Everything

**Topicality Things
Standards
Core of the Topic – Brain Drain
Brain drain is central to debates about immigration
Sabharwal 13 (Meghna Sabharwal, Public affairs school of economic political and policy sciences the university of Texas at Dallas, 23 Sep
2013, Introduction: Immigration and Its Impact on Human Capital Development, Pages 293-296 ,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13876988.2013.812775?scroll=top&needAccess=true)//SC
All papers in this special issue showcase the importance of institutional policies and government priorities
towards immigration. More importantly, all the papers tackle the vital issue of human capital
development within the migration debate. Even as scholarship on immigration grows, studies in the field
are mostly implanted in the economics debate; political and bureaucratic structures and their impact on
immigration policies are less discussed. Furthermore, comparative work that showcases the convergence
and divergence in immigration policies across various nations remains restrictive. The articles all deal with
immigration and its impacts on human capital development both for the sending and receiving countries
in a comparative context covering six of the seven continents (Asia, South America, North America,
Europe, Australia and Africa). In a global world, immigration clearly emerges as an area of interest to
governments and policy makers alike as they strive to meet their human capital needs.
Substantial
2AC - Regulations
Regulations CAN be substantial restrictions especially in the age of Trump
O'Brien 18 – Quoting Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an immigration reform group launched by
tech leaders, Sara O’Brain is a writer covering tech culture and startups for CNN Tech. She frequently
writes about topics including online harassment, H-1B visas, and technology's role in alleviating or
exacerbating social issues.(7-17-2018, "Visa policy change will make it easier for Trump administration
to deny applications," CNN=#fakenews) https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/16/politics/visa-policy-
changes/index.html //pleb
"It is the newest in a series of moves by the administration to substantially restrict legal
immigration by making it more difficult, expensive and bureaucratic for the applicants while allowing
the government to easily deny claims for people who should be coming here -- or who are here and
stuck in a broken visa system -- and strengthening our country," Schulte told CNN.
Regulations are substantial restrictions

Sternberg 4 -- Mark R. von Sternberg is Senior Attorney at Catholic Legal immigration Network, Inc./Catholic
Charities Archdiocese of New York, where he concentrates on litigation before the Immigration Courts and the
Board of Immigration Appeals. Since January 1999, Mr. von Sternberg has served as an adjunct faculty member at
Pace University School of Law where he teaches general immigration and comparative refugee law. Since August
2003, Mr. von Sternberg has also been an adjunct professor at St. John's University Law School where he co-
teaches an immigration rights clinic. Mr. von Sternberg received a J.D. degree from Vanderbilt University School of
Law in 1973 and an LL.M. degree (in international legal studies) from New York University School of Law in 1984.
Mr. von Sternberg has lectured in law schools and at professional associations regarding immigration matters and
has written extensively, particularly in the areas of refugee law, international humanitarian law, and human rights.
In 2002, he received the AILA Pro Bono Award., (--2004, "Immigration and Nationality Law"38 Int'L Law. 415, Lexis)
//pleb
In place of NSEERS, the United States has begun formulating the United States Visitor and Immigrant
Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program, which was announced by the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) Secretary Tom Ridge in April 2003. 6Link to the text of the note US-VISIT entails the
collection of vital information, including biographic details and data concerning criminal, immigration,
and security-related matters, of non-citizens seeking admission to the United States. Correspondingly,
the Department of State has adopted regulations which substantially restrict the conditions upon which
non-immigrants may have a personal consular interview waived prior to admission to the United States.
The new regulations are expected to engender substantial delays. New regulations were also adopted in
2003 to clarify the distribution of responsibilities among the federal agencies charged under the
Homeland Security Act with administering U.S. immigration laws.
2AC - Caps
Numerical caps are a substantial restriction
Goring 2k -- Darlene C. Goring, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Kentucky College of Law.
B.B.A., Howard University; J.D. and LL.M., Northwestern University School of Law., (--2000, "In Service
To America: Naturalization Of Undocumented Alien Veterans, "31 Seton Hall L. Rev. 400, Lexis) //pleb
The INA also provides additional preference categories for aliens seeking to immigrate who do not
qualify as immediate relatives. See INA 201(a), 8 U.S.C. 1151(a) (1994). There are, however, numerical
limits imposed on these categories that substantially restrict the number of immigration visas
allocated annually to qualified immigrants. Depending on the country of origin, such limited allocations
result in lengthy waiting periods before immigration visas become available. The numerical visa
limitations found in INA 201(a) apply to three visa preference categories: family-sponsored immigrants,
employment-based immigrants, and diversity immigrants. The maximum annual allocation of visas for
these categories is 491,900, world-wide family sponsored preference limit is 226,000; world-wide
employment-based preference limit is at least 140,000, and the world-wide limit for diversity preference
limit is 55,000. Bureau of Consular Affairs, U.S. Dep't of State, Visa Bulletin: Immigration Numbers for
Nov. 2000, available at http://travel.state.gov/visa bulletin.html (last visited Nov. 6, 2000).
2AC – 17%
Substantially is an increase of at least 17%
Gelatt and Meyers (Julia Gelatt, Deborah W. Meyers, "Legal Immigration to United States Increased
Substantially in FY 2005", The Migration Policy Institute is an independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit
think tank dedicated to the study of the movement of people worldwide. The institute provides analysis,
development, and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at the local, national, and international
levels, xx-xx-xxxx, accessed 7-25-2018, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/legal-immigration-
united-states-increased-substantially-fy-2005 (download)) //AL
Legal Immigration to United States Increased Substantially in FY 2005 New data released by the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) show that in Fiscal Year (FY) 2005: ƒ Lawful permanent
immigration grew by 17 percent from FY 2004. ƒ The number of people who adjusted their status to
lawful permanent residence increased 26 percent, explaining much of the overall growth. ƒ The level of
newly arriving lawful permanent residents remained relatively steady. ƒ Refugee admissions rose slightly
from FY 2004, but remained below pre-9/11 levels. ƒ The level of temporary visitors rebounded to near
pre-9/11 levels. ƒ Naturalizations increased by almost 13 percent from FY 2004.
2AC - Empirics
The Quota Law of 1921 is the first substantial restriction – excludes anything empiric
before 1921
South-Western 2004 (South-Western University, "South-Western: Immigration", South-Western
University, 1-12-2004, accessed 7-25-2018,
https://www.swlearning.com/economics/policy_debates/immigration.html)//AL
There were no substantial restrictions on immigration into the U.S. until the passage of the Quota Law
of 1921. This law set quotas on the number of immigrants based upon the country of origin. The Quota
Law primarily restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe. The Immigration and
Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 (and subsequent amendments) eliminated the country-specific
quota system and instead established a limit on the maximum number of immigrants allowed into the
U.S. Under this Act, preferential treatment is given to those who immigrate for the purpose of family
reunification. Those possessing exceptional skills are also given priority. No limit, however, is placed
upon the number of political refugees allowed to immigrate to the U.S. (The definition of a political
refugee, however, is narrowly defined and has sometimes been quite controversial.)
Congress
1NC – Congress
Restrictions must be actions from Congress – its both the legislative and enforcement
arm
Cardozo 1915 - Benjamin Cardozo, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,
1915("THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, Appellant, v. CLARENCE A. CRANE, Respondent,” 108
N.E. 427 Court of Appeals of the State of New York, 2-25-1915, Available Online from
https://casetext.com/case/people-v-crane-7)//BM
The legislative power of the people of the state is plenary except as they have abridged it by the State
Constitution or consented to its restriction by the Federal Constitution. That power is vested in the
legislature. The statute under consideration is valid unless it transcends the constitutional restrictions
already quoted; if it overpassed them it was and is as inoperative and impotent, as to persons lawfully
assailing it, as if non-existent. Whether it did or did not is to be determined upon the general object or
purpose sought therein by the legislature and its efficiency to effect it. The purpose of a statute
impugned as unconstitutional must be determined from the natural and legal effect of the language
employed, and whether it is or is not repugnant to constitutional provisions must be determined from
its natural effect when put into operation. ( Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 64; Henderson v. Mayor,
etc., of N.Y., 92 U.S. 259, 268.) The statement already made of the intent and the general purpose to be
effected by the statute under consideration need not be repeated.
2NC - Restrictions
Only Congress has the formal authority to restrict immigration
Natelson 10 - Rob Natelson, Independence Institute’s Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence,
law professor for 25 years, serving at three different universities, 2010(“Does the Constitution really give
Congress power over immigration?” Independence Institute, 12-17-2010, Available Online from
https://i2i.org/does-the-constitution-really-give-congress-power-over-immigration/)//BM
Article I, Section 8, Clause 10 of the Constitution granted power to Congress to “define and punish . . .
Offences against the Law of Nations.” I decided to dig more deeply into the eighteenth century legal sources to determine whether that might
include authority over immigration. Sure enough, it turns out that during the Founding Era, restrictions over immigration and emigration
comprised a well-recognized branch of the “Law of Nations.” In other words, Congress’s power to “define and punish . . .
Offenses against the Law of Nations” included authority to “define” immigration rules and “punish”
those who violated them. An explanation appears in latest update of my book, The Original Constitution: What It Really Said and Meant . Why is this
constitutional detective story significant? First, clarifies why the constitutional text assumes that after 1808 Congress could
regulate “Migration” from foreign lands. Second, it clarifies that Congress cannot use the interstate
commerce power to bar non-commercial travel within the United States. Third, it knocks one of the props out from under
an argument that, however silly, is solemnly advanced by some “liberal” writers – that “commerce” included non-business travel, and therefore that “commerce”
also included nearly all other human relationships. Finally, this story underscores a point I explain for the layperson in The Original Constitution: When the
Constitution is unclear, eighteenth century law offers us valuable trail marks toward the truth.
2NC – Legal Immigration
Legal immigration means entry authorized by statutes
Ramirez 83 – Jesus Ramirez, JD @ University of Texas, 1983("The Simpson-Mazolli Bill: Altering the
Policy of Neglect of Undocumented Immigration from South of the Border," Texas International Law
Journal, 18 Tex. Int'l L. J. 347, Available to Subscribing Institutions via HeinOnline)//BM
FOOTNOTE 14:
14. "Legal immigration" refers to entry pursuant to an immigration visa that is authorized by immigration
statutes and regulation. See generally I.N.A. of 1952, 8 U.S.C. §1181(1976 & Supp. V 1981); 8 C.F.R. §211.1-212.9 (1982); 8 U.S.C. §§1421-
1435, 1444-1449 (1976 & Supp.V 1981); 8 C.F.R. §§334.1-342.9 (1982).
2NC - Reduce
Courts can’t reduce—they rely on congressional members to rule
Hanson and Benforado 6 - Jon D. Hanson, professor at Harvard Law School; and Adam Benforado,
Frank Knox Fellow at Cambridge University, 2006("The Drifters: Why the Supreme Court Makes Justices
More Liberal", Boston Review, 1-2-2006, Available Online from http://bostonreview.net/jon-d-hanson-
adam-benforado-the-drifter-supreme-court-makes-justices-more-liberal)//BM
It would be a mistake to believe that the only situation that influences justices comes from within the
Supreme Court building or individual judges’ limited spheres of interaction. The mechanisms designed to
keep the judiciary independent of the other branches of government are necessarily incomplete, and
there is good evidence that judges frequently interpret laws in ways that align with the particular policy
desires of sitting members of Congress and the current president. This is not surprising given the forces
that Congress and the president can bring to bear on the judiciary—including limiting or even stripping
jurisdiction in certain areas, altering the size of federal courts, and instituting impeachment hearings.
Just as important is the fact that the court cannot implement its orders without the acquiescence and
assistance of other government actors. In addition, lower-court judges may be constrained by pressures
not to be overruled by higher courts or the need to stake out particular positions in order to improve
their chances of promotion within the judiciary.
2NC – Normal Means
Congress has complete authority over immigration policy
Han 16 – Henry Han, professor of immigration law at Cornell University, 2016(“Immigration,” Cornell
Law Review Legal Information Institute, June 2016, Available Online from
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/immigration)//BM
Federal immigration law determines whether a person is an alien, the rights, duties, and obligations
associated with being an alien in the United States, and how aliens gain residence or citizenship within
the United States. It also provides the means by which certain aliens can become legally naturalized
citizens with full rights of citizenship. Immigration law serves as a gatekeeper for the nation's border, determining who may enter,
how long they may stay, and when they must leave. Congress has complete authority over immigration. Presidential
power does not extend beyond refugee policy. Except for questions regarding aliens' constitutional
rights, the courts have generally found the immigration issue as nonjusticiable. States have limited
legislative authority regarding immigration, and 28 U.S.C. § 1251 details the full extent of state jurisdiction. Generally, 28 U.S.C.
§ 994 details the federal sentencing guidelines for illegal entry into the country. By controlling the visa process, the federal
government can achieve the goals of its immigration policies. There are two types of visas: immigrant visas and
nonimmigrant visas. The government primarily issues nonimmigrant visas to tourists and temporary business visitors. The government divides
nonimmigrant visas into eighteen different types, but for most types, does not impose a cap on the number that may be granted in a year. Only
a few categories of non-immigrant visas allow their holders to work in the United States.
Immigrant visas, on the other hand,
permit their holders to stay in the United States permanently and eventually to apply for citizenship.
Aliens with immigrant visas can also work in the United States. Congress limits the quantity of immigrant
visas, which numbered 675,000 in 1995 (480,000 family-sponsored immigrants, 140,000 employment-
based preference immigrants, 55,000 diversity visa lottery immigrants). This limit is sometimes referred
to as the "permeable cap," because it is often exceeded due to certain immigration categories that are
not limited. Many immigrant visas remain subject to per-country caps.
Congress is normal means – they have sole authority over immigration policy
Weissbrodt and Danielson 04 - David Weissbrodt, professor of law specializing in Immigration; and Laura Danielson
immigration lawyer at USCIS; 2004(“CHAPTER 2: THE SOURCE AND SCOPE OF THE FEDERAL POWER TO REGULATE IMMIGRATION AND
NATURALIZATION”, Human Rights Library, Available Online at http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/immigrationlaw/chapter2.html)//BM
The plenary and unqualified power of the federal government to regulate immigration, naturalization,
and related foreign policy belongs to Congress. The possible international consequences of decisions in this area have made
the federal judiciary extremely reluctant to substitute its judgment for the legislature's. Justice Jackson articulated the Court's position in
Harisiades v. Shaughnessy (Sup.Ct.1952): "[A]ny policy towards aliens is vitally and intricately interwoven with
contemporaneous policies in regard to the conduct of foreign relations, the war power, and the
maintenance of a republican form of government. Such matters are so exclusively entrusted to the
political branches of government as to be largely immune from judicial inquiry or interference." Subsequent
decisions echo this sentiment. Since the judiciary poses no obstacle, Congress has been historically free to "exclude aliens
altogether or prescribe the terms and conditions upon which they may enter and stay in this country."
Lapina v. Williams (Sup.Ct.1914). For example, Congress exercised its plenary authority in the Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (“IIRIRA”) that facilitated the removal of non-citizens. IIRIRA appears
to show that the legislative branch wields the full measure of the federal plenary power over
immigration. In light of two 2001 Supreme Court decisions, some scholars have questioned whether the plenary power may have its limits,
but in each case the Court recognized the potential for legislative plenary power. In Nguyen v. INS (Sup.Ct.2001), the Court upheld INA §
309(a)’s distinction between illegitimate children of U.S. citizen fathers and mothers, but rather than a weak rational basis review, the Court
applied the same intermediate scrutiny standard it would apply for ordinary gender-based classifications. This appears to be a step toward
limiting the plenary power, but the Court noted that it did not need to address the “wide deference accorded to Congress in the exercise of its
immigration and naturalization power” because it held that no equal protection violation had occurred. Similarly in Zadvydas v. Davis
(Sup.Ct.2001), the Court held that a reasonable time limitation on post-removal detention must be inferred because “a statute permitting
indefinite detention would raise a serious constitutional problem.” In reaching this holding, the Court described the legislature’s plenary power
as being “subject to important constitutional limitations.” Despite these constitutional problems, the Court stated that had it found clear
Congressional intent to grant the Attorney General the power to indefinitely detain non-citizens ordered removed, it would have had to uphold
such detention.
Congress is the sole arbiter of immigration - the courts don’t have authority due to
plenary powers – and the executive defers to congress for the boundaries of its
enforcement in immigration law
Clarke 11 (Robbie Clarke, associate in the Financial Restructuring practice, received his J.D. magna cum laude from Washington and Lee
University School of Law, Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice Volume 17 | Issue 2 Article 64-1-2011, “Reaffirming the
Role of the Federal Courts: How the Sixties Provide Guidance for Immigration Reform”, Pg. 468-469,
http://law2.wlu.edu/deptimages/journal%20of%20civil%20rights%20and%20social%20justice/Clarke.pdf)//SC
Congress’s Plenary Powers The history of immigration must begin with Congress, because under the
accepted interpretation of Congress’s constitutional authority,23 the legislative branch maintains
essentially plenary control over immigration policy choices.24 This dominion not only includes the
ordinary power of Congress to legislate but also considerable autonomy from the Constitution itself in
fashioning these laws: "[O]ver no conceivable subject is the legislative power of Congress more complete
than it is over [immigration policy]."25 Immigration policy is then principally a creature of politics, and it
is this freedom from the sturdier foundations of the Constitution that has given this area such
uncertainty.26 Thus, any consideration of U.S. immigration policy is inherently an examination of Congress
and the political pressures that have come into play over the decades.27 Recent constraints placed by
Congress on judicial review also invoke another instance of its plenary authorities: the near-absolute
power to control the jurisdiction of the federal courts.28 "[D]ramatically limiting the scope of the
judiciary’s guaranteed institutional autonomy,"29 this capability to alter federal jurisdiction has allowed
Congress to reduce the judiciary’s role in immigration adjudications.30 In addition to the judiciary’s lack
of control, the executive branch has historically deferred to Congressional judgment for the boundaries
of its enforcement powers, and for decades Congress has expanded on these powers.31 The sum total of
this authority gives Congress the discretion to greatly empower the executive agencies to carry out
immigration policy and simultaneously relegate the judiciary to a minimal level of participation.32
The Constitution gives Congress the power for immigration reform

Chacon 14 - Jennifer Chacon, professor of law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law,
2014(“Who is Responsible for U.S. immigration policy?” American Bar Association, Spring 2014,
Available Online from
https://www.americanbar.org/publications/insights_on_law_andsociety/14/spring-2014/who-is-
responsible-for-u-s--immigration-policy-.html)//BM
Article I, Section 8, clause 4 of the Con-stitution entrusts the federal legislative branch with the power
to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” This clear textual command for uniformity establishes
that the federal government, specifically Congress, is responsible for crafting the laws that determine
how and when noncitizens can become nat-uralized citizens of the United States.
Congress has sole authority to establish immigration laws – courts uphold
Chacon 14 - Jennifer Chacon, professor of law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law,
2014(“Who is Responsible for U.S. immigration policy?” American Bar Association, Spring 2014,
Available Online from
https://www.americanbar.org/publications/insights_on_law_andsociety/14/spring-2014/who-is-
responsible-for-u-s--immigration-policy-.html)//BM
From that time on, the Court upheld federal immigration regulations against constitutional challenges,
although the underlying rationale shifted. With the Chinese Exclusion Case in 1889, the Court began
issuing a series of decisions in which it treated congressional power over the regulation of
immigration as a virtually unreviewable, plenary power. The Court upheld congressional immigration
laws and executive enforcement of those laws against a series of challenges, in spite of their patently
discriminatory nature and lack of due process guarantees for noncitizens. The Court repeatedly suggest-
ed that this federal power flowed from the federal government’s prerogative to control foreign affairs.
Congress delegates power to the courts and the executive under the plenary power
doctrine
Zas 4 – Maria Zas, J.D., January 2004, The John Marshall Law School, Magna Cum Laude; J.D., 1986,
University of Buenos Aires Law School, 2004(“Consular Absolutism: The Need for Judicial Review in the
Adjudication of Immigrant Visas for Permanent Residence,” 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 577, The John Marshall
Law Review, v.37 no.2, pg. 590-1, Available Online from
https://repository.jmls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1411&context=lawreview)//BM
2. Plenary Congressional Power
The Supreme Court has always recognized Congress' plenary power to regulate immigration." 7
Congress can determine the terms and conditions to admit or exclude immigrants in the United
States. Under this power, Congress can delegate enforcement of immigration laws to the executive
branch and set out procedural rules under which such agents will operate." 9 But courts have
extended such power to encompass the doctrine of consular absolutism, resorting to obscure
interpretations of the INA."' The rationale is that Congress has empowered consular officers to enforce
the INA as Congress sees fit, and courts should not interfere with such a delegation of power. 2 '
However, this is a distorting interpretation of § 104 INA that only precludes the Secretary of State from
reviewing consular officers decisions regarding the issuance or denial of visas. 2 If anything, § 104
supports the preclusion of administrative review but has no relation to judicial review.22
2NC – Excludes Courts
Only Congress can regulate immigration – court action isn’t topical
Cox and Rodriguez 15 – Adam B. Cox, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law
School; and Cristina M. Rodriguez, Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law, 2015(“The
President and Immigration Law,” Yale Law Journal, 8-7-2015, Available Online from
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2635638)//BM
Congress’s plenary power to regulate immigration sharply limits the judiciary’s involvement in
immigration regulation. Since the plenary power doctrine was first formulated, the Supreme Court has emphasized that
immigration represents an issue best left to the political branches. The resulting extended focus by scholars on the
implications of this distribution of power between courts and the political branches has obscured a second important separation-of-powers
issue: the question of how immigration authority is distributed between the political branches themselves. The
Court’s immigration jurisprudence has shed little light on this question, often treating the political branches as something of a singular entity.
Surprisingly little scholarly commentary has addressed the inter-relationship between the two branches or attempted to discern whether
consistent power-sharing patterns have emerged over time.
Courts can only make a law unenforceable – it can’t restrict itself

Treanor and Sperling 93 – William M. Treanor, Associate Professor of Law, Fordham University;
B.A., Yale College, 1979; A.M., Harvard University, 1982; J.D., Yale Law School, 1985; and Gene B.
Sperling, Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; B.A., University of Minnesota, 1981;
J.D., Yale Law School, 1985; 1993(“Prospective Overruling and the Revival of ‘Unconstitutional'
Statutes,” Columbia Law Review, v. 93, 1993, pg. 1913)//BM
Commentators have generally agreed with the overwhelming majority of courts that an overruling
decision has the effect of automatically reviving statutes. For example, Erica Frohman Plave observed
that revival was a necessary function of the limited scope of a judicial determination of
unconstitutionality: "Such laws found unconstitutional are merely unenforceable until such time as they
are found valid." 54 Professor Gerald Gunther has pronounced Attorney General Cummings's conclusion
that Adkins "simply "suspended' enforcement" 55 of the District of Columbia minimum wage statute
"persuasive," 56 and Professor Melville Nimmer similarly declared that "it seems clear that Attorney
General Homer Cummings' opinion was correct." 57 Finally, Professor Oliver Field noted that a statute
that has been found unconstitutional becomes enforceable when the case in which it was held
unconstitutional is reversed because "a declaration of unconstitutionality does not operate as a repeal
of a statute." 58 [*1916]
The courts can’t change the law, they only make parts of it unconstitutional
Treanor and Sperling 93 – William M. Treanor, Associate Professor of Law, Fordham University;
B.A., Yale College, 1979; A.M., Harvard University, 1982; J.D., Yale Law School, 1985; and Gene B.
Sperling, Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; B.A., University of Minnesota, 1981;
J.D., Yale Law School, 1985; 1993(“Prospective Overruling and the Revival of ‘Unconstitutional'
Statutes,” Columbia Law Review, v. 93, 1993, pg. 1913)//BM
Unlike the Supreme Court, several state courts have explicitly addressed the revival issue. The relevant state court cases have concerned the specific issue of
whether a statute that has been held unconstitutional is revived when the invalidating decision is overturned. n42 With one exception, they have concluded
that such statutes are immediately enforceable. The most noted instance in which the revival issue was resolved by a court involved the District of Columbia
minimum wage statute pronounced unconstitutional in Adkins. After the Court reversed Adkins in West Coast Hotel, President Roosevelt asked Attorney
General Homer [*1913] Cummings for an opinion on the status of the District of Columbia's statute. The Attorney General responded, The decisions are
practically in accord in holding that the courts have no power to repeal or abolish a statute, and that notwithstanding
a decision holding it unconstitutional a statute continues to remain on the statute books; and that if a
statute be declared unconstitutional and the decision so declaring it be subsequently overruled the statute will then be held valid from the date it became
effective. n43 Enforcement of the statute followed without congressional action. n44 When this enforcement was challenged, the Municipal Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia in Jawish v. Morlet n45 held that the decision in West Coast Hotel had had the effect of making the statute enforceable. The
court observed that previous opinions addressing the revival issue proceed on the principle that a
statute declared unconstitutional is void in the sense that it is inoperative or unenforceable, but not
void in the sense that it is repealed or abolished; that so long as the decision stands the statute is dormant but not dead; and that
if the decision is reversed the statute is valid from its first effective date. n46 The court declared this precedent sound since the cases were "in accord with the
principle "that a decision of a court of appellate jurisdiction overruling a former decision is retrospective in its operation, and the effect is not that the former
decision is bad law but that it never was the law.' " n47 Adkins was thus, and had always been, a nullity. The court acknowledged that, after Adkins, it had been
thought that the District of Columbia's minimum wage statute was unconstitutional. As the court put it, " "Just about everybody was fooled.' " n48
Nonetheless, the court's view was that since the minimum wage law had always been valid, although for a period judicially unenforceable, there was no need
to reenact it. n49 Almost all other courts that have addressed the issue of whether a statute that has been found unconstitutional can be revived have reached
the same result as the Jawish court, using a similar formalistic [*1914] analysis. n50 The sole decision in which a court adopted the nonrevival position is
Jefferson v. Jefferson, n51 a poorly reasoned decision of the Louisiana Supreme Court. The plaintiff in Jefferson sought child support and maintenance from her
husband. She prevailed at the trial level; he filed his notice of appeal one day after the end of the filing period established by the Louisiana Uniform Rules of
the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals rejected his appeal as untimely, even though the Louisiana Supreme Court had previously found that the applicable
section of the Uniform Rules violated the state constitution. One of Ms. Jefferson's arguments before the state Supreme Court was that that court's previous
ruling had been erroneous and that the rules should therefore be revived. In rejecting this claim and in finding for the husband, the Court stated: Since we
have declared the uniform court rule partially unconstitutional, it appears to be somewhat dubious that we have the right to reconsider this ruling in the
instant case as counsel for the respondent judges urges us to do. For a rule of court, like a statute, has the force and effect of law and, when a law is stricken as
void, it no longer has existence as law; the law cannot be resurrected thereafter by a judicial decree changing the final judgment of unconstitutionality to
constitutionality as this would constitute a reenactment of the law by the Court - an assumption of legislative power not delegated to it by the Constitution.
n52 The Louisiana Court thus took a mechanical approach to the revival question. According to its rationale, when a statute is found unconstitutional, it is
judicially determined never to have existed. Revival therefore entails judicial legislation and thereby violates constitutionally mandated separation of powers:
because the initial legislative passage [*1915] of the bill has no legitimacy, the bill's force is considered to be purely a creature of judicial decision-making.
Jefferson has little analytic appeal. Its view of the separation of powers doctrine is too simplistic. Contrary to the Jefferson rationale, a "revived" law is not the
pure product of judicial decision-making. It is, instead, a law that once gained the support of a legislature and that has never been legislatively repealed. Its
legitimacy rests on its initial legislative authorization. Moreover, the
view that a statute that has been found
unconstitutional should be treated as if it never existed may have had some support in the early
case law, but it has been clearly rejected by the Supreme Court. Instead of treating all statutes that it
has found unconstitutional as if they had never existed, the Court has recognized a range of
circumstances in which people who rely on an overturned decision are protected. Indeed, as will be
developed, the doctrine of prospective overruling evolved to shield from harm those who relied on
subsequently overruled judicial decisions. n53 In short, the one case in which there was a holding
that a statute did not revive does not offer a convincing rationale for nonrevival.
Courts can only provide review to an unjustifiable denial – they cannot issue or
regulate visas
Law Review, v.37 no.2, pg. 586-88, Available Online from
II. THE DOCTRINE OF CONSULAR ABSOLUTISM. ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT
A. Enunciation of the Doctrine
The lower courts have consistently applied the common law doctrine of consular absolutism, also known
as consular nonreviewability, for the last seventy years" since its enunciation in United States ex rel.
London v. Phelps."6 The doctrine establishes that consular officers' decisions to grant or deny visas are
not subject to judicial review.77 Although the doctrine is not absolute, the exceptions do not provide
much relief." First, the doctrine does not apply to non-discretionary regulatory duties.79 However, the
courts limited the regulatory duty of a consular officer to the mere adjudication of the case." In other
words, the court has jurisdiction solely to order the consul to either issue or deny the visa.8
Second, some courts seem to recognize an exception to the applicability of the doctrine when
petitioners' constitutional rights are violated and the government fails to provide a legitimate good faith
reason for denying the visa.8 The petitioner is the relative or U.S. employer, not the immigrant. This
exception is so narrow that no court has yet found an opportunity to apply the exception.' Finally, the
application of the doctrine remains an open question in cases where the consular officer disregards the
"procedural safeguards of due process" or clearly disregards applicable regulations." But the two courts
raising the question declined to answer it since it was not an issue for determination in the cases before
the court.87
Other than these limited exceptions the doctrine applies even if the consul acts capriciously, arbitrarily
or maliciously,88 and even if the decision relies on erroneous information or erroneous interpretation
of the law. 9
FOOTNOTE 78
78. The only exception the courts clearly recognize to the doctrine of consular absolutism is the court's
power to order the consular officer to act; however, the court has no power to order the consular
officer to issue the visa or review the reasons for denial. Patel v. Reno, 134 F.3d 929, 931 (9th Cir. 1997).
