☠️⚰️ THEIR VOICES DROWNED OUT BY THE NOISE OF WAR, COVID, SUPPLY CHAIN PROBLEMS, & INFLATION, MILLIONS FACE STARVATION!

Tracy Wilkinson
Tracy Wilkinson
Foreign Correspondent
LA Times
PHOT: LATimes.com

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=20ee182f-524e-4e7d-8158-51345f6fd59e

Tracy Wilkinson reports in the LA Times:

By Tracy Wilkinson

WASHINGTON — The scenes witnessed by journalists and humanitarian workers in recent months have been striking: In Sudan, swollen-bellied babies are looking for anything to eat. In Yemen, where warring parties have blocked humanitarian aid, hollow-eyed children and their mothers languish on the brink of death from starvation. In Ukraine, the elderly are collecting rancid rain runoff for drinking water.

Malnourishment and hunger were big problems even before Russia invaded Ukraine in February and cut off Europe’s breadbasket from its markets, sparking a flurry of dire warnings about the world’s food supplies. Dozens of countries across the globe are already suffering from devastating food shortages, so much so that the number of people facing starvation more than doubled in just the last two years, to 345 million, according to United Nations figures.

The causes are myriad: drought and flooding, and the interruption of supply chains triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in China. An estimated 20 wars or conflicts — the latest in Ukraine — have also seriously disrupted access to food and water.

“The current food security challenge that we’re facing [is] due to these three Cs: climate, COVID and conflict,” said Ramin Toloui, assistant secretary of State for economic affairs, one of several Biden administration officials tasked to food-security issues.

The bleak situation drew the attention of powerful diplomats Friday when U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the foreign ministers of six other of the world’s largest economies met in Germany to map out plans for easing global food shortages. Few observers expect real solutions to emerge but hope the summit will highlight the crisis and boost funding for anti-hunger efforts.

The Biden administration has committed about $8.5 billion to emergency food assistance and related programs, focusing initially on the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Lebanon and Haiti, Blinken said.

“We hear all these numbers; we’ve all cited numbers of this growing food insecurity,” Blinken said in Berlin. “But what we know is this: We know that those numbers are people, real people, real lives, real livelihoods, mothers, fathers, children. … As human beings, all of us have to be seized with this.”

The U.N.’s World Food Program calculates that eight of the 10 largest food crises worldwide are being primarily driven by conflict — in Yemen, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Such wars force people from their homes into long desperate treks for safety. They devastate farms and wreak havoc on food distribution systems.

In Latin America, food scarcity is also driving tens of thousands of people to abandon parched or hurricane-leveled farms and migrate to the United States.

These were the disasters already in motion when Russia invaded Ukraine. Now, the U.N. says the Russian blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports could lead 40 million more people to go hungry.

. . . .

Caitlin Welsh, a veteran expert in global food security who heads that program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said hunger and famine have consequences for both health and politics.

Hungry people can be angry people, and the rising price of food or fuel have led to coups throughout history. The health effects of going hungry can be far-reaching and insidious, Welsh said.

“The sudden elevation in prices [of foodstuffs like bread] can make people shift from more nutritious food to items of lower nutrition,” she said. And for pregnant women and young children, that can cause lifelong disabilities, Welsh said.

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Read Tracy’s complete article at the link.

War is bad, particularly when those who needlessly start them for their own amusement, ego, and nationalistic jingoism escape accountability. See, e.g., V. Putin.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-27-22

DEFEATED U.S. REGIME’S MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE DISMAYS ALLIES, STRENGTHENS IRAN, LEAVES BIDEN-HARRIS WITH FOREIGN POLICY MESS THAT MIGHT NOT BE QUICKLY SOLVED — Misgovernance, Stupidity, Corruption Have Lasting Consequences For National Security! — Kakistocracy Is Bad!☠️🤡🤮⚰️👎🏻

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-sanctions-on-iran-faltering/2020/11/15/5ce29fbe-22c1-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html

From WashPost:

By Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet

November 15 at 6:49 PM ET

Last week, as the White House digested news of a defeat at the polls, Trump administration officials were greeted with reports of troubling setbacks on two fronts in the country’s long-simmering conflict with Iran.

First came a leaked U.N. document showing yet another sharp rise in Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. Then, satellites tracked an Iranian oil tanker — the fourth in recent weeks — sailing toward the Persian Gulf after delivering Iranian petroleum products to Venezuela.

The first item was further proof of Iran’s progress in amassing the fissile fuel used to make nuclear energy and, potentially, nuclear bombs. The second revealed gaping holes in President Trump’s strategy for stopping that advance. Over the summer, the administration made a show of seizing cargo from several other tankers at sea in a bid to deter Iran from trying to sell its oil abroad. Yet Iran’s oil trade, like its nuclear fuel output, is on the rise again.

The Trump administration is entering its final months with a flurry of new sanctions intended to squeeze Iran economically. But by nearly every measure, the efforts appear to be faltering. The tankers that arrived in Venezuela in recent weeks are part of a flotilla of ships that analysts say is now quietly moving a million barrels of discounted Iranian oil and gas a day to eager customers from the Middle East to South America to Asia, including China.

The volume represents a more than tenfold increase since the spring, analysts say, and signals what experts see as a significant weakening of the “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed by the Trump administration since it withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.

Other countries, many of them scornful of Trump’s unilateralism on Iran, are showing increasing reluctance to enforce the restrictions, even as Iran embarks on a new expansion of its uranium stockpile, according to industry analysts and intelligence officials, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive assessments.

[Trump imposes more sanctions and sells off Iranian oil]

As a result, Trump is widely expected to leave President-elect Joe Biden with a crisis that is worse, by nearly every measure, than when he was elected four years ago: an Iranian government that is blowing past limits on its nuclear program, while Washington’s diplomatic and economic leverage steadily declines.

“The Tehran regime has met ‘maximum pressure’ with its own pressure,” said Robert Litwak, senior vice president of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of “Managing Nuclear Risks,” a book on countering proliferation threats. Far from halting Iran’s nuclear advances, Litwak said, the administration’s policies have “diplomatically isolated the United States, not Iran.”

The weakening of sanctions pressure gives Iran more time to deal with its still formidable economic challenges, without losing a step in its bid to re-create uranium assets it had given up under the terms of the nuclear accord, the intelligence officials and industry experts said. Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported to member states in a confidential document that Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium has swollen to nearly 8,000 pounds, more than 12 times the limit set by the 2015 nuclear deal. Iranian officials justify the breach by noting that it was Washington, not Tehran, that walked away from the agreement.

Even among staunch U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, dismay over the Trump approach has cooled support for the kind of broadly enforced economic boycott that might push Iran to change its behavior, analysts said.

“Many eyes may be averted now” when it comes to Iranian cheating on sanctions, said Eric Lee, an energy strategist with Citigroup in New York. “Many countries are frustrated with U.S. unilateralism, even those with well-placed misgivings about Iran.”

. . . .

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Read the full article at the link.

I have no doubt that President Joe Biden will return competence to the State Department. But, repairing the mess left by the unholy Trump/Pompeo clown show won’t happen overnight. Respect and trust are built up over time. Once lost, they are not quickly regained. 

For example, any immigration/human rights expert could tell you how once-respected State Department Country Reports on Human Rights have gone from being the “international gold standard” to being “hackish” far right political screeds not worth the paper they are written on. This, in turn, has forced private organizations and NGOs to spend time, effort, and resources doing the State Department’s job. Meanwhile, the loss of competence and expertise at EOIR and the indifference of many Article III Judges means that even with the heroic efforts of of the private sector, justice for asylum seekers is more of “crap shoot” than a fundamentally fair legal process!

Kakistocracy has consequences!🤮🤡Seldom happy ones.💩☠️⚰️

 

PWS

11-15-20

UPDATE: SCARY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: “Malicious Incompetent” Mike Pompeo Now Operating @ “Peak Incompetence” As He Tries To Totally Screw America In The Waning Days Of the Clown Show!

Jason Rezaian @ WashPost:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/16/mike-pompeos-legacy-incompetence-peaked-with-his-failed-iran-policy/

 

GRETA THUNBERG: AN INSPIRATIONAL LEADER FOR OUR TIMES & THE FUTURE: “She is committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to try to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns.”

Carolyn Korman
Carolyn Korman
Staff Writer
The New Yorker

Carolyn Kormann writes in The New Yorker:

News Desk

The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg is the Perfect Antidote to Donald Trump

She is committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to try to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns.

On December 3rd, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist from Sweden, completed her second transatlantic voyage, by almost entirely emissions-free sailboats, in the span of four months. Her small figure, dressed in black, stood, waving, on the bow of a catamaran, as it approached the port of Lisbon. Hundreds of people, standing onshore, cheered, welcoming her back to Europe. “I’m not travelling like this because I want everyone to do so,” she told reporters after walking off the boat onto dry land. “I’m doing this to send a message that it is impossible to live sustainably today, and that needs to change.” The scene felt both ancient and precisely of this moment, like Thunberg herself, who writes regularly in a paper journal but has mastered social-media virality, who can seem ageless and androgynous (the fierce stare) while also strikingly young and girlish (the braids), who acts with an otherworldly grace while delivering an outraged message grounded in the latest, best climate science. Her lightning-strike emergence as the planet’s hero, her capacity to inspire students around the world—all in the span of little more than a year—can seem like a prophesied story, an epic poem, a fable. Margaret Atwood (and others, including myself) have compared her to Joan of Arc—if the teen-age medieval warrior, who was burned at the stake in part for impersonating a man, had been inspired by scientific reports instead of divine voices and visions of angels. Centuries from now, we hope, people will live in a thriving, equitable civilization and tell Thunberg’s tale, too.

But it is, as Thunberg says repeatedly, precisely what we do during this century that will determine the fate of those future centuries, and what we do during the next decade that will determine the climate for the nearly two billion children alive today. They are the ones Thunberg represents, whom she is fighting for, and whom she has mobilized, since August, 2018, when she first sat outside the Swedish Parliament with a simple handwritten sign that read, in black letters, “SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET.” Hundreds of thousands of students (and, gradually, their parents), in cities around the world, have followed her lead, striking from school and marching in the streets to protest for climate action. “You say you love your children above all else,” she said in her first big address, at last December’s United Nations climate talks. “And yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

From Lisbon, Thunberg took a train to Madrid, where leaders from around the world were gathering for another round—the twenty-fifth since 1995—of U.N. climate negotiations (known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP25). The point of this year’s talks was for countries to lay the groundwork for ambitious new targets in the reduction of their greenhouse-gas emissions. By the end of 2020, according to the terms of the Paris Agreement, countries are to commit to new nationally determined contributions (N.D.C.s, in U.N.-speak) that reflect the scale of global decarbonization necessary to limit global heating to two degrees Celsius. (The current pool of N.D.C.s, which many countries are not even meeting, would lead to more than three degrees warming by century’s end.) A related issue at the talks has involved carbon markets—detailed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement—in which one country can pay another country for its emissions reductions (the equivalent of buying a carbon credit) and then count those reductions towards its own N.D.C. Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India have, reportedly, all been blocking text that would provide strong regulations of these kinds of markets and accounting mechanisms. Though the final text of this year’s agreement is due today, the deliberations will likely continue at least until Saturday.

Thunberg, meanwhile, has increasingly referred, in mathematical detail, to carbon budgets, or the amount of carbon dioxide that we have left to emit into the atmosphere if we want to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In her speech to world leaders in Madrid, on Tuesday, she referred her audiences to page 108, chapter 2, of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and she said that, if we are to have a sixty-seven per cent chance of achieving that goal, we had, as of the first of January, 2018, four-hundred-and-twenty gigatons of carbon dioxide left in our carbon budget. That number is now much lower, considering that we emit approximately forty-two gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. This means that we have roughly eight years left to burn fossil fuels at current levels before our budget is empty. For all the efforts underway to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they are nowhere near enough. Global emissions again hit a record high in 2019. As Thunberg also said, in the same speech, “The biggest danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and C.E.O.s are making it look like real action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative P.R.”

On Wednesday, Time named Thunberg the magazine’s Person of the Year. Donald Trump, who is famously obsessed with being on the cover of Time, could not stand it. He has campaigned on fossil-fuel expansion, has betrayed on numerous occasions that he does not understand what climate change is, and, on November 4th, he officially began proceedings to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. (Every other country in the world remains a signatory to the pact.) On Thursday, in response to Thunberg’s news, he tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Thunberg, as always, took the President’s mockery in stride, changing her Twitter bio, minutes later, to “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”

This is not the first time that Thunberg has one-upped Trump’s mocking tweets. In September, she gave a historic speech with the kind of rhetorical vigor that exemplifies her gifts as an orator. “This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!” Later, Trump retweeted a video clip of her remarks, adding, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” The same day, Thunberg put the exact words in her Twitter bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

Thunberg is Trump’s perfect foil. She is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns so that we avert climate change’s deadliest impacts and destabilizing tipping points. Thunberg is devoted to learning, writing, and understanding the world around her. She constantly lifts up other young climate leaders—especially those from indigenous and frontline communities—and begs reporters to focus on them, not her. (On Monday, she and Germany’s most prominent youth activist, Luisa Neubauer, hosted a press conference with young leaders from the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Russia, and Uganda.) She is a gifted public speaker, not because she stirs up chaos and hate through incoherent rants, but because she speaks elegantly and intelligently, in logical, pithy, unmuddied sentences. Her rhetorical gifts are, perhaps, all the more remarkable considering that, when she was younger, she fell into a major depression concerning climate change and stopped speaking altogether for months. As she said at the start of her speech on Tuesday, “A year and a half ago, I didn’t speak to anyone unless I really had to. But then I found a reason to speak.”

Carolyn Kormann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Read more.

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Wow! No wonder Trump and his cronies are so scared of her!

PWS

12-14-19

DON KERWIN @ CMS: The Darkness Of Trump’s White Nationalist Xenophobia Descends Over Ronald Reagan’s “City On The Hill!”

Donald M. Kerwin
Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

https://cmsny.org/publications/assault-on-refugee-protection-kerwin-9-30-19/

The Darkening City on the Hill: The Trump Administration Heightens Its Assault on Refugee Protection

NEW ESSAY | CMS Executive Director Donald Kerwin

In 2018, the global population of forcibly displaced persons reached a record 70.8 million, including 25.9 million refugees and 3.5 million asylum-seekers. The United States led the response to past refugee crises of a similar magnitude, as, for example, in the aftermath of World War II and the Vietnam conflict. Yet although the United States remains the largest donor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,[1] the Trump administration has sought to steer the country in a different direction. The United States now seems poised to become the global leader in refugee responsibility shunning and of exclusionary nationalist states, whose leaders the president regularly praises, fetes and seems to emulate.  The administration’s recent actions have been particularly damaging to the nation’s identity, to the millions of forcibly displaced in search of safety and a permanent home, and to the ethic of responsibility sharing set forth in the Global Compact on Refugees, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly last December.

On September 26, 2019, the White House released two long-anticipated decrees. Its Executive Order on Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement requires that both states and localities consent to the resettlement of refugees in a particular locality.  If either refuses to consent, the Order provides that “refugees should not be resettled within that State or locality,” except in very narrow circumstances that include prior notification of the president. States could bar refugee resettlement, for example, in cities that have been renewed by refugees and that badly want and need them. The Order purports to ensure that “refugees are resettled in communities that are eager and equipped to support their successful integration into American society and the labor force.”  Yet significant coordination already occurs, and it can be strengthened without creating a state and local veto that would hamstring the federal government’s administration of this program. For many years, media sources and politicians, including the president, have railed against the refugee program’s putative insecurity and the burdens it imposes on communities. If implemented, the Order would further politicize refugee protection and diminish resettlement opportunities. Evisceration of the refugee program (not integration) seems to be the Order’s purpose, and would certainly be its result.

In addition, the Order seems to require states and localities to take an affirmative step – as part of a yet-determined process – to consent to refugee placement.  In other words, they must “opt in” to the program. If they do not, then the federal government would deem the jurisdiction unacceptable for resettlement. In these circumstances, the enhanced federal consultation with states and localities and their “greater involvement in the process” of refugee placement would consist of nothing at all.

Also on September 26, the administration released the President’s annual Report to Congress on Proposed Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year (FY) 2020. This document announced the administration’s decision to limit refugee admissions to 18,000 in FY 2020, the lowest number in the 40-year history of the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), lower even that the two years following the 9/11 attacks.[2]  The Refugee Council USA explained the implications of this decision as follows:

This decision is unprecedented, cruel, and contrary to American humanitarian values and strategic interests. Historically, the United States has been the global leader on refugee resettlement, setting an average refugee admissions goal of 95,000 people annually. To slam the door on persecuted people while the number of refugees displaced globally continues to rise to historic levels upends decades of bipartisan tradition. It also abandons thousands of refugees in need of resettlement, leaving them in precarious, often life-threatening situations.

The Refugee Council USA also pointed out that the forthcoming Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for FY 2020 – which constitutes formal notice of the refugee ceiling – will further dismantle “the community-based infrastructure in the US, which has long welcomed the most in-need refugees and provided them the opportunity to rebuild their lives in safety.”  This infrastructure – which has been decades in the making – will take years to rebuild.

The administration’s rationale for historically low admissions are specious. The Report to Congress makes the obvious point that it would be more impactful to “resolve” refugee-producing conditions, than to resettle large numbers of refugees. Yet there is no reason why the United States cannot administer a robust resettlement program and address the causes of displacement through diplomacy. These two strategies complement each other. Resettlement is typically available for a relatively small number of particularly vulnerable refugees. UNHCR reports that 68 percent of its refugee submissions for 2018 “were for survivors of violence and torture, those with legal and physical protection needs, and particularly vulnerable women and girls. Just over half of all resettlement submissions concerned children.”

Moreover, the Trump administration has failed to wield US “[d]iplomatic tools – for example, foreign assistance, economic and political engagement, and alliance-building” to resolve refugee-producing conditions or to create the conditions that would allow refugees to return home safely and voluntarily. To the contrary, it has been consistently dismissive of these tools and has failed to create any new legal avenues for desperate persons to migrate. Instead, it has cut foreign aid to states that have generated the largest numbers of asylum-seekers in recent years, and it terminated the Obama-era Central American Minors program, which allowed qualifying children from Central America’s Northern Triangle states to enter the United States legally as refugees or parolees in order to join their legally present parents.

The Report to Congress also lauds the US commitment to asylum and to other protection programs, which it argues make the United States “the most compassionate and generous nation in history.”  Yet the administration has systematically sought to weaken the US asylum system and its “temporary and permanent protection” programs for “victims of trafficking, humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, and special immigrant juvenile status.”

In particular, it has sought to rescind Temporary Protected Status for the overwhelming majority of its beneficiaries. It has used the cruelty of family separation and detention to deter asylum-seekers from coming. It has reduced due process protections by expanding the expedited removal process. It has also corrupted the expedited removal process by allowing Border Patrol agents – who lack sufficient training in refugee protection and who tend to be deeply suspicious of asylum claims – to assume the role of Asylum Officers and to determine whether asylum-seekers possess a “credible fear” and thus can pursue their claims. It has adopted numerous strategies to prevent and deter asylum-seekers from reaching US territory such as criminally prosecuting and detaining them, and limiting access to the system, including through interception in transit, crude turn-backs at the border, and metering (scheduling) requirements in Mexico for insufficient interview slots in the United States.

Other administrative initiatives will force asylum-seekers to abandon their claims. Under the Return to Mexico program (misnamed the “Migrant Protection Protocols”), for example, US asylum seekers need to wait in dangerous Mexican border communities, while their cases slowly wind through the US immigration system. Early reports indicate that the United States has returned some asylum-seekers to Southern Mexico, making it impossible for them to pursue their claims. The Trump-era Attorneys General have also tried to reject, by fiat, certain common asylum claims (such as those based on gang violence) and have sought to diminish the independence and rigor of the immigration court system. The administration has also sought to weaken protections based on child welfare principles – which it sees as enforcement “loopholes” – for unaccompanied refugee and migrant minors, and for other vulnerable groups.

As it did in announcing its (then) record low admission ceiling for FY 2019, the Report to Congress for FY 2020 argues that the “current burdens on the U.S. immigration system must be alleviated before it is again possible to resettle large number of refugees.”  It is true that asylum applications to the United States have spiked in recent years. Yet as Susan Martin has argued, the United States has historically been able to meet significant demands on its asylum system and to resettle substantial numbers of refugees. In the early 1980s, for example, it received and settled 125,000 Cubans and many thousands of Haitians who had reached Florida’s shores.  It also resettled more than 207,000 refugees in 1980 and nearly 160,000 in 1981. By FY 1994, it faced a backlog of more than 425,000 pending asylum applications, but it still resettled 113,000 refugees in 1994 and nearly 100,000 in 1995. Martin concludes that the Trump administration either is “far less competent than its predecessors in managing complex movements of people so it must make a tradeoff between resettlement and asylum” or, more likely, “it is using asylum as a thinly veiled excuse to reduce overall immigration admissions.”

Finally, the Report to Congress claims that the president “is taking new steps to make sure that the refugees that the United States welcomes are set up to succeed.” In support of this claim, it references the Executive Order on Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement, which (as discussed) effectively bars resettlement in states and localities that object or do not affirmatively consent to it.  This measure, combined with the administration’s pitifully low admissions ceiling, will deny the possibility of admission and, thus, integration to countless refugees. The Order allows for the resettlement of “spouses and children” following to join refugees.  However, the admissions cap will keep many resettled refugees indefinitely separated from their families and, in this way, will impede their integration.

As it stands, refugees have been remarkably successful in the United States without the administration’s “reforms.”  A 2018 study by the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) compared 1.1 million resettled refugees who arrived between 1987 and 2016, with non-refugees, the foreign born, and the total US population.  It found that the labor force participation (68 percent) and employment rates (64 percent) of the 1.1 million refugees exceeded those of the total US population (63 and 60 percent), which consists mostly of US citizens.  Refugees with the longest tenure (who arrived between 1987 and 1996) had integrated more fully than recent arrivals (from 2007-2016), as measured by: households with mortgages (41 to 19 percent); English language proficiency (75 to 55 percent); naturalization rates (89 to 24 percent); college education (66 to 32 percent); labor force participation (68 to 61 percent); employment (66 to 55 percent); and, self-employment (14 to 4 percent). Finally, the study found that refugees who arrived between 1987 and 1996 exceeded the total US population in median personal income ($28,000 to $23,000), homeownership (41 to 37 percent) and many other metrics.

To cap off the worst month in the 40-year history of the US refugee protection system, the US Supreme granted a stay on September 11, 2019 that ensured that the United States would, at least temporarily, reject most asylum claims from migrants who have passed through a third country (not their own) on their way to the US-Mexico border. It stayed a lower court order that enjoined the implementation of an interim final rule that will allow claims from such asylum-seekers to proceed only if they can show that they first sought and failed to receive asylum or Torture Convention protection in a third country.[3]

In the best of circumstances, the US asylum process is arduous and uncertain, and many persons who have fled violence and other dangerous conditions ultimately do not prevail in their claims. However, the rule would make it far more difficult even to access this system.  It would bar most asylum claims to the United States, including almost all from Central America and other nations that have been the source of most US asylum applications in recent years. Although described as a “safe third country” measure, the rule evinces no concern for the safety of asylum-seekers, for their aspirations, or for the ability of refugee-producing states such as Guatemala or El Salvador to accommodate additional asylum requests. It also violates international law. The stay means that the rule will now go into effect, while the underlying legal challenges to it run their course. If upheld, the rule would eviscerate the US asylum system.  In fact, this seems to be its purpose.

The administration’s policies raise the question: Why does the United States offer protection to refugees and asylum-seekers at all?  In passing the Refugee Act of 1980, which established USRAP and harmonized US asylum standards with international law, Congress recognized “the historic policy of the United States to respond to the urgent needs of persons subject to persecution in their homelands,” and it encouraged “all nations to provide assistance and resettlement opportunities to refugees to the fullest extent possible.”  For decades, there has been a bipartisan consensus that saving lives – as the US refugee program undeniably does – reflects and projects US ideals to the world. Moreover, refugees do not threaten or burden the nation: They renew it by exemplifying core US values, such as courage, endurance, and a love of freedom.  Most refugees passionately identify with the United States, having found in it the security, opportunity and freedom denied them elsewhere. Robust refugee protection policies, the consensus held, serves the nation’s interests in global stability, diminished irregular migration, and increased cooperation on US diplomatic, military and security priorities.  The program has also saved countless persons who risked their lives to work for and on behalf of the US government.

In his July 30, 1981 statement on US immigration and refugee policy, President Ronald Reagan committed to continuing “America’s tradition as a land that welcomes peoples from other countries” and that shares “the responsibility of welcoming and resettling those who flee oppression.”  He also acknowledged the importance of these policies to the nation’s interests. In his January 11, 1989 farewell address to the nation, Reagan spoke of the United States as a nation that had always stood as a beacon of freedom to the world’s refugees, but that this identity needed to be “rediscovered.”  It needs to be rediscovered now as well, and before the Trump administration succeeds in fully dismantling one of the nation’s defining and proudest programs.

[1] The lion’s share of the UNHCR’s budget – more than three-quarters – goes to its refugee program.

[2] As is its wont, the administration skirted the law in setting the refugee ceiling prior to its statutorily mandated consultation with Congress on admissions. It insists that it still plans to consult with Congress, but to what substantive end is not clear.

[3] The administration misused the previously rare procedure of issuing an “interim final rule” to allow the asylum rule to go into effect prior to formal notice and comment rulemaking, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act.

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Thanks, Don, for shedding light on what will go down as one of the darkest chapters in modern U.S. history.  

Also, as Don so cogently points out, support for refugee admissions used to be a bipartisan issue. Now, the ugliness and counter-productivity of Trump’s racist xenophobia has overtaken the GOP and made it an anathema to America’s future. 

What would RR think? His optimism and braver view of America’s role in the world stands in sharp contrast to the darkness of Trump’s White Nationalist cowardice, ignorance, and weakness.

PWS

10-01-19

BELOW THE RADAR SCREEN: Trump Uses UN Speech To Urge Return To Unbridled, Racist, Xenophobic Nationalism That Caused Two World Wars, The Holocaust, & Fueled The Rise Of Communism, While Killing 80-100 Million People! — He’s An Existential Threat To Civilization!

https://apple.news/AiFomr1e1Tni878bxZd4OKw

Letters to the Editor [LA Times]: Trump’s U.N. speech extolling nationalism was frightening

President Trump’s speech at the U.N. dismissing globalism and praising nationalism endorsed the very ideologies the U.N. was formed to combat.

To the editor: In his speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump called for rejecting everything the United Nations stands for and a return to nationalism. Great.

This is what comes from someone who is ignorant of history — and fairly recent history at that. It was nationalism that brought us the two most catastrophic wars in human history. It is nationalism that has been at the root of many conflicts since then.

The U.N. was created to combat this most destructive of ideologies. For the most part, it has been succeeding, but in small, incremental, not often seen ways.

Now, the man in the White House wants to throw it all away. And for what? Self-aggrandizement? Profit for defense companies? Or just to give fodder to his followers?

Stephen McCarthy, Monrovia

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Stephen McCarthy “gets” it. Unfortunately, Trump, the GOP, and their enablers don’t!

Will the electorate “wake up” in time. Or, will we repeat the worst mistakes in history with America as the main culprit?

PWS

09-26-19

RETIRED MILITARY LEADERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST TRUMP’S WANTON DESTRUCTION OF U.S. RFUGEE PROGRAM — “When we slam the door on refugees, we encourage other nations to do the same, contributing to a less compassionate and more dangerous world, one in which our military will increasingly be called to provide stability.”

Admiral Robert J. Natter
United States Navy Official photo of ADM (Line) [Now Retired] Robert J. Natter, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations N3/N5. As of August 1999.
Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mark P. Hertling
U.S. Army

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/08/cutting-refugee-admissions-will-have-severe-consequences-us-military/

Admiral (Ret.) Robert J. Natter & Lt. General (Ret.) Mark P. Hertling write in WashPost:

Robert J. Natter is a retired U.S. Navy admiral who served as commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and U.S. Fleet Forces from 2000 to 2003. Mark P. Hertling is a retired lieutenant general who served as commanding general of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012.

America was founded as a safe haven to persecuted people and a beacon of hope, liberty and freedom to people around the world. Those themes reflect our values, and the welcoming of refugees to our shores is one of our proudest legacies and a fundamental part of who we are as a nation.

As military leaders, we spent nearly four decades defending these values. But today, a core American legacy is at risk, as the Trump administration is reportedly considering issuing severe, unprecedented cuts — potentially even zeroing out — the bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, the established legal means of entry for these deserving people.

This week, we joined a group of 27 retired generals and admirals — all of whom have been operational leaders in military conflicts and exhibited courage in defending our values on the battlefield — in writing to President Trump expressing grave concerns about the direction of this vital program.

That’s because for many of us, welcoming refugees is not just a matter of smart policy and a reflection of our national values; it is also personal. Many of us know these refugees: They worked for and with us in our fight against terrorists and insurgents. The tangible and significant improvements we were able to make in the lives of millions as well as efforts to protect our own soldiers, sailors and Marines would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters, logisticians, engineers and others.

Many of those individuals were targeted because of their assistance to us. They and their families have often been threatened for working with coalition forces, yet they bravely continued in their service at every level from translating conversations at the infantry squad level to contributing to task-force-level diplomatic missions. They may claim different cultures and speak different languages, but they have all put their lives on the line along with our citizens as part of our team.

