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Trump to revoke legal status for 240,000 Ukrainians as US steps up deportations
Apparently underway before the White House blowup with Zelensky, These people are in the US as parolees essentially, so removing this legal status would allow them to be deported quickly.
Other big story is Afghans who worked with US troops may have their legal status stripped.
If the US invades your country and you fight alongside the invaders, the least you could be rewarded with is protection.
Every poll I've seen also shows Americans overwhelmingly support hosting Ukrainian refugees. If thousands of Ukrainians are deported to Ukraine, especially if fighting is still ongoing or resumes in the near future (more likely than not given Russia's stated territorial ambitions), I wonder if this event will be remembered in the same way turning Jewish arrivals by boat prior and during WW2 is remembered.
I'm also curious if this is a tactic to inflate deportation numbers. There is no way they hit their goal of deporting millions of illegals who have been in the country for decades, so you focus on people like this who are easier to track down and deport (and ironically, genuine refugees). The number of deported people is a lot higher after two years, but you haven't actually made a dent in the illegal population.
I know this place is quite reactionary and conservative, but is there anyone who actually still believes that the US should be a safe haven for at least some amount of people escaping war and violence, especially if those people are disproportionately women and children like the Ukrainians?
Why (outside of naked partisan historical shaping) would turning over refugees to be press-ganged to the Eastern Front be remembered this way, but not paying for there to be an Eastern Front in the first place?
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A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog is willing to help because the scorpion is fighting the frog-nazis. But it hesitates, afraid that it'll be punished if the frog-nazis see it helping a scorpion. The scorpion offers to let the frog move in with it afterwards. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. After crossing the river, the scorpion hops on a helicopter and flies away. As the chopper takes off, the frog asks the scorpion why it changed its mind, to which the scorpion shouts back: "I just remembered I'm super racist. And besides, you're not a scorpion, so any promise I make to you doesn't really count." "But I'll die." "Damn, that shit sucks."
Then the frog goes to read a history book and learns that scorpions do this all the time.
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When you're dealing with desperate people, there's really no cost to screwing them over except the moral injury of going back on your word. They don't have any ability to get you back and the concern that they won't work with you in the future is mostly obviated because desperate people don't have a choice but to queue up to get screwed over again and again. And the moral injury is heavily defrayed if you don't consider the people you're betraying to have moral worth.
Many Trumpists have more or less openly embraced the idea that the only people with moral value are a nebulous subset of Americans. For everyone else, it's transactional at best, if not outright malicious.
Interesting parable, but it doesn't really establish why the frog was desperate to aid the scorpion against the frog-nazis.
That's because the frog's motives are significantly less relevant than its desperate circumstances.
I don't really understand what desperate circumstances actually compelled the frog to aid the scorpion against the frog-nazis. Or is the causal relationship flipped, like, the frog must be desperate otherwise it would not be aiding the scorpion?
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I agree this is bad. (The Ukrainian thing, not the Afghans - they should all go). But no, it's not comparable. Most Ukrainian refugees live in other European countries. These ones could simply join them. Russia isn't going to invade the rest of Europe and start genociding people, as Germany did in WWII.
Why should the Afghan interpreters/aids all go?
Well, I don't agree that settling Afghans in the United States is a good policy or something we should be pursuing. The reasons why are numerous, but basically I'm an immigration skeptic, I'm sure you can fill in the details yourself.
Any Afghans? Categorically all Afghans?
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Why would you think that these two are remotely similar? Preventing Jewish immigration ostensibly meant that they could all be killed. Sending Ukrainians back simply means that some percent of them may be drafted by the Ukrainian authorities, and some percent of that may die accordingly, with the rest probably safe in Kyiv.
Without security guarantees, what prevents Bucha, Makarov, Izyum, Liman etc. from happening in Kiev? We actually have more evidence of Russian atrocities against Ukrainians than Nazis against Jews in 1938.
Ukraine will likely invent atrocities to boost morale, sure. But I don’t think the average person actually believed in the Bucha et al stuff. Atrocity propaganda has been a staple of the Western war machine since Leopold in the Congo, probably even before.