FOOTNOTE 82
82. See Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U.S. 753, 768 (1972) (denying review of the visa denial to a journalist
professing communist ideas). The court held that courts lack jurisdiction to review denials of visas
when the government provides a "facially legitimate and bona fide reason" for its conduct. Id. at 770.
The court left open the question of reviewability as to decisions lacking such justification. Id. But see
Patel, 134 F.3d at 932 (interpreting the Mandel decision as providing for judicial review in cases where
the government does not provide for a good faith reason for the denial).
FOOTNOTE 84
84. Mandel, 408 U.S. at 753. Even though petitioners' constitutional rights were violated the court held
that as long as the government provides a bona fide reason to deny the visa the court would not look
beyond that good faith reason. Id.
Congress has solve authority to restrict immigration under plenary power – only
congress can overcome that presumption
Law Review, v.37 no.2, pg. 588, Available Online from
B. Arguments in support of the doctrine
Although not all the courts applying the doctrine elaborate legal reasons for its adoption,"' those who
do, focus mainly on three arguments: 1) The Administrative Procedural Act (APA) does not apply to
consular officers' decisions,"u 2) Congress has plenary power to regulate immigration,"u 3) the
issuance or denial of a visa is a discretional act in the realm of non-justiciable political questions."°
1. The Inapplicability of the APA
The APA creates a presumption in favor of judicial review of administrative acts that adversely affect,
aggrieve, or injure a person."5 The act recognizes two exceptions to the reviewability of an
administrative act: when a statute precludes review of the particular administrative act' °6 or when the
law commits the action to the discretion of the agency. 107
The INA does not preclude judicial review of consular officers' decisions. '08 The Supreme Court made
clear that inferences or implications from legislative history are not enough to preclude reviewability.' °
Congress must explicitly preclude review of the particular administrative act to overcome the strong
presumption."'
The second exception, an "act committed to agency discretion,""' has been argued in at least one
decision where the Secretary of State revoked a visa.'12 However, the appellate court in that case did
not hold that revocation of visas was committed to consular officers' discretion."3 The court
distinguished the discretional character of the decision when reached by a Secretary of State versus the
regulated character of the same decision when reached by a consular officer.14
Neither Congress nor the State Department's own regulations commit the issuance or denial of a visa
to the sole discretion of the consular officer."
In sum, there are no arguments to justify excepting consular officer's decisions from the strong
presumption of reviewability of administrative acts.1
FOOTNOTE 93
93. The courts have interpreted § 1104 as precluding administrative review. Saavendra Bruno, 197 F.3d
at 1156.
FOOTNOTE 102
102. Saavedra Bruno, 197 F.3d at 1157-60 (explaining that the doctrine of consular absolutism is one of
the exceptions to the APA). The court read a third exception into the APA interpreting the words of §
702, "any other appropriate legal or equitable ground" as referring to the consular absolutism doctrine.
Id. at 1158.
FOOTNOTE 108
108. The INA only precludes administrative review. 8 U.S.C. § 1104 (2000).
FOOTNOTE 113
113. Id. The court explained that an administrative act is committed to agency discretion when the court
has no standard to judge the agent's act because the statute is broad or vague. Id.
Courts don’t have any authority over immigration - 4 warrants - allowing courts to
change immigration processes would undermine efficiency, uniformity and capacity
Feere 9 (Jon Feere, former legal policy analyst, left the Center for a position at Immigration and Customs Enforcement B.A. in political science
and communications from the University of California, Davis and his J.D. from American University's Washington College of Law. “Plenary Power:
Should Judges Control U.S. Immigration Policy?”, February 25, 2009 ,https://www.cis.org/Report/Plenary-Power-Should-Judges-Control-US-
Immigration-Policy, [accessed 7/26])//SC
The U.S. Constitution provides no direction to any branch of government on “immigration,” although it
does invest the power of “naturalization” in Congress.1 Immigration law has developed over time through
numerous statutes and regulations created and adopted by the legislative and executive branches — the
political branches of the United States government. Historically, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken a
hands-off approach when asked to review the political branches’ immigration decisions and policymaking.
The ability of Congress and the executive branch to regulate immigration largely without judicial
intervention is what has come to be known as the political branches’ “plenary power” over immigration.2
Ever since immigration became an issue of political significance more than 100 years ago, the political
branches have been able to exclude and deport aliens or deny certain benefits according to political,
social, economic, or other considerations, largely without being second-guessed by the judicial branch.
The Supreme Court, in fact, did not seek to assert judicial authority and instead recognized that
immigration decisions “are frequently of a character more appropriate to either the Legislature or the
Executive than to the Judiciary.”3 Ultimately, for much of America’s history, immigration-related decisions
were made within the political branches by politically accountable actors according to legislation written
by elected representatives of the American citizenry. Courts have articulated numerous justifications for
keeping immigration regulation largely within the confines of the political branches. Some of those
justifications include:
 Political Question Doctrine: Federal courts generally refuse to hear cases that involve policy questions
best resolved by elected officials. The logic is that elected officials are more accountable to the public
and can best represent the public’s interests. Elected officials are also more likely to understand the
political implications of their decisions. The connection between immigration and foreign affairs,
national security, and similar policy-related fields has often resulted in courts invoking this doctrine.
 Lack of Capacity: Courts are designed to adjudicate legal issues and simply lack the institutional
capacity to make political judgments. Immigration law is inherently political because it’s created
entirely within the political branches. Any judicial invalidation of immigration statutes almost always
requires some amount of “legislating from the bench” and, even still, courts simply do not have the
ability to remedy the potentially far-reaching political, social, and economic effects of a ruling that
goes against statutory law.4
 Uniformity: The specifics of immigration (how many, who gets admitted, who gets deported, etc.) are
regulated by federal-level political-branch policies. If lower courts become too involved in this process
and craft unique statutory interpretations, there is a strong likelihood of an inconsistent immigration
system that varies from one jurisdiction to another. This would arguably be in direct violation of the
Constitution, which requires a “uniform rule of naturalization.” Such a result would make it difficult
for citizens to change the system if so desired. Aliens would also find it difficult to navigate the system.
 Efficiency: From a resource perspective, a court-run immigration system would be problematic.
Judges are already grappling with the ever-escalating onslaught of immigration cases; reducing the
authority of the political branches to easily remove or exclude aliens would obviously increase the
caseload.
 Immigration Enforcement Is Not Punishment: The Supreme Court has held that due process
protections apply when an individual faces punishment in the form of deprivation of life, liberty, or
property, but that an alien being returned to his homeland or denied entry to the United States is not
being punished and therefore cannot expect the courts to grant him these protections. Deportation
and exclusion is simply an administrative procedure.
 History: The great weight of legal authority is in support of judicial deference to the political branches
on the issue of immigration. The concept of stare decisis, which stands for the principle that past
holdings should be respected by the courts, ensures that the plenary power doctrine cannot easily be
abandoned.
2NC – Excludes Executive
The executive branch can only parole – it’s not an immigration status, they’re
considered a nonimmigrant
Kandel 17 – William A. Kandel, Immigration Policy Specialist at Congressional Research Service with a
Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of Chicago, 2017(“A Primer on U.S. Immigration
Policy,” Congressional Research Service (Intent for Congress), 11-14-2017, Available Online from
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R45020.pdf)//BM
DHS may, at its discretion and on a case-by-case basis, “parole” an alien into the United States for
urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. Parole does not constitute formal admission
to the United States and is not classified as a formal immigration status (e.g. nonimmigrant,
immigrant). It is granted for a specified period of time. Parolees may obtain employment authorization
but must leave when the parole expires or, if eligible, be admitted in a lawful status.41
The executive branch has as much power as Congress delegates to them

Cox and Rodriguez 15 – Adam B. Cox, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law
School; and Cristina M. Rodriguez, Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law, 2015(“The
President and Immigration Law,” Yale Law Journal, 8-7-2015, Available Online from
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2635638)//BM
For decades, immigration law and scholarship has been preoccupied with limits on the power of courts
to police immigration policy. But the focus on this separation-of-powers question has obscured a second: how is immigration
authority distributed between the political branches themselves? In this Article, we explore how the allocation of
immigration power between the President and Congress has evolved as a matter of historical practice and constitutional law. A long-overlooked
history hints that the President has at times asserted inherent executive authority to regulate immigration. At the same time, the explosive
growth of the administrative state has assimilated most executive policymaking into a model of delegated authority. The intricate immigration
code associated with this delegation framework may appear at first glance to limit the President’s policymaking discretion. In practice,
however, the modern structure of immigration law actually has enabled the President to exert considerable control over immigration law’s core
question: which types of noncitizens, and how many, should be permitted to enter and reside in the United States? Whether Congress
intended for the President to have such freedom is less important than understanding the breadth of
the Executive’s power and its asymmetric nature. The President has considerable authority to screen
immigrants at the back end of the system, through enforcement decisions, but minimal control over
screening at the front end, before immigrants enter the United States. We argue that this asymmetry
may sometimes have pathological consequences -- consequences Congress could mitigate by formally
delegating power to the President to adjust the quotas and admissions criteria at the heart of
immigration law. In general, Congress specifies in great detail the criteria for admission and removal,
particularly when it comes to the major categories of family and labor migration that make up the bulk
of admissions. In this sense, immigration law resembles tax law, where Congress retains control over
marginal rates, or criminal law, where Congress defines the elements of a crime, rather than other regulatory arenas in
which Congress has delegated broad authority to the executive branch to set standards.
Executive officers are bound to enforce requirements in INA statutes – they can’t rule
alone
The threshold issue then is a determination of the extent of the duty the INA creates on consular
officers. 4 1 If we were to accept the courts' interpretation that the only duty created is the duty to
act,'" then courts would not have jurisdiction to judge consular officers' visa denials." But if we were to
interpret the consular officer's duty to adjudicate the case in conformity with the provisions of the INA,'
then the consular officers' acts become justiciable.
The two provisions applying to the issue support this second interpretation.17 The INA gives consular
officers the authority to grant or deny visas without intervention from the Secretary of State or the
INS." This provision taken alone would support the courts' interpretation. 149 However, consular
officers must exercise their authority to issue or deny visas "subject to the eligibility requirements in
the statute and corresponding regulations."50 Therefore, the duty the INA creates in a consular officer
is the duty to act in conformity with the lengthy and detailed INA provisions 151 when denying a visa.
Whether the agent violated this duty is justiciable.
FOOTNOTE 151
151. See 8 U.S.C.S § 1182 (2003) (describing the conditions and terms under which aliens are ineligible
for visa or admission into the United States). Note that Congress classified the ineligibility provisions
according to the different grounds for denial. In each of the categories Congress precisely detailed the
requirements, circumstances and exceptions to find an alien ineligible. Most of these provisions leave
no room for discretion. See, e.g., § 1182(a)(1) (excluding aliens with a contagious disease according to
regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services); § 1182(a)(2) (excluding aliens
convicted of the commission of certain crimes such as those involving moral turpitude). Only a few of
these provisions admit discretional exercise. See, e.g, § 1182(a)(4) (excluding those aliens who "in the
opinion of the consular officer" could become a public charge). Note, however, that the same section
lists the factors that consular officers must consider at a minimum before excluding the immigrant on
the grounds of public charge.
2AC – Normal Means - Executive
Normal means - the president has the power to regulate immigration restrictions
Liptak 17 - Adam Liptak, Former lawyer and professor at the University of Chicago and Yale University,
2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Supreme Court and law reporter for the New York Times, 2017(“The
President Has Much Power Over Immigration, but How Much?” The New York Times, 2-5-2017,
Available Online from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/05/us/politics/trump-immigration-
law.html)//BM
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s executive order on immigration has prompted a constitutional showdown that could leave a mark on the
law for generations and seems likely to end in a landmark Supreme Court decision. A ruling by the court on Mr. Trump’s travel ban on seven
predominantly Muslim countries could help answer some crucial legal questions: How much independent constitutional authority
does the president have over immigration, and how much power has Congress given him? The likely answer to both questions:
a lot. But other parts of the Constitution may temper or defeat that power. Among them are the due process and equal protection clauses
and the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion. Here is a look at the leading arguments in the case. What have the
judges said? Many trial judges around the country have blocked aspects of Mr. Trump’s executive order. But none have issued an order as
broad as the one by Judge James Robart, a federal judge in Seattle, who blocked the key partsof the executive order, which had suspended
travel from the seven countries and limited the nation’s refugee program. The case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco. That court on Saturday declined to issue an immediate stay of Judge Robart’s order, but it indicated that it would
weigh in soon after additional briefs were filed, with the last one due Monday afternoon. After it rules, an appeal to the Supreme Court seems
likely. Judge Robart’s brisk ruling contained almost no reasoning. By contrast, Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, of the Federal District Court in
Boston, issued a 21-page decision on Friday refusing to block the program and discussing the legal arguments in detail. Judge Gorton also
sketched out the broader picture. “The rich immigrant history of the United States has long been a source of strength and pride in this country,”
Judge Gorton wrote. “Conversely, the public interest in safety and security in this ever-more dangerous world is strong as well.” The balance, he
wrote, tipped in favor of Mr. Trump. How broad is the president’s constitutional power? Article
II of the Constitution confers
authority on the president, the Supreme Court has said, to conduct foreign affairs and address immigration. In
their brief to Judge Robart, lawyers for Washington State, one of the two plaintiffs, along with the State of Minnesota, said there were
constitutional checks on these powers. “While courts generally give more latitude to the political branches in the immigration context, this does
not mean that the political branches can act with impunity,” the brief said. “Federal courts,” the brief said, “have no more sacred role than
protecting marginalized groups against irrational, discriminatory conduct.” In the Ninth Circuit, the Trump administration said judges were ill-
equipped to decide cases involving national security. “Unlike the president,” the administration’s brief said, “courts do not have access to
classified information about the threat posed by terrorist organizations operating in particular nations, the efforts of those organizations to
infiltrate the United States, or gaps in the vetting process.” Noah G. Purcell, the solicitor general of Washington State, appeared to concede in
court that there were areas in which Mr. Trump was entitled to act. But he asked the court to protect people whose lives
had been changed by Mr. Trump’s order in a flash. “The focus of our claim,” he said, “is on people who have been here and have, overnight,
lost the right to travel, lost the right to visit their families, lost the right to go perform research, lost the right to go speak at conferences around
the world. And also people who had lived here for a long time and happened to be overseas at the time of this order, which came with no
warning whatsoever, and suddenly lost the right to return to the United States.” How much power has Congress given the president? On Friday,
defending Mr. Trump’s executive order in a Seattle courtroom, Michelle Bennett, a Justice Department lawyer, cited Youngstown Sheet & Tube
Co. v. Sawyer, a 1952 decision in which the Supreme Court rejected President Harry S. Truman’s assertion that he had the authority to seize
steel mills during the Korean War. The most famous part of the decision is a concurrence from Justice Robert H. Jackson, which set out a
framework for considering clashes between presidential power and congressional authority. The president has the most power when he acts
with congressional authorization, Justice Jackson said, and an intermediate amount when Congress is silent. The president’s power is at its
“lowest ebb,” Justice Jackson wrote, when Congress has forbidden a particular action. Truman’s actions fell into the third category, Justice
Jackson wrote. Ms. Bennett, by contrast, said Mr. Trump’s order was in the first category. “Here we have the president acting pursuant to
power that Congress gave him, which means, under the Youngstown steel seizure case, he’s acting at the apex of his power,” she said. A
key
part of immigration law does give the president broad power. It says, “Whenever the president finds that
the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the
interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary,
suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the
entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.” But another part of the law forbids discrimination
“because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence,” but only “in the issuance of an immigrant visa.” The Trump
administration argues that the power to bar entry, the subject of the first law, is broader than the limits on issuing visas. What about arguments
based on religious discrimination? Lawyers for Washington State have said that the executive order violates the First Amendment’s prohibition
against government establishment of religion because its provisions on the refugee program favor minority religions. “President Trump and his
advisers have made clear that the very purpose of this order is to tilt the scales in favor of Christian refugees at the expense of Muslims,” they
wrote in their brief to Judge Robart. The Trump administration urged the Ninth Circuit to reject arguments based on religious discrimination,
even though Mr. Trump has said he meant to favor Christian refugees. Judicial consideration of the president’s motives, the brief said, would
violate the separation of powers. “The more searching inquiry envisioned by the states would create substantial separation-of-powers
problems, by permitting probing of the president’s subjective motive in issuing the order,” the brief said. Could the case founder on the issue of
injury? The states challenging the order face the initial hurdle of demonstrating that they have suffered the sort of direct and concrete harm
that gives them standing to sue. Judge Robart ruled that they did, relying on a decision from the federal appeals court in New Orleans, which
said Texas could sue to challenge President Barack Obama’s plan to defer the deportation of millions of unauthorized immigrants and allow
them to work. “The executive order adversely affects the states’ residents in areas of employment, education, business, family relations and
freedom to travel,” Judge Robart wrote. He said the states had been hurt because the order affected their public universities and their tax
bases. In its Ninth Circuit brief, the Trump administration called the states’ asserted injuries “attenuated and speculative” and did not address
the Texas decision. In court in Seattle on Friday, Ms. Bennett said the government disagreed with the Texas ruling.
