President Donald Trump has always loved the idea of taking other countries’ oil by force. And he claims to have accomplished that goal in Venezuela. The war there “lasted 48 minutes, and we paid for the war with what we’ve taken out many, many, many times. Where have you heard that before? You haven’t heard that before. That’s the old fashioned way, right? The old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump told a crowd in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

That’s not how other officials advertised U.S. oversight of Venezuelan oil. “We’re the bankers, we don’t direct the funds,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told the Economic Club of Minnesota in January. “This is the oil of the people of Venezuela,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified to Congress a few weeks later, claiming that the U.S. government was making sure that “the needs of the Venezuelan people can be met” through oil sales.

In a way, they’re both right. Shortly after the U.S. military operation in Venezuela on January 3, 2026, the two countries cut a deal to put sanctioned Venezuelan oil revenues under the control of the U.S. Treasury. The money still belongs to Venezuela on paper, but it’s controlled by U.S. officials for all practical purposes—and trying to get any transparency on where it’s going has been like pulling teeth. 

The oil deal demonstrates the raw, unaccountable, and global power that economic sanctions give to the U.S. Treasury. Neither the American nor the Venezuelan people have a clear picture of what’s going on. The case of Venezuela also shows how, despite invoking Ronald Reagan’s anticommunism, the Trump administration is much more concerned with imposing direct economic control than nurturing free markets. After all, the Venezuelan oil deal is a U.S. partnership with a socialist dictatorship.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. Treasury had imposed sanctions on the Venezuelan oil and banking sectors, preventing Venezuela’s state-owned oil company from exporting to North America and its socialist government from dealing in U.S. dollars. After the January 2026 operation, the Venezuelan leadership cut a deal. The Trump administration issued sanctions exemptions and even shielded Venezuelan money from U.S. lawsuits. In exchange, Venezuela began putting its oil revenues into bank accounts in the “custody” of the U.S. Treasury.

At first, the money went into a mysterious account in Qatar. Rubio told Congress on January 28 that there was a “short-term mechanism” for the Venezuelan government to “submit every month a budget of this is what we need funded.” A week later, Bessent stammered and refused to answer while Rep. Sean Casten (D–Ill.) asked him what legal authority the Treasury was exercising or what written agreements were in place.

On February 13, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced that the Qatari account was being closed after $500 million had passed through it. “Since Venezuela has so many creditors and they owe a lot of money, we had some risk if we put it into a U.S. bank account set up quickly that creditors could freeze that money,” he told NBC News. But now the administration was ready to move the money through a Citibank account controlled by the Treasury.

The new Citibank account had slightly more checks and balances, in theory. Both the U.S. State Department and the Venezuelan government announced in April that they had hired outside auditors, and Rubio told Congress in June that it would be “an ongoing audit, so it’s not a once-a-year audit, it’s on every expenditure, every single disbursement is audited.” The Venezuelan government also created a website called Transparent Sovereignty to publish oil transactions.

But as far as the public is concerned, it is still a big mystery. The State Department has not published either the written agreements or the results of the audits. Transparent Sovereignty only lists one transaction, a $300 million fuel oil sale from March 2026. The Financial Times estimated last month that Venezuela had sold more than $13 billion in oil under the new arrangement. Asked about the report, Trump bragged that it was “even more than that.”

The administration simply hasn’t forked over all the information it promised. Despite promising in April to produce quarterly audit reports, the Trump administration hasn’t sent anything to Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Financial Times reported on July 22. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee wrote another letter on Wednesday demanding information. Even hawkish Republicans who supported the operation have started to get uneasy about the lack of transparency on the money.

“We have never seen those [audit] reports…It’s been six months. I would like to see two reports, because it’s every three months,” Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R–Fla.) said during a July hearing. In response, Assistant Secretary of State Caleb Orr promised to give Congress “appropriate summaries” that would “protect relevant information that’s part of our foreign policy.” In other words, the fate of that money is a state secret.

The administration has consistently named what the oil money will be used for: paying Venezuelan government employees’ salaries. Transparent Sovereignty, the Venezuelan website, also says that the $300 million from fuel oil went towards paying for the increase in minimum wages announced in April. But it’s impossible to actually evaluate those claims without a paper trail.

Although the Venezuelan arrangement is uniquely secretive, it isn’t the only place where the U.S. government exercises dictatorial power over another country’s finances. After invading Iraq in 2003, the U.S. government redirected all of its oil revenues—which account for 90 percent of the Iraqi state budget—to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. When the Iraqi parliament asked U.S. troops to leave in 2020, the Trump administration threatened to seize the account. U.S. officials privately threatened the Iraqi oil account after Iraqi elections in November 2025, telling the winning parties that the money would be cut off if they appointed the wrong people to his cabinet, Reuters reports.

Trump wants to use the ongoing war in the Middle East to expand these arrangements even more. “We’re doing the same thing, by the way, in the lovely Islamic Republic of Iran. We’re knocking the hell out of them,” he said in his Vegas speech.

The post Trump Says He Took Venezuela's Oil. Here's What Actually Happened. appeared first on Reason.com.

It’s not often that one finds a movie about federal regulation, much less a high-concept rom-com set in a quasi-dystopian alternate present that no one quite realizes is dystopian. But that’s what One Night Only is.

The movie is set in present-day New York, three years after the passage of a federal regulation, simply known as “the mandate,” that banned all sex outside of marriage—except for, you guessed it, one night only. During this one night, singles are free to have sex without the threat of legal crackdown; the rest of the time, they are monitored via implants that detect body chemistry and alert the police if shagging is detected. Basically, it’s The Purge: but for Sex. 

What seems to have bothered some critics is that this is a clearly authoritarian society in which private, personal decisions are monitored and criminalized, and most of the characters in the movie seem to go along with it, more or less. Sure, there are “repeal” signs hung in shops and apartment windows, and there’s anti-mandate graffiti sprayed on alley walls. There is even an anti-mandate rally planned for the night after the annual free-for-all, with a shaggy, handsome, anti-mandate male pop star who ends up playing a part in the movie’s proceedings. And there are repeat lawbreakers, who we encounter in a scene set in a police station. But by and large, the public takes the sexual prohibition for granted; meanwhile, brands capitalize on the special exemption evening, organizing special ad campaigns and products around the mandate’s strictures.

In other words, faced with a punitive legal crackdown on a personal decision, there’s token opposition, but mostly everyone shrugs, moves on with their life, and maybe tries to make a buck. 

Does this sound familiar? One only needs to look at the broad acceptance of the war on drugs to see this sort of exasperated acceptance of prohibition play out; compliance with COVID-19 mandates, especially in liberal outposts like New York City, also comes to mind. Yes, there were pockets of resistance and non-compliance, probably represented in the readership of this very piece. But large swaths of the public responded with little more than a grumble and a shrug. 

One Night Only posits that where sex is concerned, the public might do the same. That doesn’t mean the premise has no weaknesses: the most glaring is that the movie misses an opportunity to have a more robust black market of on-the-quick marriages and divorces. Since marital sex is legal in the movie’s rom-com dystopia, why aren’t people getting sham married for a night or two, or while they shack up? Wouldn’t this devalue marriage in ways that might be relevant for a rom-com?

And it’s hardly believable when some of the movie’s hijinks revolve around a condom shortage and resultant price gouging for a single remaining rubber; if, as the movie repeatedly suggests, brands are just building the mandate into their marketing and product decisions, shouldn’t protection, which is required by the law, be in abundant supply? 

But these premise-begging head-scratchers are mostly just a means to an end, a way to create complications for a pair of fated lovers to finally get together. Because yes, despite the inherent darkness of the premise—the movie actually takes time to show police enforcement of non-compliant sex, and even notes how it wastes policing resources—this is a rom-com. And it’s a reasonably charming, if imperfect, one at that. 

The pair in question are a singer, Allie (Monica Barbaro), who is stuck doing commercial ditties, and Owen (Callum Turner), a pizza shop owner with a model’s body and a taste for Buck Mason’s expensive-for-Instagram clothes (his relationship with the brand becomes a recurring joke). The pair have the requisite downtown meet-cute and love/hate tension, and the movie gives them increasingly absurd—even beyond the premise—comic reasons to stay apart, even as their flirty chemistry becomes harder and harder to deny. 