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If those Afghans were so evil as to collaborate with foreign occupiers and their puppet regime based around raping boys (bacha bazi) and growing opium what else are they capable of? Absolutely reckless to let them live in America.
Collaborating with foreign occupiers is not evil per se. It depends on the evilness ratio between the non-occupation government and the occupying force. If your nations government is a liberal democracy and your occupier are the Nazis, helping the occupiers is bad, if it is the other way round, it is praiseworthy. You own allegiance to humanity, not whatever government the nation you ended in happens to have. (As far as Afghanistan goes, I think that more than one side can be disgusting. With the Taliban regime, I think that rapes are limited to marital rapes between husband and wife and women who are inadequately controlled/protected by their male relatives.)
Also, what is your position on US military members who helped prop up the "puppet regime based around raping boys and growing opium"? Presumably, a US serviceman had a lot more alternatives to propping up the regime (e.g., going to military prison) and was a lot more complicit in insuring the regime survival than some Afghan dude who would be willing to be an interpreter for the US forces so his family would not starve. Who knows what else the marines who fought on the side of the rapists might do as civilians back in America. Absolutely reckless, it would be much safer to deport anyone who served in Afghanistan back there.
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I don’t know how many layers of irony you’re on. It doesn’t really matter. We have banned you numerous times already for picking fights and spitting the laziest possible hot takes. Your last warning was a month ago, but you clearly didn’t take it to heart, because this is nearly indistinguishable.
Banned for a month this time.
What
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I don't have a good answer to this, but how is Ukraine going to rebuild if everyone with means just vacates the country?
If we let in Ukrainian refugees, and they don't go back after the war is over, we're going to destroy Ukraine much more surely than the Russian army ever would. They've already lost like a third of their 1989 population. This would be the final coup de grace. And, for the Ukrainian men risking their lives on the front line, what will they come back to if all the women are gone? The raw deal just gets more raw.
If I was Ukrainian, my goal would be to permanently settle in the US or western Europe. Who wouldn't?
As for the U.S., I think the presence of Ukrainian immigrants is largely neutral, neither a boon nor a burden. But we are destroying Ukraine by letting them in. Maybe we should flip the script and let in Russian women and children instead?
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I believe Ukrainians who aren’t draft dodgers or degenerates should be welcomed here. But didn’t the Biden admin have some push to only bring in LGBT Ukrainians or similar nonsense?
...Who aren't draft dodgers? So they can stay as long as they're not in danger of being killed or crippled? That's absurd. They should have more right to claim asylum than all the economic migrants and would-be-criminal "refugees" from the 3rd world.
I don't want draft dodgers in my country. If they won't return to fight for their homeland they should be executed for desertion.
I guess you'd also have to execute a bunch of Russians as well, in this case. It's more of a mentality thing - there's little patriotism in any post-Soviet countries
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I recently watched Guy Ritchie's The Covenant. I'll observe three things: that it's about an Afghan translator, I suspect the reason it's specifically "Guy Ritchie's The Covenant" is because it stands so far away from the rest of his repertoire that nobody would think he made it, and the performances are superb with Jake Gyllenhaal excellent as expected but the star of the movie being Dar Salim. I think Ritchie aspires toward Ridley Scott, who was recently elevated to Knight Grand Cross (the highest class, Knight/Dame Commander is the second-highest and confers knighthood/damehood), and the prolific amount of work he's done since 2019 is in pursuit of his own knighthood. In the vein of Scott, GRTC is I think analogous to Black Hawk Down, it's a far better movie, though I did enjoy BHD, and also something rings probably coincidental as Ritchie cast Josh Hartnett in a couple of his recent movies and Hartnett held top-billing on Black Hawk Down. Big fan.
The film paints a compelling picture of the apparent bureaucratic mess of approving visas but of course it doesn't explain the actual Special Immigrant Visa Program It's a 14-step vetting process to prevent Taliban infiltrators, who were numerous, from gaining entry to the United States. As a lengthy process bureaucratic mishaps are going to happen, but it's not arbitrarily slow, nor should it be.
