In its latest move to restrict immigration, the White House issued a new proclamation on Friday that will require visa applicants to prove that they “will have health insurance within 30 days of entering the country or that they can afford to cover any medical expenses,” Ted Hesson and Dan Diamond report for Politico.

“The move effectively creates a health insurance mandate for immigrants, just months after Trump and congressional Republicans repealed the Affordable Care Act's mandate, arguing that its tax penalty was ‘cruel’ and created an unfair burden.”

From Laredo, Texas, welcome to Monday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes.

Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].

CANADA DENIED – Work permits for Canadians are “increasingly being denied” by the U.S. federal government, reports Dave Battagello in the Windsor Star. “Often the decisions being made at the border are to the detriment to the U.S. economy or desperate needs of various employers across Michigan where there are shortages in qualified personnel.”

ARIZONA’S ADVOCATES – Advocates in Arizona are sounding the alarm over the social and economic impacts of the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to annual refugee admissions, Daniel Gonzalez writes for the Arizona Republic. Among them is Rev. Deborah Hutterer, bishop of the Grand Canyon Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: “It's refugees who contribute to our community, both economically and with their passion for this country, (and) bring with them their diverse cultures and backgrounds that only enrich the United States.“

A TEXAS CRISIS – The U.S. could find itself in an immigration crisis of a different kind —an economically debilitating shortage of immigrants — if the federal government continues on its current path, argues Rob Curran in a column Dallas Morning News. “Texas businesspeople, economists and common sense all agree: choking off the flow of immigrants across the Rio Grande will choke off economic growth in the state and, eventually, the nation.”

COURT IN SESSION – Today marks the beginning of a new term for the U.S. Supreme Court, during which they are expected to rule on the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, USA Today’s Richard Wolf reports. “The court's willingness to hear the case signals a potential win for the White House, but how it wins would be crucial. If the justices say Trump has the same discretion to end the program that Obama had to create it, a future president just as easily could renew it. If they agree with the Justice Department that it's unlawful, Congress would have to step in.”

UNPRECENDENTED – The University of Glasgow’s Benjamin Thomas White writes in The New Humanitarian about the pitfalls of how we currently talk about the “unprecedented” number of refugees worldwide: “Talking about the unprecedented scale of current displacement reduces the complexity of many different displacements, with many different causes, to a single and impossibly huge ‘crisis’. This is likely to make members of the public, or politicians, less able to understand and contextualise specific displacements, and less able to imagine smaller-scale but more practicable solutions.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali