• NYC Bans Calling Someone an “Illegal Alien” out of Hate

    It’s now against the law in New York City to threaten someone with a call to immigration authorities or refer to them as an “illegal alien” when motivated by hate. The restrictions — violations of which are punishable by fines of up to $250,000 per offense — are outlined in a 29-page directive released by City Hall’s Commission on Human Rights. The Commission on Human Rights made clear that the directive is, at least in part, a rebuke of federal crackdowns on illegal immigration.

  • Does Norway Have a Far-Right Problem?

    A recent article in the Guardian by Sindre Bangstad, a Norwegian social anthropologist describes Norway as being in the grip of pervasive, far-right nationalism, with violence simmering just below the surface. “Norway is in denial about the threat of far-right violence,” reads the bombastic headline. Kathrine Jebsen Moore, a fellow Norwegian, writes that Bangstad misrepresents and misleads: she motes that the Norwegian Police Security Service still regards Islamist terror threats as the most serious threat to Norway, even if it has upgraded the threat of far-right extremism from “unlikely” to “possible” after an attempted mosque attack in August. But “to see in the upgrading of the terrorist threat posed by far-right groups a general mood of irrational hatred for immigrants and Muslims, and portray Norway as a hotbed for racism, is just wrong,” Moore writes, adding: “Norway, like other European countries, is faced with a new set of challenges as it changes from a homogenous nation to a country with a growing immigrant population” – and that “Norway is coping with this influx a lot better than Sweden. So, is Norway in denial about its far-right problem? Don’t believe it.”

  • Border Communities Inundated with Surveillance Technologies

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) the other day published The Atlas of Surveillance: Southwestern Border Communities. The Atlas consists of profiles of six counties along the U.S.-Mexico border, outlining the types of surveillance technologies deployed by local law enforcement—including drones, body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, and face recognition. The report also includes a set of 225 data points marking surveillance by local, state, and federal agencies in the border region.

  • Will Denmark Become Like Sweden?

    Denmark has experienced 10 bombings since February. The latest took place on August 27 in a residential complex, Gersager, in the Greve area, very close to Copenhagen. No one was injured, but the building was seriously damaged. This year, the Swedish city of Malmö has experienced 19 bombings. Sweden is exporting not only its bombings to Denmark. Gang crime, with its shootings and murders, has also traveled across the border. As to the nationality of migrants engaged in crime, statistics show that Lebanese male migrants are engaged in crime almost four times as much as the average Dane. They are followed by male descendants from Somalia, Morocco, and Syria.

  • “People Actively Hate Us”: Inside the Border Patrol’s Morale Crisis

    For decades, the Border Patrol was a largely invisible security force. Agents called their slow-motion specialty “laying in” — hiding in the desert and brush for hours, to wait and watch, and watch and wait. Two years ago, when President Trump entered the White House with a pledge to close the door on illegal immigration, all that changed. “No longer were they a quasi-military organization tasked primarily with intercepting drug runners and chasing smugglers,” four New York Times journalists write. “Their new focus was to block and detain hundreds of thousands of migrant families fleeing violence and extreme poverty — herding people into tents and cages, seizing children and sending their parents to jail, trying to spot those too sick to survive in the densely packed processing facilities along the border.”

  • Major Impact Expected from Supreme Court Asylum Decision

    While legal challenges continue to make their way through the nation’s 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — which includes the southern border states of California and Arizona —  the Supreme Court ruled that, in the interim, the Trump administration could begin denying asylum claims to migrants at the country’s southern border who did not first seek protection in another country along their route. The policy would affect asylum-seekers at the border, who are largely from Central America, as well as an increasing number of migrants from outside the Western Hemisphere.

  • U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Erodes Protections for Asylum Seekers, UN Says

    The U.N. refugee agency is expressing concern about the negative impact of Wednesday’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on people seeking asylum in the United States. The ruling affirms the Trump Administration’s policy that denies asylum to anyone who does not seek protection in countries through which they pass before reaching the U.S. border.

