Popular Economics Weekly
It is a well-known fact that the US has had a history of labor shortages, dating from the Revolutionary War. Colonial America was defined by a severe labor shortage that employed forms of unfree labor such as slavery and indentured servitude and by a British policy of benign neglect (salutary neglect). Over half of all European immigrants to Colonial America arrived as indentured servants, says Wikipedia.
Then why would the Trump administration enact an immigration ban on seven primarily Moslem countries, when we need all the immigrants we can import to fill the 5.5 million job openings that remain unfilled, as well as find the workers for his promised $1 trillion in infrastructure projects?
Hence the need and tradition of immigrants adding new blood and man (and women) power to our workforce. The colonies were also characterized by religious diversity, with many Congregationalists in New England, German and Dutch Reformed in the Middle Colonies, Catholics in Maryland, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians on the frontier. Sephardic Jews were among early settlers in cities of New England and the South. Many immigrants arrived as religious refugees: French Huguenots settled in New York, Virginia and the Carolinas. Many royal officials and merchants were Anglicans.
They need to come from all religions, in other words, particularly Islam, which is the third most populous religion with 1.6 billion practitioners
So when will the Trump team get that message, especially after contempt citations are already being filed as he defies the latest court injunctions against his temporary travel ban?
At least one contempt of court citation has been filed against President Donald Trump and another is likely to be submitted on Friday, charging that the administration has defied court orders by denying entry to the United States by an untold number of immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
The Commonwealth of Virginia filed its contempt motion late Wednesday night in Alexandria federal court. Meanwhile, an attorney who is trying to assist more than 200 Yemenis in gaining entry into this country said Thursday that her office will file a contempt motion of its own on Friday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
Judges in Brooklyn, Boston, Alexandria, Va., and Seattle, as well as two more in Los Angeles have issued orders to stop the government from carrying out the executive order Trump signed last Friday that suspended for 90 days the issuance of visas to people from seven countries deemed by the U.S. government to present a terrorist threat. They are Syria, Libya, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Iraq and Yemen. The president’s executive order also suspended refugee admissions from all countries for 120 days.
“The Trump administration is acting as if he is running a dictatorship,” attorney Julie Ann Goldberg said in a telephone interview from Djibouti, where her clients are being held in transit. “It’s as if he has forgotten there are three branches of government in this country and has totally disregarded any judicial order. He is ignoring them across the country.”
Federal officials have issued statements saying that they are taking steps to “immediately” comply with the court orders. As of Thursday, the government had recommended denials of boardings to 1,136 immigrants with visas or other documents who sought entry into the United States, while they had granted waivers to 87 immigrants. Restrictions appear to have been lifted nationwide on lawful permanent residents of the United States, some of whom had difficulty gaining entry into the country in the earliest stages of the order’s rollout.
And now we have the revelation that more than 100,000 entry visas were revoked in the middle of the night, without notifying the courts or agencies that are involved. But because a Washington State Federal Judge has granted a nationwide injunction to lift the travel ban, the Department of Homeland Security has just announced it has suspended all actions to implement the immigration order and will resume standard inspections of travelers as it did prior to the signing of the travel ban.
And now a State Department official tells CNN the department has reversed the cancellation of visas that were provisionally revoked following the President's executive order last week -- so long as those visas were not stamped or marked as canceled.
Harlan Green © 2017
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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