President Joe Biden signs a series of executive orders on health care, in the Oval Office, on Jan. 28, 2021.Evan Vucci / AP

President Joe Biden has signed a series of executive orders on a wide range of issues almost every day he’s been in office — from climate change to racial equality to curtailing the spread of Covid-19.

But for all the fanfare, it’s unclear how many are just symbolic gestures that will need legislative action in years to come. Congress, not the president, is tasked with making laws — a fact that Biden, who spent 36 years as a senator from Delaware, is surely aware.

“Big change, long-term change, less fragile change require legislation,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a government and legal studies professor at Bowdoin College who has studied presidential executive orders. Many orders also end up in lengthy court challenges, he said.

On the campaign trail, Biden frequently pushed back at demands from the liberal wing of his party for sweeping change by saying that he would need Congress to sign off on the largest changes.

The orders represent a White House effort both to reverse Trump Administration policies and to send an early signal to supporters that Biden intends to make good on his campaign promises.

Some of Biden’s executive orders have more of an impact than others. He has recommitted the U.S. to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change after Trump withdrew from it in 2017, for example, and reversed a Trump-era ban on transgender people serving in the military.

On Thursday, he signed an executive order to restore parts of the Affordable Care Act that Trump — through executive order — had dismantled.

But others Biden has signed appear more diffuse and aspirational.

One executive order directed governmental agencies to identify unspecified “actions” to address the current economic crisis resulting from the pandemic. It did not prescribe any specific actions.

Another order denounced anti-Asian discrimination and xenophobia. But it didn’t say how exactly that would be achieved.

Yet another calls on the Office of Management and Budget to “modernize and improve” the regulatory review process — but overhauling the regulatory review process was a top priority of the Trump administration, which worked for four years to change the system.

Experts point to the fact that executive orders are both simple to sign and simple to undo, creating confusion both domestically and internationally as one president is able to simply reverse policies enacted by another.

“The lack of continuity is an issue, and it does lead to a lack of stability for everyone from automakers to homeowners,” Rudalevige said.

White House advisers have been quick to defend Biden’s use of executive orders, particularly after The New York Times published an editorial Thursday urging him to “ease up” on the practice.

“We are not taking executive action in lieu of legislation: we are taking executive action to fix what Trump broke in the executive branch,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain wrote on Twitter.

“Of course we are pursuing our agenda through legislation,” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield noted, pointing to the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan the administration is negotiating in Congress.

Presidents since George Washington have used executive orders to advance their priorities, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But the practice has become a flashpoint for controversy in recent years as Congress and the public have become more politically polarized.

Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to sign several high profile executive orders.

“I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” he announced in 2014, signaling that he would not wait for lawmakers to enact his agenda.

Obama’s most contested executive order, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, was an immigration measure he signed in 2012 aimed at offering limited legal status to some 700,000 immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children. The measure faced numerous court challenges and was effectively overturned by the Trump administration until the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Trump’s effort.

Trump took the use of executive orders even further, issuing almost as many in four years as Obama did in eight. Many of Trump’s orders, such as advancing the Keystone Pipeline and promoting a travel ban from several majority-Muslim countries, have been among the first Biden has sought to reverse.

Beth Fouhy is the senior politics editor for NBC News and MSNBC, based in New York.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/fragile-change-biden-inks-executive-orders-many-lack-force-n1256165

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EU citizens who witnessed the European referendum will not be surprised that Boris Johnson is again turning his fire on us. As a leading figure in Vote Leave, Johnson oversaw a campaign grounded in dog-whistle xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiment. Now in the final week of the election campaign, the Conservatives have reverted straight back to the old playbook.

The European referendum was a low point for many EU nationals in Britain. Dishonest and misleading claims – a Johnson signature in this general election – were already a key feature of Vote Leave back then. Shamelessly they declared that the whole of Turkey would flood the UK should we vote to Remain. This was blatantly obvious Islamophobia.

The British tabloid press aggressively propagated against Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans. We were simultaneously denounced as benefit scroungers and job stealers, to be held responsible for crumbling public services and an overstretched NHS. To top it off, we were probably all dangerous criminals too. Just existing in this climate of hostility felt deflating.

After Leave won the referendum, the demand to end the free movement of people quickly became the red line for negotiations, locking us out of the single market. It seemed ludicrous that politicians happily advocated for is economically the worst possible Leave option, just to be able to pull up the drawbridge for British and European citizens wanting to live in each other’s countries. Perhaps we should not be surprised that the party that oversaw austerity wreaking havoc across the country for nearly a decade is more concerned with appeasing its hard-right elements than doing what is best for the British people.

The ongoing hostility makes it hard for many of the other Europeans I know in Britain to feel happy and at home, even if they have lived here for most of their adult lives. To add insult to injury, Johnson now proclaims that Europeans have treated the UK too much as though it were “their own country”. This claim is so outrageously offensive because it moves the goalposts of immigration discourse in the UK even further into the gutter. The Tory mask is clearly slipping: whilst they claim to have “sensible” policies on immigration that mean Britain is open to migrants who “contribute”, Johnson is now telling us that the fundamental problem lies in us feeling like we belong.

Framing the argument in this way makes clear that it does not matter to Johnson and the Conservative Party whether someone has come here with a job, is (in their narrow definition) skilled or has a family life to attend to. Being able to “feel at home” in a country means to have rights. It is these rights that a Conservative government will strip away from us.

Despite promises from Priti Patel to the British Asian community that the ending of free movement and the preferential treatment for Europeans will result in leveling up access to the country at the time of the referendum, we are now seeing the opposite. Conditions will not improve for non-European migrants who have long been subject to a form of points and skills-based system. Rather we are heading towards a future that creates a group of second-class citizens, migrant laborers on short term “low-skilled” guest worker visas with no route to permanent settlement, purely here to serve the needs of businesses.

This is a future in which the government will do its utmost to ensure that immigrant communities cannot and will not feel at home here. They have no desire for the UK to be a diverse country. They will not treat those workers – whether they are from the EU or elsewhere – with the dignity and respect they deserve.

The danger of where this will lead is clear. Those who came here as part of the Windrush generation were asked to supply the labor Britain needed, including in the NHS. They are a part of the fabric of this country, but the British state denied their rights. Boris Johnson’s comments make clear that this is how the Conservative Party views all migrant communities.

Sabrina Huck is a Labour List columnist and a German national.

Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/brexit/2019/12/boris-johnson-s-attack-eu-citizens-shows-tories-dont-think-migrants-belong

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Social stability in Latin America is at risk under the pressure of Venezuelan refugees.

More than 4 and a half million people have left the country and the flow continues to grow dramatically as the political crisis has not been solved.

Neighboring countries are increasingly having problems to deal with the situation.

“Demands continue to grow, the number of refugees continues to increase. We greatly appreciate international cooperation, but seeing the growth of the phenomenon, we need to raise awareness about the challenge and to increase international cooperation,” explained Carlos Holmes Trujillo, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Colombia.

Colombia is the country that has received the most refugees, one million four hundred thousand, followed by Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Brazil.

Under the impulse of the European Union, Brussels has hosted an international conference to gather support.

In host countries, social services are under pressure. And as explained by the United Nations, problems are starting to show up.

“Now they find themselves with many hospitals, many schools that are receiving a very large number of Venezuelans in need of attention. They are increasingly in need and that this is starting to create tensions between communities. For the first time we are beginning to see outbreaks of rejection and xenophobia that are very worrying,” William Spindler, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency told our reporter.

At the beginning of next year, the EU will hold a donor conference to help the countries dealing with this exodus, the second most important in the world after the Syrian one.

“I think it is extremely wise and it is extremely urgent to mobilize international support for these countries and for the Venezuelans that are moving in these countries before this becomes a destabilizing factor”.

A first package of aid of 120 million euros has been already been promised this week.

Source: https://www.euronews.com/2019/10/31/venezuela-refugee-crisis-we-are-beginning-to-see-outbreaks-of-xenophobia

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The Washington Post created a major buzz in political circles Thursday night when it reported the Trump administration had been kicking around the idea of transporting and releasing migrants detained at the border in districts represented in Congress by their Democratic “enemies,” or in cities that have “sanctuary” policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts (Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco, of course, qualifies under either approach).

Every administration official the Post talked to denied that any such plan was under active consideration, despite its apparent strong support from presidential adviser Stephen Miller, thought to be a bigger dog than ever after a recent purge of DHS. For one thing, federal immigration attorneys could find no discernible legal authority for taking such a step, particularly since federal judges tend to frown on using executive authority visibly to “punish” political enemies, which was clearly a major rationale for the proposal.

But just when the idea was thought to be one of those scary potential Trump administration policies that cooler heads would sidetrack, you-know-who gave it fresh momentum:

As my colleague Jonathan Chait observed, the migrants-to-the-cities idea reflects a general radicalization of the administration’s challenge to legal and political norms:

There is little mystery about Trump’s intent to turn [DHS] into an unalloyed instrument of his agenda. So we are left wondering whether the danger has been thwarted, or whether it yet looms over our heads.

A related question is whether Trump’s tweets on the subject are just an act of trolling designed to put Democrats in a bad spot, or something that appeals to his (and Miller’s) crude but sometimes shrewd political instincts.

Once you think about it for a while, the migrants-to-the-cities policy does make sense from the perspective of xenophobic MAGA supporters living far from New York or Chicago or San Francisco, who count on Trump to protect them from the swarthy invaders that represent an existential threat to everything they cherish. The idea of “owning the libs” by exposing them directly and exclusively to the consequences of their unpatriotic policies makes it an even more emotionally satisfying proposition among angry conservatives. The underlying message to the president’s enemies is: You want these garbage people in our country? Then you take ‘em in your neighborhoods and streets and schools!

But there’s another side of the political coin on this subject: Though he meant it as a taunt, Trump may actually be right that accepting migrant families into their communities would make a lot of urban liberals happy. Despite the lurid picture of migrants Trump’s allies like to paint, these are hardly hardened “criminals.” Most immigrants with serious criminal records aren’t released anywhere other than back across the border. They do represent a fresh source of inexpensive labor at a time when labor markets have become very tight. For people in cities that don’t fear them, migrants could represent an important new economic resource, particularly for places where construction is booming, as the New York Times notes:

“The recent shortage of immigrant workers is impacting housing and housing affordability,” said Jerry Howard, chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders. Phil Crone, who runs the association’s Dallas chapter, said the labor bottleneck was adding about $6,000 to the cost of every home built in the area and delaying completion by two months.

Were it not for immigrants, the labor crunch would be even more intense. In 2016, immigrants accounted for one in four construction workers, according to a study by Natalia Siniavskaia of the home builders’ association, up from about one in five in 2004. In some of the least-skilled jobs — like plastering, roofing and hanging drywall, for which workers rarely have more than a high school education — the share of immigrants hovers around half.

As Splinter’s Libby Watson points out, dumping migrants anywhere without appropriate support would be horridly inhumane — not to the host communities, but to migrants themselves:

The release of these migrants to the streets without any support, of course, is vile in itself. On Christmas Day last year (gotta love this administration’s Christian charity), NPR reported that ICE had released “approximately 400 migrants near the Greyhound bus terminal with no apparent plan in place for the men, women and children” over the past few days. Those migrants were left “completely reliant on generous strangers who have been showing up in droves to distribute food, water and blankets as temperatures drop into the 40s.”

But Watson goes on to suggest that the “own the libs” rationale for such a policy doesn’t hold up:

A premise like “busing migrants to San Francisco will punish Nancy Pelosi” is not self-explanatory. I do not immediately understand the mechanism by which releasing a tired, huddled mass of immigrants in cities with massive populations — and cities where asylum approval rates are much higher — punish their representatives.

So while it’s almost certainly not going to happen, for all sorts of reasons (including the law), it’s worth noting that the administration’s assumption that people everywhere would freak out at having to deal with relatively small numbers of resettled migrants could be dead wrong. That doesn’t mean we can just happily move to a country where polarized attitudes on immigration and other subjects can be accommodated by two sets of policies that together please most of the people most of the time. But it may show that the myth of hypocritical lefties who are bigoted as everyone else is just that.

