Refugee advocates have condemned President Donald Trump’s notice to Congress last month that it plans to set a ceiling of 15,000 refugee admissions for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1. Democratic candidate Joe Biden has pledged to raise the limit to at least 125,000 slots if he is elected. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, WPR’s Elliot Waldman was joined by Meredith Owen, interim director of policy and advocacy at Church World Service, to discuss the Trump administration’s cruel and misguided policies toward refugees and how easy it would be for Biden to change them if he [...]
Late last month, President Donald Trump told Congress that his administration plans to further slash the ceiling for refugee admissions during the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, to 15,000 from an already historically low 18,000. The new limit is less than one-seventh the 110,000 slots that former President Barack Obama approved in 2016. As The New York Times put it, Trump has “virtually sealed off a pathway for the persecuted into the country and obliterated the once-robust American reputation as a sanctuary for the oppressed.” This comes as the number of refugees worldwide continues to grow. According to [...]
“On foreign and defense policy, absolutely, there is an ambition to be more united, and that vision is shared by all of the member countries,” says Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, about the European Union. “Then in practice, as you’ve seen, there are divergences, and they are more or less clear in different areas.” Those divergences have frustrated advocates of a more forceful EU that operates on the world stage with “strategic autonomy,” a phrase Mr. Bildt finds “confuses more than it clarifies.” But he adds, as someone who has “been watching these things for a [...]