2AC – Inclusive
Congress doesn’t have sole authority over immigration
Rappaport 16 - Mike Rappaport, Darling Foundation Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, Director of the Center for the
Study of Constitutional Originalism, 2016("Justice Scalia and Congress’s Power to Regulate Immigration", Law & Liberty, 10-12-2016, Available
Online from http://www.libertylawsite.org/2016/10/12/justice-scalia-and-congresss-power-to-regulate-immigration/, Accessed on 7-25-
2018)//BM
This is extremely weak. First, what international law says about the United States is not the relevant question. What is relevant is what the
Constitution says about the matter, and the
Constitution does not give Congress authority over immigration.
Congress does have the power to enforce offenses against the law of nations, but that would not confer
power to regulate immigration (since immigration is not an offense under international law). Second, there is no conflict with
international law. The entire immigration power would be shared between the federal government and the
states, which would meet any international law expectations for the country. Third as I have stated before, the Migration and
Importation Clause does not acknowledge a general immigration power, but is best read as merely
recognizing that Congress has some power over immigration through its Commerce Clause authority.
Congress could, for example, regulate ships that are coming from other nations and pass restrictions on immigration as to those ships. Congress
could also regulate immigration coming through the territories (which was a large part of the US in the early years) through its power to pass
legislation as to the territories. Claiming
that the federal government possesses an immigration power through
an inherent attribute of sovereignty is a stake in the heart of the enumerated powers and the Tenth
Amendment. This isn’t even reading an acknowledged power broadly, like the Commerce Power. It is just making up a new
power where there is no textual indication. It is hard to believe that the Tenth Amendment does not forbid this.
2AC – Parole
Parole is legal immigration – it’s solely a determination of who is to be admitted and
who should remain
Elrod 12 – Jennifer W. Elrod, Circuit Judge for the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, 2012(“VILLAS
AT PARKSIDE PARTNERS, doing business as Villas at Parkside; LAKEVIEW AT PARKSIDE PARTNERS,
LIMITED, doing business as Lakeview at Parkside; CHATEAU RITZ PARTNERS, doing business as Chateau
De Ville; MARY MILLER SMITH; Plaintiffs-Appellees v. THE CITY OF FARMERS BRANCH, TEXAS, Defendant-
Appellant; VALENTIN REYES; ALICIA GARCIA; GINGER EDWARDS; JOSE GUADALUPE ARIAS; AIDE GARZA,
Plaintiffs-Appellees v. CITY OF FARMERS BRANCH, Defendant-Appellant,” 675 F.3d 802, United States
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, 7-31-2012, Available to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis
Nexis)//BM
The majority concludes that the Ordinance [**69] is preempted as an impermissible regulation of immigration and implicitly preempted via
conflict preemption. In crafting its conclusion, the majority conflates the distinct doctrines of regulation [*827] of immigration and conflict
preemption. Because a straightforward application of Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit precedent yields a different result, I must respectfully
concur in part and dissent in part. First, although
the Ordinance no doubt concerns illegal immigrants, it is simply not
a regulation of immigration as defined by the Supreme Court in De Canas. Second, because the Ordinance explicitly
defers to federal determinations of immigration status—similar to the statute the Supreme Court upheld last term in Whiting—it is not conflict
preempted, with the exception of its separate judicial review provisions.
I. Regulation of Immigration
In De Canas v. Bica, 424 U.S. 351, 96 S. Ct. 933, 47 L. Ed. 2d 43 (1976), Justice Brennan wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court holding that a
state statute criminalizing the employment of illegal immigrants was not preempted by federal law. Before analyzing whether Congress had
preempted the statute, the Court examined whether the law was "a constitutionally proscribed regulation of immigration [**70] that Congress
itself would be powerless to authorize or approve." Id. at 356.
De Canas began that constitutional inquiry with the principle that the "[p]ower to regulate immigration is unquestionably exclusively a federal
power." Id. at 354. "But the Court has never held that every state enactment which in any way deals with aliens is a regulation of immigration
and thus per se preempted by this constitutional power, whether latent or exercised." Id. at 355. Thus, De Canas made clear that what
constitutes a "regulation of immigration" in the constitutional sense is not "the fact that aliens are the subject of a state statute." Id. Rather,
the Court narrowly defined a regulation of immigration as "essentially a determination of who should or
should not be admitted into the country, and the conditions under which a legal entrant may remain." Id.
2AC – Executive
The Executive and lower courts plays a key role in the admission of immigrants
Wasem 10 – Ruth Ellen Wasem, Clinical Professor of Public Policy Practice at UT Austin’s LBJ School of
Public Policy, former domestic policy specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress' Congressional Research
Service, Ph.D. in History, University of Michigan, 2010(“Visa Security Policy: Roles of the Departments of
State and Homeland Security,” Congressional Research Service, 3-8-2010, R41093, Available Online from
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a516405.pdf)//BM
Foreign nationals (i.e., aliens) not already legally residing in the United States who wish to come to the
United States generally must obtain a visa to be admitted, with certain exceptions noted in law. The
Departments of State (DOS) and Homeland Security (DHS) each play key roles in administering the law
and policies on the admission of aliens. Although the DOS’s Consular Affairs is responsible for issuing
visas, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigrant Services (USCIS) in DHS approves immigrant petitions, the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in DHS operates the Visa Security Program in selected
embassies abroad, and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in DHS inspects all people who enter
the United States. In addition, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) in the U.S.
Department of Justice (DOJ) has a significant policy role through its adjudicatory decisions on specific
immigration cases.
Although there was a discussion of assigning all visa issuance responsibilities to DHS when the
department was being created, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296) opted not to do so.
Rather, P.L. 107-296 drew on compromise language stating that DHS issues regulations regarding visa
issuances and assigns staff to consular posts abroad to advise, review, and conduct investigations, and
that DOS’s Consular Affairs continues to issue visas.
The executive has its own political power to delegate, regardless of the court’s
opinions
FOOTNOTE 141
141. Id. at 139. Justice Marshall distinguished the political power conferred upon the President of the
United States, which the President can delegate to executive officers, from the legal duties created by
law and which administrative officers must follow. Id. Marshall recognized the discretional character of
the political power, and held that such discretion is not justiciable regardless of the opinion the courts
may have as to the manner in which the executive should exercise that power. Id. But Marshall also
pointed out that when the law assigns a duty to an administrative officer the manner in which the
officer executes the duty is subject to the control of the courts. Id. at 141.
Executive officers are not bound by the INA –
FOOTNOTE 149
149. Id. None of these sections require that the consular officer comply with the eligibility
requirements of the INA, when issuing or denying a visa.
Executive actions are subject to the court, not to congress

FOOTNOTE 146
146. Symposium, supra note 10, at 1622. A consular officer is not free to deny a visa based on his sole
discretion. The state department regulations require consular officers to inform the applicant under
what provision in the law the consul grounds his decision to deny the visa. 22 C.F.R. § 42.81(b) (1999);
Saavedra Bruno, 197 F.3d at 1156.
2AC – Congress and Executive
The congressional and executive branches have the sole authority to create and enforce
immigration policy
Davy et al 5 (Megan Davy, Deborah W. Meyers, and Jeanne Batalova, Deborah W. Meyers was formerly a Senior Policy Analyst at the
Migration Policy Institute. Jeanne Batalova is a Senior Policy Analyst at MPI and Manager of the Migration Data Hub.Megan Davy is a former MPI
intern. “Who Does What in U.S. Immigration”, Migration Policy Institute, December 1, 2015, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/who-does-
what-us-immigration)//SC
The United States has a long history of regulating and managing immigration, dating back to the 1860s.
The U.S. Congress — the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States — develops
and passes legislation, which the president signs into law, and federal agencies (executive branch)
implement legislation. The primary immigration law today is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
(the INA). Most immigration-related legislation since then has amended various sections of the INA.
Among the most significant pieces of immigration-related legislation over the last two decades are the
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), the Immigration Act of 1990, the Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), and the Uniting and Strengthening America by
Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA-Patriot Act).
Limits – Courts
The courts don’t distinguish between immigrants and non-immigrants – they aren’t up
to date with statutes on immigration
The courts have applied the doctrine evenly to denials of nonimmigrant and immigrant visas.' The courts
failure to distinguish among types of visas and immigrants does not encompass congressional
amendments to the INA in recent years distinguishing between immigrants living in the United States
legalizing their status and those residing abroad applying for a visa.91
FOOTNOTE 91
91. In 1994, Congress enacted § 245(i) providing for adjustment of status to illegal immigrants so long as
the immigrants pay a fine and comply with admissibility requirements. By this enactment, Congress
separated from the lot of aliens coming to United States those who were already living in the country
and had a close relative or American employer petitioning on their behalf. 8 U.S.C. § 1152(i). Congress
recognized that these immigrants needed a special process to avoid unnecessary separation from their
families and jobs.
Limits – Courts (AoS)
Courts can adjudicate adjustment of status cases – it opens the door for vast, overly
broad standards
2. Courts have standards to apply
The INA and federal courts' decisions in adjustment of status cases provide vast standards to judge the
consular officer's interpretation of the INA and the application of the law to the facts." First, the INA
contains detailed provisions regarding aliens' eligibility,197 which consular officers must apply when
denying a visa.9 In fact, few of the INA provisions leave the decision entirely to the discretion of the
administrative officer adjudicating the case.'9 Even in those cases, the pertinent regulation offers
guidelines that consular officers must follow in forming their decisions.0 0 Second, federal courts can
resort to other federal court decisions interpreting those eligibility requirements in adjustment of status
denials. 201
196. The INA provides a comprehensive statutory scheme to determine when an immigrant is eligible
to receive a visa and to come to the United States. 8 U.S.C. § 1182 (2000); Wildes, supra note 153, at
900.
Limits - Regulations
Regulations would allow for a proliferation of tiny temporary affs – here’s 14
DHS 16 (“Retention of EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers”,
A Rule by the Homeland Security Department on 11/18/2016, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/11/18/2016-27540/retention-
of-eb-1-eb-2-and-eb-3-immigrant-workers-and-program-improvements-affecting-high-skilled)//SC
A. Purpose and Summary of the Regulatory Action DHS is amending its regulations related to certain
employment-based immigrant and nonimmigrant visa programs. The final rule is intended to benefit U.S.
employers and foreign workers participating in these programs by streamlining the processes for
employer sponsorship of nonimmigrant workers for lawful permanent resident (LPR) status, increasing
job portability and otherwise providing stability and flexibility for such workers, and providing additional
transparency and consistency in the application of DHS policies and practices related to these programs.
These changes are primarily intended to better enable U.S. employers to employ and retain high-skilled
workers who are beneficiaries of employment-based immigrant visa (Form I-140) petitions, while
increasing the ability of these workers to further their careers by accepting promotions, changing
positions with current employers, changing employers, and pursuing other employment opportunities. 1.
Clarifications and Policy Improvements First, the final rule largely conforms DHS regulations to
longstanding DHS policies and practices established in response to certain sections of the American
Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998 (ACWIA), Public Law 105-277, div. C, tit. IV, 112
Stat. 2681, and the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-first Century Act of 2000 (AC21), Public Law
106-313, 114 Stat. 1251, as amended by the 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations
Authorization Act, Public Law 107-273, 116 Stat. 1758 Start Printed Page 82400(2002).[1] Those sections
were intended, among other things, to provide greater flexibility and job portability to certain
nonimmigrant workers, particularly those who have been sponsored for LPR status as employment-based
immigrants, while enhancing opportunities for innovation and expansion, maintaining U.S.
competitiveness, and protecting U.S. workers. The final rule further clarifies and improves DHS policies
and practices in this area—policies and practices that have long been specified through a series of policy
memoranda and precedent decisions of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
Administrative Appeals Office. By clarifying such policies in regulation, DHS provides greater transparency
and certainty to affected employers and workers, while increasing consistency among DHS adjudications.
In addition, this final rule clarifies several interpretive questions raised by AC21 and ACWIA. Specifically,
the final rule clarifies and improves policies and practices related to:
 H-1B extensions of stay under AC21. The final rule addresses the ability of H-1B nonimmigrant workers
who are being sponsored for LPR status (and their dependents in H-4 nonimmigrant status) to extend
their nonimmigrant stay beyond the otherwise applicable 6-year limit pursuant to AC21.
 INA 204(j) portability. The final rule addresses the ability of certain workers who have pending
applications for adjustment of status to change employers or jobs without endangering the approved
Form I-140 petitions filed on their behalf.
 H-1B portability. The final rule addresses the ability of H-1B nonimmigrant workers to change jobs or
employers, including: (1) Beginning employment with new H-1B employers upon the filing of non-
frivolous petitions for new H-1B employment (“H-1B portability petition”); and (2) allowing H-1B
employers to file successive H-1B portability petitions (often referred to as “bridge petitions”) and
clarifying how these petitions affect lawful status and work authorization.
 Counting against the H-1B annual cap. The final rule clarifies the way in which H-1B nonimmigrant
workers are counted against the annual H-1B numerical cap, including: (1) The method for calculating
when these workers may access so-called remainder time (i.e., time when they were physically
outside the United States), thus allowing them to use their full period of H-1B admission; and (2) the
method for determining which H-1B nonimmigrant workers are “cap-exempt” as a result of previously
being counted against the cap.
