With the Trump administration officially expanding its travel ban to six additional countries last Friday, the United States has “slammed the door shut on Nigeria, [Africa’s] biggest economy” – undercutting American economic and foreign policy interests, Ruth Maclean and Abdi Latif Dahir report for The New York Times.
The ban will severely impact Nigeria’s economy, which relies heavily on billions of dollars in remittances from the U.S. each year. “The United States may also emerge a loser, studies suggest. Nigerians are among the most successful and highly educated immigrants to America.”
Welcome to Monday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].
UNCHECKED POWER – In an investigative piece for ProPublica, Dara Lind explores how the “nearly unchecked power” of Border Patrol agents implementing the Trump administration’s controversial Migrant Protection Protocols — also known as MPP or “Remain in Mexico” — caused the heartbreaking four-month-long separation of a Honduran family of four. David, Mirza and their two children, Sebastian and Lia, were separated by gender by agents at the border. Father and son were sent back to await trial in Mexico, while mother and daughter were sent to San Jose, California. Mirza and David “told agents they had come as a family of four. But they were never recorded that way in Border Patrol records,” despite the fact that “Border Patrol policy is clear: Whenever possible, parents, married or not, should be kept together with their children.”
GARDEN CITY, KANSAS – Back in December of 2014, USA Today’s Alan Gomez traveled to the small town of Garden City, Kansas, where then-Police Chief James Hawkins said the city's economy “would crumble” without immigrants. Now, a new documentary about how Garden City has “accepted those that have traveled from around the world to live there” is making a splash in film festival circles, Brianna Childers writes in The Hutchinson News. The film, “Strangers In Town,” features immigrants from Vietnam, Sudan, Myanmar, Uganda and Mexico. Filmmaker Steve Lerner noted that “[a]mong the first people we talked to was the police chief, and he said, ‘There’s no room for division in our town over your country of origin, the color of your skin and your sexual orientation. There’s no room here for hatred.’”
TURNING TO CANADA – Indians are immigrating to Canada “at an astonishing rate” due to the Trump administration’s restrictions on legal immigration as well as efforts by Canadian universities to attract more international students, reports Stuart Anderson in Forbes. “Given current trends, Indian scientists and engineers will likely continue to see Canada as an attractive alternative location to make their careers and raise a family. The number of Indians who became permanent residents in Canada increased from 39,340 in 2016 to 80,685 in 2019, through the first 11 months of 2019, an increase of more than 105%...”
DNA COLLECTION – U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) will soon be launching a pilot program collecting DNA from detained migrants, “pushing ahead with a project that could lead to the government collecting DNA from hundreds of thousands of detained immigrants, some as young as 14 years old, alarming civil rights advocates,” Alex Ellerbeck writes in the Texas Tribune. In a separate pilot program, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also plans to collect DNA from migrants in its custody. “Civil libertarians consider the proposal a gross violation of privacy because detained immigrants, including those asking to enter the United States to apply for asylum, are put in civil rather than criminal custody.”
RESETTLEMENT ANXIETIES – The tension and anxiety caused by the Trump administration’s executive order allowing municipalities to deny resettlement of refugees has spread from coast to coast, turning “refugees and those who work to resettle them into lobbyists of sorts,” writes Zolan Kanno-Youngs in The New York Times. As Michael A. Fenton, a councilman in Springfield, Massachusetts, put it: “Municipal officials in the Northeast, we deal with snow, we deal with potholes, we deal with property taxes, trash pickup. … We do not deal with the complications associated with refugee immigration policy.”
EUROPE’S CRISIS – While the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean has decreased in the last few years, Europe’s refugee crisis continues as 5,300 unaccompanied children currently reside in Greek refugee camps, Katy Fallon writes in Fortune. “The population has grown so big that many people now live outside of the official camp boundaries. And every week more tents appear on the increasingly packed hillside. The cramped conditions leave wide ranging and serious health implications for those living in the camp.”
Thanks for reading,
Ali
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