Many of our partners continue to live in fear, given the continued hazardous situations in various parts of the world. In Iraq alone, more than 100,000 await entry to the United States. We promised our Iraqi partners support and safety when they were shoulder to shoulder with us fighting a despicable enemy. If today we turn these people away, or reduce the numbers who are allowed entry, it will be extremely difficult to ask others to assist us in the future.

Providing safety to people who assist American troops is a core function of our refugee program, but it does not stop there. We are living in a moment of unprecedented global displacement. Of the nearly 26 million refugees across the globe, most are hosted by low- and middle-income countries bordering the unstable areas that people are fleeing. A small proportion of the most vulnerable — less than 5 percent — are selected for resettlement. In addition to humanitarian assistance, resettling refugees is a concrete way that the United States offers support to these countries, while also strengthening regional stability and reducing the risk that people will be forced to return to conflict zones.

We know firsthand that both the humanitarian and strategic consequences of conflicts in Iraq, Syria, the Balkans and East and West Africa would be much worse had neighboring countries closed their borders. We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.

When we slam the door on refugees, we encourage other nations to do the same, contributing to a less compassionate and more dangerous world, one in which our military will increasingly be called to provide stability.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has welcomed about 3 million refugees from around the world who have gone on to contribute to and strengthen this country in immeasurable ways. The average refugee admission level across both Republican and Democratic administrations is 95,000 annually. Yet in the last two years, admissions have plummeted 75 percent.

In the next two weeks, the president will decide how many refugees we will admit in 2020. That decision will determine whether we uphold America’s legacy as a haven for the persecuted, and it will send a powerful message to the world about who we are as a people. We strongly recommend that this lifesaving humanitarian program be restored to historic bipartisan-supported levels.

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“We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.”

So much for the Trump Administration’s “solution” of returning refugees and other forced migrants to danger zones in their own countries or to countries that are equally or more dangerous. Killing and abusing forced migrants through improper returns and “deterrents” intended to make them “die in place” is reminiscent of other types of “final solutions” that were disastrous for humanity. Only, this time, the U.S. is the “leader of the pack” downward rather than one of those fighting to save humanity.  

A thoroughly cowardly performance by Trump and his White Nationalist gang.

Also, for the more than four decades I have been involved in immigration and refugee issues, overseas refugee admissions have received overwhelming bipartisan support. What has happened to the GOP which suddenly has “swallowed the whistle” in the face of Trump’s cowardly White Nationalism?

It appears that retired military leaders, like former U.S. Immigration Judges, can make a “full time job” out of speaking out against the stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane policies of the Trump Administration.

PWS

09-10-19

THE U.S. REFUGEE PROGRAM IS A SMASHING SUCCESS THAT SAVES LIVES WHILE PROMOTING THE NATIONAL INTEREST IN MANY WAYS — NOW, TRUMP & HIS STUPID & CRUEL WHITE NATIONALIST GANG WANT TO COMPLETELY SHUT OUT REFUGEES AT A TIME OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST NEED AND WHEN AMERICA NEEDS MORE IMMIGRANTS!

Julie Hirshfeld Davis
Julie Hirshfeld Davis
Congressional Reporter
NY Times
Michael D. Shear
Michael D. Shear
White House Reporter
NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/us/politics/trump-refugees-united-states.html

Julie Hirshfeld Davis & Michael D. Shear report for The NY Times:

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear

  • Sept. 6, 2019

WASHINGTON — The White House is considering a plan that would keep most refugees who are fleeing war, persecution and famine out of the United States, significantly cutting back a decades-old program, according to current and former administration officials.

One option that top officials are weighing would cut refugee admissions by half or more, to 10,000 to 15,000 people, but reserve most of those spots for people from a few countries or from groups with special status, such as Iraqis and Afghans who work alongside American troops, diplomats and intelligence operatives abroad. Another option, proposed by a top administration official, would reduce refugee admissions to zero, while leaving the president with the ability to admit some in an emergency.

Both options would all but end the United States’ status as a leader in accepting refugees from around the world.

 

The issue is expected to come to a head on Tuesday, when White House officials plan to convene a high-level meeting to discuss the annual number of refugee admissions for the coming year, as determined by President Trump.

“At a time when the number of refugees is at the highest level in recorded history, the United States has abandoned world leadership in resettling vulnerable people in need of protection,” said Eric Schwartz, the president of Refugees International. “The result is a world that is less compassionate and less able to deal with future humanitarian challenges.”

For two years, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, has used his considerable influence in the West Wing to reduce the refugee ceiling to its lowest levels in history, capping the program at 30,000 this year. That is a more than 70 percent cut from its level when President Barack Obama left office.

The move has been part of Mr. Trump’s broader effort to reduce the number of documented and undocumented immigrants entering the United States, including numerous restrictions on asylum seekers, who, like refugees, are fleeing persecution but cross into the United States over the border with Mexico or Canada.

Now, Mr. Miller and allies from the White House whom he placed at the Departments of State and Homeland Security are pushing aggressively to shrink the program even further, according to one senior official involved in the discussions and several former officials briefed on them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail the private deliberations.

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

John Zadrozny, a top official at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, made the argument for simply lowering the ceiling to zero, a stance that was first reported by Politico. Others have suggested providing “carveouts” for certain countries or populations, such as the Iraqis and Afghans, whose work on behalf of the American government put both them and their families at risk, making them eligible for special status to come to the United States through the refugee program.

Advocates of the nearly 40-year-old refugee program inside and outside the administration fear that approach would effectively starve the operation out of existence, making it impossible to resettle even those narrow populations.

“Pulling the rug out from under refugees and the resettlement program, as is reported, is unfair, inhumane and strategically flawed for the United States,” said Nazanin Ash, the vice president for global policy and advocacy for the International Rescue Committee. “This is a program that is reserved for, and vital to, the most vulnerable refugees.”

Now, officials at the advocacy groups say the fate of the program increasingly hinges on an unlikely figure: Mark T. Esper, the secretary of defense, who they are hoping will save the program by protesting the cut and recommending that Mr. Trump set a higher refugee ceiling.

Barely two months into his job as Pentagon chief, Mr. Esper, a former lobbyist and defense contracting executive, is the newest voice at the table in the annual debate over how many refugees to admit. But while Mr. Esper’s predecessor, Jim Mattis, had taken up the refugee cause with an almost missionary zeal, repeatedly declining to embrace large cuts because of the potential effect he said they would have on American military interests around the world, Mr. Esper’s position on the issue is unknown.

The senior military leadership at the Defense Department has been urgently pressing Mr. Esper to follow his predecessor’s example and be an advocate for the refugee program, according to people familiar with the conversations in the Pentagon.

But current and former senior military officials said the defense secretary had not disclosed to them whether he would fight for higher refugee admissions at the White House meeting next week. One former general described Mr. Esper as in a “foxhole defilade” position, a military term for the infantry’s effort to remain shielded or concealed from enemy fire.

Image

pastedGraphic.png

For two years, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration advisor, has used his influence to reduce the refugee ceiling to its lowest levels in history.

Credit

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

A senior Defense Department official said that Mr. Esper had not decided what his recommendation would be for the refugee program this year. As a result, an intense effort is underway by a powerful group of retired generals and humanitarian aid groups to persuade Mr. Esper to pick up where Mr. Mattis left off.

In a letter to Mr. Trump on Wednesday, some of the nation’s most distinguished retired military officers implored the president to reconsider the cuts, taking up the national security argument that Mr. Mattis made when he was at the Pentagon. They called the refugee program a “critical lifeline” to people who help American troops, diplomats and intelligence officials abroad, and warned that cutting it off risked greater instability and conflict.

“We urge you to protect this vital program and ensure that the refugee admissions goal is robust, in line with decades-long precedent, and commensurate with today’s urgent global needs,” wrote the military brass, including Admiral William H. McRaven, the former commander of United States Special Operations; General Martin E. Dempsey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Lt. General Mark P. Hertling, the former commanding general of Army forces in Europe.

They said that even the current ceiling of 30,000 was “leaving thousands in harm’s way.”

Gen. Joseph L. Votel, who retired this year after overseeing the American military’s command that runs operations in the Middle East, also signed the letter. In an interview, he noted that the flows of refugees leaving war-torn countries like Syria was one of the driving forces of instability in the region.

“We don’t do anything alone,” General Votel said of American military operations overseas, which are regularly helped by Iraqi citizens who become persecuted refugees. “This is not just the price we pay but an obligation.”

Mr. Mattis privately made the same arguments in 2018 and 2019 as he tried to fight back efforts by Mr. Miller to cut the refugee cap, which had already been reduced to 50,000 by Mr. Trump’s travel ban executive order.

Joined by Rex W. Tillerson, who was then the secretary of state, and Nikki R. Haley, the United Nations ambassador at the time, Mr. Mattis succeeded in keeping the cap at 45,000 for 2018. The next year, Mr. Miller tried to persuade Mr. Mattis to support a lower number by promising to ensure the program for the Iraqi and Afghans would not be affected. But Mr. Mattis refused, pushing for the program to remain at 45,000 refugees. But with Mr. Tillerson gone, Mr. Miller succeeded in persuading the president to drop the ceiling to 30,000.

In his announcement last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued that because of a recent surge of asylum seekers at the southwestern border, there was less of a need for the United States to accept refugees from abroad.

“This year’s refugee ceiling reflects the substantial increase in the number of individuals seeking asylum in our country, leading to a massive backlog of outstanding asylum cases and greater public expense,” Mr. Pompeo said at the time.

Now, a year later, Mr. Miller and his allies have repeatedly made that same argument in urging that the number go even lower.

Barbara Strack, who retired last year as chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the United States used to be a model for other countries by accepting refugees from all over the globe. After America began accepting Bhutanese refugees from Nepal, she said, other countries followed suit.

“Very often, that leadership matters,” she said. “That is something that is just lost in terms of who the United States is in the world and how other governments see us.”

The State Department was once the main steward and champion of the refugee resettlement program, but under Mr. Trump, that has changed, as the president and Mr. Miller have made clear that they view it with disdain. The top State Department official now in charge of refugees is Andrew Veprek, a former aide of Mr. Miller’s at the White House Domestic Policy Council who — with Mr. Zadrozny — was a central player in 2017 in efforts to scale back refugee resettlement as much as possible.