There is probably a weirder, darker, more scathing version of this movie more specifically targeted at Reason readers, given this magazine’s longstanding interest in personal liberty and regulatory overreach, perhaps set at the Department of Health and Human Services, which, based on the government signage that appears seemingly everywhere in the film’s fictional New York, is tasked with enforcing the rule. There might be a twisted satire about Congress working toward passage of the law, an episode handled in a single, amusing exchange between Owen’s mother and her boyfriend, who argue about it by shouting nearly every of-the-moment buzzword at each other. (If anything, the “law” aspect is where the movie’s concept really strains belief. This is a world in which…Congress passed an actual law?!) 

But this isn’t really a movie about regulatory crackdowns and legislative maneuvering. It’s just a quirky, high-concept romantic comedy, reasonably competent and, concept aside, perfectly formulaic. 

The question it asks is not: Is this the rise of fascism? Instead, it’s: Can two hot, charming, young adults find love and build a relationship in a world of casual authoritarianism and shocking crackdowns on personal liberty that no one treats as actually shocking? It’s a question worth pondering for more than one night.

The post <i>One Night Only</i> Is a Rare Rom-Com About Regulation appeared first on Reason.com.

New York Assemblywoman Nikki Lucas (D–Brooklyn) has proposed a bill that would require supermarkets and other retailers to give customers who use self-checkout a 10-percent discount. Lucas argues that shoppers are doing work once performed by cashiers, such as scanning and bagging, which saves the stores money on labor. Her proposal would give customers part of those savings in the form of a discount.

The post Brickbat: Cash Back appeared first on Reason.com.

The Trump administration pledged to define itself largely by a hard-line approach to immigration. In keeping with that promise, it is pursuing what the government calls the “largest denaturalization effort ever.”

Denaturalization isn’t new, but it has been used sparingly in modern history, in part because it is extremely costly and time-consuming amid finite resources. An immigrant may be denaturalized for a few reasons, including misrepresenting themselves to the government in a way that helped them obtain citizenship and committing certain crimes prior to naturalization occurring.

This week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it had pinpointed 25 naturalized immigrants whose citizenship it would seek to revoke. “Today’s filings represent the largest coordinated denaturalization effort in Department history, but they are only the beginning,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement on Monday. “The Justice Department will continue to use every tool available to protect the integrity of the naturalization process and the safety of the American people.”

The move comes shortly after the administration’s July announcement that it would seek “to revoke U.S. citizenship from 10 naturalized criminals including child molesters, scammers, and drug dealers.” The cases appear to be largely in line with the ones previous administrations pursued.

The departure is mostly that it is now a priority as opposed to an outlier. From 1990 to 2017, the DOJ filed 305 denaturalization cases. Trump’s second administration, meanwhile, has filed 123 cases in a little over a year and a half, the government said. In April of this year, it was revealed that the Justice Department had 384 people in its sights for denaturalization; the administration has set a quota for denaturalization referrals from the Department of Homeland Security. 

It is generally difficult to strip someone of citizenship after it has been conferred. The government must meet a high burden of proof, and the subjects of such cases are entitled to a much more robust process than non-naturalized potential deportees. The diversion of limited resources, The New York Times notes, may affect how the DOJ is able to approach priorities like “health-care fraud, procurement fraud, enforcement of civil rights laws, and asset forfeiture cases.” (I will admit that the government focusing less on seizing assets from people who are potentially innocent, in favor of deporting offenders found guilty of crimes, does not necessarily seem scandalous to me. But I digress.)

As with the administration’s earlier push to expel various students from the U.S., making denaturalization a priority will not do much to inflate the White House’s raw deportation numbers. Though President Donald Trump came to office promising the largest mass deportation campaign in history, his administration has generally deported people at similar rates as previous presidents, to the dismay of some conservatives. But the rejiggering of priorities is a reminder that the bigger change here is one of public relations.

The post The Trump Administration Promises the 'Largest Denaturalization Effort Ever' appeared first on Reason.com.