  • New EU Office Criticized by Liberals, NGOs as Conveying a "Xenophobic Message"

    EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen was accused by liberal and leftist members of the European Parliament, and by several international organizations, of creating a new position which conveys a xenophobic message. The new office – the official name is The Office for Protecting Our European Way of Life — has been the subject of bitter criticized within Brussels and throughout the EU. von der Leyen defended he decision saying: “Our European way of life is holding up our values,” she told reporters. “The beauty of the dignity of every single human being is one of the most precious values.”

  • Get Ready for the Venezuela Refugee Crisis

    With its economy in free fall, after having already contracted by half this decade, and with its future politics completely up in the air as President Nicolas Maduro clings semi-constitutionally to power, Venezuela teeters on the brink. “Even if things do not get that bad, it is easy to imagine scenarios in which ten million Venezuelans become refugees — with many millions inside the country struggling just to stay alive as food supplies dwindle and public health conditions deteriorate even further,” Juan Carlos Pinzón Bueno and Michael O’Hanlon write.

  • How Immigration Can Make Some U.K.-Born Residents Feel Worse Off Even If They Aren’t

    Worries about the effects of immigration are prevalent in politics across Europe and the U.S. In the U.K., for instance, concerns over immigration dominate much of the Brexit debate. For many, immigrants are seen as a source of competition for jobs and access to public services (irrespective of whether this is true or not). Peter Howley writes in The Conversation that despite the intuitive appeal of this argument, empirical evidence to support it is lacking. The explanation for the negative perception of immigration is rather found in subjective well-being, and the effects of immigration on subjective well-being were found to be more negative and more notable in certain subgroups. These groups include relatively older people (those over 60), those with low household incomes, and/or the unemployed. “The main concern with these findings is that if – despite positive economic benefits– immigration is associated with adverse effects on the subjective well-being of certain groups in society, then this makes the challenge of integration more difficult,” Howley writes.

  • How Climate Change Is Driving Emigration from Central America

    Migration from Central America has gotten a lot of attention these days, including the famous migrant caravans. But much of it focuses on the way migrants from this region – especially El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras – are driven out by gang violence, corruption and political upheaval. These factors are important and require a response from the international community. But displacement driven by climate change is significant too.

  • HHS IG: Migrant Children Separated from Parents "Suffered Significant Distress"

    Migrant children who were separated from their parents by U.S. agents at the U.S.-Mexican border last year suffered significant distress, feelings of abandonment and other serious mental health issues, the inspector general’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a disturbing report released Wednesday.

  • Europe’s Fear of Refugees Is the Only Thing That Can Save Syria

    Since last April, the Syrian government has been on a rampage, deliberately targeting civilians in Idlib province, and continuing a deliberate campaign of destroying medical facilities. Bashar al-Assad’s regime and his Russian allies have bombed health facilities 521 times since the start of the conflict. Yet, at last month’s G-7 summit in France, Idlib went unmentioned in the discussions over global security. “The West, it seems, is haunted more by the specter of the refugee than by the suffering of children. To break through this apathy, Syrians will have to use the only leverage available to them: The threat to flee toward Europe once again,” Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes in Foreign Policy.

  • Harvard Student’s Deportation Raises Concerns About Border Device Searches and Social Media Surveillance

    Media outlets reported this week that an international student at Harvard University was deported back to Lebanon after border agents in Boston searched his electronic devices and confronted him about his friends’ social media posts. EFF argues that these allegations raise serious concerns about whether the government is following its own policies regarding border searches of electronic devices, and the constitutionality of these searches and of social media surveillance by the government.

  • What Ending the Flores Agreement on Detention of Immigrant Children Really Means

    Last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued its final rule on custody of two groups of noncitizen children, establishing different procedures for the treatment of children accompanied by at least one parent at the border prior to arrest and “unaccompanied alien children” (UACs) who crossed the border and were arrested without a parent. the core of the DHS final rule echoes a position taken earlier by the Obama administration: Protections for UACs in the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA) do not apply to accompanied minors.