There are 3,650,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey alone – 44% of whom are children, Omer Karasapan writes for the Brookings Institute. And Turkish public opinion, which started off supportive of welcoming refugees, has changed: “A poll in 2016 showed 72 percent had no problems with refugees. These days and across the political spectrum around 80 percent wish for their return to their home country. A sharp 2018 economic downturn has had an effect. This is also a historical pattern for host countries. ‘As the number of refugees and length of time they remain in a country grows,’ Fletcher School’s Karen Jacobsen notes, ‘citizens… become less willing to provide for them.’”

Welcome to the Tuesday-before-Thanksgiving edition of Noorani’s Notes. With a big thank you to the Notes team, we’re off for the rest of the week. Enjoy the turkey, the football, and time with loved ones.

And thank you, as always, for reading!

ALABAMA INTERNATIONAL – Eliminating the international student work program – known as the Optional Practical Training Program – which allows international students to work temporarily after graduation, will hurt Alabama’s universities, Jim Mather writes in an opinion piece in AL.com. “International students provide a massive financial assist to every university in this nation. At the University of South Alabama, our area’s largest institution of higher learning, they pay double the tuition of in-state students—$21,540 per year compared to $10,070.” Then there’s the jobs impact: “The $600 million Airbus factory that opened here in 2015 just started hiring in January, and they are already holding job fairs in other states because Mobile’s existing labor market is too tight. Many international students would like to remain in the United States after they graduate and get jobs, which would help bridge that gap.”

THE WALL – The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is now the de facto lead of managing construction of the border wall – a project where the lack of progress has frustrated the president, Josh Dawsey and Nick Miroff report in The Washington Post. “Kushner convenes biweekly meetings in the West Wing, where he questions an array of government officials about progress on the wall, including updates on contractor data, precisely where it will be built and how funding is being spent. He also shares and explains the president’s wishes with the group.”

LEGAL IMMIGRATION (1/2) – Since January 2017, President Trump has done a lot to wall off the country from those seeking to immigrate through legal channels, Rachel Morris writes in an in-depth piece for HuffPost’s Highline. “In the two years after Trump took office, denials for H1Bs, the most common form of visa for skilled workers, more than doubled. In the same period, wait times for citizenship also doubled, while average processing times for all kinds of visas jumped by 46 percent, even as the quantity of applications went down. In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a startling 70 percent less than the year before.”

LEGAL IMMIGRATION (2/2) – The backlog of active immigration cases has surpassed 1 million – nearly doubling since President Trump took office, reports Danae King in The Columbus Dispatch. “In Ohio, 12,851 cases are pending in Cleveland Immigration Court, the state’s only such court. That is up significantly from 3,295 in 2009. It’s also double the 6,184 in 2016.” The backlog is due in part to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ 2018 order directing immigration judges to end the practice of removing cases from their dockets unless they issue a decision, as well as the president’s January 2017 executive order “when he made every immigrant who was in the country illegally a priority for deportation.”

ABOUT THAT TREE – An undocumented immigrant in Maryland who was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being fined for improperly removing a tree is suing the state, Rebecca Tan reports for The Washington Post. The man, José Ricardo Villalta Canales, had no prior criminal record when he helped a relative cut down a tree in Rockville in early August. Officers with the state’s Department of Natural Resources “allegedly took five minutes to fine Villalta $320, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt. But they detained him for more than two hours after making a routine check of a national database to see if he was the subject of any outstanding state, federal or local warrants.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali