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Would this argument also work to defend a hypothetical instance of a Democratic administration revoking the visa of pro-Trump (and hence, in particular, in favour of Trump's current Ukraine/Russia policy) students?
Yes, I view this as being an acceptable consequence of the policy I support.
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Sure, if you could find any. And if the Democrats got into a deporting-immigrants mood. And they had publicized their views enough. And...
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I don't think this particular type of argument is very convincing given the number of years of abuse of due process, misuse of government agencies, NGOs, the cathedral, etc etc by the woke and the left.
The left has been doing more or less this kind of thing for years (just not this specific thing because they care less about deportation).
It's just asking for unilateral disarmament at this point and worse - at a time when the winner of the war is starting to change just a bit.
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It's an asymmetric weapon; campus protests, and especially administration-tolerated or -supported campus protests, tend very much to the left.
Who said this weapon only works on campus protesters?
Well, it only works for protesters who protest in areas where the police and/or the prosecutors are instructed to be friendly to them.
Essentially, this means Blues can protest anywhere they want under this sort of ruleset, because they dont want to protest in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. Because Red voting in cities has been expelled by paramilitaries and general crime they dont have political power in those areas, despite being essential for the survival thereof.
Have a little imagination. People post all kinds of things under their real names online these days.
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How far can it stretch before it stops being "this weapon", and shifts to being a different one? If the standard is "...her[/his] presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda.", then campus protesters (or rally organizers, or similar) are pretty much the only valid targets.
The right-wing base doesn't generally shout their opinions from a soapbox in the same way, and therefore isn't as vulnerable to this.
Other than, you know, that one time in DC. And that one time in Charlottesville. And if they own a pickup truck, the bumper stickers and flags. Or the T Shirts. And the rallies.
If the most right-wing examples you can think of literally contain more left-wingers than right- (such as Charlottesville, if you include counter-protesters), then I'm comfortable calling them less vulnerable.
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Those mostly weren't foreigners and thus would not be affected by this particular weapon.
The asymmetric weapons the left had were already quite sufficient to deal with the DC and Charlottesville people.
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I think that "hindering a policy agenda of an administration" could be applied much more broadly than that.
For example, a Harris administration could have decided to deport all Tesla or Twitter employees without US passport on the pretext of them harming their economic agenda. Or an administration could deport all foreign journalists which lean a way the regime does not like. Or you could kick out all foreign professors who do not fall in line with the administration. Or prevent international conferences on topics which you would rather not see discussed. Or deprive areas where the other party is in power of international tourism.
At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process. In the past, the US was able to attract the very best immigrants. If a highly qualified immigrant is willing to forgo political expression as a condition of their residency they might as well immigrate to China -- getting deported from there as a Westerner is likely less of an ordeal than getting deported from the US is.
Yes, with the caveat is that if the reason for kicking them out is activity that would be protected under the First Amendment, the Secretary of State would have to personally approve each deportation. This is statute law; Trump isn't making stuff up here. It appears this was involved for Khalil; it doesn't look like it for Chung since they're accusing her of criminal activity, the details of which presumably they'll have to give when this gets to court. Again, deporting aliens who commit crimes is legal by statute.
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Due process for being revoked also hinges on due process that does revoke, or deny, being honored and not undermined or circumvented willfully or publicly. Otherwise, there is no due process- there is only the binding commitments by those who are able to get away with not honoring commitments against those expected to be bound by them.
If you want a demos to be publicly on board with, say, refugee acceptance, then you need refugee criteria that are not transparently redefined and gamed to facilitate acceptance of people beyond the original concept of refugees. Similarly, if you want there to be public expectation of a judicial review of immigration cases, then there needs to be a basis for there to be an expectation of timely resolution and that migrants won't simply be let go and disappear into the interior. Absent a basis for public trust that the system would work properly, there is likely to be little political traction over concerns that the system won't work properly in other ways. It may be true, but it was already true.
This is not, to be clear, an endorsement. It is, however, an observation.
What we are seeing is a consequence of policy tools that can benefit a nation greatly being changed in ways that destroy public trust and legitimacy in said tools, often because said tools were used for partisan advantage or even abuse. The partisan utilization of said tools, often at the public advocacy of members of those very institutions due to ideological capture overriding professionalism, has led them to no longer being seen as great benefits for the nation as much as benefits to the partisans at the expense of their opponents. That things can benefit the partisans and the country alike has become outweighed by the desire to defy partisan impositions and the who-whom distinction of who has the power to get away with it.