That has left the Defense Department as the last agency that could potentially preserve the refugee program. Its proponents inside the administration say they feel a sense of desperation waiting to see whether Mr. Esper will become its advocate.

“The strength of D.O.D.’s argument would really make a difference,” Ms. Strack said. “There just needs to be an acknowledgment that this administration would be walking away from a longstanding, bipartisan tradition of offering refuge to the most vulnerable people around the world.”

That sense of foreboding has intensified in recent weeks, as Mr. Miller has locked down the process for determining the refugee ceiling, to guard against leaks and cut down on opportunities for officials to intervene to save it. Normally, cabinet-level officials would be informed in advance of the options to be discussed at a meeting like the one scheduled on Tuesday.

This time, officials have been informed that their bosses will learn what numbers the White House is proposing only when they sit down at the table and are asked to weigh in.

Correction: September 6, 2019

An earlier version of this article misstated the age of a refugee program. It is 40 years old, not 50 years old.

Helene Cooper and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.

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Here’s a recent post featuring Don Kerwin of Center for Migration Studies (“CMS”) highlighting the many successes of our national refugee program and how it serves the national need.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/07/21/don-kerwin-cms-refugees-helped-make-america-great-now-unpatriotic-trump-administration-plans-to-completely-abandon-worlds-refugees-at-their-time-of-greatest-need-rich/

As someone who worked on the enactment and initial implementation of the Refugee Act of 1980, I find Trump’s actions to be shockingly un-American and short sighted. The Refugee Program is there for very good reasons — to implement our obligations under the U.N. Convention & Protocol Relating To The Status of Refugees in an orderly and transparent manner with needed participation from both Congress and the Executive. 

While no program is “perfect,” the Refugee Admissions Program under the Refugee Act of 1980 is about as close to a perfect program as you can get. It has fostered nearly unprecedented cooperation among the U.S., other signatory countries, and NGOs who do much of the “footwork” at minimal costs to the Government in relation to the program’s long-term contributions to saving lives and promoting the national interest. Terminating it is nothing short of insane — the action of diseased and twisted minds overcome by fear, cowardice, and White Nationalist-stoked racism.

Undoubtedly, a future Administration will attempt to restore the program to its important place in the American foreign and domestic policy arenas. But, it won’t be so easy. The success of today’s overseas program is based on years of shared expertise among our government institutions, the NGO community, and the international community. Once that apparatus is “disassembled” and the expertise lost or diverted elsewhere, it will not be easily or quickly restored. 

Indeed a much more rational program, recommended by many, would be to substantially increase our refugee admissions, even above Obama Administration levels, and to include a realistically generous and robust program for identifying and accepting for resettlement refugees from the Northern Triangle without forcing them to make the difficult journey to the U.S. border to seek our protection.

Incidentally, since there is an irreducible requirement of “non refoulment,” or “non-return” under Article 33 of the U.N. Convention & Protocol, refugees will continue to seek protection from the U.S. no matter what lengths to which the Trump Administration goes to harass and punish therm. Eliminating existing legal refugee and asylum programs will just make their quest more dangerous and uncertain. It also will force those who succeed in establishing their cases for protection to “remain in limbo” in the U.S. rather than being welcomed and integrated into our society so that they can achieve their full human potential. Talk about a “lose-lose!” But, ultimately, making everybody a loser is about the only real skill that Trump, American’s greatest con-man, possesses.

Every day, the vile characters in the Trump Administration lead our country downward — toward the darkest recesses of failure and despair. We need national leaders who can show us the way upward again, before it’s too late for all of us.

PWS

09-08-19

BLOWN OPPORTUNITY: THE GLOBAL COMPACT FOR SAFE, ORDERLY & REGULAR MIGRATION WAS AMERICA’S BEST CHANCE TO LEAD ON A GLOBAL PHENOMENON THAT ISN’T GOING AWAY — Trump’s Mindless White Nationalism Made The U.S. Walk Away From A Deal We Probably Need More Than Any Other Country!

http://www.afsa.org/immigration-debate

Former U.S. diplomat David Robinson writes in The Foreign Service Journal:

Closing the distance between legal requirements and humanitarian instincts is a global, rather than national, enterprise.

BY DAVID ROBINSON

Thirty-two years of diplomatic service taught me a number of things. One is that wherever politics and society seem irredeemably dysfunctional, it is not an accident. It is, at some level, intentional. Someone has a vested interest in continuing the chaos. Someone is getting rich, or powerful, or both; and even the most zealous reform efforts will likely fail unless those interests are mollified or neutralized.

The immigration debate follows that lesson. It is shrill, jumbled, disjointed, often illogical—and largely irrelevant to the reality it claims to address. A big, beautiful wall across our southern border may do little to stem the flow of drugs, criminals, terrorists and even unauthorized migrants into the United States—but its promise is pure gold. Like all the other sharp notes in this performance—including the travel ban, chain migration and anchor babies—the cacophony surrounding the wall helps both supporters and opponents puff out their chests and strut their virtue.

The only losers are those who have more than a partisan or emotional interest in resolving the conflict, including actual immigrants and the communities that receive them. They should not expect a resolution to their real and pressing concerns anytime soon.

Yet the scope of irregular migration today—with upward of 65 million people on the move—is such that it cannot be pushed aside. At the same time, no single country can respond adequately on its own. Diplomacy in the interest of fashioning international agreements to manage the problem is the only viable approach.

Legal Requirements vs. Humanitarian Instincts

Public talk about immigration reminds me of every discussion I ever heard in a Bosnian coffee shop during my 2014-2015 tenure as principal deputy high representative, and earlier as a refugee officer. It invariably begins and ends with an impassioned reference to some horrific event that obscures rather than illuminates the issue at hand. Both sides illustrate strongly held opinions with graphic examples excoriating the other point of view. Anti-immigrant zealots demonize immigrants as rapists and murderers; the other extreme sanctifies them as innocent victims of circumstance or malice. Both points of view are dehumanizing. They rely on stirring but distorted images to carry their arguments rather than on real people with complex motives and histories. Their aim is to capture the moral high ground, not to solve the problem.

Focusing on national immigration reform as a response to that wave is neither comprehensive nor realistic.

But manipulating imagery does not change the facts. Immigration has no inherent moral value, and immigrants are neither more nor less virtuous than anyone else. They were pushed or pulled from their homes by a host of different reasons from personal ambition to cataclysmic disaster. Some are victims, some are opportunists; some should be welcomed, some rejected. What separates migrants and non-citizen immigrants from their citizen neighbors is vulnerability. Regardless of wealth, stature or origin, immigrants are at the mercy of authorities and systems over which they have little or no influence. Their voices and images may be emotionally affecting, but their future is beyond their control.

That dependency drives the conflict about immigration reform, setting the rule of law against humanitarian impulse. It also opens the door to diplomacy. National laws deciding who may and may not enter a country always produce inequities; they always leave on the outside someone who has a legitimate need for entry but lacks the appropriate legal category or political timing to gain it. Visa classifications, refugee protocols and asylum guidelines cannot keep pace with global trends—from criminal violence and global warming to new definitions of marriage and family composition. Immigration liberalizers point to the law’s deficiencies and appeal to values over statutes, while build-the-wall advocates tout the law as the final, unyielding authority. The debate has turned into a name-calling melee as the number of migrants and intending immigrants continues to grow.

My own views on migration evolved in two parts. As a junior consular officer in the Dominican Republic, I scrupulously followed the rules and kept away from America’s shores the “wretched refuse” desperate enough to believe our own mythology. Years later, as a refugee officer, I met humanity’s outcasts in the makeshift places they sought shelter. The memory of a refugee child from Kosovo haunts me still. Who had the right to confine a 10-year-old boy behind a chain link fence? Legally, the government of Macedonia, whose border he had crossed; morally, nobody. It is shocking to me that I may now encounter that same scenario in the United States: legally permitted, morally repugnant.

Unproductive Approaches to Irregular Migration

Erasing that image and closing the distance between legal requirements and humanitarian instincts is a global, rather than national, enterprise. No single country has the political or social bandwidth to respond adequately to the growing demands and pressures of irregular migration. Sixty-five million people on the move do not fit into existing categories, either legal or humanitarian. Neither will they be deterred by piecemeal border controls. Focusing on national immigration reform as a response to that wave is neither comprehensive nor realistic. It is akin to promoting air conditioners as the answer to climate change. The problem will just continue to grow until it overwhelms efforts to avoid it.

Equally unproductive is treating irregular migration as principally a development challenge. Initiatives to reduce poverty or end conflict may have merit in their own right, but they are a long-term gamble, at best, and seldom include migrants in their plans and programs. The Dadaab complex in Kenya, a “temporary” shelter to hundreds of thousands of refugees for three decades, is a case in point. By any rational measure, Dadaab is a development challenge rather than a humanitarian crisis, but that transition never happened. In the meantime, its occupants remain in limbo, deprived of relatively normal and productive lives. Those who are able will continue to migrate and seek their futures elsewhere, including in the United States.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, though nonbinding, marks the first comprehensive effort to address human mobility at the global level.

Sidestepping the challenge of irregular migration leads nowhere. The only realistic starting point for effective, palatable reform is to accept shared responsibility for managing migration in the first place. We cannot eliminate the reasons large numbers of people move unexpectedly, nor can we isolate ourselves from their impact. We can, however, build agreements and networks across borders that establish the norms and rules for their treatment and that address the concerns of the communities that encounter them. We can, through diplomatic agreements, impose a semblance of order on what has become chaos.

There is precedent for this approach. The 1951 Refugee Convention and the subsequent regional agreements it prompted have created a durable framework for the protection of people fleeing persecution and seeking asylum in other countries. They make refugee protection a duty under international law and prohibit forcible return home. The agreements also establish common criteria for adjudicating refugee claims. The regime is imperfect and under stress, but it works. It measures progress, clarifies disputes and assigns responsibility. It is also the basis for a web of public and private, national and international agencies working to implement and improve it. Until recently, the United States was its most generous and reliable supporter.

