The first Trump administration sought to destroy the refugee system. it severely cut back on refugee administratons which caused severe disruption to the network of non-profit organizations (largely faith-based) to survive.  below is the American Immigration Council’s analysis of measures the new administration has taken (date of report January 22):

Key policy changes

• Suspending arrivals of refugees to the United States indefinitely as of January 27, 2025. (“Realigning the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program”)

• Directing the federal government to design a new refugee process that selects only refugees who will be able to “assimilate into the United States,” and gives states and localities more say in allowing refugees to settle in their areas. (“Realigning the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program”)

• Instructing officials to create a list of countries that are alleged to share insufficient information with the U.S. for vetting purposes, laying the groundwork for a new travel ban. (“Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists”)

What’s already happened

• While the text of the executive actions gives January 27 as the date for the suspension of the refugee program, the State Department sent a memo to resettlement agencies on January 21 instructing them to cancel all travel for incoming refugees—essentially suspending the program six days early.

What happens next

• U.S. refugee admissions—with potential case-by-case exceptions—will be halted until the U.S. government is satisfied a better program has been created. The Homeland Security Secretary is responsible for providing reports every 90 days on the progress of such a program.

• A list of countries that share “insufficient” information with the U.S. will be provided to the president within 60 days, at which time travel and immigration bans may be issued against anyone from those countries.

• Within 30 days, the Secretary of State is directed to provide recommendations to limit visa programs to exclude foreign nationals who do not support specific ideological values.

 

 

The Trump administration addressed immigration in the inauguration speech and on its website in the statement called Make America Safe Again. Here are some observations to a few parts of the statement and to his speech:

“Ending Biden’s catch and release policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.”  Comment: This is a catch-all statement which, in my opinion, resets immigration policy to the first Trump administration.

Another statement refers to deportation focusing on “record boarder crossings of criminal aliens under the prior administration.” Comment: This is an example of Trump’s use of the word criminal to refer to a broad swathe of foreign-born persons without any evidence of actual past or present criminal activity. In his inauguration speech he said that there were people coming from mental hospitals and prisons across the border. Trump and his associates have been cagey in the last month about the scope of their deportation program. Perhaps to avoid embarrassment of failure in expelling a million or more persons, they have referred often to deporting criminals.

Refugees: “The president is suspending refugee resettlement, after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.”  Comment:  We may see a return to a purposeful dismantling of the refugee program, which drove annual refugee entries from the 80,000 – 100,000 level to under 20,000.

The way to significantly reduce refugee resettlement is to reduce the number of refugees and other temporary visa holders coming into the country. Neither the inauguration speech nor this statement address how the administration we’ll cut back on refugee migration and address the large number of humanitarian parole and temporary protected status persons in the country now.

Birthright citizenship: The statement does not address birthright citizenship, but Trump did in the inauguration speech. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Children not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. applies to children born to foreign diplomats who are protected by sovereign immunity.

It also applies to children of an invading force. While not explicitly stated in the Constitution, legal interpretations suggest that children born to members of a hostile occupying force would not be granted citizenship, because an invading force is deemed not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S.

No mention of immigration legislation: competely missing from the speech and the statement.

 

The George W Bush administration launched a series of large raids. This turned out badly in terms of public response and the administration stopped them. I have collected information on these and subsequent raids here.

Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board does not want these kinds of raids.

The Wall Street Journal article: The raid is expected to begin on Tuesday morning, a day after Trump is inaugurated, and will last all week, the people said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will send between 100 and 200 officers to carry out the operation. The Trump team intends to target immigrants in the country illegally with criminal backgrounds—many of whose offenses, like driving violations, made them too minor for the Biden administration to pursue. But, the people cautioned, if anyone else in the country illegally is present during an arrest, they will be taken, too…..

The transition team had been contemplating cities to target in a day-one operation as a way of making an example of so-called sanctuary cities, which adopt policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities. They settled on Chicago both because of the large number of immigrants who could be possible targets and because of the Trump team’s high-profile feud with the city’s Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson…..

The Chicago Police Department referred any questions about pending immigration enforcement actions to the federal government.  CPD, in a statement, cited Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, under which the department “does not document immigration status”—or share information with federal immigration authorities. “We will not intervene or interfere with any other government agencies performing their duties,” it added.

The Laken Riley Act, passed by the House of Representatives and being considered by the Senate, is an act that does little to change immigration law. But there are two expansions of the existing law.  One, the Homeland Security “shall” [i.e. must] detain an unauthorized person in the event they are “charged with, is arrested for, is convicted of, admits having committed, or admits committing acts which constitute the essential elements of any burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting offense.”  That is, they cannot be released pending further legal action, but must be detained, even for shoplifting.

Two, the law grants a state Attorney General standing to file suits to enforce certain provisions of existing law if an unauthorized person within that state commits a “harm” as defined by law. A state Attorney General can get a court to require Homeland Security to apply a power already in place, which is to deny the issuance of all visas to a that person’s country if that country tends not to accept their citizens subject to deportation. At this time, these countries include China, India, Venezuela, Cuba, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Pakistan, Russia and Somalia.  For example, if an unauthorized person in Texas who is a citizen of Ethiopia falls within the scope of this law, the Attorney General of Texas can through a court stop all visa issuance for persons from Ethiopia.

The second of these provisions is what is controversial.

 

 

Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement on January 3, “We need major reforms in the H-1B program.” The full statement is here.

Sanders argues that the H-1B visa program is exploited by corporations to replace well-paid American jobs with low-wage foreign labor. He says, “We must utilize this program as a very short-term and temporary approach“ to meeting workforce needs.  He advocates for reforms like raising minimum wages for guest workers and enabling them to switch jobs.

Sanders statement reflects persistent blinkered political thinking about immigration, and exposes the vulnerability of the Democratic Party to a major attack from Republicans. For one, he implicitly buys into the idea that for the most part bringing a worker in on a temporary basis means an American loses a job. I doubt he would say that when addressing the hundreds of thousands of temporary farm workers who come in from Latin America.

Further, he does what virtually every politician does when addressing immigration, which is to think in the extremely short term with no consideration of intermediate, much less long term, workforce needs.   No national Democratic politician, from what I read has come forward with a proposal on how to draw upon the huge talent pool in the world to complement, not replace, American workers.

Republican senators are, I believe, ready to come forward with a comprehensive immigration bill that would feature skilled labor, and defend this approach using a intermediate and long term vision of how to maintain a highly productive workforce. I have zero factual knowledge that such a bill is in the works. I am interested in how Sanders would respond to such a proposal.

The Wall Street Journal’s Michelle Hackman and Tariri Parti posted an article in the first few minutes of the new year which explains why I have predicted for months that mass deportation will not occur. The article cites five reasons. There is a sixth, the most powerful deterrent: public outrage over the first few arrests of law abiding unauthorized persons who have contributed to their communities for years.

Immigration-court backlog: Most immigrants in the U.S. illegally can’t be deported without a hearing in immigration court, where they have a chance to ask for asylum or another avenue to stay in the country. But immigration courts are so backlogged that hearings are being scheduled as far into the future as 2029.

Outside experts estimate that Congress would have to hire about 5,000 immigration judges—the system now has roughly 500—to efficiently sort through all existing cases as well as new ones.

I outlined here the complex series of steps to deport some one.

Lack of ICE agents: The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is responsible for arresting immigrants in the country illegally, detaining them and deporting them. It has roughly 6,000 agents on staff and funding to jail about 40,000 immigrants at any given time. It doesn’t have nearly the fleet of planes needed to deport millions of migrants back to their home countries.  The government is also having trouble recruiting new Border Patrol agents and doesn’t have enough asylum officers to hear claims made outside of court.

Republicans are hoping to use a budget process known as reconciliation to pass billions of dollars in spending for ICE as well as Trump’s border wall without needing Democratic votes.  Trump plans to declare a national emergency soon after taking office, which could unlock additional money taken out of the Pentagon’s budget for projects such as border-wall construction.

Blue-state resistance: Immigrants living in the country illegally are often concentrated in big, Democratic-led cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a CNN interview recently that he wouldn’t be cooperating with federal immigration authorities. “The law is very clear,” he said. “Local police officers are not federal agents.”

Without local cooperation, ICE would need to post officers on watch outside of jails for hours or days to catch a release. They can also conduct neighborhood raids, but immigration officers—unlike regular police—don’t have warrants to make an arrest, meaning they can’t enter a person’s home to arrest them.

Lack of cooperation from foreign countries: Among the reasons President Dwight Eisenhower was able to pull off a broad deportation program in the 1950s, which Trump cites as a model, was that everyone he sought to send out of the country was from Mexico. But over the past few years, immigrants crossing into the U.S. illegally have come from record numbers of countries, such as China, India, Mauritania and Uzbekistan.

Many of the newly-arrived migrants in the U.S. come from countries where diplomatic relations are frayed or even nonexistent, such as Venezuela.  U.S. immigration law allows immigrants to be deported to third countries if their home countries won’t take them back, but getting a third country to agree is rare.

Legal challenges: Many of the changes proposed by Trump and Stephen Miller, his incoming deputy chief of staff and longtime immigration adviser, can only be done through Congress—or perhaps even through a constitutional amendment.

