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 [...]
Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Edward Alden is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott. Of all the self-defeating actions in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants, the most puzzling is its obsession with driving foreign students out of the United States. Last week, the administration unveiled a proposed rule that would force out many students by revoking visas if they fail to finish their degrees in four years, and would also limit students from many African and Middle Eastern countries to two-year visas. This comes on top of its failed effort earlier this year to strip visas from foreign students in [...]
As recent polling has confirmed, the prestige and image of the United States have suffered a precipitous decline under President Donald Trump. As for Trump himself, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed that people in a variety of other countries place more stock in the leadership of both China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin than in America’s president. Although domestic issues are likely to dominate the upcoming U.S. presidential election, for these reasons and others, a key feature of Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign to send Trump into political retirement has appropriately been addressing the damage to [...]
