students attending American universities who were blocked from returning to the United States from visits abroad. One student said in a Twitter post that he would be unable to study at Yale. Another who attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was refused permission to board a plane. A Sudanese graduate student at Stanford University was blocked for hours from entering the country.
Donald Trump hails immigration ban as passengers turned back from US-bound flights
Updated about an hour ago
VIDEO
[...]
"It's working out very nicely. You see it at the airports, you see it all over," Mr Trump said, after denying the immigration halt was a Muslim ban.
[...]
Mr Trudeau tweeted: "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada".
[...]
"I never thought something like this would happen in America," said Mohammad Hossein Ziya, 33, who came to the US in 2011 after being forced to leave Iran for his political activities.
Mr Ziya, who lives in Virginia, has a green card and planned to travel to Dubai next week to see his elderly father.
"I can't go back to Iran, and it's possible I won't be able to return here, a place that is like my second country," he said.
Saleh Taghvaeian, 36, who teaches agricultural water management at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, said he feared his wife will not be able to return from Iran after a visit.
"In Iran they're not being allowed to get on the airplane," he said.
Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Already Harming American Science
"A Federal Judge Just Issued A Stay Against Donald Trump's "Muslim Ban""
Iranian scientists have been a major boon to everything from Mars exploration to Ebola-fighting to advanced mathematics.
Protesters at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Patrick Fallon / Reuters
Ed Yong Jan 29, 2017
Samira Asgari had been preparing for the trip for months. She had just earned her Ph.D. from a Swiss university and was ready to start a postdoctoral fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, studying how a person’s genes affect our response to tuberculosis. But on Saturday morning, at Frankfurt Airport, she was intercepted by an American consulate, who stopped her from boarding her plane to Boston. “He said that it’s the U.S. government who issues the visa, and if they change their mind, the visa isn’t valid,” she says.
They had indeed changed their mind. On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order .. https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/01/trump-immigration-order-muslims/514844/ .. banning citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries—Iraq, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen—from entering America under any visa, for at least 120 days. Asgari, who is Iranian, was sent back to Switzerland. Having given up her apartment in anticipation of the move, she has nowhere to stay. To make matters worse, her luggage is missing.
“The shock wore off yesterday evening. Now there’s just extreme sadness, and a very strong feeling that I’ve been discriminated against,” she says. “Even in Iran, you have this picture of America as a dreamland. But for people like me, this isn’t the America we imagined.”
For years, Iran has led the U.S. State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, and so it is not unusual that Iranian scientists would face extra scrutiny from security officials, especially given concerns about nuclear proliferation in Iran. However, like the other countries affected by the ban, no immigrants from Iran .. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/an-immigration-order-as-stupid-as-it-is-counterproductive/514847/ .. have carried out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and the end of 2015. And given the blanket nature of the ban, it affects many scientists who have nothing to do with nuclear research.
Asgari is only one of hundreds of scientists who have been affected by Trump’s .. https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/01/trump-immigration-order-muslims/514844/ .. ban, which also applies at least originally]to green-card holders who have permanent residence in the U.S., but have gone overseas for professional or personal reasons. That includes Ali Abdi, an Iranian Ph.D. student studying anthropology at Yale University. A few hours after taking part in the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., he left the U.S. to do ethnographic research in Afghanistan. He’s now stuck in Dubai, awaiting a visa from the Afghan consulate. If that falls through, he doubts he can return to the U.S. despite having a green card, and he rules out a return to Iran because of his record of civil-rights activism. “Let see how things unfold in the U.S.,” he says. “I am sure people around the globe will resist.”
“Many talented friends of mine can’t come back to finish their degrees, simply because they went back to their hometowns to visit their parents,” says Saeed Mehraban, an Iranian Ph.D. student who is working on quantum computing at MIT, and is currently in Austin visiting his advisor .. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3167 . “I’m just taking a domestic flight from Texas to Boston, and I’m still scared they may do me harm.”
“Professional and personal lives are being destroyed,” says Josh Plotkin .. http://mathbio.sas.upenn.edu/ .. from the University of Pennsylvania. One of his postdoctoral fellows—an Iranian, and a legal permanent resident of the U.S.—was traveling abroad when Trump’s order was signed. “They are now separated from their spouse, and likely unable to attend faculty job interviews that are scheduled in the coming weeks. This postdoc was working on new ways to treat HIV/AIDS.”
Others who are in the country are effectively trapped. They .. https://twitter.com/moeinch/status/825211900325539840 .. can’t leave .. https://twitter.com/J__qu/status/825161427732353025 , lest they be denied re-entry. Indeed, many are being told to stay put by their institutions. On Friday afternoon, MIT sent an email to its international scholars advising them to “consider postponing any travel outside of the U.S.” until the executive orders had been clarified. Harvard University sent a similar email late Saturday, adding that since “the executive order also contemplates that additional countries could be added to the banned list … all foreign nationals should carefully assess whether it is worth the risk to travel outside the country.”