A core issue they have attempted to surmount is that under existing law migrants can legally ask for asylum even if they have entered the country unlawfully. Trump, and even Biden, sought to get around this by making asylum seekers live in Mexico while their claims were being weighed, jailing them, or coming up with new rules to make asylum seekers otherwise ineligible. As long as the law remains on the books, however, the government will struggle to find legal ways to narrow that right.

 

 

Two individuals can have a productive, rational, and deeply satisfying argument over the merits of a more restrictionist versus a more inclusive immigration policy. We do not have this debate because the political leadership in the country has evaded it. What we do have is, among several disruptive behaviors,  scapegoating of immigrants.

Donald Trump appears often to scapegoat immigrants, primarily as the cause of violence, but also stealing jobs. There’s an element in his rhetoric which suggests the so-called scapegoat mechanism of collective violence. This was articulated by René Girard (1923-2015), a French philosopher who taught at Stanford and one of whose students is Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and erstwhile supporter of trump.

Elements of the scapegoat mechanism:

Social tensions intensify, seen in an increase in a phenomenon of severe competition over status and identity. We can see this within the right (at the Mar a Lago court) and within the left (virtue signaling, censoring).

Release of tensions: this can involve group action to blame an individual or group. The scapegoat is often chosen arbitrarily, typically someone who stands out as different or vulnerable. Poor unauthorized immigrants fit this profile.

By focusing collective violence on a single target, the community temporarily sets aside internal rivalries and conflicts. The act of scapegoating provides a cathartic release for the community’s destructive tensions. Blaming a scapegoat gives the illusion of control over complex, systemic problems.  Doesn’t this seem like a conventional behavior of Trump?

Girard argues that for scapegoating to be effective, the community must be unconscious of the mechanism. They must genuinely believe in the scapegoat’s guilt.

It is quite remarkable that the mass deportation idea runs completely afoul of the legal protections afforded any resident of the United States. I have posted recently on the complex steps from detaining an individual in the United States and deporting them.

Given that the immigration issue very likely worked against the Harris candidacy and in favor of Trump, I am noting here what the Biden White House did in first days of its administration in 2017. The boldness is a far cry from the furtive actions taken in 2013 and 2024 to reduce the visibility of border crossings.

Setting the stage – 2020 Democratic Party platform: In the summer of 2016, the Party issued a platform which included a 1,800 word section of immigration. This section provided the context for substantially all Biden administration action on immigration until it sought to cut down border crossings in 2023.

The section includes this overall concept: “Democrats believe that our fight to end systemic and structural racism in our country extends to our immigration system, including the policies at our borders and ports of entry, detention centers, and within immigration law enforcement agencies and their policies and operations.”  The section includes no mention enforcement of laws on legal status of persons or mention of borders except to revoke Trump administration policy. The mentions the “root causes” of migration—”violence and insecurity, poverty, pervasive corruption, lack of educational and economic opportunity, and the impacts of climate change,” calling for “well-designed assistance programs can help prevent and mitigate the effects of migration crises around the world.”

January 20, 2021, Comprehensive Immigration bill: The Biden administration submitted, as expected, an immigration bill on January 20: the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021. The highlight of the bill is legalization of substantially all unauthorized persons in the country as of 1/1/21.  It did not significantly alter the design of the country’s visa system except for normalization, through temporary legal status, of the state of unauthorized persons

February 2017 Executive Order: On February 2, 2021, the president issued an executive order “on Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems and Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans.” The order was focused on the rights of foreign-born persons in the country. There was no mention of policy and practice about authorizing entry to the U.S. or addressing the unauthorized population:

“Consistent with our character as a Nation of opportunity and of welcome, it is essential to ensure that our laws and policies encourage full participation by immigrants, including refugees, in our civic life; that immigration processes and other benefits are delivered effectively and efficiently; and that the Federal Government eliminates sources of fear and other barriers that prevent immigrants from accessing government services available to them.”

Remain in Mexico program suspended: Biden’s DHS on the first day of his administration suspended all new enrollments in MPP, ending people being sent back to Mexico. It undertook immediately to terminate the program.

Other executive orders in early 2021, (go here for more detail):  revoked the prior Administration’s orders excluding noncitizens from the Census; directed the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Attorney General, to take all appropriate actions under the law to achieve the goal of preserving and fortifying Dreamers’ protections; repeals Muslim/African Bans; reviewed Trump Administration “extreme vetting” practices; immediately terminated the national emergency declaration used to justify some wall-funding diversions and immediately pauses wall construction projects to review legality of the funding and contracting methods used.