US immigration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 238 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘What’s happening is not genocide’: Biden criticizes ICC for seeking arrest warrants for Israeli officials – as it happened

      by

      “I will always ensure that Israel has everything it needs to defend itself against Hamas and all its enemies,” Biden said. “We want Hamas to be defeated.”But Biden also mentioned support for civilians in Gaza. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said, noting that his administration is working to bring the region together and a two-state solution.“Let me be clear,” he added, “we reject the ICC’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Whatever these warrants may imply, there’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”“What’s happening is not genocide.”Political leaders in the US sharply defended Israel today after international criminal court chief prosecutor Karim Khan has caused a political earthquake by requesting arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas officials. The warrants, which include prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hamas group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, were denounced by US president Joe Biden who doubled down on his comments during a speech for the Jewish American Heritage Month Celebration, held at the White House.It will now be up to the ICC’s judges to determine whether to issue the warrants.Here’s a rundown of what else has happened today so far:
      President Biden used his speech at the Jewish American Heritage Month Celebration to highlight his administration’s work to crack down on antisemitism while reiterating his “ironclad” support for Israel.
      Senators Mitch McConnel and Bernie Sanders voiced strong opinions from opposite sides of the debate, with McConnell condemning the ICC and Sanders championing its cause.
      Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, has also come out against the ICC’s request for arrest warrants against top Israeli and Hamas officials, calling them “baseless and illegitimate”.
      US State Department officials also added criticisms of the ICC over it’s approach to Israel but said they would continue working with them to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin over actions taken against Ukrainian civilians.
      The UK Foreign Office also objected to Khan’s request, saying it would not help the process of negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza.
      US senator Lindsey Graham said he feels deceived by ICC staff, and accused Khan of rushing the decision to seek arrest warrants.
      Khan thanked international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who he said acted as a special adviser in his investigation.
      Biden concluded his speech by emphasizing his work to combat antisemitism in the US, calling it “absolutely despicable”. Pointing to a national strategy rolled out before last October, Biden said a new wave of financing amounting to $400 million has been made available for jewish nonprofits, schools, synagogues and other faith-based organizations to support their physical security.He added that his administration has “put colleges on notice”. “The department has to investigate discrimination aggressively,” he said.His remarks ended with a promise.“Let me assure you as your president – you are not alone,” he said. You belong. You always will belong.” He thanked everyone in attendance. “In moments like this the ancient story of Jewish resilience endures because of its people. That’s what today is all about.”“I will always ensure that Israel has everything it needs to defend itself against Hamas and all its enemies,” Biden said. “We want Hamas to be defeated.”But Biden also mentioned support for civilians in Gaza. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said, noting that his administration is working to bring the region together and a two-state solution.“Let me be clear,” he added, “we reject the ICC’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Whatever these warrants may imply, there’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”“What’s happening is not genocide.”Emhoff has just introduced President Biden, who noted he was honored to be introduced by the first-ever Jewish spouse.The President talked about the important history of freedom of religion in the US and the important contributions of Jewish Americans, before adding that the reception comes during hard times. Noting the “fresh and ongoing” trauma inflicted on October 7 and in its aftermath, Biden promised that the work continued to free Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, noting his support for Israel is “ironclad”.“We are going to get ‘em home,” he said of the hostages. “We are going to get em home, come hell or high water.”The event kicked off with cheers as Second Gentlemen Emhoff, flanked by the president and vice president, heralded the administration’s support for the Jewish community. But, the celebratory tone shifted quickly.“This is also a challenging time for our community,” he said. “It has been a dark and difficult 7 months. There is an epidemic of hate including a crisis of antisemitism in our country and around the world. We see it on our streets, our college campuses, and our places of worship.”Adding that the work feels difficult, he encouraged the crowd. “We keep fighting because we have no choice but to fight.”Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will be speaking soon at the Jewish American Heritage Month Celebration. At last year’s event, held at the White House, Biden focused on his support for Israel and his strategy to combat antisemitism.“My support for Israel’s security remains longstanding and unwavering, including the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks,” Biden said last year. “And I’m proud – I’m proud of our support – and my colleagues that are here today as well – for Israel’s Iron Dome, which has intercepted thousands of rockets and saved countless lives in Israel.”Stay tuned as we wait for this year’s event to begin.Even as US political figures continue to rail against the ICC over Israel and Hamas, Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, said the US is fully onboard with actions taken against Russia for crimes committed in the Ukrainian conflict.In a press conference on Monday, following a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Matthew Miller, a state department spokesperson, said the US still supports the ICC and the “important work over the years to hold people accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity”.But National Security Council spokesman spokesman John Kirby claimed that there is a difference between what’s happening in Ukraine and what’s happening in Gaza.“It is an actual war aim of Mr Putin to kill innocent Ukrainian people,” Kirby said, noting that targeting of civilians and infrastructure is evidence of that.In Gaza, however, Kirby claimed the high toll taken on civilian lives was inadvertent. Meanwhile, as CNN reports, roughly 40% of Gaza’s population – more than 900,000 people – have been displaced in the past two weeks due to Israeli bombardment.Calling the ICC a “a rogue kangaroo court”, and its prosecutor “self-aggrandizing”, Senator Mitch McConnell vehemently criticized the move for arrest warrants in remarks on the Senate floor.“Since the immediate aftermath of October 7, Israel, her allies, and Jewish people around the world have faced pernicious efforts to equate a sovereign nation’s self-defense with barbaric acts of terrorism,” McConnell said, linking the issue to the protests that erupted across university campuses against the violence that’s been inflicted on Palestinian civilians.McConnell continued, calling the warrants for both leaders of Hamas and Israel are “the most noxious attempt at moral equivalence”. Using the move to question the legitimacy of the international criminal court, the Republican leader pushed his colleagues to act:
      Support Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist savages like Sinwar … reject the fiction that unaccountable bureaucrats in The Hague have any power over a sovereign nation that isn’t a signatory to its authority … commit to imposing significant costs on the court and its agents if it pursues shameful and baseless charges against Israel … and choose once and for all between actual justice and the rule of the loud campus mob.
      Senator Bernie Sanders supports the request for arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders relating to the Israel-Gaza conflict, saying that the “ICC prosecutor is right to take these actions”, in a written statement released on Monday afternoon.Noting that the warrants may or may not be carried out, he said: “It is imperative that the global community uphold international law.”Here is Sanders’ statement in full:
      In the last several years, the international criminal court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for political leaders who violate international law and engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity. That includes Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose illegal invasion of Ukraine initiated the most destructive war in Europe since world war II; Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who started the horrific war in Gaza by launching a terrorist attack against Israel, which killed 1,200 innocent men, women, and children; and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in response, has waged an unprecedented war of destruction against the entire Palestinian people, which has killed or injured over 5% of the population.The ICC prosecutor is right to take these actions. These arrest warrants may or may not be carried out, but it is imperative that the global community uphold international law. Without these standards of decency and morality, this planet may rapidly descend into anarchy, never-ending wars, and barbarism.
      The rights group Amnesty International is not pleased with the British Foreign Office’s criticism of the international criminal court prosecutor Karim Khan and his application for arrest warrants against Israel and Hamas’s leaders.“To see the UK undermining the International Criminal Court like this is a real slap in the face for Israeli and Palestinian victims of war crimes and other grave human rights violations who sorely deserve justice,” Amnesty International UK’s head of government affairs Karla McLaren said in a statement. She continued:
      By failing to recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction – which the court itself has established – the UK is placing itself on the wrong side of history and continuing a pattern of soft-pedalling over Israel’s crimes. This is deeply damaging for international justice and for the protection of civilians everywhere.
      We need major change from the UK over the human rights crisis in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including a realisation that justice and accountability processes are the best way out of this decades-long crisis.
      The UK should back the ICC chief prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants, get behind the ICJ genocide case, call for an immediate ceasefire and a massive scaling up of aid into Gaza, and it should order an immediate halt to further UK arms transfers to Israel.
      Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the US House of Representatives, echoed Joe Biden’s rejection of the international criminal court chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister Yoav Gallant.In a statement, the House minority leader said:
      The arrest warrant request by the International Criminal Court against democratically elected members of the Israeli government is shameful and unserious. America’s commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad. I join President Joe Biden in strongly condemning any equivalence between Israel and Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization.
      Biden has generally supported Israel since Hamas’s 7 October attack, though recently warned Benjamin Netanyahu against allowing its military to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and held up a weapons shipment.Despite Jeffries’s solidarity, rank-and-file Democrats are growing uneasy with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and its impact on civilians. Here’s more on that:Inside Iran, the Guardian’s Deepa Parent reports that Ebrahim Raisi was remembered by many for his crackdown on nationwide protests that began after a woman died in custody following her arrest under the country’s hijab laws. Here’s more on that:Activists in Iran have said there is little mood to mourn the death of the country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash near the border with Azerbaijan on Sunday.Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, announced a five-day public mourning period after the deaths of Raisi, the foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other passengers on the helicopter. However, Iranians who spoke to the Guardian have refused to lament the death of a man who they say was responsible for hundreds of deaths in his four-decade political career.It was during Raisi’s tenure that protests swept the country after the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested by police under Iran’s harsh hijab laws. More than 19,000 protesters were jailed, and at least 500 were killed – including 60 children – during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. The police continue to violently arrest women for refusing hijab rules.Hours before Raisi’s death was confirmed by state media, videos circulated on Telegram showing celebratory fireworks, one of them from Amini’s hometown of Saqqez. Iranians from inside and outside the country shared posts reminding the world of Raisi’s brutal presidency and his repression of political dissidents.A spokesperson for the White House’s national security council offered condolences on the death of Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash, but noted he had channeled funds to armed groups in the Middle East, Reuters reported.“No question this was a man who had a lot of blood on his hands,” the spokesperson John Kirby said at the White House.Raisi perished in a helicopter crash alongside Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and six other passengers and crew. Here’s more about his death:In an interview with CNN, the international criminal court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, defended the investigation that led to his request for arrest warrants against top Israeli and Hamas officials.Khan accused Hamas’s leaders, including the group’s head, Yahya Sinwar, of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape, sexual assault and torture. He also leveled allegations against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Yoav Gallant, of extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberately targeting civilians.Here’s what Khan had to say about how he reached his conclusion: More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Migrants, real and imagined, grip US voters, 1,500 miles north of border