“Democratic Socialism” is a growing movement on the US political left. Thus, it’s important to pay attention to its ideas, and outline where they go wrong. My Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh recently posted a succinct, but thorough and insightful critique of ten ideas in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform. DSA is probably the best-known currently active socialist organization in the US. Here’s an excerpt:

1. “Under socialism, ‘You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right.'”

There are prices on housing, medicine, food, and energy because these goods are scarce and have alternative uses. “Scarce” means that there are not enough of them to satisfy all demand at a price of zero. Those goods must be produced by people who must be fed, trained, equipped, and persuaded to show up to work. In a free-market economy, workers produce those goods because they are paid to do so, the owners of firms organize production efficiently because their profits depend on it, and the owners of capital sell it to the most profitable firms. All that activity is guided by the incentives and information provided by prices.

Similarly, there are many different uses for these goods. Prices provide a signal and an incentive to producers to decide what to build and to consumers to decide what to buy. Abolishing prices abolishes neither the costs of production nor the choices of consumption. It destroys the information and incentives that tell producers what to make, in what quantity, where, and at what sacrifice of alternatives. No socialist economy has ever solved the problem of efficiently allocating those resources without prices set by market exchange…..

3. “As free market economies fail, they turn to right-wing authoritarianism, but ‘if we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty.'”

Economic freedom and political freedom are correlated. The Economic Freedom of the World report finds that the freest quartile of economies enjoys average incomes 6.2 times higher than the least free. Incomes for the poorest tenth are 7.8 times higher, and life expectancy is 17 years longer. Denmark, the democratic socialists’ favorite exhibit, is nothing of the sort. It ranks ninth in the world for economic freedom, and its prime minister traveled to Harvard to say, “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” The regimes that actually abolished private ownership ran the authoritarian experiment themselves. More than two dozen socialist trials ran over the past century, and every one that collectivized its economy ended in one-party rule. Socialists will often deny that those countries were really socialist because they are selecting on outcomes, but there is a long history of Western socialists celebrating each new socialist government at the beginning of its reign, only to sour on it when the disaster strikes….

The classless society fared no better on its other promises of peace and social harmony. Each trial produced a new ruling class of party officials with better apartments and worse manners than the bourgeoisie they replaced; peace among nations tracks commerce rather than collective ownership,…. Authoritarianism follows the concentration of economic power in the state. That concentration is the DSA’s core proposal….

4. “Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals.”

“At no cost to individuals” doesn’t include the individuals who will pay for it. The Mercatus Center’s Charles Blahous estimated that Medicare for All would add $32.6 trillion in federal costs over 10 years under assumptions favorable to the plan, and the left-leaning Urban Institute put the figure at $34 trillion. That mostly shifts spending from premiums to higher taxes, but the new expanded tax bill would start near a tenth of GDP, grow from there, and exceed what doubling all projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections could cover. And presumably the entire point is to expand health care consumption, which randomized experiments show does little to improve health, so these estimates understate the additional resources such a scheme would require. Single-payer systems also pay with longer wait times, because a monopoly provider whose patients cannot take their business elsewhere doesn’t have an incentive to change. England’s National Health Service carried 7.3 million waiting cases as of this spring, and the median Canadian patient now waits 28.6 weeks between referral and treatment, triple the wait in 1993.

America’s own health care problems cannot be blamed on free markets because the United States does not have a free market health care system. The US government controls 84 percent of health spending through a complex system of tax rules, expenditures, and other mechanisms. That’s higher than in 27 out of 38 OECD countries. The share of the US health care sector under government control “is closer to communist Cuba (89%) than the average OECD nation (75%),” according to Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute. The specific portions of national health care systems under direct government control, and the ways they are controlled, vary across countries. American health care is a largely government-run system.

As they say, read the whole thing!

For those interested, Alex is just as tough on right-wing versions of economic statism. See our coauthored article, “The Case Against Nationalism.” Nationalist and socialist central planning have much in common.

I previously wrote about “The Perils of Democratic Socialism” (a 2019 post that remains relevant to today’s DSA agenda), and more recently about “The Contradictions of Socialist Prison Abolitionism” (which highlights the clash between socialists’ coercive economic agenda and the desire of many of them to abolish prisons). In 2024, I wrote about how Venezuela – a nation until recently held up as a model by many Western socialists – exemplifes the dangers of democratic socialism.

