Trump’s Executive Order "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States" – A Sign of Things to Come, or Business as Usual?

In the same week that President Trump issued his now infamous executive order suspending refugee admissions into the US and temporarily barring entry to passport holders from seven predominantly Muslim countries, he also issued two other executive orders that affect immigration. These other two orders—“Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” which, among other things, directs the immediate construction of a border wall, and "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States"—did not receive quite the same level of media attention as the “travel ban,” which has been the subject of already extensive federal litigation. Still, both may have a very broad impact on immigration and immigrant communities in the US. Trump's other executive actions signed early February—including "Enforcing Federal Law with Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking," which among other actions aims to increase prosecutions for immigration and visa fraud, and "Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety," which will set up a task force to develop "strategies to reduce crime, including, in particular, illegal immigration"— may also signify that the scope of individuals likely to be targeted and deported is widening.

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New York Times: “Japan Limited Immigration; Now It’s Short of Workers”

Japan’s strict stance on immigration—it has very little illegal immigration and is officially closed for those seeking low-skill labor—has led to worker shortages in many industries. Similar to the United States and other developed countries, Japan has had a difficult time finding workers for low-skill and low-wage jobs in the food, manufacturing, healthcare, and restaurant industries, and these labor shortages have helped put a brake on economic growth:

That is prompting Japan to question some fundamental assumptions about its labor needs. The debate is politically delicate, but changing realities on the ground—in Japan’s factories and fields—are forcing politicians to catch up. Japan’s total foreign-born labor force topped one million for the first time last year, according to the government, lifted in part by people entering the country on visas reserved for technical trainees.

While the government has incredibly strict immigration policies, lawmakers created immigration loopholes, most notably a “trainee” program, to allow hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers from such countries as China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Cambodia, fill empty jobs. As the Japanese population shrinks, in the last five years the trainee program has doubled in size, to over 200,000, according to official data, and there are plans to expand it. The “trainee” designation is not entirely accurate, since apart from a short period of language study, most trainees “receive little or no instruction that would distinguish them from regular manual laborers,” specialists and participants say. “The system is like calling a crow white,” Yoshio Kimura, a member of Parliament from the governing Liberal Democratic Party who heads the party’s labor committee, tells the New York Times. “What we’re really doing is importing labor.”

Because of decades of low birthrates, the number of working-age Japanese has been falling since the mid-1990s. Official census figures confirmed recently that Japan’s population shrank by nearly a million during the last half-decade. Nationwide unemployment is at three percent. The situation is serious in some industries with three to four positions open in nursing care and construction for every person who applies, according to government surveys.

Despite its popularity and critical function it plays because of the declining population, the trainee program is full of abuse. Nobuya Takai, a lawyer who has represented foreign trainees in labor disputes, explains that since companies do not hire the trainees directly, but through a myriad of government and private-sector middlemen, most trainees end up thousands of dollars in debt to pay broker fees before they even arrive. Moreover, since trainees cannot easily switch jobs, they do not have the option to leave a bad or abusive employer. “They can’t change jobs, and they lose money if they go home,” Takai says. Complaints about unpaid labor are common. Liu Hongmei, a Chinese worker, quit her Shanghai clothing factory job because she was promised wages three times her $430-per-month Chinese wage. “It seemed like a big opportunity,” she says. She arrived in Japan in debt after paying brokers $7,000 to arrange her visa, and found difficult working conditions and lower-than-promised pay. Her bosses, she says, “treat us like slaves.” In 2011, an American State Department report on human trafficking indicated the trainee program had inadequate protections against “debt bondage” and other abuses.

Some argue that Japan’s anti-immigrant stance and worker shortage problems may be a warning for other developed countries as they make possible changes to immigration policy. Present Trump campaigned on calls for a crackdown on undocumented  immigrants, saying they “compete directly against vulnerable American workers.” He also promised to cut back legal immigration with new controls to “boost wages and ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first,” although a study last year found, with few caveats, that immigrants do not take Americans’ jobs and in many cases create jobs.

Japanese parliament has approved the creation of a new agency to oversee the trainee program last year, in response to criticism over worker abuse. Additionally lawmakers plan to bring in more workers, and allow more kinds of businesses to hire them, including nursing homes and cleaning companies for offices and hotels. Kimura and some other lawmakers want to establish a formal guest worker system, though it would still not open a path to permanent stays. “If we want economic growth in the future, we need foreigners,” Kimura says.

New York Times: “U.S. Technology Startups Panic Over Immigration Ban”

Silicon Valley technology start-ups and businesses, many with immigrant founders and a diverse workforce, are reacting strongly against President Trump’s executive order banning travel for nationals of certain Muslim-majority countries. President Trump’s executive order, issued late last month, halted the US refugee program for 120-days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and imposed a ninety-day travel suspension on individuals from seven predominantly Muslim countries, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The ban, which was temporarily halted on Friday by a Seattle judge, has led to widespread protests and legal challenges, and many venture capitalists and start-up founders are reporting it’s already impacted key business decisions and employee operations. "I've never seen something impact the day-to-day thought process of CEOs so fast,” Neeraj Agrawal, general partner at Battery Ventures, tells the New York Times.

"Here and now, today, we have businesses that are stopping because their employees can't travel in and out of the United States," David Cowan, a partner at Silicon Valley firm Bessemer Venture Partners, says. "This will be the No.1 cause of missed business plans in 2017." Cowan, who also sits on the board of a cybersecurity company in Israel, says the company has delayed moving its headquarters to the US because its employees are "from all sorts of countries.” Other companies have also reported delaying plans to open up US locations. Amin Shokrollahi, founder and chief executive of Kandou, a semiconductor company, is reconsidering plans to open a US design center that would have employed at least twenty people. The Iranian-German dual citizen is based in Switzerland, and he and his Iranian colleagues canceled plans to attend a trade show in Silicon Valley, where he was supposed to have received an award. 

The employee base of many Silicon Valley companies is especially diverse. More than half of all "unicorns"—startups valued at $1 billion or more—have at least one immigrant founder, according to a 2016 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Arlington, Virginia. "There is a panic in the startup community," Bill Stock, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), tells the New York Times. "Startups are very concerned because of the unpredictability of the order."

The opposition to the travel ban is so strong that nearly 130 companies, many of them in the technology field, filed an amicus brief late Sunday in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which declined to reinstate the travel ban after it had been blocked. The brief was signed by large and small tech companies including Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Uber, Tesla, and Intel and says that the “instability and uncertainty” created by the executive order “will make it far more difficult and expensive for US companies to hire some of the world’s best talent—and impede them from competing in the global marketplace.” President Trump says the ban is necessary to protect Americans, objecting to the judicial ruling that blocked his ban: "The judge opens our country to potential terrorists and others that do not have our best interests at heart. Bad people are very happy!"

While many technology companies have been outspoken in their protest of the ban, other companies are keeping quiet. Fortune Magazine contacted nearly every company in the Fortune 100 for a response to the Muslim ban, and the “responses were almost uniformly no-comments or punts, with spokespeople explaining executives were still assessing the impacts of the ban.”

Don't Panic: Secondary Inspection Isn’t Always Cause for Concern

Dear Mr. Khan:

First off, we’re big fans.

You are one of the most successful film stars in the world (if not the most successful). I mean, to have nicknames like “King of Bollywood” and “King Khan” and to be known simply by the initials “SRK,” it’s obvious you are very special. You’ve appeared in more than eighty Bollywood films, have earned numerous accolades including 15 Filmfare Awards, and have a passionate following in Asia and the Indian diaspora worldwide.

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The Guardian: “Backlash against Trump migration order grows as Obama issues warning”

President Donald Trump’s executive order signed last Friday halting the US refugee program and banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries has led to chaos at airports, legal challenges, protests across the country, and worldwide condemnation. It has even led to former President Barack Obama weighing in, warning that “American values are at stake.”

The travel ban was immediately challenged in courts, and on Saturday night, a federal judge granted an emergency stay for citizens of the affected countries who had already arrived in the US as well as those in transit and who hold valid visas, ruling that they were allowed to enter the US. The federal judge in the Eastern District of New York ruled on a habeas corpus petition filed by the ACLU on behalf of Hameed Khalid Darweesh and Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, who were both denied entry and detained after landing at JFK airport. Darweesh worked in Iraq as an interpreter and engineer for the US military for ten years and had been granted a visa after extensive background checks. Alshawi had been granted a visa to join his wife and son who are already permanent US residents.

The executive order affected numerous travelers and refugees, many who had waited years and undergone extensive vetting to come to the US. The order also affected a grandmother visiting her family in the US, an Iranian medical researcher, and an MIT student, among many others. A second temporary stay, more broad than the New York order, was also issued by two federal judges in Boston on Sunday. Their ruling puts a seven-day hold on enforcement of Trump's executive order, and states that no approved refugee, holder of a valid visa, lawful permanent resident or traveler from one of the seven majority-Muslim nations affected by the ban can be detained or removed anywhere in the US for the next seven days due solely to Trump's executive order.

