I am not a fan of President Trump’s controversial Executive Order on immigration. I think it contains good provisions, such as prioritizing the resettlement of religious-minority refugees who are at the greatest risk of being killed in their homelands, and the global visa requirements review is a fine idea. However, I considered its chaotic rollout and broad application to green card and SIV-holders extremely reckless, and I think suspending the Syrian refugee program without first establishing an alternative is unconscionable. “America First” is good insofar as it recognizes that the primary responsibility of a nation is to its citizens (not the global community), but this must not descend into an amoral realpolitik that repudiates our secondary (but nevertheless real) responsibilities to do what we can to help the world’s most vulnerable non-citizens.
However, a great many people have already weighed in on the substance of Trump’s Executive Order, and I don’t have much to add to the global conversation. On the other hand, a friend asked me the other day whether Trump’s EO is legal, and I think that that discussion has been badly neglected by almost everyone.
Those who are talking about the law are largely talking nonsense. While protesters chant that the order is “unconstitutional” simply because it “advances prejudice” (as one Facebook commenter put it to me), a surprising amount of the discussion by the Great and Wise has revolved around loose comments by private citizen Rudy Giuliani about a so-called “Muslim ban,” which critics have tried to tie to the EO and thus to the Establishment Clause. Even if they succeeded in this, it’s a thin case against the EO’s legality, since potential immigrants (who are not persons under U.S. jurisdiction) have very few constitutional rights in the first place. In light of the fact that many of President Trump’s harshest critics positively applauded President Obama’s actually unconstitutional orders on immigration and health care, one suspects there may be some motivated thinking at work here.
Right-wing defenses of the EO, by contrast, have relied (in my opinion) far too heavily on the President’s constitutional foreign-affairs power, which does give the President broad authority to act in the national interest, but with the caveat that Congress can severely limit it by statute.
Congress has done just that. The legality of the EO is not primarily a constitutional issue, but a statutory one. The best attack on the EO so far, proposed by David Bier for the New York Times and expanded on by Patterico at RedState, revolves around the statutes in question, and attacks the EO solely on the basis of those statutes. My favorite Congressman, Justin Amash, has endorsed these attacks.
However, those attacks are mistaken. Solely on the basis of the statutes in question, it is clear that the EO is perfectly legal.