 H-1B cap exemptions. The final rule clarifies and improves the method for determining which H-1B
nonimmigrant workers are exempt from the H-1B numerical cap due to their employment at an
institution of higher education, a nonprofit entity related to or affiliated with such an institution, or a
governmental or nonprofit research organization, including a revision to the definition of the term
“related or affiliated nonprofit entity.”
 Protections for H-1B whistleblowers. The final rule addresses the ability of H-1B nonimmigrant
workers who are disclosing information in aid of, or otherwise participating in, investigations
regarding alleged violations of Labor Condition Application (LCA) obligations in the H-1B program to
provide documentary evidence to USCIS to demonstrate that their resulting failure to maintain H-1B
status was due to “extraordinary circumstances.”
 Form I-140 petition validity. The final rule clarifies the circumstances under which an approved
Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker (Form I-140 petition) remains valid, even after the petitioner
withdraws the petition or the petitioner's business terminates, including for purposes of status
extension applications filed on behalf of the beneficiary, job portability of H-1B nonimmigrants, and
job portability under section 204(j) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1154(j).
Second, this rule builds on the provisions listed above by making changes consistent with the goals of
AC21 and ACWIA to further provide stability and flexibility in certain immigrant and nonimmigrant
visa categories. The amended provisions improve the ability of certain foreign workers, particularly
those who are successfully sponsored for LPR status by their employers, to accept new employment
opportunities, pursue normal career progression, better establish their lives in the United States, and
contribute more fully to the U.S. economy. These changes also provide certainty for the regulated
community and improve consistency across DHS adjudications, thereby enhancing DHS's ability to
fulfill its responsibilities related to U.S. employers and certain foreign workers. Specifically, the final
rule provides the following:
 Establishment of priority dates. To enhance clarity for the regulated community, the final rule
provides that a priority date is generally established based upon the filing of certain applications or
petitions. The new regulatory language is consistent with existing DHS practice in establishing priority
dates for other Form I-140 petitions that do not require permanent labor certifications (labor
certifications)—such as petitions filed under the employment-based first preference immigrant visa
(EB-1) category.[2] See final 8 CFR 204.5(d).[3]
 Retention of priority dates. To enhance job portability for workers with approved Form I-140 petitions,
the final rule explains the circumstances under which workers may retain priority dates and effectively
transfer those dates to new and subsequently approved Form I-140 petitions. Priority date retention
will generally be available as long as the approval of the initial Form I-140 petition was not revoked
for fraud, willful misrepresentation of a material fact, the invalidation or revocation of a labor
certification, or material error. This provision improves the ability of certain workers to accept
promotions, change employers, or pursue other employment opportunities without fear of losing
their place in line for immigrant visas. See final 8 CFR 204.5(e).
 Retention of employment-based immigrant visa petitions. To enhance job portability for certain
workers with approved Form I-140 petitions in the EB-1, second preference (EB-2), and third
preference (EB-3) categories, but who are unable to obtain LPR status due to immigrant visa backlogs,
the final rule provides that Form I-140 petitions that have been approved for 180 days or more would
no longer be subject to automatic revocation based solely on withdrawal by the petitioner or the
termination of the petitioner's business. See final 8 CFR 205.1(a)(3)(iii)(C) and (D). Start Printed Page
82401
 Eligibility for employment authorization in compelling circumstances. To enhance stability and job
flexibility for certain high-skilled nonimmigrant workers in the United States with approved Form I-
140 petitions who cannot obtain an immigrant visa due to statutory limits on the number of immigrant
visas that may be issued, the final rule allows certain beneficiaries in the United States in E-3, H-1B,
H-1B1, L-1, or O-1 nonimmigrant status to apply for separate employment authorization for a limited
period if there are compelling circumstances that, in the discretion of DHS, justify the issuance of
employment authorization. See final 8 CFR 204.5(p).
 10-day nonimmigrant grace periods. To promote stability and flexibility for certain high-skilled
nonimmigrant workers, the final rule provides two grace periods of up to 10 days, consistent with
those already available to individuals in some nonimmigrant classifications, to individuals in the E-1,
E-2, E-3, L-1, and TN classifications. The rule allows an initial grace period of up to 10 days prior to the
start of an authorized validity period, which provides nonimmigrants in the above classifications a
reasonable amount of time to enter the United States and prepare to begin employment in the
country. The rule also allows a second grace period of up to 10 days after the end of an authorized
validity period, which provides a reasonable amount of time for such nonimmigrants to depart the
United States or take other actions to extend, change, or otherwise maintain lawful status. See final
8 CFR 214.1(l)(1).
 60-day nonimmigrant grace periods. To further enhance job portability, the final rule establishes a
grace period of up to 60 consecutive days during each authorized validity period for individuals in the
E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, O-1 or TN classifications. This grace period allows high-skilled workers
in these classifications, including those whose employment ceases prior to the end of the petition
validity period, to more readily pursue new employment should they be eligible for other employer-
sponsored nonimmigrant classifications or employment in the same classification with a new
employer. The grace period also allows U.S. employers to more easily facilitate changes in
employment for existing or newly recruited nonimmigrant workers. See final 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2).
 H-1B licensing. To provide clarity and certainty to the regulated community, the final regulations
codify current DHS policy regarding exceptions to the requirement that makes the approval of an H-
1B petition contingent upon the beneficiary's licensure where licensure is required to fully perform
the duties of the relevant specialty occupation. The final rule generally allows for the temporary
approval of an H-1B petition for an otherwise eligible unlicensed worker, if the petitioner can
demonstrate that the worker is unable for certain technical reasons to obtain the required license
before obtaining H-1B status. The final rule also clarifies the types of evidence that would need to be
submitted to support approval of an H-1B petition on behalf of an unlicensed worker who will work
in a state that allows the individual to be employed in the relevant occupation under the supervision
of licensed senior or supervisory personnel. See final 8 CFR 214.2(h)(4)(v)(C).
Restrictions
1NC – Legal
‘Restriction’ – implies legal limitations not simply a functional one
Oxford English Dictionary 2012 “restriction”
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/restriction?region=us
Definition of restriction noun (often restrictions) a limiting condition or measure, especially a legal one: planning
restrictions on commercial development the limitation or control of someone or something, or the state of being
limited or restricted: the restriction of local government power
‘restriction’ refers to a legal instrument that is defined in context

Victorian Law Reform Commission (an independent, government-funded organisation that develops, reviews and
recommends reform of Victoria's state laws. The Commission has a charter to consult with the community and advise the Attorney-General on
how to improve and update Victorian laws.) 2010 “Purpose and Nature of Covenants”
http://www.lawreform.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/EandC_Final_Report_ch_6.pdf
The term ‘restriction’ is sometimes used in a functional sense, to mean the effect of any legal instrument
(such as a transfer, plan or statutory agreement) that imposes a specific restriction on the use of a lot. Sometimes it is used
to mean the instrument itself. For the sake of clarity, we use the term in its functional sense.30 6.33 ‘Restriction’
has no fixed meaning in legislation. Its meaning depends on the context. The Subdivision Act contains a definition
but it is inadequate and the related statutes do not assist: • The Subdivision Act defines ‘restriction’ as ‘a restrictive covenant or restriction
which can be registered or recorded in the register under the Transfer of Land Act’.31 • The Transfer of Land Act provides for the recording of
‘restrictive covenants’ only.32 Plans that may include restrictions can be registered, but the restrictions specified in the plans are not
recorded.33 • Adding to the confusion, the Planning and Environment Act defines ‘registered restrictive covenant’ to mean ‘a restriction within
the meaning of the Subdivision Act’.34
2NC – Legal
Making immigration tough, expensive, or unlikely isn’t a prohibition
Caiaccio 94 - Kevin T. Caiaccio, member of the State Bar of Georgia since 1995, J.D. University of
Georgia, 1994(“HOWARD V. BABCOCK, THE BUSINESS OF LAW VERSUS THE ETHICS OF LAWYERS: ARE
NONCOMPETITION COVENANTS AMONG LAW PARTNERS AGAINST PUBLIC POLICY?” 28 Ga. L. Rev. 807,
Georgia Law Review, Spring 1994, Available to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)//BM
While the Howard court acknowledged the enforceability of some law practice covenants under the
Business Code, the key issue became whether the agreement, which called for the loss of 82.5% of net
profits by the departing partners, was one that "restricted" [*820] the practice of law. n95 The court
essentially adopted the Haight court approach, stating that a reasonable cost imposed on a departing
partner does not restrict the practice of law. n96 The court labeled the cost a mere "economic
consequence" to an "unrestricted choice." n97
The majority in Howard reasoned that such a construction was consistent with Rule 1-500 and that this
construction struck a balance between competing interests. n98 According to the court, this
interpretation allowed a departing partner to practice law anywhere in the state and represent any of
the former firm's clients who were willing to follow. n99 The departing partner would, however, have to
compensate the firm for its loss of income. Therefore, the court remanded for a factual determination
as to whether the loss of withdrawal benefits constituted liquidated damages or an unacceptable
penalty. n100 The majority opinion justified this break with years of nationwide precedent by reasoning
that "a revolution in the practice of law has occurred." n101 This "revolution" required the "economic
interests of the law firm to be protected as they are in other business enterprises." n102 The court
supported its recognition of a "revolution" by noting the increased propensity of law firms--even large,
seemingly stable firms--to split up as partners grab clients on the way out. n103 As a result,
noncompetition agreements have become common, despite the near universal recognition by courts
and ethics committees that such agreements are unenforceable. n104 Furthermore, the court reasoned
that the pervasiveness of lateral hiring, even among high-level partners, has undermined the
assumption that firms are stable institutions. n105 The court concluded that, [*821] due to these
"sweeping changes" in the profession, the per se rule banning noncompetition agreements among law
partners should be abolished. n106
The court then addressed some of the arguments made by the dissent and by other courts upholding
the ban. According to the majority of the court, two primary arguments exist in support of the ban: (1)
an attorney should have the freedom to practice law where and for whom he or she pleases, n107 and
(2) clients are not commodities and should have the freedom to choose representation. n108 The
majority argued that these freedoms are merely "theoretical" because they are routinely circumscribed.
n109 For example, attorneys, like other professionals, may be fired or forced out by their partners
despite the wishes of the client. n110 Similarly, an attorney is not required to accept representation of
every client that seeks services, and a lawyer may even be required to decline representation of a
prospective client if a conflict of interest exists. n111 In fact, an attorney has many grounds to justify
terminating a relationship with a client. n112 Finally, the majority noted that, in civil cases, clients have
no "right" to an attorney at all. n113 Thus, these "freedoms," upon which the per se rule is justified, are
in fact already limited. n114
The court proceeded a step further, arguing that permitting restrictive covenants may even serve the
client. According to the court, the ban promoted a "culture of mistrust" and damaged the stability of law
firms. n115 Partners may be reluctant to refer clients to or support the practice of their fellow partners
if fear persists that a partner may leave with those clients at any time. n116 The court concluded that
the changing nature of the business of law, the permissibility of such covenants in other [*822]
professions, and the undesirable promotion of the culture of mistrust required the abolition of the per
se ban on lawyer restrictive covenants. n117 The court remanded the case to the trial court for analysis
under the test of reasonableness applicable to all restrictive covenants. n118
Justice Kennard, the sole dissenting justice, made several arguments in support of the per se ban. First,
Kennard offered a different interpretation of Rule 1-500 of the Rules of Professional Conduct, arguing
that the rule was unambiguous: agreements that restrict competition are unethical. n119 She criticized
the majority's argument as flawed because it interpreted "restrict" to mean "prohibit" and claimed that
a reasonable cost was not a restriction. n120 According to the dissent, this interpretation does not give
the words their plain and ordinary meaning. n121 In their ordinary meaning, restrict and prohibit are not
synonymous; a price as high as 82.5% of net profits certainly constitutes a restriction. n122 Therefore,
the partnership agreement violated the clear meaning of the rule.
In support of this interpretive argument, the dissent cited the "discussions" that accompany the Rules
and "provide guidance for interpretation." n123 The discussions accompanying Rule 1-500, which the
majority ignored, were unequivocal:
$ (Rule 1-500$ ) permits a restrictive covenant in a law corporation, partnership, or employment

agreement. The law corporation shareholder, partner, or associate may agree not to have a separate
practice during the existence of the relationship; however, upon termination of the relationship
(whether voluntary or involuntary), the member is free to practice law [*823] without any contractual
restriction . . . . n124
According to the dissent, the court should not have endorsed an interpretation completely inconsistent
with this unambiguous commentary. n125
Second, the dissent argued that, despite the majority's perceived "revolution" in the practice of law,
n126 the law is still primarily a profession, and lawyers should continue to strive for the highest ethical
standards. n127 Although no one in the private sector could continue to practice law without a profit, an
attorney has a very high fiduciary duty. This duty often requires an attorney to place the interest of a
client above her own interest. Therefore, the client's right to choose representation is paramount to the
interests of the attorney. n128 Enforcing covenants not to compete, on the other hand, would
subordinate the client's rights to the monetary interests of established firms. n129
Next, the dissent attacked the argument that, since noncompetition agreements are enforceable in
other professions, lawyers should not be treated differently. n130 According to the dissent, the ethics
rules of other professions are not helpful because "the nature, ideals, and practices of the various
professions are different." n131 Notwithstanding the rules with respect to other professions, lawyers
should strive to obtain the highest ethical standards because "ethics is not a subject in which the
objective is to achieve consensus at the level of the lowest common denominator." n132
[*824]
Finally, the dissent noted that the purpose of ethics regulations is to protect the public, not the
monetary interests of law firms. n133 According to the dissent, the majority subordinated the rights of
clients and lawyers to the business interests of firms and justified this erosion of ethics standards by
concluding that these rights are merely "theoretical" because they are already circumscribed. n134 The
dissent strenuously disagreed with the majority's conclusion, arguing that this analysis was irrelevant.
The issue in this case was not whether a partner may be forced out of a law firm, nor whether a conflict
of interest existed; n135 the issue was whether the defendant-law firm could "prevent a willing attorney
from representing a willing client." n136 Therefore, the majority's analysis on this point was merely
"rationalization, not reasoning." n137
The dissent concluded that the court should not promote the weakening of ethical standards and that
the integrity of the legal profession demanded upholding the per se ban on covenants not to compete
between law partners. n138
IV. Analysis and Recommendations
Although the Howard court set out persuasive policy reasons for abolishing the per se ban on lawyer
restrictive covenants, the majority's reasoning contained several flaws. First, the court misconstrued the
meaning of the ethics rule: under the majority's interpretation, the rule prohibits only outright bans on
competition. In reaching this conclusion, the court violated several rules of statutory construction.
