What AI Will Do to Elections | Red States Don’t Want Chinese Neighbors | The Specter of Family Separation, and more

There could scarcely be a worse time to skimp on combating harmful content online. More than 50 countries, including the world’s three biggest democracies and Taiwan, an increasingly precarious geopolitical hot spot, are expected to hold national elections in 2024. Seven of the world’s 10 most populous countries—Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States—will collectively send a third of the world’s population to the polls.

Why America’s National Security Establishment Keeps Falling Short  (Derek Leebaert, National Interest)
In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Collins (Bill Murray) got to escape the time loop, but so far, we are stuck. Anger over the latest “forever wars” shadows the 2024 elections, as do proxy wars and new entanglements. The way out is, first, to accept that the U.S.“national security establishment” is not up to the task of political-military leadership. Yes, the United States won the Cold War. But that was a generation ago, and victory entailed countless diversions, including 100,000 dead on the Pacific Rim.
There’s always much talent among the country’s high-powered foreign policy enthusiasts but also much delusion in their attempts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force. The examples of winter 2023-2024 include collapsed approaches to Ukraine and the Middle East. Whatever the compelling doctrines of such experts, most of them are winging it when in office, as did earlier high political appointees like Bundy, Kissinger, and Rice.
A lifetime of recurring moral and practical failures can be averted. Steps include a more restrained approach to the nation’s security and political fixes like limiting patronage positions in State, Defense, and other parts of the politico-military bureaucracy. Doing so in no way undercuts U.S. advantages of industrial, financial, commercial, and cultural engagement with the world. On the other hand, failing at a fifth misguided war could be the end of the story.

Red States Don’t Want Chinese Neighbors  (Josef Burton, Foreign Policy)
Last year, several U.S. states—most publicly, Florida—passed laws that severely restrict Chinese nationals’ ability to buy property. More than a dozen states are debating similar laws that target individuals from China and, in some cases, other countries such as Iran and Syria. Proponents of these laws have argued that this legislation is a way to fight China’s threat to the United States. As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put it at a Republican presidential primary debate in December, “I banned China from buying land in the state of Florida.”
The wave of legislation harks back to the days when the United States embraced widespread legal discrimination against East Asian people. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned all immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States for a decade; the alien land laws, a series of 19th- and 20th-century laws, limited land ownership in more than a dozen U.S. states by immigrants from certain countries—primarily China and Japan. The acts’ proponents claimed that the laws would protect white workers from competition, but the real motivation was racism. Essentially, lawmakers used discrimination to manufacture a geopolitical threat.
Yet while the new laws evoke the anti-Asian racism of a century ago, lawmakers are looking to another era for legal justification: the post-9/11 security apparatus. The so-called war on terror made national security concerns an easy way to fold bigotry into public policy. Over the past two decades, Washington has discriminated against Muslims under the guise of security, culminating in then-President Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban that targeted Muslim-majority countries for what his administration claimed was the “security and welfare of the United States.”
Now, states are citing “national security interests” as the legal basis for their anti-Chinese laws. In Florida, DeSantis said the state was “taking action to stand against the United States’ greatest geopolitical threat—the Chinese Communist Party.” The bill bars people who are “domiciled” in China from buying property or agricultural land in most of the state, with one primary exception: Individuals who hold non-tourist visas can purchase one residential property on less than two acres if it’s farther than five miles from military installations or “critical infrastructure.” Chinese nationals who own property in Florida must also register promptly with the state’s Commerce Department or face strict penalties.

Mo. Gov. Parson Bans China-Owned Agricultural Land Near Critical Military Facilities  (Amber Ruch, KFVS12)
Governor Mike Parson announced Tuesday, January 2 he issued an executive order banning individuals and businesses from nations designated as foreign adversaries from buying agricultural land within a 10-mile radius of critical military facilities.
Executive Order 24-01 bans any citizen, resident or business from a foreign adversary, outlined in 15 C.F.R § 7.4, from owning or acquiring Missouri agriculture land within 10 miles of critical military facilities. Nations currently classified as foreign adversaries include China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
According to a release from the governor’s office, for the purposes of this order, “critical military facilities” refers to all staffed military facilities in Missouri.

The Specter of Family Separation (Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic)
Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office in 2017, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were dispatched across the country to round up as many undocumented foreigners as possible, and the travel ban put into limbo the livelihoods of thousands of people from majority-Muslim countries who had won the hard-fought right to be here—refugees, tech entrepreneurs, and university professors among them. The administration drew up plans for erecting a border wall, as well as an approach to stripping away the due-process rights of noncitizens so they could be expelled faster. These changes to American immigration policy took place in the amount of time that it would take the average new hire to figure out how to use the office printer.
Within days of Trump’s election, his key immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, was already gathering a group of loyal bureaucrats to start drafting executive orders. Civil servants who were veterans of the George W. Bush administration found the proposals to be so outlandishly impractical, if not also harmful to American interests and perhaps even illegal, that they assumed the ideas could never come to fruition. They were wrong. Over the next four years, lone children were loaded onto planes and sent back to the countries they had fled without so much as a notification to their families. Others were wrenched from their parents’ arms as a way of sending a message to other families abroad about what awaited them if they, too, tried to enter the United States.
If given another chance to realize his goals, Miller has essentially boasted in recent interviews that he would move even faster and more forcefully. And Trump, who’s been campaigning on the promise to finish the job he started on immigration policy, would fairly assume if he is reelected that harsh restrictions in that arena are precisely what the American people want. “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he declared during a speech in Iowa in September, referring to 1954’s offensively titled Operation Wetback, under which hundreds of thousands of people with Mexican ancestry were deported, including some who were American citizens.