More on Immigration

Hot Air takes the anti-Trump side of the question, arguing that the Immigration Act of 1965 makes it illegal to use national origin (the Trump order doesn't, in fact, use religion) as a criterion.

However, 8 U.S. Code § 1182 -- current by an act of 2015 -- holds:
(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
This is the sort of thing that courts ordinarily sort out, and I suspect the courts will chew on this one for a while. It may well be that the Congress has passed incompatible laws, which means sorting out which one overrules the other. Still, I expect a vigorous Article II defense from the Trump administration, and even the Supreme Court is only co-equal to the Presidency.

We may be living with this for a while. Good to see that the green card issue, at least, has been sorted out. General Kelly came down on the matter today, and I doubt Trump will buck one of his Marines.

UPDATE: Looks like Trump's base is in no way shocked by this move, as you'd expect given that he campaigned on this for like nine months. One expects that the Quebec mosque shooting will underline the point of wanting to check immigrants carefully -- at least one shooter was from Morocco, which isn't even on Trump's list.

With that plus the pending SCOTUS nomination, the politics of this may settle down. The courts can then do their work in peace.

UPDATE: The Intercept says that the widespread reports that the shooter was Moroccan are false.

UPDATE: The Quebec police now believe the one shooter acted alone, with what news reports are describing as 'two rifles and an AK-47.' I assume they don't know why that's a strange thing to say. Apparently he is a nationalist, which in Quebec means having an intensely French identity.

2 comments:

jabrwok said...

Well, we could just repeal the 1965 law, or we could bar ALL immigration for, say, 60 years or so. Either one works for me, though ideally we'd accept immigrants who'd assimilate well and add to our overall wealth and quality of life (ie, not Muslims).

E Hines said...

Couple things. Blanket bans on Muslims is a bit far. I've worked with quite a number of Muslims; nowhere near all of them are jihadists, none of the ones with whom I worked even were Sharia adherents. All had assimilated quite nicely. If we had religious...discussions...they were about as vociferous as any ordinary Protestant-Catholic, or Baptist-anybody, or anybody-Papist tete-a-tetes. Based on my sample size, we can handle--assimilate--a fair number of them.

Second, I disagree that Trump's EO violates INA-65, and it doesn't even need the 2015 Act to have that status. INA-65 bars the use of national origin, race, and ancestry as basis for immigration. The EO doesn't even approach that. It bars entry for a short period of time, and nothing more. Even the restriction on entry from Syria is temporary, if more open-ended.

Eric Hines