Supreme Court allows full enforcement of Trump travel ban

[Cow Poke]

https://www.apnews.com/b8244def36484...ump-travel-ban

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to fully enforce a ban on travel to the United States by residents of six mostly Muslim countries.

This is not a final ruling on the travel ban: Challenges to the policy are winding through the federal courts, and the justices themselves ultimately are expected to rule on its legality.

But the action indicates that the high court might eventually approve the latest version of the ban, announced by President Donald Trump in September. Lower courts have continued to find problems with the policy.

Opponents of this and previous versions of the ban say they show a bias against Muslims. They say that was reinforced most recently by Trump’s retweets of anti-Muslim videos.

“President Trump’s anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret. He has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter. It’s unfortunate that the full ban can move forward for now, but this order does not address the merits of our claims,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. The ACLU is representing some opponents of the ban.

Just two justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, noted their disagreement with court orders allowing the latest policy to take full effect.

[One Bad Pig]

You didn't like referring back to the earlier thread?

[Mountain Man]

I think this news is significant enough that it warrants a new thread.

[Starlight]

I think the travel ban is a waste of everyone's time. It's a band-aid in the wrong place and it doesn't fix the underlying problem (the Wall proposal is similar).

The underlying problem is two-fold: That the US immigration system is bizarre and needs reorganizing and updating for the modern world; and you're getting a lot of people flying into the country and then overstaying their visas and thus becoming illegal immigrants.

The correct solution to the first problem is to overhaul the immigration system to be a "points based" system like other OECD countries, whereby potential immigrants get points for things like quality of English spoken and written, education level, wealth or business experience, coming from a culturally similar country to the US, and they can add up their points and if they meet the current threshold they're in (and your government then tweaks the threshold to decrease or increase total immigration rate as desired).

The second problem has somewhat solved itself as the rate of illegal immigrants leaving the US over the past 10 years or so has been pretty much equal to the number entering, so you aren't currently being flooded with illegal immigrants, so whether you actually need to take action on it is questionable.

However, it's a pointless waste of money and time to do non-solutions such as building a Great Wall of Mexico that doesn't stop commercial airplane flights, and banning a handful of random countries that aren't the ones that terrorists who have attacked the US have come from. Those might make a few ignorant people feel good, but they don't do anything useful toward solving the actual problems.

[Mountain Man]

I think the travel ban is a waste of everyone's time.

Kind of like your posts.

You say that "the US immigration system is bizarre and needs reorganizing and updating for the modern world". Ironically, the primary reason we're in our current mess is because Ted Kennedy thought the same thing 50-years ago, and America has been suffering from that terrible legislative decision ever since. The best way to clean up our immigration system is to restore it to the way it was pre-1965 with strict limits placed on the quality and quantity of people allowed into the country, and to vigorously enforce the law against those who enter illegally.

[Starlight]

The best way to clean up our immigration system is to restore it to the way it was pre-1965 with strict limits placed on the quality and quantity of people allowed into the country, and to vigorously enforce the law against those who enter illegally.

Probably yes. If Trump were getting his GOP congress and senate to pass that bill, rather than wasting time and money banning random countries and building walls, I'd consider him more competent.

Though honestly, your immigration rate is so low anyway (my country's is 3 times higher per capita, and you have heeeeeeaaaaaapppsss of land area) that the whole thing is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things. The US has sooooo many more pressing issues that are way more important than immigration: e.g. homelessness; lack of healthcare-for-all; lead in the water supplies; absurdly high imprisonment rates; lack of law enforcement for fraudsters on Wall St; absurd amounts of "defense" spending attacking random countries around the world and killing civilians and destabilizing entire regions of the world and inspiring terrorism; absurdly high amounts of political corruption so the politicians do what the lobbyists want rather than what the people want; lack of infrastructure spending; police stealing more people's money than burglars do ("civil forfeiture"); police shooting people at the drop of a hat including children, naked people running away from them, and a woman in pajamas who'd called them; gun deaths being so prolific that on average a toddler shoots a person a week; climate change etc. While I loosely agree with you on immigration and loosely agree with you as to what the correct policy solutions are, it pales in comparison to the US's urgent issues and is literally probably around item number 30 in any prioritized list of things the US needs to fix.

However, insofar as immigration is an issue, and insofar as Trump is taking action on it, he's currently taking the wrong actions on it which don't solve the issues.

[Raphael]

Apart from maybe a moral victory, I have a problem with this. The travel ban was meant to be a temporary thing whilst better vetting methods were put into place (6 weeks or something like that wasn't it). Now a year later, those better vetting methods should be in place and the Travel Ban should be irrelevant.

[Cow Poke]

You didn't like referring back to the earlier thread?

Perhaps if I had seen an earlier thread..

[Starlight]

The travel ban was meant to be a temporary thing whilst better vetting methods were put into place (6 weeks or something like that wasn't it). Now a year later, those better vetting methods should be in place and the Travel Ban should be irrelevant.

12 weeks I think was the original timeframe (90 days). But that was always said with a bit of a wink to the audience who were meant to understand that this "temporary" measure while they "figured out what was going on" was actually meant to be a permanent ban to try to stop a few brown people and particularly Muslims from immigrating. It was supposed to make gullible Trump supporters feel happy and like Trump was saving them from all the bad brown Muslims... (who weren't actually a threat from those countries and weren't immigrating in any significant numbers... it was just BS all the way down).

[Terraceth]

Apart from maybe a moral victory, I have a problem with this. The travel ban was meant to be a temporary thing whilst better vetting methods were put into place (6 weeks or something like that wasn't it). Now a year later, those better vetting methods should be in place and the Travel Ban should be irrelevant.

1. US government
2. Getting things done expediently.

Pick one.

[One Bad Pig]

Perhaps if I had seen an earlier thread..

Did you think this was about a DIFFERENT travel ban?

[Cow Poke]

Did you think this was about a DIFFERENT travel ban?

I thought you meant an earlier thread about the SCOTUS decision. So, yes, I didn't like referring to the EARLIER earlier thread about the travel ban. I thought this was worth its own thread.

[One Bad Pig]

I thought you meant an earlier thread about the SCOTUS decision. So, yes, I didn't like referring to the EARLIER earlier thread about the travel ban. I thought this was worth its own thread.

I figured it would be good to bring the older thread up to date with the promised later decision.

[Starlight]

1. US government
2. Getting things done expediently.

Pick one.

It's worth noting that other governments in the world are much more efficient. e.g. the government Raphael and I have here in NZ. So it is not a problem with 'government' in general, it is a problem with the specific ways your government is currently functioning, and hence something that can and should be fixed.

In particular, I would suggest, it is a result of both: An extremely corrupt political system because your country has allowed politicians to fully sell-out to lobbyists and the Republican party consistently votes 100% against any attempts at constitutional change designed to reduce corruption; and a result of Republican determination to break and sabotage government in order to try to convince the populace that government can't work and hence further their general goal of letting the rich get richer by screwing over the working people, the poor, and the environment and removing all government rules and regulations that would protect those groups from the rich and powerful (basically government is what's stopping the rich from pillaging the country, so they want to break government).

Of course, some of the US government failure is inherent in its poor design structure. The Founding Fathers were trying to come up with a system that seemed good to them in the 18th century, and they didn't have a lot of empirical data to work from, and they wanted 'checks and balances'. Unfortunately the system they came up with is pretty unwieldy and other countries that have tried copying it have had their governments grind to a gridlocked halt and collapse. The US has seemed on the brink of that this last decade with government shutdowns and no legislation being able to pass due to political gridlock etc. Other countries over the last couple of centuries have developed much more effective governmental systems, and the consensus of political scientists seems to be now that parliamentary systems (e.g. the UK, NZ, Australia, Canada) are better in general than presidential systems on numerous grounds. But the difficulty of changing the US Constitution, and the reluctance of entrenched political interests to ever change the system that brought them into power in the first place, seems likely to mean that the US won't be able to redesign its government short of a country-devastating political crisis... even a civil war didn't manage it last time.

[Sparko]

Apart from maybe a moral victory, I have a problem with this. The travel ban was meant to be a temporary thing whilst better vetting methods were put into place (6 weeks or something like that wasn't it). Now a year later, those better vetting methods should be in place and the Travel Ban should be irrelevant.

except the liberals kept stopping any such methods from being implemented.

I think the window for the travel ban has passed though, so I doubt they will reinstate it. But this sets a precedent for the next time. It won't be possible for some federal judge to just block it on a whim next time.