This applies to other beneficial things as well. I think higher education is a good thing. But if you want cross-partisan support of public universities that employ talented foreign professors, then you need to maintain cross-partisan support. This is harder when public universities take open and consistently partisan stances on public issues and their own employment / admission processes. It becomes even harder when said partisans attempt to overtly and covertly circumvent unambiguous legal prohibitions to their partisan preferences. The demonstrated interest in such cases is not 'let's prioritize the public interest'- it is the preservation of partisan interest.
As partisan prioritization prevails, appeals to the broader nation grow weaker. 'Think of the good to the nation from tourism,' for example, will often fall flat if it comes a few years after tourist-centers were attempting to organize boycotts of other parts of the nation over ideological differences.
It might be 'beneficial' to have high public trust in public institutions, but trust does not follow the benefit of having trust. Trust follows from the actions. The more partisan the actions, the more partisan the trust, and thus subject to revocation / reversal with partisan changes.
Yes, this does mean things will get worse before they get better. This is an observation, not an endorsement. But it will not avoid getting worse / get better faster to simply respect an imposed a partisan preference system... particularly when the partisan coalition in question is not a social majority, but has/had conflated institutional capture with social persuasion.
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This is the hard core of the debate. It's the same with treaties: on the one hand, how do you make a binding commitment when your government potentially switches between factions every four years? On the other hand, how do you make democracy work if you permit governments to bind the hands of their successors?
How fair is it that Biden or Starmer or Boris Johnson can import 600k immigrants in a program that has a guaranteed citizenship at the end of it and then say, "Har har, it benefits the nation that we can make binding commitments about permanent residence, suck it."
Don't get me wrong, your point is legitimate, which is what makes it complicated. I will go so far to say that I think it is a genuine flaw in democracy as a system, which only survived as long as it did because power was firmly reserved to an elite who tended to agree, and who were careful about issues of genuine contention.
With legislative supermajorities. If you can get 51% agreement on something, good for you, but there's no reason to expect that to bind others once a slight shift of political winds leaves you at 49%. But if you can get 60% (or 67%?)? That might be something worth hanging on to for longer, if it's not so soundly refuted that support drops to 40% (or 33%).
Why? If you have supermajority agreement on something, you don’t need a special mechanism to protect it - no government has attempted to legalise murder or indentured servitude for small children.
If you don’t, if it falls beneath 50%, why should the fact that 60% of people thought policy X was a good idea 10 years ago prevent it from being dropped when those people change their minds?
Technically, because a little hysteresis is beneficial in any case where a continuous (and worse: continuous plus noisy) input is used to determine a discrete output where switching between outputs is costly. We wouldn't even consider using a keyboard without a "debounce" filter; it might be reasonable to consider using a government with one.
Politically, for the same reason as we have a supermajority requirement for Constitutional amendments - to permit governments to, slightly, bind the hands of their successors. In the case of binding commitments it would also be sufficient to simply have a population who were mostly able to avoid hitting "defect" first in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, but here we are.
At least we're getting better. We had a government that legalized slavery for small children for nearly a century, yet now the thought of something similar happening again is worthy of use as a reductio ad absurdum. Maybe that's the paradox you're pointing out, though? The distance from "we should amend the Constitution to prevent voters from legalizing slavery" to "we can't imagine voters legalizing slavery" wasn't too great. Perhaps it's pointless to speculate about amending the Constitution to force voters to not make any game-theoretic screwups, if we couldn't actually get such an amendment through until we practically have an electorate who wouldn't screw up regardless.
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The justification doesn't require it only apply to campus protesters, though. One could easily imagine a Dem deporting Jordan Peterson and other non-citizens for "interfering with foreign policy"
Deporting Jordan Peterson would be a lot less harsh than what happened to him. But yes, Democrats could do something with it; it's an asymmetric weapon but not an utterly one-sided one.
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I'm personally willing to bite the bullet and say that I think foreign nationals should generally avoid making themselves part of American politics.
Well, I mean, the implied problem is that only foreigners who have the wrong kind of politics as far as the administration in power is concerned will run into trouble - so as long as you admit international students at all, under this principle, they become a way to bolster the numbers of the pro-government camp on American campuses. Due to the nature of the "marketplace of ideas" at university, this is bound to have adverse effects on the political expression even of native students who happen to oppose the government line.
(On the other hand, if international students are actually all forced to be completely apolitical, this may not make people happy either - I remember hearing complaints about Chinese MA students on this basis from both tribes during my US grad school period)
Well, so don’t go to big protests when you’re not a citizen, problem solved. It’s not even a permanent thing, just until you are granted us citizenship. It’s not asking them to take sides, to the contrary, it’s asking them to not take sides. Which I think is reasonable because you’re not a citizen, can’t vote and have literally no stake in the outcome of the political process in the USA.