Perhaps it could even become a popular slogan: Dear Migrants: Welcome to New York City!

Source: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/could-trump-sending-migrants-to-cities-make-everybody-happy.html

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(UNITED NATIONS) — The World Refugee Council called Thursday for up to $20 billion stolen by government leaders and now frozen in the United States, Britain and other countries to be reallocated by courts to help millions of displaced people forced to flee conflict, persecution and victimization.

The council also called for people responsible for the growing crisis of refugees and internally displaced people — including government leaders, military officers and opposition and rebel figures — to be held accountable, all the way to the International Criminal Court.

Chaired by former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, the 24-member council which was formed in May 2017 includes former heads of state and ministers, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, and leading business, civil society and human rights officials.

The 218-page report it launched Thursday goes beyond what the United Nations has done, at a time when the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes is 68.5 million, the highest since World War II. Its release also comes as populist and nationalist political figures “are exploiting people’s anxieties, fears” about refugees, Axworthy said,

Tanzania’s former President Jakaya Kikwete, a council co-chair, said the current crisis is a consequence of some countries’ internal policies, authoritarianism, sectarianism, violence and conflicts, “but the other aspect is that the attitude towards refugees has changed.”

“In the past people have been welcoming, friendly,” he said. “Now people are … closing the doors for people who are … fleeing from danger. But they say, ‘no, no you can’t come’ … and refugees are being blamed as being the problem.”

Kikwete said “unscrupulous politicians” are using refugees to get votes “because when you tell your people they’re dangerous” they react, and the politicians become popular.

At the same time, the report said, “the humanitarian commitment of nations, once a norm, has given way to nativism. Xenophobia — fear and exclusion of the ‘outsider’ — has gathered force in America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.”

The U.N. refugee agency, which relies on voluntary contributions, is seriously underfunded and its head, Filippo Grandi, called in his latest report on forced displacement for “a new and far more comprehensive approach” to the crisis “so that countries and communities aren’t left dealing with this alone.”

Axworthy told a news conference: “What we’ve really proposed is a way in which you have to get out of the box in which refugees are seen simply as ‘a humanitarian issue.’”

“There has to be a much stronger level of involvement,” he said, in matters of security, development, human rights, accountability and finance for the world’s 25.4 million refugees and 40 million internally displaced, along with 3.1 million asylum seekers.

Axworthy said the World Bank has estimated that there are between $15 billion and $20 billion “in purloined assets that various political leaders have stolen from their people.”

How much of that can be recovered, he said, depends on how many governments and countries are prepared to give their courts the right to reallocate the money. He pointed to Switzerland, which has done just that, as a model.

Fen Osler Hampson, the council’s executive director, said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s regime has complained it doesn’t have access to $3 billion in bank accounts frozen in the United States. He said there are several hundred million dollars belonging to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s family frozen in London bank accounts. And in the case of South Sudan, he said, “the generals have several hundred millions that are frozen in bank accounts in Nairobi.”

“All it takes is political will to introduce that legislation” to give courts the right to reallocate that money, Hampson said.

The World Refugee Council’s argument is that refugees and internally displaced people, the majority of them women and children, are the most vulnerable in the world and should therefore have the primary claim on those assets, he said.

Other prospects for new money, Hampson said, are to leverage the vast resources of the private sector and create “refugee bonds,” similar to “green bonds” to tackle climate change.

Another proposal is a kind of cap-and-trade system where if a country isn’t willing to resettle refugees for political reasons it can make financial contributions to developing countries saddled with huge costs for hosting millions of refugees, Hampson said.

As for accountability, Axworthy said using the International Criminal Court to prosecute Myanmar’s military leaders for alleged crimes against humanity for the crackdown that led over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh would “take away the impunity” for those responsible for massive displacement.

The council also called for the drafting of a new protocol to the 1951 Refugee Convention requiring “collective responsibility for refugees.”

Contact us at editors@time.com.

Source: http://time.com/5512860/world-refugee-council-frozen-aid/

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