Socialism – in the DSA-endorsed sense of government control over all or most of the economy – has led to disaster wherever tried. We are unlikely to make it work much better than the Russians, Chinese, Cubans, North Koreans, and others who came before.

The post Alex Nowrasteh on "Ten Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Arguments for Socialism and Why They're Wrong" appeared first on Reason.com.

Here is the before design (courtesy the Internet Archives):

And here is the after design.

The home page now indicates which cases are currently being argued, as well as links to the latest opinions.

The Opinions page also has a full text search, which seems to work quite well. I also like the calendar feature, which neatly displays which cases are being argued in which courtrooms at which times.

Congratulations to everyone involved with the renovation, especially Clerk extraordinary Lyle W. Cayce who will soon be retiring after a distinguished career.

The post The Fifth Circuit Websites Gets A Glow-Up! appeared first on Reason.com.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused other countries—particularly China—of attempting to influence American politics, all while his administration is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to shape political debates abroad.

The State Department is currently accepting applications from MAGA-aligned groups in Europe for two or three grants, ranging from $1 million to $3 million, out of a total funding pot of about $4.9 million.

The grants are intended to fund research, conferences, cultural programs, and civil-society groups addressing “mass migration,” national sovereignty, and lawfare, all in the name of defending “our common Western civilizational heritage.” The agency is also looking to finance programs to “identify, analyze and respond to instances of lawfare and judicial activism that undermine democracy and national sovereignty.”

In addition to this open grant application, the State Department is considering three separate awards to named British organizations. According to documents reviewed by The Guardian, it intends to allocate $7 million to 878, a recently established group founded by former government special adviser Radomir Tylecote and former Conservative minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. The group is dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission,” working with “scholars in Israel and other closely allied nations” to rejuvenate “knowledge of the origins of our constitutional tradition.”

A further $5 million has reportedly been set aside for Free Speech Union International, an offshoot of the Free Speech Union (FSU), to “promote free speech and oppose digital overregulation across Britain, Europe, and Australia.” The Free Speech Union, which defends free speech in Britain (a principle constantly under attack), currently states that they “take no government money.”

“FSU International expressed interest, but hasn’t yet formally applied,” Toby Young, the founder and director of the Free Speech Union and a member of the House of Lords, tells Reason. “If the US government wants to spend money to project America’s soft power overseas, these are the kinds of groups—promoting free speech and free markets—it should be funding.”

The department is also reportedly considering a $3 million grant to the Jobs Foundation for a project titled “Countering Overregulation to Advance American Investment.” The Jobs Foundation, co-founded by former Vote Leave—the official pro-Brexit campaign group—CEO Matthew Elliot, is a charity that aims to “champion the role of business as a force for good.”

Many of the groups being considered for funding by the State Department do noble work that promotes liberty and prosperity, and Britain may be in a far more perilous state without such organizations. However brilliant that work may be, it’s unclear why American taxpayers are being forced to fund these foreign groups.

The funding opportunities sit awkwardly alongside Trump’s repeated attacks on foreign aid. On his first day back in office, Trump declared that foreign-aid bureaucracy was “not aligned with American interests” and ordered that no assistance be distributed unless it was “fully aligned” with his foreign policy. The administration has since boasted of eliminating billions in “woke, weaponized, and wasteful” overseas spending. Apparently, however, using American taxpayers’ money to subsidize ideologically sympathetic organizations abroad is acceptable.

Yet over 800 federal funding opportunities for international and domestic projects have been posted on simpler.grants.gov since June 5th, totaling more than $25.34 billion. This includes various foreign funding opportunities, including $500 million for a U.S.-Africa Strategic Investment Program, a quarter of a million dollars for a conference in Korea, and thousands of dollars for a 21-month program in Jordan that would hold monthly screenings of classic American sports films for Jordanian young people to promote “American excellence.”

Trump promised to end wasteful foreign spending, not to replace left-wing nation building with MAGA nation building. American taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll either.

The post Why Does Trump Want To Give Millions of Dollars to Right-Wing Europeans? appeared first on Reason.com.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently imposed a ban on new foreign-made robotic devices, drawn so broadly as to even include robot vacuums. It’s an especially devastating blow, since one of the most prominent robot vacuum manufacturers has already been the victim of overzealous regulators.

“Today, the Federal Communications Commission updated its Covered List to include two new categories of devices,” the agency announced last week, including “‘advanced robotic devices’ (defined as mobile robots, such as humanoids and quadrupeds).”

The Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019 directed the FCC to “publish and maintain a list” of “communications equipment or services from a company that poses a national security risk to U.S. communications networks.”

Items on the list are “prohibited from getting FCC equipment authorization,” effectively preventing their sale or use in the U.S.

The new ban goes much further than just humanoid robots: A National Security Determination cited in the announcement includes any automated software-controlled devices weighing more than 4.4 pounds that are “capable of locomotion, obstacle avoidance, navigation, or movement on the ground.”

The ban won’t apply to any devices already on the market, and it allows the government to grant exemptions “after finding that such device or class of devices do not pose such unacceptable risks.” But it still seems remarkably arbitrary, especially when it’s sold as a means of protecting national security.

“The FCC isn’t actually targeting companies with poor security. It’s targeting basically every robovac company, regardless of their security practices—because basically every robovac is manufactured outside the US,” Sean Hollister writes at The Verge.

In fact, “the government isn’t asking these companies any questions about security—not one—to get the waiver that lets them through,” Hollister adds. “The FCC only wants to know where they’re designed and made and assembled and tested and influenced, and get a specific commitment to start manufacturing them in the US instead. Even then, it appears the FCC will simply preference US companies without any new commitments to security or US manufacturing.”

Earlier this year, the FCC banned all foreign-made wireless routers, and it’s currently considering a proposal to ban foreign-made drones, even those it had previously approved.

But this new ban is worse, especially considering how it will hurt a company that has already endured its share of abuse from government regulators.

Amazon announced in 2022 that it would acquire iRobot, the Massachusetts-based company that makes the Roomba robot vacuum. While it was once a pioneer in the space, iRobot had fallen behind its competitors: The New York Times‘ Wirecutter no longer recommends Roomba products, noting they “have not performed well in our testing in recent years.”

An acquisition by a company with pockets as deep as Amazon’s could have been a much-needed lifeline, allowing iRobot to invest in research and development.

Instead, busybody regulators in both the U.S. and Europe opposed the merger on antitrust grounds.

In a letter to then-Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and five other lawmakers said the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “should use its authority to oppose the Amazon–iRobot transaction”—which, they warned, “could harm consumers and reduce competition and innovation in the home robotics market.”

The European Commission, the European Union’s governing body, also objected, fearing that “because Amazon’s online marketplace is a particularly important channel,” it “may have the ability and the incentive to foreclose iRobot’s rivals.”

Amazon abandoned the deal rather than try to placate regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, iRobot laid off one-third of its workforce and soon faced bankruptcy. It also reported in a bankruptcy filing that tariffs on goods from Vietnam, where it made most of its products, added $23 million to its costs in 2025.

In December, the company announced it would instead be acquired by China-based company Shenzhen Picea Robotics, its primary contract manufacturer. At the time, iRobot owed Picea nearly $100 million.

Considering, as Reuters reported last week, that “the FCC is expected to exempt many non-Chinese suppliers from the restrictions,” this means iRobot will have borne the brunt of two successive presidential administrations’ regulatory actions.

The post FCC Bans Foreign-Made Robots, Including Roombas appeared first on Reason.com.

Since returning to office last year, President Donald Trump has imposed numerous immigration restrictions that he argues will benefit the American people. The Trump administration recently amended one such measure, a development that suggests it might not be having its intended effect.

Starting in January, the Trump administration froze “decisions on visa extensions, work permits and green cards for citizens of 39 countries,” The New York Times reported. A presidential proclamation cited the need to protect Americans “from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security and public safety, incite hate crimes, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.” It outlined very narrow exceptions—for example, “any athlete or member of an athletic team” traveling “for the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event.”

In May, the Trump administration tacitly admitted this broad restriction is not in the national interest. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly updated its website “to indicate that physicians are no longer subject to the processing hold,” and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it would “resume issuing visas and work permits for the group,” The New York Times reported.