      by

      Rhinelander is closer to the Arctic Circle than to Mexico, so it is no great surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin city have laid eyes on the foreign migrants Donald Trump claims are “invading” the country from across the US border 1,500 miles to the south.But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is nonetheless sure they are a major problem and he’s voting accordingly.“We don’t see immigrants here but I have relatives all over the country and they see them,” he said. “That’s Biden. He’s responsible.”Large numbers of voters in key swing states agree with Schuh, even in places where migrants are hard to find as they eye cities such as Chicago and New York struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.Trump has been pushing fears over record levels of migration hard in Wisconsin where the past two presidential elections have been decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. A Marquette law school poll last month found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree that “the Biden administration’s border policies have created a crisis of uncontrolled illegal migration into the country”.Trump has twice held rallies in Wisconsin over the past month at which migrants have been a primary target. In Green Bay he called the issue “bigger than a war” and invoked the situation in Whitewater, a small city of about 15,000 residents in the south of the state.Republican politicians have turned Whitewater into the poster child for anti-migrant rhetoric in Wisconsin after the city’s police chief, Dan Meyer, appealed for federal assistance to cope with the arrival of nearly 1,000 people from Nicaragua and Venezuela over the past two years.Meyer made clear in a letter to President Joe Biden in December that he was not hostile to the foreign arrivals as he expressed concern about the “terrible living conditions” endured by some.“We’ve seen a family living in a 10ft x 10ft shed in minus 10 degree temperatures,” he wrote.But the police chief said that his department was struggling to cope with the number of Spanish-speaking migrants because of the cost of translation software and the time taken dealing with a sharp increase in unlicensed drivers. Meyer also said that his officers had responded to serious incidents linked to the arrivals including the death of an infant, sexual assaults and a kidnapping.However, he told Biden that “none of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people … In fact, we see a great value in the increasing diversity that this group brings to our community.”That did not stop Republican politicians from descending on Whitewater to whip up fear.The Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, a close ally of Trump who has spoken at the former president’s political rallies, and a Republican member of Congress from the state, Bryan Steil, held a meeting in the city to denounce what they described as the “devastating” consequences of the migrant arrivals.Johnson blamed “the whole issue of the flood of illegal immigrants that have come to this country under the Biden administration”.Steil declined to back Meyer’s appeal for federal financial assistance and said the answer lay in legislation to secure the border. However, the congressman was among those Republicans who killed off a bipartisan border security law after Trump opposed the legislation in an apparent move to keep the crisis a live political issue going into the presidential election.View image in fullscreenRepublican members of the Wisconsin legislature wrote to Biden in January demanding action over what they claimed was a surge in violent crime in Whitewater even though Meyer has said he sees no threat to residents from the migrants and that “we are a safe community”.Some Whitewater residents are furious at the political intervention. Brienne Brown, a member of the city council for six years, said residents had been welcoming of the migrants, with community organisations providing food, furniture and bedding to many.“The spotlight fell on us because Ron Johnson and Bryan Steil decided to make it a political event for themselves. Most people here were incredibly angry. They feel like they’ve been used as a political football,” she said.“The crime that is occurring is super low level, which is mostly our police department pulling over somebody in a car who doesn’t have a licence.”The police chief has called for migrants to be allowed to obtain driving licences but the Wisconsin legislature will not allow it.Brown said that the serious incidents of assault involved domestic violence as well as the case of a woman who abandoned her newborn baby in a field, and that those kind of crimes remained uncommon.Wisconsin has long relied on migrant workers, many of them undocumented, as farm labour. Studies have suggested that the state’s dairy farms would grind to a halt without foreign workers. Historically, most were from Mexico. Whitewater tended to attract people from Guanajuato as migrants from the Mexican state sent word back about job opportunities.Brown noticed a change during the Covid crisis.“I’d knock on doors a lot just to talk to my constituents right around the pandemic. I started noticing that a lot of them were not from Mexico. They were from Nicaragua and Venezuela,” she said.Brown said the workers moved into accommodation left by students forced to return home by the pandemic lockdown.“We have a lot of farms, a lot of chicken farms, a lot of egg farms. There are factories that make spices, there are factories that can food. They’re always looking for low-paid workers and they never have enough. So there was plenty of work available,” she said.Schuh, like many other Americans critical of what they describe as Biden’s open border policy, makes a point of distinguishing between those who go through the formal process of immigration with a visa and those walking across the border to seek asylum or work illegally.“I have nothing against immigrants but it has to be done the right way,” he said.Trump continued to stoke the issue at a rally in Michigan earlier this month when he blamed Biden for the murder of Ruby Garcia in March. The former president claimed his administration had deported the man who has confessed to the shooting, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, and that “crooked Joe Biden took him back and let him back in and let him stay in and he viciously killed Ruby”. Ortiz-Vite was deported in 2020 following his arrest for drinking and driving. It is not clear when he returned to the US.Trump told the rally that he spoke to Garcia’s family and that they were “grieving for this incredible young woman”. But Garcia’s sister, Mavi, denied that anyone in the family spoke to the former president and accused him of exploiting the murder for political ends.“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” she told WOOD-TV.“It’s always been about illegal immigrants. Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Mass deportations, detention camps, troops on the street: Trump spells out migrant plan

      by

      Donald Trump is planning to unleash the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history should he win re-election in November, involving legally questionable deployments of military and police units and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border.Trump has laid out his vision for a “record-setting deportation operation” in a series of rally speeches, newspaper articles and social media posts. He intends to move swiftly after inauguration day next January to stage mass roundups of immigrants across the country, conducting raids inside big cities where he would face certain Democratic opposition.“On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday. He told his adoring supporters that immigrants were coming in by the millions from foreign prisons and “insane asylums” leading to the “plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns”.Immigration experts say that the deportation plans for a Trump White House 2.0 dwarf anything previously seen – both in scale and in the intensity of the former president’s determination to run roughshod over legal guardrails. He attempted workplace raids during his 2016 presidential term, but they were largely stymied in the courts.“This time we need to take Trump at his word,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When he talks about mass deportation – in boxcars, or bus loads, or planes, or whatever – that’s what he’s going to do.”Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior White House policy adviser and hardline immigration guru who is likely to be central in a second term, told the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in a podcast interview that the plans were going to be pushed through. “I want everybody to understand this is going to happen. If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately.”In an interview with Time magazine this week, Trump emphasized that speed was critical to his strategy for removing many of the at least 11 million people without legal status living in the US today.“We’re going to be moving them out as soon as we get to it,” he said.To skirt around due process laws protecting asylum seekers,Trump has said he will invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act which allows for summary deportation of any non-citizen from a foreign enemy country. He says he will apply the provision in the first instance against “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members”.Immigration experts fear that such summary removals could ensnare US citizens in the dragnet.“Trump will have his agents remove people, then ask questions later. If somebody looks like they’re undocumented, meaning they have brown or black skin, or speak with an accent, they could be included irrespective of their citizenship,” Leopold warned.Mass deportation would form the centerpiece of a Trump second term. It aligns with other aspects of his vision for the 47th presidency, which promises to be more ruthless, radical and revenge-laden than any administration in modern times.The former president will be counting on the rightward shift in the federal judiciary, which he effected when he was last in the White House. Over the four years of his presidential term, he placed more than 200 judges on the bench, and succeeded in transforming the US supreme court into a rightwing bastion.View image in fullscreenWith Trump and his team setting their sights on deporting more than a million people each year, the operation would inevitably require major infrastructure including new detention camps. Miller said that “large-scale staging grounds” would be constructed near the border, probably in Texas.“You create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft,” Miller told Kirk.Flesh has been placed on the bones of Trump’s immigration plans by Project 2025, a presidential transition operation spearheaded by the rightwing Heritage Foundation that has compiled a 920-page policy review aiming to “institutionalize Trumpism”. By its calculations, the daily number of beds in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centers would need to rise from the current 34,000 to more than 100,000.Ice itself should be given free rein to carry out “civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate”, Project 2025 says (emphasis in the original). The Trump campaign has stressed that outside groups like Heritage do not speak for the former president, but the policies contained in the review hew closely to his intentions and are likely to provide foundations for administration policy.Even with its 21,000 employees, Ice would be overwhelmed by the task of rounding up millions of people without the involvement of other entities. Trump told Time magazine that he would turn initially to the national guard, and then to the US military.“If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military,” he said.When Time pointed out that under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the military is prohibited in most circumstances from acting domestically against civilians, Trump replied: “Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”In fact, undocumented immigrants are civilians (though not citizens). As such, they enjoy equal protection rights under the US constitution.Trump likens his immigration plans to the mass deportation of some 300,000 Mexicans by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955. Though Trump is contemplating massively greater numbers, the two plans bear striking similarities.Both schemes were justified using racist stereotypes of immigrants. Eisenhower’s was called “Operation Wetback” and portrayed Mexicans as dirty and dangerous.Trump repeatedly talks about “migrant crime” at his rallies, telling Wednesday’s crowd in Michigan that prisons and mental institutions all around the world were being “emptied into the United States like we are a dumping ground”. Notably, criminologists report that immigrants – whether they have legal status or not – are more law-abiding than US-born citizens.Mass roundups are likely to threaten the “Dreamers”, the more than half a million immigrants who came to the US as undocumented children and who have been granted partial rights to remain under the deferred action program known as Daca. Trump has indicated he intends to tear up the Daca scheme, which he tried and failed to do in his first term.View image in fullscreenTrump also plans to use state and local police forces to assist Ice in roundups. That would be embraced with alacrity by Republican-controlled states like Texas where the governor, Greg Abbott, is already striving to give state police the power to arrest undocumented migrants.But it would be fiercely opposed in Democratic states which have tended to place a firewall between their law enforcement officers and federal immigration activities. Undocumented people are concentrated in big cities under Democratic control, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, raising the specter under Trump’s plans of open confrontation between law enforcement agencies receiving conflicting orders from authorities led by the two main parties.Miller said that Republican governors would be encouraged to deploy their national guard over the border into Democratic-controlled states where undocumented migrants enjoy so-called “sanctuary city” protections. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, could send troops into Maryland which has a Democratic governor, Wes Moore.“If you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close,” he told Kirk’s podcast.Leopold predicted that pitching one state against another would quickly deteriorate into a “police state mentality”.“Are we going to see a complete breakdown of the unity of the American state?” he said. “It’s possible.” More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden calls Japan and India ‘xenophobic’: ‘They don’t want immigrants’