A Necessary First Step

Extending the principles of protection and due process beyond refugees to all vulnerable migrants seemed within reach as recently as the United Nations General Assembly in 2016. All 193 member-states approved the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants that, among other actions, called for a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. The compact was approved in December 2018. Although nonbinding, it marks the first comprehensive effort to address human mobility at the global level. It extends human rights norms and development goals to previously disregarded people while reaffirming the prerogative of every country to enforce its own laws. While not a permanent solution to runaway migration, the compact is a necessary first step toward diplomatic problem-solving. It is a meeting place, not a traffic cop, and shifts the needle away from blame toward shared responsibility.

Predictably, however, storm clouds gathered early. The United States was the first to jump ship, citing the paper-thin excuse that the compact interfered with sovereign law enforcement even though it explicitly reaffirms state sovereignty on all immigration decisions. A transparently flimsy excuse made even before the document had been fully drafted, it nevertheless emboldened others to follow. By the time the compact came to a vote, 29 countries had abandoned the effort, leaving 164 to endorse it.

Washington’s position on almost any significant issue signals either permission or caution; and at best, when directed skillfully, it compels action.

This backtracking is significant because it reflects pernicious nationalism as much as supposed flaws in the compact itself— such as signaling climate change as a trigger for migration and encouraging the use of detention only as a last resort. Politically manipulated fear of migrants from “shithole countries” (as our president has called them) and Muslim refugees from war zones had advanced a narrative that facts, no matter how twisted, simply did not support. Yet while the threat may be fake news, proclaiming it worked to the advantage of politicians and pundits who trade on isolationism, supremacy and ignorance.

It may not be unusual for countries to walk away from nonbinding agreements, and often their absence goes unnoticed. The United States is an exception to that rule; its absence is always felt and its presence is almost always required for meaningful international agreements to take root. An ambassador from a Middle Eastern country sitting next to me in Geneva in December 2011 groaned and shook his head when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared to the packed audience that gay rights are human rights. I asked him why he had come, knowing the direction of the speech in advance. He smiled, shrugged and said: “The American Secretary of State. Of course I’m here. But I don’t like it.” He didn’t have to like it, but he did have to deal with it—as long as the United States and its allies continued to press the point.

Diplomatic Leadership

While a Secretary of State’s moral and diplomatic authority may be less compelling today than it was then, it still matters. Influence is not optional for the United States. Washington’s position on almost any significant issue signals either permission or caution; and at best, when directed skillfully, it compels action. Not supporting the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration is a missed opportunity to set a global agenda that is too complex and ambitious to thrive without U.S. diplomatic and financial support. There are signs of hope, mainly in Africa, in countries that have embraced the compact and are building the legal and humanitarian framework it promotes. They may have some regional success; but globally their influence is no match for the challenge they face.

So the question remains: Where will the global leadership come from? Humanitarian imperatives and rule of law requirements are still on a collision course. The administration apparently hopes the problem will go away if we hide behind a wall. It will not. The rational choice is to join ranks with those seeking a coordinated response to the challenge. That is the direction American diplomacy should take and American diplomats should endorse.

David Robinson retired as a career member of the Senior Foreign Service in 2017, after a 32-year career. In addition to serving as ambassador to Guyana from 2006 to 2008, he served as assistant secretary for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization from 2016 to 2017. Ambassador Robinson was also a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration from 2009 to 2013, and special coordinator for Venezuela in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs from 2008 to 2009. He previously served as principal deputy high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, implementing the Dayton Peace Agreement; as assistant chief of mission in Kabul; and as deputy chief of mission in La Paz and Asunción. Currently he is associated with the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.

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The total failure of Trump’s arrogantly ignorant White Nationalist immigration policy is a great illustration of the truth of what Robinson says.  Without “regime change” and a smarter, more courageous, leader willing to cooperate with other nations in addressing migration in a humane, realistic, and mutually beneficial manner, our immigration and refugee policies will continue to founder and fail.

PWS

06-05-19

INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”

http://time.com/longform/migrants/

Haley Sweetland Edwards writes in Time Magazine:

But they were willing to do whatever it took. Going back to Guatemala was simply not an option, they said. Monterroso explained that in October, their family was forced to flee after a gang threatened to murder the children if they didn’t pay an exorbitant bribe, five months’ worth of profits from their tiny juice stall. The family hid for a day and a half in their house and then sneaked away before dawn. “There is nobody that can protect us there,” Monterroso said. “We have seen in the other cases, they kill the people and kill their children.” Her voice caught. “The first thing is to have security for them,” she said of her kids, “that nothing bad happens to them.”

All told, more than 159,000 migrants filed for asylum in the U.S. in fiscal year 2018, a 274% increase over 2008. Meanwhile, the total number of apprehensions along the southern border has decreased substantially—nearly 70% since fiscal year 2000. President Donald Trump has labeled the southern border a national crisis. He refused to sign any bill funding the federal government that did not include money for construction of a wall along the frontier, triggering the longest shutdown in American history, and when Democrats refused to budge, he threatened to formally invoke emergency powers. The President says the barrier, which was the centerpiece of his election campaign, is needed to thwart a dangerous “invasion” of undocumented foreigners.

But the situation on the southern border, however the political battle in Washington plays out, will continue to frustrate this U.S. President, and likely his successors too, and not just because of continuing caravans making their way to the desert southwest. Months of reporting by TIME correspondents around the world reveal a stubborn reality: we are living today in a global society increasingly roiled by challenges that can be neither defined nor contained by physical barriers. That goes for climate change, terrorism, pandemics, nascent technologies and cyber-attacks. It also applies to one of the most significant global developments of the past quarter-century: the unprecedented explosion of global migration.

. . . .

They abandoned their homes for different reasons: tens of millions went in search of better jobs or better education or medical care, and tens of millions more had no choice. More than 5.6 million fled the war in Syria, and a million more were Rohingya, chased from their villages in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands fled their neighborhoods in Central America and villages in sub-Saharan Africa, driven by poverty and violence. Others were displaced by catastrophic weather linked to climate change.

Taken one at a time, each is an individual, a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, hope and despair. But collectively, they represent something greater than the sum of their parts. The forces that pushed them from their homes have combined with a series of global factors that pulled them abroad: the long peace that followed the Cold War in the developed world, the accompanying expansion of international travel, liberalized policies for refugees and the relative wealth of developed countries, especially in Europe and the U.S., the No. 1 destination for migrants. The force is tidal and has not been reversed by walls, by separating children from their parents or by deploying troops. Were the world’s total population of international migrants in 2018 gathered from the places where they have sought new lives and placed under one flag, they would be its fifth largest country.

The mass movement of people has changed the world both for better and for worse. Migrants tend to be productive. Though worldwide they make up about 3% of the population, in 2015 they generated about 9% of global GDP, according to the U.N. Much of that money is wired home—$480 billion in 2017, also according to the U.N.—where the cash has immense impact. Some will pay for the passage of the next migrant, and the smartphone he or she will keep close at hand. The technology not only makes the journey more efficient and safer—smugglers identify their clients by photos on instant-messaging—but, upon arrival, allows those who left to keep in constant contact with those who remain behind, across oceans and time zones.

Yet attention of late is mostly focused on the impact on host countries. There, national leaders have grappled with a powerful irony: the ways in which they react to new migrants—tactically, politically, culturally—shape them as much as the migrants themselves do. In some countries, migrants have been welcomed by crowds at train stations. In others, images of migrants moving in miles-long caravans through Central America or spilling out of boats on Mediterranean shores were wielded to persuade native-born citizens to lock down borders, narrow social safety nets and jettison long-standing humanitarian commitments to those in need.

. . . .

The U.S., though founded by Europeans fleeing persecution, now largely reflects the will of its Chief Executive: subverting decades of asylum law and imposing a policy that separated migrant toddlers from their parents and placed children behind cyclone fencing. Trump floated the possibility of revoking birthright citizenship, characterized migrants as “stone cold criminals” and ordered 5,800 active-duty U.S. troops to reinforce the southern border. Italy refused to allow ships carrying rescued migrants to dock at its ports. Hungary passed laws to criminalize the act of helping undocumented people. Anti-immigrant leaders saw their political power grow in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy and Hungary, and migration continued to be a factor in the Brexit debate in the U.K.

These political reactions fail to grapple with a hard truth: in the long run, new migration is nearly always a boon to host countries. In acting as entrepreneurs and innovators, and by providing inexpensive labor, immigrants overwhelmingly repay in long-term economic contributions what they use in short-term social services, studies show. But to maximize that future good, governments must act -rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.

. . . .

But protocols and treaties can, at best, hope to respond to the human emotions and hard realities that drive migration. No wall, sheriff or headscarf law would have prevented Monterroso and Calderón, or Yaquelin and Albertina Contreras, or Sami Baladi and Mirey Darwich from leaving their homes. Migrants will continue to flee bombs, look for better-paying jobs and accept extraordinary risks as the price of providing a better life for their children.

The question now is whether the world can come to define the enormous population of international migrants as an opportunity. No matter when that happens, Eman Albadawi, a teacher from Syria who arrived in Anröchte, Germany, in 2015, will continue to make a habit of reading German-language children’s books to her three Syrian-born kids at night. Their German is better than hers, and they make fun of her pronunciation, but she doesn’t mind. She is proud of them. At a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, she tells them, “We must be brave, but we must also be successful and strong.” —With reporting by Aryn Baker/Anröchte, Germany; Melissa Chan, Julia Lull, Gina Martinez, Thea Traff/New York; Ioan Grillo/Tijuana; Abby Vesoulis/Murfreesboro, Tenn.; and Vivienne Walt/Paris •

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I strongly encourage everyone to read Haley’s outstanding article at the link.  It is one of the best and most easily understandable explanations of a complex phenomenon that I have seen recently. As I always say, “lots of moving parts.” But Haley and her colleagues have distilled the fundamental truths concealed by this complexity. Congrats and appreciation to Haley and everyone who worked on this masterpiece!