Foreign-born professionals are critical to the country’s medical workforce: A quarter of American doctors are international medical graduates. Rural counties and communities are especially dependent on foreign-born physicians. They will prove even more important during the next decade, because the U.S. will face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, according to an estimate from the Association of American Medical Colleges. The visa pause was “forcing physicians who’ve lived in the U.S. for years to stop working and exacerbating staffing shortages that are a longstanding headache for hospital administrators,” Politico reported in April.

Plenty of obstacles remain for foreign doctors. Delays in processing visa waiver applications for a program run by the Department of Health and Human Services could mean that “hundreds of foreign doctors about to complete training in the U.S. will have to leave the country” imminently, KFF Health News reported in May. Hospitals are also having a hard time sponsoring international physicians because of the $100,000 H-1B visa fee that the Trump administration introduced last fall. “Canada and other countries are trying to recruit these doctors away from the U.S., offering incentives like fast-tracked permanent resident status,” Axios noted in March.

The foreign doctor carveout is a positive development, but it is a narrow solution to a bigger problem. Imprecise immigration restrictions harm the country in ways that decision makers can’t—or won’t—imagine.

The post Why Trump Quietly Carved Out Doctors From His Own Visa Freeze appeared first on Reason.com.

5 years ago
Aug/Sept 2021

“In the two decades since the September 11 attacks, the absence of REAL ID enforcement has not made domestic flights more vulnerable to terrorism. Meanwhile, the federal government and the states have not been able to implement REAL ID at scale, and the general public does not seem to see a need for it. The next time Congress debates the future of REAL ID, it should repeal the requirement for good.”
Scott Shackford
“Even COVID-19 Couldn’t Kill 
REAL ID”

15 years ago
Aug/Sept 2011

“After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it became fashionable on the right, and among some hawkish liberals, to defend and even promote the idea of an American Empire to keep us safe from terrorists, hold rogue nations in check, and secure global commerce…..In the middle years of the last decade, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grew steadily worse, this jingoism fell out of favor, leaving only a shrinking core of committed neoconservatives to champion the virtues of empire. Still, the questions posed by American global military dominance were far from settled in public opinion.”
John Payne
“Temptations of Empire”

“If we are getting over 9/11 in ways big and small, it’s not because we have worked through the pain and the terror and the anger but simply because we are forgetting it ever happened in the first place. Within another decade at most, we will walk by 9/11 memorials the same way we stroll by the World War I cenotaphs installed in town squares across the country. Catharsis be damned; this is probably the way we always get over trauma. Repression and historical amnesia are among the most powerful tools God or evolution has handed us.”

Nick Gillespie
“Why Art Failed Us After 9/11”

“Looking back at the few bright moments during those first days and weeks after the attacks, I can think of hardly any that emanated from a politician or figure of influence….The strength of America on display 10 years ago did not result from centralizing new bureaucracies in Washington, unionizing new sets of federal employees, or devising easier ways for the government to snoop on and even kill its own citizens. It came from individual human beings, accustomed to living in freedom, acting in a decentralized manner to make an atrocious event slightly less painful. There’s an important lesson there, waiting to be learned.”
Matt Welch
“The Day Everything Continued To Change”

55 years ago
September 1971

“The [Federal Communications] Commission has an impossible job; it cannot police the thousands of licensees across the nation to ensure that they remain within the charters granted them. Lacking an overall conceptual framework, it cannot respond rationally to the technological advances which continually outpace and outscope the political and jurisdictional rules and regulations it sets forth.”
Michael Bloom
“The Data Communications Battle”

“The Democratic Party Platform of 1888 called tariffs and quotas the ‘mother of monopoly.’ The famous trusts of the time (e.g., sugar and tobacco) were protected from foreign competition. It was wisely argued that free trade would protect the American consumer by allowing the whole world to compete for his business. Monopolizing the world production of a product is infinitely more difficult than monopolizing a national market. When Brazil tried to restrict her coffee sales to raise prices, she only succeeded in causing coffee to be grown in other countries, which meant greater production and lower prices than before.”
Rod Manis
“Free Enterprise and the Monopoly Myth”

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