      by

      Joe Biden has called Japan and India “xenophobic” countries that do not welcome immigrants, lumping the two with adversaries China and Russia as he tried to explain their economic circumstances and contrasted the four with the US on immigration.The remarks, at a campaign fundraising event Wednesday evening, came just three weeks after the White House hosted Fumio Kishida, the Japanese prime minister, for a lavish official visit, during which the two leaders celebrated what Biden called an “unbreakable alliance,” particularly on global security matters.The White House welcomed Indian PM Narenda Modi for a state visit last summer.Japan is a critical US ally. And India, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, is a vital partner in the Indo-Pacific.At a hotel fundraiser where the donor audience was largely Asian American, Biden said the upcoming US election was about “freedom, America and democracy” and that the nation’s economy was thriving “because of you and many others”.“Why? Because we welcome immigrants,” Biden said. “Look, think about it. Why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan having trouble? Why is Russia? Why is India? Because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants.”The president added: “Immigrants are what makes us strong. Not a joke. That’s not hyperbole, because we have an influx of workers who want to be here and want to contribute.”There was no immediate reaction from either the Japanese or Indian governments. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Biden was making a broader point about the US posture on immigration.“Our allies and partners know well in tangible ways how President Biden values them, their friendship, their cooperation and the capabilities that they bring across the spectrum on a range of issues, not just security related,” Kirby said Thursday morning when asked about Biden’s “xenophobic” remarks. “They understand how much he completely and utterly values the idea of alliances and partnerships.”Biden’s comments came at the start of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and he was introduced at the fundraiser by Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, one of two senators of Asian American descent. She is a national co-chair for his reelection campaign.Japan has acknowledged issues with its shrinking population, and the number of babies born in the country in 2023 fell for the eighth straight year, according to data released in February. Kishida has called the low birth rate in Japan “the biggest crisis Japan faces” and the country has long been known for a more closed-door stance on immigration, although Kishida’s government has, in recent years, shifted its policies to make it easier for foreign workers to come to Japan.Meanwhile, India’s population has swelled to become the world’s largest, with the United Nations saying it was on track to reach 1.425 billion. Its population also skews younger.Earlier this year, India enacted a new citizenship law that fast-tracks naturalization for Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who have come to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.But it excludes Muslims, who are a majority in all three nations.It’s the first time that India has set religious criteria for citizenship. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Activists march for immigrant rights in Wisconsin: ‘We’re making this country strong’