Second, the court failed to recognize the need to articulate a new standard for law partners. Instead, the
court held that agreements between law partners should be analyzed under the "rule of reason" test
applicable to ordinary business partnerships. This Comment contends that the rules of
[*825] ethics, as currently written, mandate a higher standard for attorneys than for other types of
partners. In abrogating the per se ban, courts should interpret the rule in a manner that balances the
changing nature of the practice of law with the competing ethical considerations.
a. proper construction of the rules of professional conduct
The Howard court began its analysis by examining the California Business and Professions Code, which
expressly permits reasonable restrictive covenants among business partners. n139 The court noted that
this provision had long applied to doctors and accountants and concluded that the general language of
the statute provided no indication of an exception for lawyers. n140 After reaching this conclusion,
however, the court noted that, since it had the authority to promulgate a higher standard for lawyers,
the statute alone did not necessarily control, n141 and the court therefore proceeded to examine the
California Rules of Professional Conduct. n142 The court avoided the apparent conflict between the
business statute and the ethics rule by undertaking a strained reading of the rule. In essence, the court
held that the word "restrict" referred only to outright prohibitions, and that a mere "economic
consequence" does not equal a prohibition. n143
2NC – Excludes Easement
Restriction is separate from Easement
Haneman 59 – Vincent S. Haneman, former Associate Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court,
1959(““RUSSELL S. BERTRAND, ET AL., PLAINTIFFS-RESPONDENTS, v. DONALD T. JONES, ET AL.,
DEFENDANTS-APPELLANTS,” 58 N.J. Super. 273, Superior Court of New Jersey (Appellate Division), 12-4-
1959, Available to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)//BM
An existing easement in lands to be conveyed violates the terms of an agreement to convey real estate free and clear of all encumbrances. Freedman v. Lieberman,
2 N.J.Super. 537, 543 (Ch. 1949). Although there have been cases in which the phrase "subject to restrictions of record" has been held to encompass easements, see
Nass v. Munzing, 100 N.J. Eq. 421 (Ch. 1927); Kutschinski v. Thompson, supra; Kaufhold v. Cador Construction Co., 109 N.J. Eq. 1 (Ch. 1931), the facts of the case sub
judice do not warrant such an interpretation. In the above cited cases the court found either that the complainants knew of the easement at the time of contracting
or that the easement was observable by a mere casual inspection of the property and that the complainants had inspected the property several times with a view of
purchase prior to the making of the contract. In the instant case, both plaintiffs and their counsel denied any actual knowledge of the existence of the easement on
September 16, 1957, and there was no proof adduced which would support a conclusion to the contrary. Furthermore, the sewer easement was not visible upon an
examination of the premises. In the Freedman case, supra, the United States had an unabandoned easement to enter upon the premises in order to construct
breakwaters or other barriers whenever necessary to prevent erosion on the ocean front, and the court declared that that portion of the agreement of sale reading
"title to be subject to all existing restrictions of record" did not include said easement. " The word `restriction' here connotes restrictive covenant."
Freedman v. Lieberman, supra, 2 N.J. Super. at page 546. Interestingly, the starter certificate listed " Restrictions" and "Easements" as
separate categories, and referred to several restrictions, but reported that there were no easements.
As here used, the word "restrictions" connotes restrictive covenants and not easements.
2NC – Enforceable
Restrictions must be enforceable- discouraging language doesn’t count
Barnett 3 – Stephen R. Barnett, Elizabeth J. Boalt Professor of Law Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, 2003(“DEVELOPMENT
AND PRACTICE NOTE: NO-CITATION RULES UNDER SIEGE: A BATTLEFIELD REPORT AND ANALYSIS,” 5 J. App. Prac. & Process 473, University of
Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law: The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, Fall 2003, Available to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-
Nexis)//BM
questions follow: (1) Are discouraging words "restrictions" on citation under Rule 32.1? (2) What difference, if any, does it
Four
make? (3) What is the risk of judicial resistance to [*493] no-citation rules, through discouraging words or other means? and (4) Should discouraging words be forbidden?
1. Are Discouraging Words "Restrictions" under Rule 32.1?
it is not clear that discouraging words have to be considered "restrictions" on citation under
The committee's statement notwithstanding,
words may be wholly admonitory - and unenforceable. The Fourth Circuit's rule, for
the proposed Rule 32.1. These
example, states that citing unpublished opinions is "disfavored," but that it may be done "if counsel
believes, nevertheless, that [an unpublished opinion] has precedential value in relation to a material
issue in a case and that there is no published opinion that would serve as well." n129 On the question of what counsel "believes," surely
counsel should be taken at her word; counsel's asserted belief that an unpublished opinion has precedential or persuasive value should not be considered a falsifiable fact. Hence no sanction should be available for violating the
Fourth Circuit's rule, and the rule's discouraging language in turn would not be a "prohibition or restriction" that was barred by Rule 32.1 as presently drafted.
In the rules of some other circuits, however, the language disfavoring citation of unpublished opinions is unmoored from anyone's "belief" and arguably does impose an objective "prohibition or restriction" determinable by a court.
n130 A court might find, for example, that the required "persuasive value with respect to a material issue that has not been addressed in a published opinion" n131 was not present, and hence that the citation was not permitted
by the circuit rule.
With what result? It would follow, paradoxically, that the opinion could be cited - because the circuit rule would be struck down under Rule 32.1 as a forbidden "restriction" on citation.
. If the local rule's discouraging

The committee's double-negative drafting thus creates a Hall of Mirrors in which citation of an unpublished opinion [*494] would be allowed either way
language is merely hortatory, it is not a "restriction" forbidden by Rule 32.1; but that doesn't matter, because such a rule does not bar the citation in the first place.
If, on the other hand, the local rule's language has bite and is a "restriction," then Rule 32.1 strikes it down, and again the citation is permitted.
2AC - Regulations
Regulations on legal immigrants ARE restrictions
Bernstein-Baker 7 -- Judith Bernstein-Baker is the Executive Director of HIAS and Council Migration
Service of Philadelphia. She received her B.A. from Binghamton University, her M.S.W. from the
University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, and her J.D. from Temple University School of Law., (--
2007, "Citizenship In A Restrictionist Era: The Mixed Messages Of Federal Policies, "16 Temp. Pol. &
Civ. Rts. L. Rev. 367, Lexis) //pleb
These efforts, however, are occurring at a time of fear and uncertainty for the foreign-born. 113Link to
the text of the note Although the pitched debate has been about "illegal immigration" since 1996, legal
immigrants have heard a drumbeat of restrictions: increased risk of deportation, limitation of social
rights in the form of denying public benefits previously available, proposals to abolish birthright
citizenship, increased application fees with more complex application requirements, heightened scrutiny
of applications from the most vulnerable individuals, increased delays for selected groups and
individuals due to security checks, and new proposals that make the cost of citizenship out of reach of
many low wage earners, while at the same time seeking to change the citizenship examination. 114
Many of the recent actions have been presented through administrative fiat, with little or no
opportunity for public review. The messages underscore an ambivalence and ambiguity about legal
immigration and citizenship: become a citizen if you want to be a full social and legally recognized
participant, but we will make the process more difficult, more risky, and more expensive.
Regulations can have the intent of substantially limiting immigration

Kasai 18 -- Nathan Kasai, Policy Advisor, He earned a J.D. from the George Washington University
School of Law and a bachelor’s degree from American University. While in law school, he worked in a
variety of public policy and advocacy positions, including with the Senate Judiciary Committee and the
National Center for Lesbian Rights. (4-11-2018, "Trump's Predictably Cruel Attack on Lawful Immigrants
Receiving Public Benefits – Third Way, "No Publication, )https://www.thirdway.org/memo/trumps-
predictably-cruel-attack-on-lawful-immigrants-receiving-public-benefits //pleb
Moreover, the regulatory changes appear to alter the weight of using a benefit in the overall public
charge determination. Federal law requires DHS to consider “totality of the circumstances” in public
charge determinations.26 The administration can’t change that with a regulatory change, but they can
modify how severely they consider certain factors they consider negative. The new rules, list receipt of
benefits under the category of “heavily weighted negative factors.”27 They also list medical conditions
without non-subsidized health insurance.28 The Administration not only wants to punish immigrants for
receiving an ACA health insurance subsidy, but it wants to double down on punishing them, if they get
sick. Immigration officials have long had substantial discretion in their public charge findings, but
everything in the proposed rules signals a draconian intent to substantially restrict lawful
immigration.
Reduce
2NC – Suspend
Reduce means to diminish – that’s just a less radical form of suspend -
Widener and Hamilton 1 - Hiram E. Widener Jr., United States Circuit Judge of the United States
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; and Clyde H. Hamilton, Senior United States Circuit Judge of the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, former Judge for the United States District Court
for the District of South Carolina; 2001(“CARRINGTON GARDENS ASSOCIATES, I, A VIRGINIA LIMITED
PARTNERSHIP, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HENRY G. CISNEROS, SECRETARY OF HOUSING AND URBAN
DEVELOPMENT, Defendant-Appellee,” 1 Fed. Appx. 239, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth
Circuit, 1-17-2001, Available to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)//BM
Under the regulation, 24 C.F.R. § 886.123, the payments to Carrington could have been stopped for good, the contract terms aside. For
construction of the contract terms, we adopt the wording of the opinion of the district court for the next three paragraphs of this opinion which
follow: The plain meaning of the word "withhold" is "to retain in one's possession that which belongs to or is claimed or sought by another. . . .
To refrain from paying that which is due." Black's Law Dictionary 1602 (6th ed. 1990). Using this common meaning of "withhold," HUD clearly
has the authority to retain housing assistance payments. But, the HAP Contract's withhold remedy also limits how long [**7] the funds may be
retained. The housing assistance payments may be retained only "until the default under this Contract has been cured." Tr. Ex. 8, § 26. Once the
default is cured, HUD may no longer keep the retained funds. This remedy, therefore, creates a trust type relationship where HUD has the
authority to keep the withheld funds on the owner's account only while the owner is in default and thereafter must pay out the withheld funds
when the default is cured. In contrast, the reduce-or-suspend remedy suggests a more permanent forfeiture of funds. The
word
"suspend" means "to interrupt; to cause to cease for a time; to post pone; to stay, delay, or hinder; to
discontinue temporarily, but with an expectation or purpose of resumption." Black's Law Dictionary 1446 (6th ed. 1990). "Reduce"
means "to diminish in size, amount, extent, or number." Webster's Third New International Dictionary 1905 (1981). <3>
Based on these definitions, "reduce" is merely a less radical form of "suspend." Under the common
meanings of "reduce" and "suspend," HUD has the authority to discontinue housing assistance
payments entirely or diminish the size of the payments while Carrington Gardens [**8] is in default. Like the withhold
remedy, this remedy limits how long payments may be discontinued or diminished -- only "until the default under this Contract has been
cured." Tr. Ex. 8, § 26. After the default has been cured, therefore, HUD must resume full housing assistance payments. Unlike the withhold
remedy, however, under the plain language of the reduce-or-suspend remedy, HUD is under no obligation to pay out any discontinued or
diminished funds. The words "suspend" or "reduce" furnish no inference or suggestion that HUD is obligated to retain suspended or reduced
funds on the owner's account until a default is cured. This language in the HAP Contract speaks [*243] only to HUD's obligation to begin full
payments after the default is cured. JA 546-548. <3> "Reduce" is not found in Black's Law Dictionary. Hence, the Court
defaults to Webster's.
Legal Immigration
2NC – Federal Government
Legal Immigration is the granting of LPR status by the federal government – its distinct
from citizenship
Perry et. al 1 – Marc Perry, Acting Chief of the Public Information Office at the Census Bureau, joined the Census Bureau in 1997 as a
demographer in the Population Division; Barbara Vandervate, Retired Census Bureau staff (37 years); Lea Auman, Population Division at the US
Census Bureau; and Kathy Morris, Population Division at the US Census Bureau, 2001("Evaluating Components of International Migration: Legal
Migrants", US Census Bureau, December 2001, Available Online from https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2001/demo/POP-
twps0059.html)//BM
1. Background
Legal immigration is the process by which a non-citizen of the United States is granted legal
permanent residence in the United States by the federal government. A non-citizen with legal
permanent residence status may remain in the country, be employed, and travel outside the United
States without restriction. A legal permanent resident may also seek naturalization. Attaining legal
permanent residence in the United States is not the same as becoming a United States citizen.
After dropping to relatively low levels during the period 1931 to 1970 (see Table 1), legal immigration to
the United States has increased significantly in recent decades, primarily as a result of a change in
immigration law in 1965. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 7.6 million
people attained legal permanent residence in the United States in the fiscal year 1991 to 1998 period--
an amount equaling the peak levels of immigration early in the Twentieth Century.
2NC – Legal Immigrant
Definitions that specify “Legal Immigrant” are bad – the term is not distinct from
undocumented
twps0059.html)//BM
Perhaps the bigger limitation of legal immigration data is simply that it is increasingly difficult to easily
define what we mean by a "legal immigrant." The Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA) defines a
legal immigrant as a non-citizen of the United States who is granted legal permanent residence in the
United States. This is a straightforward, easily understood definition. However, its weakness is that it
makes no distinction between people who have applied for--but not yet received--legal permanent
residence and unauthorized people. The large backlog of adjustee applications is but one group of
quasi-legal immigrants. While adjustee applicants may not yet have legal permanent residence (and
some percentage of them will no doubt be denied legal permanent residence when their applications
are eventually processed), many of them will eventually become legal permanent residents. In the
meantime, most of them have the ability to legally seek employment in the United States. By not
including these categories of people with the legal immigration component, we are including them in
the residual foreign born. Thus, by dividing immigration into the categories of legal immigrant (those
with LPR) and unauthorized (all others who entered the country but do not have LPR), we lose a
category of authorized people who do not have LPR.
2NC – Asylees
Asylees blur the distinction between temporary and permanent
twps0059.html)//BM
Asylees
The quality of existing statistics on asylees is hampered by several general limitations. First, there is
currently some degree of overlap and doublecounting between asylees and other components of legal
immigration, because asylees can have any legal status when they apply for asylum. For instance, most
of the people in temporary protected status are also seeking asylum.
Second, because the processes of applying for asylum, applying for legal permanent residence, and
receiving legal permanent residence often take a number of years, there is a large quasi-legal
population of pending asylees. As with the quasi-legal refugee component, these are not unauthorized
people in the strict sense of the word. Asylee applicants, for instance, are now authorized to work after
six months. Once registered, they are able to obtain a social security number and apply for other
benefits through ORR. Asylee applicants are not currently accounted for in any population estimates
methods, which relegates them to the residual foreign born.
We see from Table 7 that as of FY 1998, the overwhelming majority of asylee applicants come from
twelve countries, including nine countries in Central and South America, suggesting that a large
percentage of asylee applicants are Hispanic. Table 7 indicates also that only about half (32,822 of
69,407) of cases granted asylum between 1990 and 1998 were for these 12 countries, even though they
constitute an overwhelming majority of cases filed during the period and cases pending at the end of
the period.
TABLE OMITTED
Finally, a recent GAO report suggested that asylees are undercounted by a significant degree. INS
maintains statistics on asylees, while data on asylee appeals are maintained by EOIR. Some people win
asylum on appeal through EOIR, while in other cases "trailing relatives" (some already in the US, others
new arrivals) are not counted. In 1998 GAO estimated that these additional categories would have
increased the asylee count for 1996 from 18,000 to at least 29,000. By the end of the decade, this asylee
undercount had become sizable.
2AC – Includes Refugees and Asylees
Legal Immigration consists of both admittees and adjustees – that includes refugees
and asylees
twps0059.html)//BM
Major components of legal immigration
There are numerous ways to qualify for legal permanent residence in the United States, and the 7.6
million immigrants who received legal permanent residence in the fiscal year 1991 to 1998 period
represent a wide variety of immigrant situations. INS immigration data are therefore partitioned into a
number of different categories, based on the INS class of admission. These admissions vary in terms of
application procedure and data source. Differences in data sources and application procedures are
important because they impact how well we are able to estimate both the total number of legal
immigrants and their demographic characteristics. Consequently, throughout this document we will
present our findings separately for four types of legal immigrants: new arrivals, adjustees, refugees, and
asylees. These four groups are discussed briefly in the next section.
Two main administrative routes are open to aliens who wish to become legal permanent residents of
the United States, depending on their residence at time of application. New arrivals are people living
outside the United States at the time of application for legal permanent residence. They must apply
through the U.S. consular office in their country and are unable to enter the United States as legal
permanent residents until receiving their visa. From fiscal years 1991 to 1998, 3.5 million people
received legal permanent residency as new arrivals.1
Adjustees are people already living in the United States at the time of application for legal permanent
residence. These people are adjusting from a nonimmigrant status--such as foreign student, temporary
worker, refugee, or undocumented migrant--to legal immigrant status. Because adjustees are already
living in the United States when they apply for legal permanent residence, they do not apply through the
consular office in their previous country. Instead they apply directly to the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) for permanent resident visas. Roughly 4.1 million adjustees obtained legal
permanent residence in the United States between 1991 and 1998.2 This adjustee number includes 0.9
million refugees and asylees who adjusted status.
Among those adjusting status, there are two main groups of immigrants. Refugees are people who
cannot return to their country of nationality because of persecution or a well-founded fear of
persecution. Refugees must apply for refugee status from outside the United States, and must reside
in the U.S. for a minimum of one year before applying for legal permanent residency. According to INS
figures from the 1998 yearbook, 0.8 million refugees received legal permanent residency between fiscal
years 1991 and 1998. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the department of Health and
Human Services provides data on refugee arrivals to this country.
Asylees are defined as people who (1) are unable or unwilling to return to their country of nationality
because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution, (2) applied for asylum while living in the
United States or upon arriving at a port of entry, and have been granted asylum, or (3) applied for
asylum during deportation and were granted asylum by the Executive Office of Immigration Review
(EOIR). The applicant's legal status at time of application is not taken into account when INS makes the
decision about asylum. The Census Bureau includes asylees in the legal immigration component only
when they change status to legal permanent residence. About 106,000 asylees converted to legal
permanent residence during fiscal years 1991 through 1998, according to the 1998 INS yearbook.
The asylee process is a complex one involving multiple steps. In this paper, we will use the term 'asylee
applicant' to refer to people applying for asylee status. Successful applicants are known as 'asylees.'
Asylees applying for legal permanent residence will be referred to as 'pending asylee adjustees,' while
those who are granted this status are known as 'asylee adjustees.' For DAPE purposes, it is important to
realize that for both the asylee and refugee components there are people in various stages of
application for legal permanent residence.
Limits – Adjustment of Status
Including adjustees unlimits the topic - their numbers are innaccurate
twps0059.html)//BM
But while the numbers of applications for adjustment was increasing substantially from 1995 through
1997, the number of applications for adjustment actually completed by INS was not. For various
reasons, the numbers of applications completed declined for fiscal years 1997, 1998, and 1999. The
result was a large increase in the backlog of pending applications for adjustment of status, as shown by
Table 3.
TABLE OMITTED
These shifts in application processing are problematic in several ways. First, they cloud the immigration
data, making it difficult to know whether year to year changes in immigration numbers are due to actual
changes in immigration patterns or simply due to changes in processing. Second, the existence of a
large backlog has created a shadow, quasi-legal immigrant population that does not fit easily into
existing international migration categories. We'll return to this problem later on.
To correct for this backlog, the Census Bureau shifts adjustee cases from later years backwards, so that
the number of adjustees in a given fiscal year matches the number of applications in that year (with
certain exceptions and allowances). The class of admission variable is used to make sure that none of
the shifted adjustees exceeds existing numeric quotas in those immigration categories where quotas
exist. After the supply of adjustees from these later years is exhausted, cases from existing files are
replicated, under the assumption that future adjustees will have characteristics similar to current
successful adjustees. The result of this attempt to account for the adjustee backlog has been an increase
in the number of estimated adjustees for all years since 1995, in some cases by a large amount (see
Table 4).
Predictability – Refugees
Including refugees is unpredictable – admission numbers are unstable
twps0059.html)//BM
Refugees
The Census Bureau produces an estimate of the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. each year by
using data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) of the Department of Health and Human
Services (DHHS). After the ORR data on refugees are compiled, we use INS microdata to impute missing
age and sex data for this population. Imputing race and Hispanic origin characteristics for refugees is
done similarly, but uses the 1990 census data on foreign-born migrants who entered the United States
in the preceding five years.
The refugee component is unique in that refugees often arrive in the U.S. in sudden "waves" as a result
of sudden political upheaval in foreign countries. Consequently, there is no assumption of a year-to-
year stability in the flow of refugees from a particular country. Because of the instability in refugee
flows, the time series of when refugees adjust to legal permanent residence would not be an accurate
reflection of their original entry to the United States. Refugees adjusting to legal permanent residence
are thus included as refugees at their time of arrival, based on time series of arrival data from ORR, and
are not included in the proxy rule.
For DAPE, our goal was to estimate the legal immigration component for the period 1990 to 2000. We
limited our refugee component to include only those refugees who arrived in the United States after
April 1, 1990 and received legal permanent residence before April 1, 2000. While 1.04 million people
entered the United States as refugees during the 1990s, only 0.8 million received legal permanent
residence before April 1, 2000. Some of the remaining 0.2 million refugees who have not yet received
legal permanent residence will undoubtedly adjust their status in the future.
Including refugees is unpredictable – there is no brightline as to when they become

LPR
twps0059.html)//BM
Refugees
In general, the quality of refugee data is considered to be high, due to the existence of accurate
administrative records from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The major source of error for the
refugee component is simply agreeing when to include refugees as legal immigrants. For DAPE, our
estimate of refugees for 1990 to 2000 was restricted to the 800,000 refugees who entered the United
States during these years and also adjusted status to become a legal permanent resident. ORR data
indicate that slightly more than one million refugees entered the country during the 1990s, indicating
that roughly 200,000 non-adjusted refugees (one million minus 800,000) are erroneously excluded from
DAPE's legal immigration component and are thus included in the residual foreign born.
Another limitation is the process by which demographic characteristics are assigned to refugees. We
assume that the race and Hispanic origin of refugees from a particular country matches the race and
Hispanic origin of recent immigrants from that country. This assumption is probably the most
reasonable way of establishing race and Hispanic origin detail for refugees. However, it might not hold
true in those circumstances where refugees are fleeing a particular country specifically because they are
ethnic minorities. This is certainly a possibility, because refugee status is conferred on people who claim
fear of persecution based in part on race, sex, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social
group.
Predictability – Asylees
Including asylees is unpredictable - asylees are governed under separate legislation,
but Asylee laws require changing overall laws
twps0059.html)//BM
Asylees
The Census Bureau does not currently include asylees in the population estimates universe until they
apply for permanent residence status. Consequently, asylees' legal immigration information does not
coincide with their initial entry into the United States. Data for asylees who have adjusted their status
are available in the INS microdata file, and are processed in the same manner as the data for the rest of
the adjustee population. They are tallied and accounted for separately in the total adjustee population.
Asylees changing status to legal permanent residence are constrained by statutory limits. Through 1990,
the limit was 5,000 asylees adjusting status per year. In 1990 the limit was changed to 10,000 (effective
in 1991), with 22,700 asylees adjusting status in 1991 under a grandfather clause in the 1990 legislation.
For fiscal years 1992 through 1998, asylee adjustees have averaged slightly under 9,500 per year.
Asylees adjusting status are also subject to country limitations (as are the balance of the adjustees). This
requires that they wait until slots are available for their country of nationality.
There has been a large increase in the number of applications for asylum in recent decades. In the 1970s
applications averaged 3,100 per year. In the 1980s, applications increased to an average of 55,000 per
year, and in the 1990s further increased to an average of 123,000 per year. A relatively small and
declining percentage of the applicants are granted asylum: from 22.5 percent of those applying in the
1970s to 7.8 percent in the 1990s. Some applicants have become legal permanent residents through
legislation benefiting specific countries, such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, and countries
of the former Soviet Union. Applying for legal permanent residency through this legislation removes the
applicants from the regular asylum process.4
Once applicants are granted asylum, they must wait one year to apply for legal permanent residence,
and are subject to the same overall limit, and specific country limits, set for all adjustees. About 71,000
people were granted asylum by INS in fiscal years 1993 through 1997. During that same time, about
44,000 asylees became legal permanent residents. People can also appeal to Executive Office of
Immigration Review (EOIR) for asylum. Between 1993 and 1997, an additional 21,000 people received
asylee status through EIOR. These figures are not included in any INS statistics on asylees. Thus, while a
total of 92,000 people were granted asylum between 1993 and 1997, only 44,000 were granted legal
permanent residence, resulting in a backlog of more than 48,000 registered asylees awaiting adjustment
to legal permanent residence (Table 5).
Including adjustees is unpredictable – they are already resident in the US and its
impossible to determine when they count as LPR
twps0059.html)//BM
Adjustees
The adjustee component of legal immigration has perhaps the most limitations of any of the four
components. It has neither the refugee component's accurate system of administrative records nor the
new arrival component's conceptual simplicity. Adjustees are people already resident in the United
States at the time of their application for legal permanent residence; therefore data on adjustees at
their time of entry into the United States do not necessarily match data when legal permanent residency
is obtained. At what point, then, does someone make the transition from unauthorized to authorized?
Adjustee data are also complicated by definitional difficulties. At what point should an adjustee first be
included in our estimates of the resident United States population: when they apply for legal
permanent residence, or when they actually receive legal permanent residence?
The proxy rule we use to estimate the number of future adjustees entering the U.S. in the current year
also has its limitations. While the proxy rule may generally hold true when levels of new arrivals and
adjustees are constant, it is less applicable when annual levels of immigration are not constant. When
the number of new arrivals is increasing substantially each year, the proxy rule will underestimate the
number of future adjustees. When the number of new arrivals is decreasing each year, the proxy rule
will overestimate the number of future adjustees.
The increasing backlog of adjustee applicants has greatly complicated the ability to make accurate
estimates of the size and composition of the adjustee population. Currently we know very little about
the backlog population's demographic composition. After the supply of adjustees from these later years
is exhausted, cases from existing files are replicated, under the assumption that future adjustees will
have characteristics similar to current successful adjustees.
Predictability - Admission
Limiting the topic to admittees is the most predictable – its uncomplicated and has
few discrepancies
twps0059.html)//BM
New Arrivals
Unlike the adjustee component, the new arrival component is relatively straightforward and
uncomplicated. To examine the completeness of the flow, we compared INS new arrival data with
numbers of visas issued by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs (BCA) for fiscal years
1993 through 1998 (see Table 6). Both the INS and BCA data exclude data on refugees and asylees. The
BCA totals are always higher, ranging from 1,167 higher in FY1996 to 35,996 higher in FY 1997. Possible
explanations for the discrepancies include situations where the applicants receiving the visa never
actually entered the U.S, applicants changed their minds, their circumstances changed, the political
situation in their country changed, the home country government created bureaucratic or legal
impediments, or the applicants became ill or died.
TABLE OMITTED
Other explanations are that the applicant entered the U.S. in the year following that in which the visa
was granted, or that the applicant received the visa but INS lost the paperwork, so that the applicant
was not in the INS file as a new arrival. INS indicated that paperwork does disappear on occasion, and
that the other possible explanations were credible. In any event, the discrepancies for these years are
relatively small and appear to be explainable. This suggests that the new arrival data we receive from
INS are reasonably complete and contain relatively few limitations.
** Aff Things
Trafficking
*I don’t believe that every card in the 1AC is necessary. For instance, the second Kelly card on the
advantage is repetitive with some other cards through the advantage/solvency.