That said, since 2021 the US has brought in nearly 200,000 Afghan refugees; the top estimate for collaborators is 300,000; the Taliban issued amnesty and pardons for translators and soldiers who fought against them, and while there have been extrajudicial killings, the numbers are minimal, such killings were also inevitable. It's war, there are going to be war crimes, and while I don't think most or even half of the dead necessarily deserved it, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if all 160 killings were of war criminals. That article also considers the Taliban killing IS-KP and NRF soldiers as violations of their promise of amnesty, they promised no such amnesty to those fighters, and also, those fighters are still carrying out attacks. They get what they deserve.
As for "Rafi," that he missed being in the 200,000 brought over and before that wasn't given an SIV despite a CIA officer's endorsements paints the picture of a man who shouldn't be here. To call CBP One a method of legal entry is bureaucratic sophistry, it was a platform expressly designed to enable any foreign national to game the US asylum system. Those admitted under its auspices should be removed, and if this CIA officer has such a problem, I'd agree to keeping "Rafi," if that officer is bound to a perpetual shared legal liability for any crime he commits.
Some details on this, lest anyone else have to look it up. Sir Ridley was made a Knight Bachelor in 2002, which isn’t super senior but does let you go by “Sir Ridley”. The Order of the British Empire is (I guess) more senior, but only the top 2 of 5 classes confer that title. Out of nowhere last year Sir Ridley was catapulted into the top class.
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You've been deleting all your top-level posts.
The posts themselves were fine. Deleting them is not. The delete button has legitimate uses, we understand some people are privacy conscious, or wish to withdraw their claims. But if you're deleting a top-level post that has active discussion underneath it, and doing so consistently, you're undermining the community and acting in bad faith.
I hope you have a good explanation for why you've been doing so, because if you keep this up, you're eventually going to be banned.
My only explanation is privacy. I don't know whether this is a good explanation.
You can enable private mode by going into https://www.themotte.org/settings/profile and turning it on at the bottom. It prevents people from clicking on your profile to see your comments. Maybe that'll help?
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It is not. This isn't the place for starting discussions if you have "privacy" concerns that require you to almost immediately delete everything you post. If you keep doing it you will be banned.
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On one hand, betraying people who you enticed to betray their country to collaborate with you and who risked life and limb to do so seems absolutely dishonourable and shameful, and I don't see how the short-term win and red meat to your base will offset the loss of soft power (and, concretely, the greater difficulty to recruit local cronies in future adventures). Arguably, being perfidious towards its vassals played a part in the ultimate downfall of the British empire; one would think the Americans could have learned a lesson from that.
On the other, there is the old adage that "if she'll cheat with you, she'll cheat on you, bro", so perhaps the US is to some extent justified in looking at those collaborators with disdain.
This metaphor doesn't really work in the context of the Taliban having emerged from an extremely bloody civil war that was still ongoing when the US intervened. And if aiding a foreign power makes you a traitor, the Taliban hardly lacked foreign assistance.
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In this metaphor, the first boyfriend being cheated on is the Taliban? That's not really a "his girlfriend got seduced by another guy" situation so much as a "when he tried to help his murderer friend hide from the cops, his abuse victim made a break for it and told them" situation. Maybe it's a risky idea to date this girl, but if the guy gets off on a technicality it still seems cruel to send her back.
Yes, and I think the "her boyfriend is evil/abusive (but she was still staying with him until I came along) and I am much better so surely she wouldn't cheat on me, a much better man" sentiment is part of the trope as well. We need to be careful how much we buy into American propaganda about the Taliban being an unpopular dictatorship - of course they would say that because "we're not invading, we're bringing liberty to oppressed peoples" is an important part of their narrative. The actual observations, including the evident low enthusiasm of most Afghans to defend the American-installed government, the doggedness with which the Taliban and their supporters continued fighting and the ease with which they reestablished themselves after the US withdrawal, as well as the continuous trickle of information about the depravity the US had to enable to keep at least a portion of local elites committed to their cause, is really quite consistent with the Taliban having a Mandate of Heaven over Afghanistan.