      by

      Led by a mariachi band, hundreds of demonstrators on Wednesday morning marched across Milwaukee to the Fiserv Forum – the home of the Milwaukee Bucks and, in July, the venue of the Republican national convention.The rally, organized by the immigrant and workers’ rights group Voces de la Frontera, is an annual event, but in 2024 it holds particular weight. The focus of the rally extended beyond immigration, to fear of authoritarianism under Republican candidate Donald Trump and critique of Joe Biden’s handling of the US role in Israel and Gaza.This year, May Day also fell on the same day as a Trump campaign event in Waukesha, which organizers seized on to denounce Trump’s immigration policy and call on Biden to use his executive authority to adopt protections for undocumented workers.“We reject [Trump’s] political platform, which promises dictatorship, deportations and separation of families,” Voces de la Frontera executive director Christine Neumann-Ortiz told the crowd Wednesday, to applause.As the 2024 presidential campaign season ramps up, Trump has increasingly stoked anti-immigrant sentiment, railing on anecdotal examples of what he calls “migrant crime” and casting the Biden administration’s border policy as insufficiently harsh. In an interview with Time magazine published 30 April, Trump proposed mass deportations, facilitated in part by the US military, during his possible second term in office and claimed that undocumented immigrants are not civilians.For Omar Flores, the co-chair of the Coalition to March on the RNC, the Wednesday rally was an occasion to draw attention to the RNC on 15 July.“A sense that people are getting in Milwaukee is that they’re a little afraid of the RNC coming here,” said Flores, who grew up in Kenosha and said he worries about political repression and rightwing vigilante violence under a second Trump term. “I know it’s scary, but we still have to march.”The Republican party has pushed for the Secret Service to move protesters away from the arena in July, and Flores said the Coalition to March on the RNC is working with the American Civil Liberties Union to ensure access.As the Republican party seizes on immigration and the border to rally support before the 2024 elections, Biden has also shifted to the right on the issue, endorsing a measure to restrict asylum-seeking and referring to an immigrant as the pejorative “illegal” during his State of the Union address. Speakers at the event offered different perspectives on how to respond to Biden’s posture on immigration and Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which Voces de la Frontera has repeatedly denounced as a “genocide”.Dr Roa Qato, a Palestinian-American OB-GYN with a practice in Milwaukee and a featured speaker at the rally said she would rather vote third party than for Biden. “It sends the message that if you don’t listen to us, we’re following through – we’re not voting for you, your empty promises are not going to work,” she said.Neumann-Ortiz said Voces de la Frontera’s political arm, which endorsed the “uninstructed” protest vote in Wisconsin’s presidential primary and forms the largest Latino voter network in the swing state, will nonetheless support Biden.“[Trump] is someone who tried to legally and through violent action undermine a democratic election, and this is someone who will follow through with their threats on mass military deportation,” said Neumann-Ortiz.“I think we’re just being very clear with President Biden and his advisers, that we can do what we can do, but if you are not listening, and you don’t take seriously the opposition that is coming from the Palestinian rights movement, from the immigrant rights movement … you’re gonna lose.”For other attendees, the May Day rally offered an opportunity to remind politicians and the broader Wisconsin community about the contributions of immigrants to their home state – documented or not.Sonia Torres, a machine operator at a furniture manufacturing company in De Pere, said that with the help of Voces de la Frontera organizers, she was able to receive temporary protected status amid a workplace dispute.“I want people to realize that we have rights,” said Torres in Spanish. “Companies only view us as a part of the budget, as a means of making money – but we need to realize we have rights.”In recent months, commentators and politicians on the right have seized on the town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, which has seen a recent influx of immigrants, to stoke anxieties about immigration. Whitewater officials have asked for federal resources to accommodate the influx of an estimated 800-1,000 new residents in the last two years but have rejected politicization of their shifting population.“Señor Donald Trump, listen, this message is just for you,” Jorge Islas-Martinez, an interpreter and bilingual educator from Whitewater told the crowd.“We are not the people that you think that we are. We are here to work and we’re changing and making this [country] strong.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Chinese students in US tell of ‘chilling’ interrogations and deportations

      by

      Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for several hours, plans for future research shattered.Many western scholars are nervous about travelling to China in the current political climate. But lately it is Chinese researchers working at US universities who are increasingly reporting interrogations – and in several cases deportations – at US airports, despite holding valid work or study visas for scientific research.Earlier this month the Chinese embassy in Washington said more than 70 students “with legal and valid materials” had been deported from the US since July 2021, with more than 10 cases since November 2023. The embassy said it had complained to the US authorities about each case.The exact number of incidents is difficult to verify, as the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency does not provide detailed statistics about refusals at airports. A spokesperson said that “all international travellers attempting to enter the United States, including all US citizens, are subject to examination”.But testimonies have circulated on Chinese social media, and academics are becoming increasingly outspoken about what they say is the unfair treatment of their colleagues and students.“The impact is huge,” says Qin Yan, a professor of pathology at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut, who says that he is aware of more than a dozen Chinese students from Yale and other universities who have been rejected by the US in recent months, despite holding valid visas. Experiments have stalled, and there is a “chilling effect” for the next generation of Chinese scientists.The number of people affected is a tiny fraction of the total number of Chinese students in the US. The State Department issued nearly 300,000 visas to Chinese students in the year to September 2023. But the personal accounts speak to a broader concern that people-to-people exchanges between the world’s two biggest economies and scientific leaders are straining.The refusals appear to be linked to a 2020 US rule that barred Chinese postgraduate students with links to China’s “military-civil fusion strategy”, which aims to leverage civilian infrastructure to support military development. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute thinktank estimates that 95 civilian universities in China have links to the defence sector.Nearly 2,000 visas applications were rejected on that basis in 2021. But now people who pass the security checks necessary to be granted a visa by the State Department are being turned away at the border by CBP, a different branch of government.“It is very hard for a CBP officer to really evaluate the risk of espionage,” said Dan Berger, an immigration lawyer in Massachusetts, who represents a graduate student at Yale who, midway through her PhD, was sent back from Washington’s Dulles airport in December, and banned from re-entering the US for five years.“It is sudden,” Berger said. “She has an apartment in the US. Thankfully, she doesn’t have a cat. But there are experiments that were in progress.”Academics say that scrutiny has widened to different fields – particularly medical sciences – with the reasons for the refusals not made clear.X Edward Guo, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, said that part of the problem is that, unlike in the US, military research does sometimes take place on university campuses. “It’s not black and white … there are medical universities that also do military. But 99% of those professors are doing biomedical research and have nothing to do with the military.”But “if you want to come to the US to study AI, forget it,” Guo said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne scientist who studies the use of artificial intelligence to model the impact of vaccines said he was rejected at Boston Logan International airport. He was arriving to take up a place at Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral researcher. “I never thought I would be humiliated like this,” he wrote on the Xiaohongshu app, where he recounted being quizzed about his masters’ studies in China and asked if he could guarantee that his teachers in China had not passed on any of his research to the military.He did not respond to an interview request from the Observer. Harvard Medical School declined to confirm or comment on the specifics of individual cases, but said that “decisions regarding entry into the United States are under the purview of the federal government and outside of the school’s and the university’s jurisdiction.”The increased scrutiny comes as Beijing and Washington are struggling to come to an agreement about the US-China Science and Technology Agreement, a landmark treaty signed in 1979 that governs scientific cooperation between the two countries. Normally renewed every five years, since August it has been sputtering through six-month extensions.But following years of scrutiny from the Department of Justice investigation into funding links to China, and a rise in anti-Asian sentiment during the pandemic, ethnically Chinese scientists say the atmosphere is becoming increasingly hostile.“Before 2016, I felt like I’m just an American,” said Guo, who became a naturalised US citizen in the late 1990s. “This is really the first time I’ve thought, OK, you’re an American but you’re not exactly an American.”Additional research by Chi Hui Lin More