International travel is a major and inescapable part of modern science. Many scientists have foreign collaborators, which “substantially increases the pace of discovery and ideas,” says Plotkin. Researchers are expected to attend conferences abroad to share their work. Some have no choice but to fly to visit remote field sites, or unique paleontological digs, or sites of disease outbreaks, or one-of-a-kind facilities like telescopes and observatories.
For many Iranian students in the U.S., restrictions were already harsh. “When we get a visa, it’s usually a single-entry visa,” says Farshad Nasiri, who is studying for a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at George Washington University. “If I were to leave the States and visit my family, I’d have to reapply for a visa and go through the whole process. I didn’t want to risk it so, for four years, I haven’t travelled. Even before Trump, it was already pretty rough; this will make it even more difficult.”
The new policies could also isolate American institutions from major sources of foreign talent. “The upshot is that, until further notice, science departments at American universities can no longer recruit Ph.D. students from Iran—a country that … has long been the source of some of our best talent,” wrote Scott Aronson .. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3167 .. (Mehraban’s supervisor), on his personal blog. “This will directly affect this year’s recruiting season, which is just now getting underway.”
Every scientist whom I contacted for this story had tales of colleagues who left and are being denied re-entry, friends who were applying for jobs in the U.S. and now reconsidering, departments that have lost prospective hires, international collaborators who were planning to travel to the U.S. for research but have been denied entry, and foreign academics who are planning to boycott American conferences. “It’s going to destabilize a lot of labs, faculty recruitments, contributions from conferences,” says Houra Merrikh from the University of Washington. “This will have a big impact at all levels in science.”
Merrikh is an immigrant herself. When she was three, her family fled the Iran-Iraq war and settled in Turkey. At 16, she moved to Texas with a green card, no family, and no money; she worked through several poor-paying jobs so she could pay for a college spot. Now a naturalized citizen of 14 years and a professor of microbiology, she studies the evolution of infectious microbes.
Of the seven countries singled out by Trump’s order, Iran has made especially rich contributions to American science, sending a steady stream of intellectual power westwards. “When people think of Iran, I think they think of Saudi Arabia or something, and it’s just a completely different place,” says Merrikh. “The culture emphasizes the importance of the sciences, and women are very much encouraged to be educated.”
“A very significant segment of the contributions to science comes from people born outside the country,” including 30 percent of American-based Nobel laureates .. http://www.vilcek.org/news/current-news/immigrant-scientists-lead-the-way-in-stem.html , says Jan Vilcek from New York University School of Medicine. An immigrant himself, Vilcek set up a foundation that awards annual prizes .. http://www.vilcek.org/prizes/overview.html .. to immigrants who have made extraordinary contributions to American society, in biomedical science and other fields. Two such prizes recently went to Pardis Sabeti and Houra Merrikh. “They represent the future of science in this country,” says Vilcek. “They show that by preventing people from Iran from coming to this country, we’re hurting our chances to excel in science. And contributions in science translate to economic gains.”
[.. bad business moves, no surprise given the president's business bankruptcy career ..]
In 2015, after Iran reached a deal about its nuclear program with the U.S. (and five other world powers), many scientists from both nations took the chance .. https://www.aaas.org/news/panel-experts-encourages-scientific-collaboration-iran .. to build even stronger collaborations. “I felt really optimistic,” says Maryam Ghadiri, a Ph.D. student at Purdue with an interest in science diplomacy. “A lot of effort, time, and expertise was spent bringing the two countries together. What the new administration did has undermined all of that.”
Trump’s executive order may stop the next Merrikhs, Mirzakhanis, Sabetis, and Naderis from realizing their ambitions—in America, at least. Take Azi Fattahi, an Iranian astrophysicist who studies the evolution of galaxies, and is working on a Ph.D. at the University of Victoria. A few days ago, she was set to give two talks at American universities, as she was mulling a job offer from the University of Michigan, and she had learned that MIT had shortlisted her for a postdoc position. All of those options have since evaporated. “There is excellent research being done in the U.S. but I won’t have the opportunity to even think about there now,” she says. “I have to go to Europe.”
“I came to America to do science, and I still have no other intention,” says Mehraban. “I have had many great friends and advisors, with whom I have been talking about life, religion, freedom and the foundations of the universe. I love the people of America. I don’t even hate Mr. Trump. I think he would feel differently if we have a cup of coffee sometime.”
.. the president's popularity rating reached a record low after 8 dragon-fired days .. surely this administration could do too much damage to the reputation and the institutional structure of the USA if it operates as is for another 4 years ..
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