But they kinda do have a stake, no?
If the green-card holders and legal residents (who have never needed to fear deportation for speech acts--to the best of my knowledge) knew Trump was going to go after them, then they would have a very real stake in the outcome of the political process.
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I would argue that foreigners have very much a stake in the political process -- they are the ones getting deported, or bombed for that matter. Having no say is different from having no stake.
Also, I do not think that "don't go to big protests" makes a good Schelling fence. There is nothing fundamentally different between going to a protest and having re-tweeted a meme which the regime decides is Not Funny. So what you end up with is that foreigners in the US should behave like people in China. Only it is even worse because with the CCP you at least know beforehand what will likely piss them off, and you can only guess if the next administration will kick you out for having owned a cybertruck, or a bluesky account or being a member of the German AfD or whatever.
If you want naturalized citizens to take part in the political process, training them to keep their head down before they have their citizenship seems obviously counter-productive.
Which administration was it who jailed an American citizen (to the applause of the Serious People Who Worry About Such Things) for sending out a "text to vote" meme? A Man for All Seasons was quoted elsethread; the fact is, the laws have ALREADY been knocked down, and now the Devil has turned tail.
False statements of fact have always enjoyed reduced 1st amendment protection. Black-letter law says that deliberately sharing false information about voting procedures is a crime. There is no "it was a meme" exception in the law, and there shouldn't be.
This was a fairly simple case of "Don't do the crime if you won't do the time."
Free speech doesn't protect YOU PEOPLE because of reasons, but it's a terrible precedent if YOUR GUY does something that impacts OUR free speech. Heard it before. But, as I said, the Devil has now turned tail.
Black letter law -- constitutional, thus higher than the one used -- says "Congress shall make no law ...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". There's no exception for "sharing false information about voting procedures" in there, nor should there be. This is exactly a case of someone being convicted for a tweet the regime found to be Not Funny.
Are you saying the 1st amendment means that there shouldn't be laws against perjury, commercial fraud, defamation etc?
Or are you saying that telling lies about voting procedures in order to influence an election is less serious than those things?
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Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers. They were entirely open about this, see “The Emerging Democratic Majority” or Tony Blair’s staffer remarking that the purpose of their immigration policy was to render British conservatism “irrelevant and out of date”.
I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.
At the object level, the person this thread is talking about is Asian-American, a demographic that is hardly solidly left.
If you are invited to the home of a kid (to be clear, in this metaphor, this is the university community) who has an ongoing conflict with their parents, and the kid brings up the topic, do you side with the kid, the parents, or do you try to awkwardly stay neutral saying it's not your place to meddle?
If you are invited to the home of an adult with roommates (with a jointly held lease) who has an ongoing conflict with their other roommates (say, the majority of them), [same question]?
(Up to you to decide which one of these is a closer model of the situation at hand, though the choice would also reveal something about your understanding of nations.)
I hear both sides out, then answer the case on its merits.
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7:4 seems pretty solid
That rate is the same as Hispanics, but unlike Hispanics the rates for Asians haven't budged:
No movement for decades reads as solid to me. Asians are more solidly Democrat than any race but Black. They are the second-most Democrat race.
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In both cases, I would express sympathy and deflect, unless there were strong cofounding factors. I wouldn't feel like it was my place to say more.
If I were asked, specifically, for my opinion then I would give it but I don't think this can be applied to the nation except perhaps for elections.
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I thought they are? Perhaps not as ridiculously overwhelmingly left as, say, African-Americans, but still solidly left.
According to PEW party affiliation of Asians is merely 2:1 in favor of the Democrats, I'll leave that up to the reader to decide whether that is "solidly left"
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Does “making themselves part of American politics” mean “engaging in any visible form of political expression whatsoever”?
We can nitpick on what we mean by “visible”, but at the end of the day, that’s really not a high bar to meet. The only visible form of political expression I ever engaged in was anonymous posting on SSC/TheMotte. Most of my friends don’t do even that.
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I'm not sure exactly where the line is, but I think it stops well short of organizing building occupations like Mahmoud did. I don't really care what their cause is, foreigners that organize the occupation of university buildings should be deported.
At this time, it's not clear what exactly this girl did; it seems likely to be much closer to any reasonable line than the Mahmoud example. The administration testing where the line is does concern me.
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