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      House Republicans present Mayorkas impeachment articles to Senate

      by

      House Republicans on Tuesday formally presented articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to the Senate, part of the party’s attempt to force an election-year showdown with the Biden administration over immigration and border security.In a ceremonial procession, 11 House Republican impeachment managers carried the two articles of impeachment across the rotunda of the US Capitol, where they informed the Senate they were prepared, for the first time in American history, to prosecute a sitting cabinet secretary for “willful and systemic refusal” to enforce border policies and a “breach of public trust”.Constitutional scholars, including conservative legal experts, have said the Republicans’ impeachment case is deeply flawed and fails to meet the high bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors” outlined in the constitution.Democrats, who control the Senate, have made clear their intention to quickly dispense with the articles, arguing that the politically charged proceedings amount to little more than a policy dispute with the administration. A two-thirds majority is needed to win an conviction in the Senate, an impossible threshold if all of the Democrats are united in favor of dismissing the charges against Mayorkas, who retains the support of Joe Biden.In February, House Republicans bypassed skepticism within their own ranks and unified Democratic opposition to approve by a one-vote margin two articles of impeachment against the secretary, who they have made the face of the Biden administration’s struggle to control record migration at the US-Mexico border.“Impeachment should never be used to settle a policy disagreement,” the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on Tuesday, adding: “Talk about awful precedents. This would set an awful precedent for Congress.”Schumer has said the Senate would convene on Wednesday as a “court of impeachment” and senators will be sworn in as jurors. Patty Murray, the Senate president pro tempore, a Democrat of Washington, presided over the chamber as the House homeland security chair, Mark Green of Tennessee, read the charges aloud.Schumer said he hoped to deal with the matter as “expeditiously as possible”. But Republicans are pressuring Democrats to hold a full trial.“We must hold those who engineered this crisis to full account,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said in a statement on Monday after signing the articles of impeachment. “Pursuant to the constitution, the House demands a trial.”Johnson initially delayed the delivery of the articles to focus on funding legislation to avert a government shutdown. Then the transmission was delayed again after Senate Republicans asked for more time to strategize ways to ensure a Senate trial.In remarks on Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell charged that it would be “beneath the Senate’s dignity to shrug off our clear responsibility” and not give thorough consideration to the charges against Mayorkas.“I will strenuously oppose any effort to table the articles of impeachment and avoid looking the Biden administration’s border crisis squarely in the face,” the Senate minority leader said.Mayorkas, the first Latino and first immigrant to lead the agency, has forcefully defended himself throughout the process, writing in a January letter to House Republicans: “Your false accusations do not rattle me.”Hours before the articles were delivered to the Senate, Mayorkas was on Capitol Hill, pressing Congress to provide his agency with more resources to enforce border policies and to pass legislation updating the nation’s outdated immigration laws.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our immigration system, however, is fundamentally broken,” he told members of the House homeland security committee on Tuesday morning. “Only Congress can fix it. Congress has not updated our immigration enforcement laws since 1996 – 28 years ago. And, only Congress can deliver on our need for more border patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges, facilities and technology.”Republicans seized on the opportunity to assail Mayorkas, blaming him for the humanitarian crisis at the country’s southern border.“The open border is the number one issue across America in poll after poll and that is exactly why this committee impeached you,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, one of 11 House Republicans tapped to serve as an impeachment manager.Several Republican senators have expressed deep skepticism about the House’s impeachment effort, former secretaries of homeland security as well as conservative legal scholars have denounced the Republicans’ case against Mayorkas as deeply flawed and warned that it threatens to undermine one of Congress’s most powerful tools for removing officials guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.A group of Republican senators are contemplating ways to slow-walk the process, suggesting they will deliver lengthy speeches and raise time-consuming procedural inquiries to keep the attention on immigration, one of Biden’s greatest political vulnerabilities.Americans broadly disapprove of the president’s handling of the border, now a top concern for many voters. Ahead of the 2024 election, Republicans have assailed Biden over the border while Donald Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, has again put immigration at the center of his campaign.An attempt to pass a bipartisan border bill – negotiated by Mayorkas and touted as the most conservative piece of immigration legislation in decades – was derailed by Republicans at the behest of Trump, who did not want Biden to notch a victory on an issue that plays to the former president’s political advantage.Biden has also asked Congress to approve requests for more border patrol agents and immigration court judges, but Republicans have refused, saying Biden should use his executive authority to stem the flow of migrants. Biden has said he is mulling a far-reaching executive action that would dramatically reduce the number of asylum seekers who can cross the southern border. More

