Today the Trump administration will publish a new rule permitting asylum seekers to be sent to other countries that have negotiated agreements with the U.S. to accept them, Ted Hesson reports in Reuters. This new regulation “states that asylum seekers may be sent to any other countries with which the United States has asylum agreements that permit such an action - even if they did not first transit through those nations.”

To put a finer point on it: If this rule is fully implemented, an individual seeking protection in the United States from religious or political persecution could be sent to Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras — which all rank among the top ten countries with the highest homicide rates in the world.

Sometimes words just escape me.

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

Job posting alert: The Forum is seeking a new Communications Director. Click here for more information.

AI SECURITY – The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is key to the U.S. maintaining a national security edge — but our immigration policies are making it harder to do that, writes Zachary Arnold in Defense One. “Foreign-born talent fuels the U.S. AI sector at every level. Immigrants lead many of America’s top AI companies, contribute groundbreaking original research in machine learning and other emerging disciplines, and handle much of the essential, ongoing work to deploy and manage AI technologies. Immigrants comprise two-thirds of U.S. graduate students in AI-relevant fields.” When we make it harder for talented innovators to come to the U.S., and when our policies at the southern border send a message that we’re not open for business, we make it tougher to lead the world in advanced technologies — much less keep Americans safe.

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES, UP CLOSE – Yakima, Washington, home to 94,000 people in Central Washington’s farming valley, has seen its number of Latino residents double in one generation, Dionne Searcey and Gobert Gebeloff report for The New York Times. Today, Yakima’s young adults are nearly twice as likely to be Latino, compared to its older adults. “In most diversifying American cities, the age dynamics are just as striking, a New York Times analysis has found. In nearly 100 U.S. metropolitan areas — from Santa Fe to New York and dozens of cities in between — whites comprise the majority of residents over the age of 45, and the minority of adults younger than that.”

HEALTH INSURANCE STUDY – According to a new study, low-income, documented immigrants actually don’t tend to move to states that offer health insurance, Nicole Narea writes in Vox. With data from over 200,000 immigrants nationwide between 2000 and 2016, the authors “found that expanding public insurance offerings in certain states didn’t have a discernible effect on immigrants who had already settled in the U.S. choosing to relocate to those states.” The findings push back on the premise of several Trump administration policies aimed at impeding immigrants’ access to healthcare.
BORDER BIZ – Business owners on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Canada border — people like Steven Nadeau in Massena, New York — are hurting, writes Christina Goldbaum in The New York Times. Since 2014, the number of passenger vehicles traveling through the Massena border crossing has dropped by about a quarter. “While the falling value of the Canadian dollar has hastened the decline, shopkeepers and local officials also point to another culprit: tighter federal immigration enforcement over the past two years. Those efforts largely have been aimed at the southern border, but crossing between the United States and Canada has also become more cumbersome, they said.” Curious to see how the holiday shopping season will treat businesses along the U.S.-Mexico border…
A GLOBAL CHALLENGE – Further developments on a story we included recenty: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson “appears to have taken a page from President Donald Trump's election playbook, promising to oversee a widespread immigration crackdown at Britain's borders if he remains in power,” Chantal Da Silva reports in Newsweek. Specifically, as part of his Conservative party’s platform set to be released this week, Johnson will unveil strict immigration reforms. Among them: “Johnson has vowed to force immigrants arriving in the UK to contribute to its National Health Service (NHS) on ‘day one’ of arriving in the country.”

MURALS – You might expect to find brightly colored, American-themed artwork in various places — and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers are not usually among them. But that’s where 15 murals, each 10 feet tall, were painted by immigrants held in custody between 2012-2016 in a Tacoma, Washington, ICE detention center, Anna Giaritelli reports in the Washington Examiner. “The paintings, which include renderings of the American flag, Mount Rushmore, a world map, and various Major League Football team logos, are unexpected in a building where people sitting behind bars are waiting to learn if they will be deported from the country.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali