On Immigration and Refugees
[no description provided]
The ban on refugees is illegal, immoral and un-American, and as an American, I want to add my voice.
The ban is illegal. ("Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Illegal.") I suspect that the United States also has legal obligations under treaties to accept refugees, but Google isn't my lawyer, and I am no expert.
The ban is immoral. Those who have gone through our immigration process and gotten green cards are being restricted from returning to the US. Those people have followed the legal path to immigration and built lives here. We made a deal with them and we're breaking it, suddenly and without warning. Those people might have jobs, school, or family to return to, and their lives are upended and uncertain. These are not illegal aliens, they are people who have gone through a complex, and sometimes kafka-esque immigration process.
I have worked with engineers from Syria. (I'm not going to name them in today's climate.) They did good work, and were good people. They were dealing with the horror of hearing family back home was missing, and they did good work anyway.
The President is hurting America with this ban. By telling those here legally that their status can be upended at a whim, he makes a strong argument against coming here by following the rules as they exist on a given day. Some people will continue to come here in violation of the law; others will go elsewhere, and another country will get both the risk and the reward from that set of refugees.
It's worth noting that the protests and court orders yesterday, while welcome, "Despite growing dissent, Trump gives no sign of backing down from travel ban." I guess we need to keep calling this what it is: un-American.
Pictured is John von Neumann, refugee, and inventor of the von Neumann architecture that's at the heart of the computer on which you're reading this, and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, on his way to protest in San Francisco.
[Update: The hawks at Lawfare blog have an analysis, Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence:.]