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This.
The idea that anyone would naturally own allegiance to the Taliban just by being born in Afghanistan and would be some kind of oath-breaker if he helped the US is absurd.
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This kind of asylum is very much in the spirit of the asylum treaty that Congress enacted and the President should be blocked from deporting them.
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It's unlikely that these people will be deported to Ukraine, as they will self-deport to Europe quite a bit before Homan can get to that.
Haven’t most EU countries started to end their Ukraine refugee schemes?
Googling around, EU's temporary protection scheme was extended to 2026 and Finland, at least, has implemented this on a national level.
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Of course it’s this. You see it in the UK and mainland Europe all the time too. They deports some tens of thousands of Latin Americans, a few Americans and Canadians and Australians who overstayed visas, some Chinese, some Thais, some Vietnamese, some Russians, some Moldovans, some Albanians, some Central Asians, the odd Turk, a few people from the nicer Caribbean islands. “Deportations are increasing!” they cheer jubilantly.
Meanwhile, the great mass of Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans, Somalis and so on remain firmly in place, very much undeported. Of course it is better for America to deport 250,000 long-standing, settled Haitian or Venezuelan illegal migrants than 250,000 Ukrainians, but this administration cares primarily about optics, when it cares about much at all.
Also, don’t delete this comment in a couple of hours or you’re going to be rightfully banned.
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I have no real problem with Ukrainian immigration to the USA, especially of women and children, but there's no reason to think they're overly unsafe at this point in Ukraine. At the start of the war western countries taking in Ukrainians from eastern regions of Ukraine was helpful to Ukraine, it reduced the burden on western Ukraine of caring for the displaced. At this point, it is either pointless or actively harming Ukraine to siphon off Ukrainian population.
Asylum is meant to be a status offered to small and specific groups for short and specific times. It can't be a status awarded to everyone in a country permanently. Western Ukraine is, at this point, safe enough for people to return to it. In the same way the Narnia kids went back to London after the Blitz. I might still support sheltering families specifically threatened, but not any Ukrainians.
The modern concept of asylum originates immediately after WW2, and the way it developed in the first ten years or so when the system actually functioned as intended was as permanent resettlement for refugees who couldn't go home because their home country had either ceased to exist as a result of the war, or had a new government who didn't want them back.
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I'm not against the concept of someone who helps us overseas getting special privileges regarding citizenship here, but according to your quote, that Afghani guy is no different from any Venezuelan or Indian crossing the border, claiming asylum, and buggering off. He has not been granted any special privileges. Perhaps he should have sought better immigration status for himself, rather than relying on a system that would inevitably get rolled back, perhaps even if the Democrats won the election.
I think if anyone could claim asylum or refugee status, it would be Ukrainians, since there is a war going on in their home country. I had no idea there were so many in the USA. I thought they were mostly a European problem to deal with. I also think there is some level of hypocrisy from Trump. If Ukrainians are out, but he supports getting white South Africans here for humanitarian reasons, it's pretty much all just vibes determining Trump's decisions, right?
White South Africans claim to asylum is ‘targeted in their home country’, which, true or not, actually meets the legal standard for refugees in a way ‘my country is at war’ does not. It’s also unclear that South African whites have a ‘nearest safe country’ willing to take them- can they just move to Namibia or Botswana at the drop of a hat?
You have a point on all of your arguments, but I will nevertheless maintain this was a vibes based decision from Trump, and strategically done so due to Ukraine's being in the news (from his own actions). There are many other groups deserving of getting asylum rejected even more, and he could have waited to kick out the Ukrainian ones when Zelensky wasn't in the spotlight to this extent.
Well yeah, this was 100% a vibes based decision off of someone telling Trump Boers like him and Zelensky doing... that in the oval office. Still has a legal basis.
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Here in case he decides to delete a top level comment again.
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