    • 275 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      As a US diplomat, I helped circumvent Trump’s Muslim ban – then realised I was part of the problem | Josef Burton

      by

      When I began working as a consular officer at the US embassy in Ankara, Turkey, I was at the beginning of what was supposed to be a 20-year diplomatic career. Maybe I didn’t love all of US foreign policy, but in my routine visa assignment I was deeply committed to treating everybody I interviewed fairly and playing my part in facilitating the American immigrant dream. Then, on 27 June 2017, Donald Trump issued orders to begin implementing the “Muslim ban”. My routine job had suddenly become deeply morally fraught and instead of blandly facilitating the American dream, I was denying it to people based on their faith.My first instinct was to draft a resignation letter, but I didn’t immediately send it because it felt at the time like I was part of a nigh-unanimous institutional rejection of an illiberal policy. More than 1,000 US diplomats put their signatures on an internal dissent cable against the Muslim ban when it was proclaimed. My boss hated the ban, my boss’ boss hated the ban, and the dozens of US ambassadors summoned to the foreign ministries of Muslim-majority countries to explain the policy tried to disown it as much as they possibly could. When I pushed back as much as I could, I did so with the full support of my bosses and colleagues. But, and this is the most important part, we always did so within the regulations.We wanted to get waivers and exceptions for every applicant possible, so we sounded out exactly what criteria for waiving the ban Washington would accept. (Family separation? Loss of a valued employee for an American business?) We found where the bar was, we created templates and standard operating procedures, and got to work slotting as many people as we could into them. Within a few months, the ban interviews were rote checklists rather than impassioned pleas for humanity. Every applicant we got who checked the boxes was a moral victory; every one who didn’t make it was tragic. But, hey, we got to tell ourselves that we tried. As time wore on, I realised that fighting for individual waivers and exemptions was resistance by pedantry. What I found myself engaging in was a deeply non-confrontational performance of virtue rather than an act of sabotage.Joe Biden repealed the Muslim ban on the first day of his presidency. When secretary of state Antony Blinken informed us that the policy had ended, he declared that the ban was “a stain on our national conscience”. It was never said in as many words, but the implication was that because we managed the policy to optimise exemptions and because we felt bad about it, and because leadership repudiated the policy in retrospect, it meant that we weren’t implicated. That the issue was settled.But it isn’t settled. The presidential proclamation repealing the Muslim ban did not surrender a single iota of the authority to implement future bans. It was only when the Muslim ban was finally over that I fully realised what I had been part of; we created another tool in the toolbox, a set of procedures and standards for processing travel bans, waivers and exemptions that could be put to literally any purpose. Our internal resistance was fundamentally morally agnostic because we fought within the technical bounds of policy implementation rather than the fact of its declaration.I quit the US state department a few months later. I quit because, despite all of our efforts from within the system to fight against the Muslim ban, there is nothing stopping a future president from reinstating it, or something like it. Trump has outright promised to reinstate an expanded and harsher Muslim ban if re-elected. I am confident that junior US diplomats in the same position I was will be disgusted, will try to push back. They might even dust off some of the old templates I made. But they will only serve to make things run smoother next time. A certain proportion of Muslim immigrants will find waivers. Some – maybe thousands, maybe most – sadly won’t, but the people implementing the ban will be better positioned to repudiate another future “stain on our national conscience”.Resistance that shaves off the rough edges of inhumane policy without reversing it is not resistance, it is complicity. As theorist Stafford Beer says: “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and an immigration system with a smoothly running Muslim ban that has generous provision for waivers and exemptions is still an immigration system that bans Muslims. I quit the US diplomatic corps because internal resistance to a racist and illiberal political project is a losing bargain.
      Josef Burton is a former US diplomat who served in Turkey, India and Washington DC More