In an open letter to President Trump and Congress, leaders of top programs at Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, Duke, and more say the Trump administration must “remove the limits on visas granted to individual countries, reform the H-1B visa program to increase the chances that top skilled talent gains entry to U.S., and even create a so called ‘heartland visa’ to encourage the flow of skilled workers to parts of the U.S. ‘that could most use the vitality of these talented individuals,’” Jacqueline Alemany writes in The Washington Post.

Applications to the top American business schools dropped at a steep rate this year, with universities struggling to attract international students.

Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].

MUSIC CITY – Nashville Mayor John Cooper will rescind former Mayor David Briley’s executive order calling on Tennessee lawmakers to repeal an anti-sanctuary city law, Yihyun Jeong at the Nashville Tennessean reports. Briley had signed the executive order during his last weeks in office to challenge the constitutionality of HB 2315, a state law ending local governments’ access to certain funds if they do not comply with a ban on “sanctuary city” policies. Cooper, who called Briley’s action “flawed,” has said that “Nashville cannot and will not be a sanctuary city.”

PUBLIC CHARGE UPDATE – Federal judges in New York, California and Washington on Friday decided to temporarily block implementation of the Trump administration’s proposed “public charge” rule. Eileen Grench and Josefa Velasquez at The City report on the ongoing confusion in New York’s Asian community as immigrant families decipher the rule’s effects: “‘It’s still going to be really complex’ to explain to immigrant communities what exactly the court rulings mean, given ‘a lot of damage that has been done,’” said Abbey Sussell of the New York Immigration Coalition.

US CITIZEN IN IMMIGRATION COURT? – Francisco Galicia, the 18-year-old U.S. citizen who was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for nearly a month, has been ordered to appear in a Harlingen, Texas, immigration court in August 2020, Obed Manuel reports for The Dallas Morning News. Now, his attorney “fears that the U.S. government may actually be trying to build a case to question his citizenship based on the fact that his mother solicited a birth certificate for him in Mexico almost three years after he was born in Dallas, an action Galicia had no control over as an almost three-year-old.”

LOSING FAITH – Texas pastor Bart Barber, a Trump voter, spelled out evangelicals’ concerns with the administration’s immigration policy in a Washington Post op-ed. Barber argues that if the president continues to follow the advice of senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, the president could alienate his evangelical base — and lose Barber’s vote in 2020. “I’m praying that the next presidential tweet will announce Miller’s departure from the White House and Trump’s decision to revert to a refugee ceiling of 95,000,” he writes. Trump must “choose between Miller’s nativist extremism and the values of the evangelical voters who elected him.”

IRAQI CHRISTIANS – In 2016, one close-knit Iraqi Christian community in southeastern Michigan helped deliver their swing state to Trump. Now, rifts between families and friends could jeopardize the president’s reelection bid there, Liz Goodwin reports in The Boston Globe. “I think they felt like we’re going to be protected and Trump cares about us,” says Crystal Kassab Jabiro of her Chaldean community. “But I think in the end they got played, basically.”

DEFERRED ENFORCED DEPARTURE – Thousands of Liberian immigrants, some of whom have been legally living in the U.S. for decades, stand to lose their immigration status on March 31, 2020, when the Trump administration ends the Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) program, Tania Karas reports for PRI. “The program being terminated means I would have to self-deport to a country I’ve never lived in,” said Yatta Kiazolu, a DED holder and PhD candidate at UCLA who arrived in the U.S. at age six.

DROWNINGS AT THE BORDER – U.S. Customs & Border Protection data show that water-related deaths at the border’s Rio Grande stretch have tripled from fiscal year 2018 to 2019, while water rescues have spiked by 1,000%, reports Catherine Shoichet at CNN. Immigration advocates like Christina Patiño Houle warn that U.S. policies are to blame: “Border Patrol agents wouldn't have needed to rescue anyone from the river … if they had devoted more resources to processing migrants swiftly at ports of entry.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali