Category Archives: immigration

An Irrelevant Argument

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Or it should be.

Recall that the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has canceled Harvard University’s authorization to enroll foreign students over that school’s decision to not bother in any serious way to protect the safety and free speech rights of Jewish students and to keep enrolling “students” who then engage in anti-American and pro-terrorist riots, building seizures, and vandalism, along with its refusal to expel and bring charges against those “students” already enrolled who’ve engaged in those behaviors. These school administration decisions could rise to the level of civil rights law violations, similar as they are, to Columbia University’s decisions which has resuled in that school being charged by HHS with civil rights law violations.

Harvard’s situation:

Harvard enrolls about 7,000 international students—more than 25% of the student body—and like many US universities it relies on their tuition payments, which are often full-fee.

As Noem noted,

It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments[.]

This echoes SecState Marco Rubio’s acknowledgment that even getting a visa (student or otherwise) in the first place is a privilege and not a right. Both acknowledgments also carry the flip side that our government has no obligation to grant visas and no obligation to authorize colleges or universities to enroll foreign students.

Still, Harvard has filed an appeal to Noem’s decision and is seeking an injunction, trying to get a judge to once again dictate from the awesome heights of a district court knoll top what a coequal branch of our government can do regarding foreign policy. In his letter “to the community,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote that the cancelation,

imperils the future of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams[.]

This is both cynically specious and wholly irrelevant. That Harvard has designed its business model to be so dependent on foreign student enrollment in no way obligates our government to allow such enrollment. Further, in no way do future “thousands of students” or “scholars” have any intrinsic right to a student visa, or any other form of visa.

The DHS decision here certainly should serve as a warning to others at colleges and universities, and at any other institution or enterprise, that coming into our nation for any purpose is a privilege and not a right, and that granting such a privilege incurs an obligation on the grantee to obey all of our laws, including the free speech rights of others and the sanctity of property, whether privately held or government held.

There is no part of Harvard’s argument that is relevant to the case. What matters—all that matters—is what does the law say? Is this cutoff permissible under existing law?

If the cutoff is permissible, then a non-activist judge who obeys our Constitution and his oath of office, must deny the injunction request. Harvard should have two basic choices: shape up and stop coddling rioters and vandals, or work to change the law.

Unfortunately, the case went before just such an activist judge. Federal District Judge Allison Burroughs has issued Harvard’s requested injunction staying the DHS cancelation.

The Potential Deportation of Khalil

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Mahmoud Khalil is the Columbia University Hamas terrorist- and Palestinian-supporter currently in ICE custody in Louisiana with a view to formally revoking his student visa and green card and deporting him. Matthew Hennesey, in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, is mostly correct in his piece regarding Khalil and others of his ilk who come to our nation ostensibly to better their own lot but in actuality to push their hatred of America and try to damage us from within.

However, he had this in his piece’s endgame:

With all that in mind, what’s the big rush [to deport Khalil]? The man’s wife is evidently eight months pregnant.

This is utterly irrelevant. The woman knew what she was doing when she married him, and she married him entirely voluntarily. She also can freely choose to go with her husband, if he winds up being deported. If she (equally freely) chooses to stay, there are a number of American agencies—governmental, non-governmental, charity—that provide support for single perinatal women and single mothers with babies (and older children) to care for.

The Jewish students whom Khalil so broadly and deeply harmed with the pro-terrorist “protests” he helped organize—group actions that prevented them from getting to their classes, overtly threatened them, seized and vandalized buildings with Nazi-oriented graffiti specifically targeted at them—had no choice in the matter. The Jewish students were carefully targeted, and separately as the Columbia management team still is demonstrating, those students have no support facilities.

I Have Questions

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Bojan Pancevski, in his piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, thinks a researcher has identified the origins of half of humanity:

For about half the people alive today, the story of where they came from just became clearer.
…
For centuries, historians and linguists have been searching for the cradle of the Indo-Europeans, an ancient people who shaped history and created the world’s largest language family, now spoken by over 40% of humanity. Now research led by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who specializes in the study of ancient populations, is making it possible to give a precise answer.

Maybe not so precise.

DNA detectives, including at Reich’s lab, analyzed DNA samples from the remains of around 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 previously known ancient samples. In two papers published in the scientific journal Nature last month, the researchers combine genetic evidence with archaeology and linguistics to argue that sometime before 3000 BC, a previously unknown people migrated from the Volga River to the Ukrainian steppe north of the Black Sea, where they mixed with a local population and formed the Yamnaya.

All of that, though, only begs a number of questions.

Who were those previously unknown people?

Where did they come from before the Volga?

Why did they migrate?

Who were the local population people?

Where had they come from?

What were the climate pressures then?

Pushing the origins answer back in time is useful and important, but these data don’t provide data for the origins of half of humanity.

Busting a Human Trafficking Ring

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Federal agents busted up a Guatemalan gang that had trafficked 20,000 illegal aliens into the US from Guatemala since 2019, at 15-18 stacks per illegal. In downtown Los Angeles,

Federal agents arrested two Guatemalan men on Friday accused of operating one of the largest human smuggling operations in the United States.

Acting US Attorney Joseph McNally:

These smuggling organizations have no regard for human life and their conduct kills. The indictment and arrests here have dismantled one of the country’s largest and most dangerous smuggling organizations.

Notice that: Federal agents got this done, not Sanctuary State agents. This is the governor who wants to be President.

Birthright Citizenship for Children of Illegally Imported Slaves

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Jason Riley, Upward Mobility columnist for The Wall Street Journal, in his op-ed last Wednesday has hung his hat on the universality of birthright citizenship on the citizenship granted the children of slaves who were illegally imported, and so as persons were present illegally. In support, he cited the 14th Amendment’s All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States clause and noted, correctly IMNSHO, the centrality of that subject to the jurisdiction thereof phrase to the hook for his hat.

Riley’s claim vis-à-vis those illegally imported slaves’ children is this:

Although the US banned the importation of slaves in 1808, an illegal international slave trade continued for decades. ….
According to the legal scholar Gerald Neuman, by the time the 14th Amendment was ratified, there were tens of thousands of black people in the US who had been brought here illegally. Naturally, some of them later bore children. It thus would seem that for authors of the Citizenship Clause, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” included the children of parents in the country without authorization.

Therein lies the failure of Riley’s argument. The Trump administration’s argument—and one I’ve made in these pages—is that illegal aliens and birth tourism mothers are not subject to our nation’s jurisdiction because, in the first instance, they’ve placed themselves outside our jurisdiction from the beginning by entering our nation illegally—in direct and deliberate contravention of our jurisdiction’s laws—and in the second instance, withholding themselves from our jurisdiction however legally they may have entered because they have no intention of staying or in any way breaking the bonds of their loyalty, citizenship, or still-accepted jurisdiction of their home nation.

Those illegally imported slaves, on the other hand, on their emancipation actively and consciously accepted the jurisdiction of our nation and our nation’s laws. They accepted and sought American citizenship, whether before or after their children were born.