World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

US President Trump has made the question of immigration into the US a national security matter.  He has done so by referring to the flow of immigrants as an invasion and by sending US troops to the US-Mexican border.  But the Pew Research Center has investigated the issue and found that the number of unauthorized immigrants in the US is at the lowest level in over a decade.  Moreover, most of those unauthorized immigrants have been living in the US for more than ten years.  According to National Public Radio:  “The study, by the Pew Research Center, is based on 2016 government data. It estimates that there were 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. that year. That’s down from a high point of 12.2 million in 2007.”  The evidence suggests that unauthorized immigration has not gotten worse; only that the attention of the US government–for whatever reason–has become more intense.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is going to conduct a hearing tomorrow on the civil war in Yemen and US support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting in Yemen.  US Secretary of State Pompeo and US Defense Secretary Mattis are scheduled to testify before the committee.  But apparently CIA Director Gina Haspel will not testify.  There is no solid information why the most important intelligence officer will not appear, but there are suspicions that the Trump Administration does not wish Haspel to contradict President Trump’s assertion that the CIA did not “conclude” that Saudi Crown Prince Salman authorized the murder of Khashoggi.  Several Senators wanted Haspel to testify but “[o]fficials said that the decision for Haspel not to appear in front of the committee came from the White House, but the national security adviser, John Bolton, denied it.”  I am not sure why Congress would defer to the Executive Branch on who should testify.

Reporters for The Washington Post held a 20-minute interview with US President Trump and one of the topics discussed was the Climate Change Report issued by 13 Federal agencies last week.  President Trump said that he did not believe the report and in the interview said: “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers….As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it.”  Unfortunately, the global environment is indifferent to what humans believe to be true or not true; what it cares about is whether humans respect the earth as an organism.  And the most recent UN report suggests that human activity has not changed at all despite the warning signs about the imminence of climate change.