On Monday, acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, ordered the Justice Department not to defend President Trump’s executive order in court. “I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right,” Ms. Yates wrote in a letter to Justice Department lawyers. “At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the Executive Order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the Executive Order is lawful.” Although this decision was mainly symbolic—she was immediately fired by President Trump and Dana J. Boente, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who was appointed to serve as attorney general until Congress acts to confirm Senator Jeff Sessions, rescinded her order—it illustrates the divide at the Justice Department as well as the haphazard nature in which the executive order was signed. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security were only permitted to view the order on Friday.

As demonstrations, legal challenges, and criticism mount—including from the business community—the White House continues to defend the order, insisting that only 109 travellers—a figure that is not entirely accurate—had been “inconvenienced” over the weekend. Within the State Department, a draft memo circulated around foreign missions strongly opposed to Trump’s executive order. “We are better than this ban,” the memo says, arguing that the ban will backfire and make the US less safe from terrorism. The draft memo states: “A policy which closes our doors to over 200 million legitimate travelers in the hopes of preventing a small number of travelers who intend to harm Americans from using the visa system to enter the United States will not achieve its aim of making our country safer. Moreover, such a policy runs counter to core American values of nondiscrimination, fair play and extending a warm welcome to foreign visitors and immigrants.”

After a weekend of confusion, the Department of Homeland Security is now saying that the order does not apply to lawful permanent residents noting that the “entry of lawful permanent residents is in the national interest. Accordingly, absent significant derogatory information indicating a serious threat to public safety and welfare, lawful permanent resident status will be a dispositive factor in our case-by-case determinations.” UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson reported on Sunday night that he had received assurances from the White House that the “Muslim ban” would only apply to UK dual nationals traveling from the listed countries directly to the US; however, the US Embassy in London contradicted this claim noting that no visas would be issued to any dual nationals of the countries listed under the “Muslim ban,” though this page has since been taken down.

"It's working out very nicely," President Trump told reporters Saturday. "You see it at the airports. You see it all over. It's working out very nicely and we're going to have a very, very strict ban, and we're going to have extreme vetting, which we should have had in this country for many years." Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, strongly disagrees, telling CNN. "This order contravenes the principles of religious liberty, equality, and compassion that our nation was founded upon in its discriminatory impact of Muslims. It also plays into the Al Qaeda and ISIS narrative that the West is no place for Muslims and that we are engaged in a war of civilizations."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the attorney general of Washington State each filed lawsuits on Monday against President Trump’s executive order, calling it an “an unconstitutional religious test.” We will provide additional updates as we receive them.

UPDATE FEBRUARY 4, 2017: A judge in Seattle ordered a nationwide halt on Friday to the travel ban after a Boston court refused to extend a stay. The ruling from the Seattle judge, James Robart of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Washington, an appointee of President George W. Bush, is the most far-reaching ruling to date, though courts around the country have stayed certain aspects of President Trump's travel ban.

The federal government was “arguing that we have to protect the US from individuals from these countries, and there’s no support for that,” Judge Robart said in his decision. The judge's temporary ruling bars the administration from enforcing two parts of President Trump’s order: the ninety-day suspension of entry into the US of individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen—and the order's limits on accepting refugees, including “any action that prioritizes the refugee claims of certain religious minorities.”

Initially calling the ruling "outrageous," the White House late Friday issued a revised statement saying it would seek an emergency halt to the judge’s stay to restore the president’s “lawful and appropriate" order. Earlier this week the State Department said 60,000 visas had been revoked. A State Department official tells CNN that the department has "reversed the cancellation of visas that were provisionally revoked following the Trump administration's travel ban—so long as those visas were not stamped or marked as canceled." The Department of Homeland Security also said Saturday it has suspended actions to implement President Trump's executive immigration order. Nationals of the affected seven-Muslim majority countries who intend on traveling outside the US or to the US should consult an experienced immigration attorney. We will continue to provide updates as we receive them.

UPDATE FEBRUARY 15, 2017: A federal judge in Virginia granted a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration from implementing its travel ban in Virginia, adding another judicial ruling to the previously existing ones challenging the ban's constitutionality. This particular ruling is significant because US District Judge Leonie Brinkema found that since an unconstitutional religious bias is at the root of the travel ban, it violates First Amendment prohibitions on favoring one religion over another.

In her twenty-two-page ruling, Brinkema writes that the "president himself acknowledged the conceptual link between a Muslim ban and the EO (executive order)." She further notes that the president's executive authority is nevertheless limited by the Constitution. "Every presidential action must still comply with the limits set by Congress' delegation of power and the constraints of the Constitution, including Bill of Rights." A Justice Department spokeswoman did not return an email to the AP seeking comment about the ruling, although President Trump has indicated that he may issue a new executive order to replace the one being challenged in court.