Haley debunks and eviscerates the restrictionist, racist “fear and loathing” baloney that Trump and his White Nationalist gang peddle. The simple truth always has been and continues to be that America needs more immigration.

The only real question is whether we are going to be smart and funnel it into expanded legal and humanitarian channels or dumb like Trump and push the inevitable migration into an extra-legal system. The latter best serves neither our country nor the humans pushed into an underground existence where they can be exploited and are artificially prevented from achieving their full potential for themselves and for us. Right now, we have a mix skewed toward forcing far, far too many good folks to use the extra-legal system.

We’ll only be able to improve the situation by pushing the mix toward the legal and the humanitarian, rather than the extra-legal. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to have a rational immigration debate with folks like Trump who start with the racist-inspired fiction that migrants are a “threat” who can be deterred, punished, and diminished.

Contrary to Trump and the White Nationalists, the real immigration problems facing America are 1) how can we best integrate the millions of law-abiding and productive undocumented individuals already residing here into our society, and 2) how can we most fairly and efficiently insure that in the future individuals like them can be properly screened and come to our country through expanded humanitarian and legal channels. Until we resolve these, American will continue to founder with immigration and fail to maximize its many benefits. That’s bad for us, for migrants, and for the future of our nation.

As a reminder, in the context of Congressional negotiations on border security, I recently put together a list of “practical fixes” to the immigration system which would address border security, humanitarian relief, and improved compliance with Constitutional Due process without major legislative changes — mostly “tweaks” and other common sense amendments that would make outsized improvements and certainly would be an improvement on squandering $5.7 billion and getting nothing but a largely symbolic “instant white elephant” border wall in return.  So, here it is again in all its hypothetical glory:  “THE SMARTS ACT OF 2019:

https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3E3

SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019

  • Federal Employees
    • Restart the Government
    • Retroactive pay raise

 

  • Enhanced Border Security
    • Fund half of “Trump’s Wall”
    • Triple the number of USCIS Asylum Officers
    • Double the number of U.S. Immigration Judges and Court Staff
    • Additional Port of Entry (“POE”) Inspectors
    • Improvements in POE infrastructure, technology, and technology between POEs
    • Additional Intelligence, Anti-Smuggling, and Undercover Agents for DHS
    • Anything else that both parties agree upon

 

  • Humanitarian Assistance
    • Road to citizenship for a Dreamers & TPSers
    • Prohibit family separation
    • Funding for alternatives to detention
    • Grants to NGOs for assisting arriving asylum applicants with temporary housing and resettlement issues
    • Require re-establishment of U.S. Refugee Program in the Northern Triangle

 

  • Asylum Process
    • Require Asylum Offices to consider in the first instance all asylum applications including those generated by the “credible fear” process as well as all so-called “defensive applications”

 

  • Immigration Court Improvements
    • Grants and requirements that DHS & EOIR work with NGOs and the private bar with a goal of achieving 100% representation of asylum applicants
    • Money to expand and encourage the training and certification of more non-attorneys as “accredited representatives” to represent asylum seekers pro bono before the Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts on behalf of approved NGOs
    • Vacate Matter of A-B-and reinstate Matter of A-R-C-G-as the rule for domestic violence asylum applications
    • Vacate Matter of Castro-Tum and reinstate Matter of Avetisyan to allow Immigration Judges to control dockets by administratively closing certain “low priority” cases
    • Eliminate Attorney General’s authority to interfere in Immigration Court proceedings through “certification”
    • Re-establish weighing of interests of both parties consistent with Due Process as the standard for Immigration Court continuances
    • Bar AG & EOIR Director from promulgating substantive or procedural rules for Immigration Courts — grant authority to BIA to promulgate procedural rules for Immigration Courts
    • Authorize Immigration Courts to consider all Constitutional issues in proceedings
    • Authorize DHS to appeal rulings of the BIA to Circuit Courts of Appeal
    • Require EOIR to implement the statutory contempt authority of Immigration Judges, applicable equally to all parties before the courts, within 180 days
    • Bar “performance quotas” and “performance work plans” for Immigration Judges and BIA Members
    • Authorize the Immigration Court to set bonds in all cases coming within their jurisdiction
    • Fund and require EOIR to implement a nationwide electronic filing system within one year
    • Eliminate the annual 4,000 numerical cap on grants of “cancellation of removal” based on “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”
    • Require the Asylum Office to adjudicate cancellation of removal applications with renewal in Immigration Court for those denied
    • Require EOIR to establish a credible, transparent judicial discipline and continued tenure system within one year that must include: opportunity for participation by the complainant (whether Government or private) and the Immigration Judge; representation permitted for both parties; peer input; public input; DHS input; referral to an impartial decision maker for final decision; a transparent and consistent system of sanctions incorporating principles of rehabilitation and progressive discipline; appeal rights to the MSPB

 

  • International Cooperation
    • Fund and require efforts to work with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to improve asylum systems and encourage asylum seekers to exercise options besides the U.S.
    • Fund efforts to improve conditions and the rule of law in the Northern Triangle

 

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No, it wouldn’t solve all problems overnight. But, everything beyond “Trump’s Wall” would make a substantial improvement over our current situation that would benefit enforcement, border security, human rights, Due Process, humanitarian assistance, and America. Not a bad “deal” in my view!

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PWS

01-27-19

 

 

TRUMP’S OUTLANDISHLY BOGUS CLAIMS LITERALLY MAKE AMERICA A LAUGHINGSTOCK BEFORE THE WORLD’S LEADERS – The “Descended From Immigrants” “Leader” Of Our “Nation Of Immigrants” Tells Immigrants To Stay Away – No Longer The “Beacon Of Hope & Freedom!”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-to-migrants-stay-home-united-nations_us_5baa5317e4b07dc0b87e3987

Sebastian Murdock reports @ HuffPost:

Trump To Migrants: Stay Home

“Make their countries great again,” Trump said during a United Nations address of those seeking safety in the U.S.
President Donald Trump delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he touted nationalism, got laughed at by world leaders, and told migrants to stop coming to the United States.

Trump began his address to world leaders by boasting of his supposed accomplishments.

“In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country … So true,” Trump said. Laughter could be heard from those in attendance.

“Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s OK,” Trump said.

Later in the speech, the president launched into his anti-immigration views, saying illegal immigration “has produced a vicious cycle of crime, violence and poverty.” He added that the United States will not participate in the U.N.’s new global compact on migration, which the world body said would “develop a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration.”

“Migration should not be governed by an international body unaccountable to our own citizens,” Trump said. “Ultimately, the only long-term solution to the migration crisis is to help people build more hopeful futures in their home counties. Make their countries great again.”

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Compare Trump’s dishonest, selfish, and downright cowardly views on immigration with those of President Ronald Reagan as quoted by Philip Klein in an article in the Washington Examiner:

Saying that the setting was fitting, Reagan spoke of the families that came through Ellis Island right by the Statue of Liberty. “These families came here to work,” he said. “They came to build. Others came to America in different ways, from other lands, under different, and often harrowing conditions, but this place symbolizes what they all managed to build, no matter where they came from or how they came or how much they suffered.”

He went on to say that, “They helped to build that magnificent city across the river. They spread across the land building other cities and towns and incredibly productive farms. They came to make America work. They didn’t ask what this country could do for them but what they could do to make this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. They brought with them courage, ambition and the values of family, neighborhood, work, peace, and freedom. They came from different lands but they shared the same values, the same dream.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/heres-how-ronald-reagan-spoke-of-immigrants-when-he-said-he-wanted-to-make-america-great-again

Selfish nationalism, ignoring international institutions, racism, and “I can do what I want because I’m bigger and have more guns” attitudes are what caused World War I and  World War II. Yet, here is America’s so-called “leader” diminishing us in the world’s eyes and spouting exactly the same type of ignorant, discredited garbage that led to two disastrous World Wars.

No wonder we are losing respect and becoming a laughingstock among nations.

No we’re not “MAGA;’ we’re “MARA” — and we are appearing ridiculous and cowardly to boot. What kind of country elects an “Evil Clown” like Trump to represent them on the world stage.

Get out the vote in November. Decent Americans need to take our country back from Trump and his non-majority “base” before it’s too late — for us and for the world! America is better than this!

PWS

09-25-18

 

NOLAN RAPPAPORT AND ALINA INAYEH WITH DIFFERENT TAKES ON TRUMP’S VIEWS ON SOVEREIGNTY AND NATIONALISM!

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/397952-trump-was-right-to-ditch-uns-plan-for-handling-refugees-and-migrants

Family Pictures

Noan writes in The Hill:

The U.S. is the only member of the United Nations (UN) that did not participate in the entire 18-month process for the development of a , which is supposed to be formally adopted in December.

The process began when the UN hosted a summit in New York on September 19, 2016, to discuss a more humane way to handle large movements of migrants. Barack Obama was the president then. At the end of the summit, all 193 member states signed the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, a 24-page document that provided a blueprint for the establishment of the compact for migrants (and a separate compact for refugees).

The declaration included numerous provisions that were inconsistent with U.S. immigration policy and the Trump administration’s immigration principles. Consequently, the Trump administration ended U.S. participation.

 

Ambassador Nikki Haley, the U.S. representative to the UN, explained in a press release that, “The global approach in the New York Declaration is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.” America decides how best to control its borders and who will be allowed to enter.

The Trump administration was right. The compact is a collective commitment to achieve 23 objectives for safe, orderly, and regular migration. Although it addresses problems that need to be resolved, some its proposed solutions would weaken U.S. border security and others would usurp congressional control over the nation’s immigration laws.

. . . .

******************************************

Alina Inayeh-Trump-Putin Summit

Meanwhile, Alina Inayeh, Director of the Bucharest Office, German Marshall Fund of the United States. writes in a Facebook post:

. . . .

This ideology of authoritarian patriarchy rejects any constraint on the ruler at home or the state abroad. Mr Trump and Mr Putin support a return to an era of unfettered state sovereignty. They would dismantle international and supranational organisations of all kinds and return to multipolar “Great Power” politics, in which alliances shift and are transactional. As Mr Trump has said, America’s allies can be “foes” on some issues and “friends” on others, without any overarching loyalties based on niceties like a shared commitment to liberal democracy.
Above all, nations would not be subject to globalist dictates about how they should treat the people within their borders. They would control and protect their definition of national purity.
From this vantage point, Nato and the EU are intolerable exemplars of the “liberal international order” — an order built in support of a set of anti-nationalist values that were encapsulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The preamble to the North Atlantic Treaty reaffirms the parties’ “faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations,” including the universal principles of “democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”.
Similarly, the EU proclaims as “fundamental values”, and indeed requirements for membership in the union, “respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law”. Not national dignity and rights, but human.
The Russian president may indeed have some kind of hold over Mr Trump, as former CIA director John Brennan has suggested. But opposition to the current international order does not require a scene out of a spy novel. The extreme right of the Republican party has been exaggerating the danger of the UN for decades. Mr Trump is only taking their views mainstream.
A 2017 poll shows more than half of Republicans say the US and Russia should work more closely together. That is still less than 20 per cent of the population, but they are “America first-ers”, the would-be architects of a new world. And they are reaching out to Britain-firsters, Hungary-firsters, France-firsters, Israel-firsters — wherever nationalists are to be found. They seek a return to the rules of the 19th century.
And why not? The post-second-world-war order is just 70 years old — a blip in the history of multi-polar diplomacy. The Soviet Union lasted 70 years. It collapsed but Russia endures. The EU could collapse and European countries would endure. Nato could collapse and transatlantic relations would endure, on a bilateral and plurilateral basis.
It is incumbent upon those of us who see an arc of progress bending towards peace and universal human rights to appreciate the full scope of the threat posed to our 20th-century global architecture. Our response has to be more than defending the status quo. We must begin sketching an affirmative counter-vision of state and non-state institutions that empower their members more than they constrain them and solve problems effectively together.

************************************************

Read the complete articles at the respective links above.

PWS

07-23-18

ELIZABETH BRUENIG @ WASHPOST: Trump Lacks The Moral Authority To Lead A “Just War!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/under-trump-there-can-be-no-just-war/2018/04/12/5ea5ab72-3dc5-11e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_story.html

Bruenig writes:

. . . .

The moral sense is worth emphasizing. Trump’s White House is characterized not only by permanent chaos but also by constantly shifting flickers of vision — will it be right-populism, typical business conservatism, ultrapatriotic nationalism or something else altogether? One waits to find out each day, which doesn’t bode well for a regime contemplating military action. Moreover, Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — both rested on his gleeful indifference to people fleeing violence, be they immigrants from the global south or refugees from the Middle East. In what world could his administration be expected to become a just steward of their interests now? Is it really possible a government that can’t rush to turn back or exile the helpless fast enough has the moral capability to attempt any kind of just war, much less the practical means to carry it out? I doubt it.

And I worry. Careful restraint is harder than impulsive action; doubting one’s own moral capacities harder than ignoring the matter altogether. This means that governments least equipped to execute just action on the international stage may be the most likely to give it a try anyway, no matter its cost in blood and souls.

******************************************

Read the rest of Elizabeth’s article at the link.

The Syrian bombing has absolutely nothing to do with saving lives or taking a stand against the use of chemical weapons and everything to do with power and Trump’s ego. Trump sand his supporters have little difficulty turning their backs on desperate and dying Syrian refugees, including children, (who, unlike the children dying from chemical weapons attacks could actually be saved without too much trouble on the so-called “Western Powers” part) every day of the week.

Nor do they have any difficulty with proposing to truncate the already limited rights of refugee children arriving at our borders, sending them back to near certain abuse, death, or perhaps forced recruitment by gangs in the Northern Triangle. In other words, Trump and his GOP cronies Are “Immoral Situational Opportunists” who care nothing whatsoever for human life except in certain “staged” political contexts such as the abortion debate or debates over “death with dignity laws.” And, even then it has absolutely nothing to do with the lives supposedly at stake and everything to do with political capital to be gained by disallowing free will.

A scummy group won’t be made less scummy by going to war, no matter what the purported cause!

PWs

04-14-18

SATURDAY SATIRE: DAVOS REPORT: TRUMP WOWS INTERNATIONAL FAT CATS WITH PROMISE THAT AMERICA WILL LEAD THE WORLD TO NEW HEIGHTS OF INCOME INEQUALITY — “Starving The Poor To Feed The Rich Will End Poverty,” Says Leader Of World’s Most Powerful Kleptocracy!

“God loves the greedy and selfish, for they shall inherit the earth, the sun, the planets, and the entire universe.”

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WARNING: THIS IS “FAKE NEWS” BUT COMES WITH MY ABSOLUTE, UNCONDITIONAL, MONEY BACK GUARANTEE THAT IT CONTAINS MORE TRUTH THAN THE AVERAGE TRUMP TWEET OR SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS NEWS BRIEFING!

PWS

01-27-18

READ (RETIRED) JUDGE THOMAS LISTER’S “Personal pledge for planetary peace!”

http://lacrossetribune.com/opinion/columnists/article_424899f4-67e5-59b6-92dc-dc9e41c8e67a.html

Judge Lister writes in the LaCrosse (WI) Tribune:

“Our planet is beset with war, terror, hunger, disease, poverty and environmental degradation which must end soon if future generations are to survive and progress.

Perpetuating hatred, ignorance, bias, prejudice, selfishness, greed, fear, extremism, jealousy and misunderstanding from generation to generation perpetuates the world’s differences, disasters, degradations and difficulties.

Without an immediate, dramatic change of direction individually and collectively, our human race will come to where we are presently — and suicidally

— headed.

I and many others doubt whether individual actions or reactions to the planet’s universal problems can or will make any difference.

I personally pledge that I will forever peacefully condemn, resist and denounce killing, terror, war, crime, prejudice, vengeance and the loss or limitation of basic human rights – including, but not limited to:

  • The right to adequate food, shelter, clean water, clean air and clothing.
  • The right to health care.
  • The right to education.
  • The right to work for a living.
  • The right to worship one’s highest spirit and/or creator.
  • The right to a homeland free of challenge or aggression.

I will work to promote remedial action by those who have too much in favor of those who have too little; and, by those who can offer aid to those who need help.

I will not tolerate — without my active peaceful protest and, where necessary my peaceful civil disobedience — any government action that violates these covenants.

I support one planetary, plenary police power, consisting of fair representation from all nations, which will enforce the principles of universal law and peace through a multinational force governed by the United Nations.

I support one World Court, representative of all nations, to interpret and administer its universal rights and laws and principles.

I support a renewed and more responsible United Nations, free of veto power vested in any single nation or select group of nations.

Any declaration of war implied by any nation, government, individual or organized entity, other than the United Nations, shall be a declaration against all earth’s people; and, I will oppose any such aggressor.

I will look anew at earth’s environmental status as well as my own in light of the damage humankind has wrought; and, I will endeavor to waste no resource, to conserve energy and prevent pollution of air, water and soil. I will try to use no more energy than is necessary to support my family.

I will teach my children and grandchildren principles of universal tolerance, love, equality, understanding, compassion, sympathy, empathy and freedom. I will teach the lessons of history and world events that have led us to this perilous time. This promotion of universal principles has become so necessary to the survival of humankind and the preservation of our earth.

I pledge to end the exposure of children to violence, including that portrayed in the media and I will also reject such portrayals myself.

I will pray for all those who are asked to understand this simultaneous planet-wide denouncement of violence and killing and vengeance even though they and their loved ones have been brutalized and victimized; and, I will promote the message that we must altogether say “enough” to violence, terror and killing. I believe earth’s present generations must agree to forgive terrible past and present wrongs and forego future wrongs and revenge.

I will respect and work to protect human differences in religion, culture, color, nationality, language, gender, age, ethnicity and political beliefs.

This dramatic and immediate change, so essential to preserving the planet and its people, will not come about through slow generational purging of the problems and prejudices that plague our earth.

We must act together to adopt sweeping, global change that will provide all people with the ultimate promise and hope, that we can together act to change tomorrow. I pledge to act responsively and responsibly to achieve this end.

I support a general amnesty for those who have engaged in conflict, so long as they terminate armed conflict and lay down their arms forever.

We must redirect worldwide economic resources from weapons and armies, fear and terror, to provide world sustenance, health, universal education and other basic human rights and needs for all. I will work for the preservation of the earth’s natural resources and development of clean renewable alternative energy to sustain future life on the planet.

I will urge others to take this pledge including my governmental representatives at all levels, my religious leaders, my nation’s military leaders, educational leaders and corporate leaders.

If we support these changes, there can and will be peace on earth and preservation of our planet and protection and perpetuation with dignity for humankind.

Thomas Lister is a trial lawyer, former Jackson County district attorney and circuit court judge. He is retiring from Fitzpatrick Skemp & Associates, La Crosse.

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Judge Thomas “Tom” Lister and I were members of the Class of 1973 at the University of Wisconsin School of Law. (No Orange Bowl — or indeed any Bowl — victories in those days — we were happy if the Badger Football team won a game. But, we faithfully attended the games in the “law student section” and the “fifth quarter” afterward!) Indeed, Tom, his wonderful wife Sally, my wife Cathy, and I were very close friends throughout those three years and have remained in touch ever since. Tom and I were members of the same “study group.”

Like me, Tom has seen the U.S. legal system from a number of different vantage points — as a prosecutor, a judge, and a private practitioner. Several years ago at our 40th UW Law Reunion we had an interesting discussion of the failures of the traditional law enforcement approach to drug and opioid use, a particular problem not only in Northern Virginia but in the largely rural Jackson Country Wisconsin where Tom was a Circuit Judge and, some years prior to that, the District Attorney.

I find Tom’s words and thoughts inspiring, particularly at a time when the level of political and intellectual discourse in our country is often quite the opposite, to say the least. I particularly appreciate his message about tolerance and the recognition of basic universal human rights — a subject which has concerned me throughout my legal career.

PWS

01-04-18