In an interview with NBC News last week, White House adviser Stephen Miller painted a bleak picture of forthcoming changes to the nation’s immigration policies should President Trump win a second term, including further crackdowns on asylum grants, work visas and “sanctuary cities.”

“In the near term, Miller wouldn’t commit to lifting the freeze on new green cards and visas that’s set to expire at the end of the year, saying it would be ‘entirely contingent’ on governmental analysis that factors in the state of the job market,” Sahil Kapur reports. “Miller said a second-term Trump administration would finalize efforts to curtail use of guest-worker programs like H-1B visas, including by eliminating the lottery system used in the process when applications exceed the annual quota and by giving priority to those being offered the highest wages.”

Meanwhile, north of the border, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is looking to attract 401,000 new permanent residents to the country next year as “part of an ambitious plan to spur Canada’s economic recovery by bringing in workers,” Bloomberg’s Kait Bolongaro and Shelly Hagan report. 

Welcome to Monday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].

BACK TO NO ONE – U.S. border officials have been expelling Central American migrant children to Mexico, where the latter often have no family members to receive them — a violation of the U.S. government’s own policies as well as a diplomatic agreement with Mexico, reports Caitlin Dickerson in The New York Times. While the Mexican government agreed to receive Mexican children and others who had adult supervision, “children from countries other than Mexico are supposed to be put on flights operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to their home countries, where they can be reunited with their families,” Dickerson explains. “The expulsions put children from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador at risk by sending them with no accompanying adult into a country where they have no family connections. … [They] reflect the haphazard nature with which many of the administration’s most aggressive immigration policies have been introduced.”  

VIETNAMESE VOTERS – While Vietnamese Americans have traditionally been “the most consistent Republican voters of all Asian American groups,” Daniella Cheslow reports for DCist on how the community is increasingly split among generational lines in Northern Virginia, with Biden building more vocal support among younger Vietnamese voters. “Like Cubans in Florida, Vietnamese Americans share a history of fleeing communism, according to researcher Mai Nguyen Do at AAPI Data … ‘Older Vietnamese Republicans might say, ‘Well, we like Trump because he’s anti-China,’ she said. ‘That’s maybe not a point that resonates as strongly with younger voters, who might be more interested in things like housing policy or more healthcare or the environment.’”

MUSLIM VOTERS – The Vietnamese American community isn’t the only traditionally Republican group experiencing a political shift: Muslim voters in New Jersey and nationwide have turned away from the GOP, with many citing Trump administration policies and growing Islamophobia within the party over the last two decades, Hannan Adely at NorthJersey.com reports. “In 2000, about 70% of Muslim Americans cast their vote for Republican George W. Bush for president. Next week, 71% are expected to vote for Joe Biden, according to a September poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.” (For what it’s worth, I am watching places like Fort Bend County in Texas, where Asian Americans are not just the fastest growing demographic, but also politically engaged.)

OLD PLAYBOOK – President Trump resorted to his signature campaign playbook of stoking public fear against immigrants this weekend, declaring Sunday, Nov. 1 to be “National Day of Remembrance for Americans Killed by Illegal Aliens.” But as Tim Steller at the Arizona Daily Star reports, the myth that undocumented immigrants are responsible for higher crime rates is simply not backed up by data. “In fact, research published in 2018 reviewed 51 studies of the linkage between immigration and crime published from 1994 to 2014 and found a very weak negative association. In other words, the presence of immigrants in any given area is weakly associated with less crime, not more.”

EVANGELICAL MINDSET – In the final moments before Election Day, Carol Kuruvilla at HuffPost provides insight into the mindset of several white evangelical voters who supported President Trump in 2016 but are now rejecting him, citing his treatment of immigrants among their biggest concerns. The administration’s 2018 policy of separating children and parents at the border was a turning point for many: “Although Trump later rescinded the zero-tolerance policy, Adam Hardy, a 39-year-old from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, hasn’t forgotten what happened that spring. He said Trump’s approach to that crisis planted the first seeds of doubt in his heart. The Bible calls on Christians to welcome marginalized people ― not to treat immigrants as the enemy, he said.”

MAPPING RETALIATION – The Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University Law School has mapped more than 1,000 incidents of reported retaliatory U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests of immigrant advocates across the country under the Trump administration, Nick Pinto reports for The Intercept. The public database and searchable map “represents the most comprehensive effort to date to document all known instances of official retaliation against immigrant rights advocates. As such, it paints a picture of a practice so widespread as to seemingly constitute an official policy of using the powers of the state against critics of an unchecked immigration apparatus.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali