Luke Ford

When I came back to the USA after 8 months in Australia in 1989, the customers officer told me that I could lose my green card for being out of the country for so long. Frightened, I immediately set about becoming a US citizen. It was the first time I realized the dramatic difference in rights between permanent resident (established in 1981) and citizen.

A lot of people who sound like they are experts have been proclaiming there’s no practical difference between American permanent residency and citizenship. They’re wrong. That many of the differences fall into a grey area does not make them unreal.

If the Secretary of State decides you are a national security risk, he can deport you even if you are a permanent resident. He can’t do this to you if you are a citizen.

The elite news media portrays Mahmoud Khalil and his ilk who are in danger of deportation as free speech martyrs for supporting Palestine. Trump-friendly media portray them as terror supporters. Either way, I don’t see how America is hurt by their absence. In theory, I don’t like deporting non-citizens for their speech, but if they’re a disruptive force who are supporting illegal behavior on college campuses (such as taking over buildings, denying access to facilities to Zionists and the like), if they are not a clear benefit for America, I’m fine with deporting them.

Many advanced economies may well have benefitted from Muslim immigration, but I’m not aware of anyone making that case. Someone needs to make that case.

Is there clear evidence that Muslim immigration is a net benefit to advanced economies? Which countries show the clearest net benefit from Muslim immigration? In which countries are Muslims paying far more in taxes than they are taking out in welfare payments and other social services? Which countries have become more Muslim and more free and more prosperous and more advanced and more innovative?

The Washington Post reports:

A few weeks ago, New York immigration lawyer Pouyan Darian sought to reassure lawful permanent residents that it was safe to travel outside the United States without jeopardizing their status under the Trump administration. With rare exceptions, he said in a viral YouTube video, those with green cards have the “absolute right” to reenter the country.

Darian is rethinking his advice. Several recent federal enforcement actions against green-card holders have gained widespread notoriety and cast a cloud of fear and anxiety over many of the nation’s estimated 12.8 million lawful permanent residents whose legal rights to live and work in the country once gave them confidence that they were immune from President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The number of confirmed detentions appears limited to a handful of highly publicized incidents, including the arrests of a pair of campus activists in New York, a German national returning to New England from an overseas trip, and a Filipina woman in Seattle who has lived in the United States for three decades.

But those apprehensions along with reports — including a viral Tik Tok video — of legal permanent residents being interrogated at U.S. airport checkpoints and pressured to sign forms renouncing their status have fanned rumors on social media, prompted green-card holders to cancel travel plans and generated a flood of frantic calls to immigration attorneys.

Darian says his counsel to clients has “absolutely changed” and he is now telling them to consider holding off on traveling because “you are subjecting yourself to scrutiny when you attempt to reenter the United States.”

“I didn’t expect them to go after green-card holders,” he said in an interview. He posted a new video on Wednesday warning that the Trump administration is going to begin focusing on permanent residents.

The Washington Post reports:

The administration’s approach: Overwhelm with action, outrun the usual checks on executive power, and change government and the country so quickly that some impacts could be irreversible even if courts later intervene.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller fully expected that invoking wartime powers would invite legal challenges, according to officials familiar with the plans. So he arranged for President Donald Trump to sign the proclamation late on a Friday night, hoping to jump-start deportations before a court could respond.

Miller’s maneuver reflected a motto he often shares with other officials: “The most important commodity in the executive branch is time.”

It also reflects the Trump administration’s broader approach in its early days: Overwhelm with action, outrun the usual checks on executive power, and change government and the country so quickly that some impacts could be irreversible even if courts later intervene. Opponents are so dizzied that they don’t know what to fight, and targets of aggression such as universities, corporations and law firms have been cowed into voluntary submission.

“When you’re winning, it’s like blitzkrieg,” Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s first-term chief strategist, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “They’re surrendering without a fight. This is extraordinary, and that’s their urgency: You got to keep pounding. Don’t let them up. Don’t let them have a breath. Don’t let them regroup. Don’t let them organize.”

…The new spin on Bannon’s original “flood the zone” formula arose from the lessons of Trump’s first term and four years out of power to hunker down and plan. Among the top lessons Miller and other alumni of the first administration learned: Force confrontations sooner and hash out the details in court rather than spend as much time vetting policies before introducing them…

An additional impact of the blitz of action is the response across institutions to avoid Trump’s retribution — by capitulating in advance.

Major companies such as Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon and Google said they would pull back on diversity programs after Trump campaigned against them. Columbia University punished students involved in demonstrations protesting Israel’s war in Gaza and agreed to overhaul an academic department under threat of losing $400 million in federal funding. The law firm Paul Weiss agreed to support the administration’s programs to reverse a punitive executive order, while other major law firms are shying away from suing the Trump administration or representing former Biden administration officials.