Organ Trafficking Advantage
International organ trafficking is highly lucrative and targets impoverished citizens
Kelly 13 (Emily Kelly- Executive Comment Editor for the Boston College International & Comparative
Law Review. Spring 2013, "INTERNATIONAL ORGAN TRAFFICKING CRISIS: SOLUTIONS ADDRESSING THE
HEART OF THE MATTER," Boston College International and Comparative Law Review; Newton Centre
Vol. 36, Iss. 2,,
https://search.proquest.com/docview/1528143508/9777405022B94BB3PQ/1?accountid=36312//sabín)
Trafficking in organs is a growing, lucrative enterprise much like the illicit markets for weapons, humans,
and drugs.14 The media has sensationalized myths concerning organ trafficking since the 1980s,15 reporting both exaggerated kidnapping
accounts and reliable reports of underground organ markets.16 Although the precise scope of the problem remains shrouded
in uncertainty, the international community recognizes organ trafficking as a human rights and public
health concern.17 The underground organ trade constitutes ten percent of worldwide organ transplants,
producing between $600 million and $1.2 billion in illicit revenue each year.18 Although organ trafficking
centers routinely shift locations, several countries have gained notoriety as hotbeds.19 Pakistan, one of the
largest “kidney bazaars” in the world, has a thriving underground market supplied by impoverished citizens.20 A legal
vacuum led to the growth of kidney transplants in the late 1980s:21 because there were no national laws or systems to address
organ donation, commercial kidney transactions quickly became prevalent.22 Today, brokers work with hospitals to locate impoverished
donors, who provide approximately 2000 kidneys each year.23 Egypt is also a center for organ trafficking, with more than eighty
percent of kidney transplants involving commercial donors.24 As in Pakistan, the absence of laws and transplant systems
made OTC trafficking the leading method for organ procurement in Egypt.25 Unlike Pakistan, however, where donors are predominately
Pakistani citizens, Egypt’s
organ vendor pool is comprised of both impoverished Egyptian citizens and sub-
Saharan African refugees.26 Increasingly, organ trafficking rings involve actors who operate simultaneously in
multiple countries to recruit donors and recipients.27 India, China, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and the
Philippines all constitute such organ supply countries.28 Patients from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and
other wealthy countries travel to organ supply countries to purchase organs in the underground market.29 Such transactions represent OTC
trafficking because donors do not typically travel from their home country.30 For example, in 2008, Indian
authorities disbanded a
ring of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and hospitals that had performed 500 illegal transplants on
foreigners using predominantly impoverished Indian donors.31 Instances of human trafficking for organ removal are also
prevalent.32 This type of trafficking involves the transport of humans through threat, force, or other
coercion, including payment.33 For example, in November 2008, Yilman Altun, a Turkish national, was transported to
a clinic in Kosovo, where his kidney was removed and transplanted into an elderly Israeli who paid the clinic
more than $100,000.34 When Altun subsequently collapsed at the airport, authorities traced his operation to a network of organ
traffickers.35 The Kosovar clinic offered up to $20,000 for organs from impoverished Turkish, Russian, Moldovan, and Kazakh nationals; most
victims never received compensation.36 Trafficking
rings are not limited to the developing world; U.S. federal
authorities uncovered a trafficking ring when they arrested Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum for arranging the sale
of a kidney for $160,000.37 The subsequent investigation revealed Rosenbaum’s practice of importing foreign donors and selling their
organs to U.S. citizens.38
This form of trafficking is harmful for donors and dangers tourists

Vol. 36, Iss. 2,,
Transplant tourism and organ trafficking have pervasive negative effects.57 Organ trafficking exploits
poor individuals who are desperate to make money for survival.58 Because profit-motivated facilitators
negotiate most transactions, donor compensation is often extremely low.59 For example, kidney donors
frequently receive less than one-third of the price that recipients pay for the organ, despite initial
promises of higher payment.60 Furthermore, donors rarely receive adequate health care after the
transplant, generating negative health outcomes that impede their ability to work and worsening their
long-run financial and physical condition.61 As a result, donors rarely succeed in paying off the very debts
that often lead them to sell an organ in the first place.62 In addition, studies have exposed the negative
sociological and psychological effects of organ sales.63 Kidney vendors frequently express regret and
disgrace associated with the decision to sell a body part.64 Communities with high rates of organ sales
also shame donors, leading many to conceal their decision out of embarrassment.65 1324 Boston College Law
Review [Symposium Issue With regard to recipients, the dangers of receiving medical care in developing countries can outweigh the benefits of
life-saving transplant tourism.66 Because governmental disease control agencies do not monitor underground organ trafficking, recipients risk
contracting infectious diseases like West Nile Virus and HIV.67 Tragically, transplant tourists also have “a higher cumulative incidence of acute
[organ] rejection in the first year after transplantation.”68 Transplant tourism also harms global public health policies.69
Most notably, the underground market impedes the success of legal organ donation frameworks.70 For
example, Thai patients have difficulty accessing health care because local doctors are preoccupied with the
lucrative practice of treating transplant tourists.71 In 2007, China banned transplant tourism because wealthy foreigners—
rather than the 1.5 million Chinese on the waiting list—received an overwhelming amount of organ transplants.72 Grisly tales of
transplant tourism and conspiracy theories surrounding organ theft may also discourage individuals
from agreeing to altruistic donation upon death out of fear that their bodies may be exploited.73 This
further contributes to the global organ shortage and exacerbates the underlying causes of OTC trafficking.74 Additionally, transplant tourism
and broader medical tourism facilitate the spread of antibioticresistant bacteria.75 Because
such bacteria are frequently found
in hospitals, tourists are easily exposed and transmit these unique strains across borders upon returning
to their home countries.76 As a result of these effects, transplant tourism has drawn increasing attention to the root of the problem:
organ shortages.77
Scenario 1 is Structural Violence:
Child organ trafficking is especially violent and manipulates the most vulnerable
Bagheri 16 (Alireza Bagheri- School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
"Child Organ Trafficking: Global Reality and Inadequate International Response." Medicine, Health Care,
and Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 2, 2016, pp. 239-246. ProQuest,
https://search.proquest.com/docview/1791230591?accountid=36312,
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11019-015-9671-4//sabín)
Child organ trafficking: the worst of the worst Organ trafficking has been ethically condemned in many
professional guidelines as well as national and international laws and regulations (Istanbul Declaration 2008;
WHO Guiding Principles 2010). As stated in the Declaration of Istanbul, ‘‘organ trafficking and transplant tourism violate the principles of
equity, justice and respect for human dignity’’. In most of the cases, adults
are the subjects of organ trafficking or THOR,
however, there are numerous reports of child organ trafficking. The cases of child organ trafficking are more
horrifying as the victims are absolutely physically vulnerable defenseless children. For instance, while in
most cases of organ trafficking in adults, or THOR, the victims are released after organ removal, in the
confirmed cases of child organ trafficking, harvesting of organs from those trafficked or kidnapped
children cost their lives. Although, it cannot be claimed that all missing children were subject of organ trafficking, the confirmed cases
of child organ trafficking are missing children who have been found dead with transplantable organs
removed from their body. The UN Secretary General Report to the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, on
preventing, combating and punishing trafficking in human organs has stated that: ‘‘…many abducted or missing children have subsequently
been found dead with certain organs removed’’ (UN Secretary General Report 2006). The technical requirements of transplantation are so
formidable that to conduct such activities in a clandestine manner is a practical impossibility unless healthcare professionals are involved. In
order for an organ transplantation to have any chance of success, a number of sophisticated medical
procedures must be conducted, such as the determining of the suitability of organ for transplantation to
permit a match with potential recipients. In particular, correct tissue and blood typing is critical to matching
donor organs and potential transplant recipients. As a result, in organ trafficking not only are brokers and other
intermediaries involved, but also physicians and hospital staff. However, even in the case of adult organ trafficking, if healthcare
professionals try to justify their unethical and illegal acts by assuming that victims of organ trafficking
are convinced -often under false promises- or forced to sell their organs, and have consented to organ removal,
this unjustified reason cannot be assumed in case of child organ trafficking. How is it possible to assume that a
trafficked or kidnaped child who is under legal age has consented to organ removal? While there are several professional ethical guidelines
about the necessity of donors consent for organ removal as well as international documents against organ trade and trafficking (Istanbul
Declaration 2008; WHO Guiding Principles 2010; Asian Task Force 2008), there is no way to justify the immorality and illegality of their
involvement in removing an organ from a trafficked child and transplant it to a recipient patient. It is important to note that organ donation by
adults has been accepted by all international guidelines -given that, amongst other requirements, there is informed consentbut, as stated in the
World Health Organization Guiding Principles (2010), no organs should be removed from the body of a living minor for the purpose of
transplantation other than in narrow exceptions allowed under national law. Article 3(c) of the United Nations Trafficking in Persons Protocol
(2000), states: ‘‘The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered
trafficking in persons’’. Given the above mentioned guidelines, the question is, how physicians can be ignorant about the medical and social
history of a trafficked child before organ removal. There is another ugly picture of child organ trafficking which makes it the worst form of organ
trafficking. Whileparents have special duty to protect their children from unnecessary harms, there are
reported cases in which children have been brokered for organ removal by their parents. In these cases
usually a parent, who has been a victim of organ trafficking, is under pressure or threatened by organ
brokers or members of a gang group to victimize her child in organ trafficking to pay her further debts
(Budiani-Saberi 2012).
Organ trafficking is detrimental for victims—poor conditions for transplants ensure

long-terms health consequences and exploitation
Bowden 13 (Jacqueline Bowden- J.D. graduate from St. Thomas University School of Law. 2013,
FEELING EMPTY? ORGAN TRAFFICKING & TRADE: THE BLACK MARKET FOR HUMAN ORGANS."
Intercultural Human Rights Law Review.
LexisNexis®.http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/hottopics/lnacademic//sabín)
A. Victims There are harmful implications for the donor, n134 the recipient, n135 and other victims who are
affected by the black market for organs. n136 A victim of organ trafficking is often a prisoner, young and
easily influenced, or an immigrant who is not aware of his or her rights. n137 A victim of organ trafficking may have
a cause of action for property rights to his or her body, coercion leading to pain and suffering, and exploitation of the poor. An
individual's human rights are at risk when an organ is [*475] extracted from his or her body involuntarily,
whether the organ is extracted from a living or nonliving person. n138 Currently, there is no U.S. legislation
granting a person property rights over their organs. n139 However, under common law, there are instances when
biological materials may be defined as property if stolen. n140 Additionally, victims endure pain and their
lives are threatened due to the lack of medical attention and poor conditions during the transplants.
n141 The profit involved motivates organ trafficking; therefore, the less expense incurred during the
organ transplants, the higher the profit for the doctors and brokers. Some victims have been admitted in
hospitals for sickness and then have had their organs removed without their consent. n142 Other
victims have reported "serious medical consequences including chronic pain,
weakness and ill health" after poorly performed transplants. n143 Once the transplant is
completed, the victim often will not receive postoperative care, causing physical disabilities or life
threatening illnesses. n144 Furthermore, the evidence suggests that organ trafficking benefits the wealthy n145
while exploiting the poor. n146 For a person [*476] who has been waiting on transplant lists and receiving dialysis
treatment, the cost of paying a donor for an illegal organ often is irrelevant. n147 To
ensure equality, the benefit to the organ
recipient must not exceed the interest of the non-consenting donor for a nonrelated recipient. n148 The
profit involved in the sale of organs often helps the impoverished escape poverty and is an incentive for them to
sell their organs. n149 Applying Rational Choice Theory (RCT) may be helpful in understanding the economics
driving the organ market. Under RCT, individuals will weigh the costs and benefits relative to their own
perspective and ultimately choose to act in a way that provides the maximum advantage for them . n150
Individuals tend to give high value to resources they lack. n151 Therefore, individuals with sufficient amounts
of money, who lack healthy organs, are willing to pay the necessary costs associated with the benefits of
new organs because this will provide maximum value for them. On the other hand, individuals who lack monetary means and
are desperate for money may be willing to bear the costs of parting with their organs to earn a decent sum if they
feel that they can live with this decision. Poor [*477] individuals may value the benefits of currency higher than the risks associated with the
sale of their organs and thereby may feel they are maximizing their opportunities. Living organ donors are often those living
in poverty,
as they are more vulnerable and are typically more willing to accept large amounts of money in exchange
for an organ. For example, at a Tsunami refugee camp in Chennai, India, the poor were exploited for their organs because, for some, it was
the only way to make money. n152 A victim from the Tsunami refugee camp gave her story of how she was
coerced into donating her kidney. n153 The victim was told her kidney was sold to the son of a wealthy
foreigner for $ 40,000. n154 However, the victim only received $ 700, yet she was promised to receive $ 3,500 and
was threatened when she attempted to collect the remaining balance. n155
Scenario 2 is Disease:
Transplant tourism increases the risk of infectious diseases

Babik and Hong 15 (Jennifer M. Babik & Peter Chin-Hong, 4-1-2015, "Transplant Tourism:
Understanding the Risks," SpringerLink, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11908-015-0473-
x//sabín)
Increased Risk of Infection The majority of studies on outcomes in transplant tourism show a significant
increased risk of infection in the tourism group, whose rate of infections are approximately 45–54 %
versus 5 % in the non-tourist group [16, 19, 20, 25]. One study showed that transplant tourism conferred an
increased risk of infection by 85-fold compared with domestic transplants [19]. These infections often occurred
early in the post-transplant course [12, 20]. Bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic infections have all been described
(Table 1). Infections in the setting of transplant tourism can be from procedural complications (such as wound
infections), nosocomial infections, blood-borne pathogens, or due to a geographically restricted pathogen
acquired as a donor-derived infection or acquired in the peri-transplant period while staying in an area of
endemicity [18••]. The risk of nosocomial infections is significantly higher in developing countries [26]. ICU
infection rates are 3.5-fold higher, and surgical site infection rates are twofold higher in developing countries
compared to developed nations [26]. Another sobering statistic is that 39 % of injections given in the developing world are
provided with reused equipment [27]. Explanations for the high rates of infection include the following: (1) many regions
where transplant tourism is practiced are tropical or subtropical areas with high rates of endemic
infections such as malaria, tuberculosis (TB), and other geographically restricted infections; (2) these
regions often have a high prevalence of pathogens such as HIV, hepatitis B virus (HBV), and hepatitis C
virus (HCV); (3) donor infectious diseases screening is likely variable and the assays used may be
substandard; (4) poor hygiene and operative conditions may exist; (5) inadequate education of patients
regarding infectious risk post-transplant; and (6) lack of prophylaxis against opportunistic infections [1, 11,
12, 14, 18••, 28]. Bacterial Infections Many reports describe wound infections, often severe, in patients
returning from a transplant abroad [4, 6, 9, 11, 21•, 20, 23]. These infections have been described with resistant
organisms, including multi-drug resistant Pseudomonas and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus [4, 11].
Urinary tract infections are also common, including infections with multidrug resistant Escherichia coli [16] and Acinetobacter [13]. Multi-
drug resistant organisms are a significant concern in many developing countries where antibiotics can be
purchased without a prescription, leading to overuse and widespread resistance [18••]. For example, ESBL rates
in India are 70–90 % [18••, 29]. In addition, the New Delhi-metallo-βlactamase (NDM) carbapenemases were
initially isolated in India but subsequently have been found in many other countries, often introduced by
patients who have pursued medical tourism abroad, including transplantation [18••, 29]. In the absence of
overt infection, travelers can also return colonized with multi-drug resistant pathogens [18••]. TB has been
described in 2–15 % of patients who have procured a transplant abroad [6, 16], including a fatal disseminated case in the USA that was acquired
in Pakistan [13]. Viral Infections Transplant
tourism increases the risk of several viral infections, most importantly
HIV, HBV, and cytomegalovirus (CMV). CMV has been reported in up to 33 % of patients returning from
transplants abroad, usually occurring in the first few months after transplant [4, 6, 11, 16]. This has been attributed
to very low rates of CMV prophylaxis use in this group [11, 14]. Patients returning from transplantation abroad have reportedly high rates of
seroconversion with HIV (4–6 %) and HBV (2–18 %) [4, 21•, 25]. Some cases of HBV infection have been fatal [11] and
others have led to local outbreaks, raising a public health concern for the introduction of
communicable diseases into the community from transplant tourism [30]. There also appears to be an
increased risk of HCV based on the high prevalence of HCV seropositivity in patients who have
undergone transplantation abroad (up to 37 % in one study), although limited pre-transplant screening in some cases
makes the exact number that have been transmitted via transplantation unknown [31]. These high rates of infection with blood-
borne pathogens are thought due to inadequate donor screening and/or transmission while on
hemodialysis in the foreign country [25]. A study of commercial kidney donors in Pakistan showed that 24 % were HCV antibody
positive and 4 % hepatitis B surface antigen positive following organ donation. It is not known if these donors had preexisting infections or
acquired infection in the setting of transplant, but the former was suspected [15]. Fungal Infections Fungal infection is perhaps
the most feared infectious complication of transplant tourism and occurs in approximately 4 % of patients [32]. The
most common fungi reported are Aspergillus and Zygomycetes but there are also rare cases of Ramichloridium, Pseudallescheria boydii, and
Trichosporon [17, 33–38]. These infections may directly involve the transplanted kidney and can be necrotic, form abscesses, and involve the
vasculature. A review of 19 fungal infections in 17 commercial renal transplants performed in Asia or the Middle East showed that 63 % were
Aspergillus and 26 % were Zygomycetes [34]. All infections were extrapulmonary or disseminated with direct involvement of the graft in 35 %
and infection of the CNS in 29 %. Graft loss occurred in 76 % and the overall mortality in this group was 59 %. The
very high rates of
direct infection of the graft were thought to be due to infection in the donor or contamination of the
organ during procurement, transport, or transplantation [33, 34, 36, 38]. Presumably as a result of this mechanism of
infection, transplant tourism accounts for 22 % of all donor-derived filamentous fungal infections [17].
Pneumocystis jiroveci (PCP) is also more commonly seen in the setting of transplant tourism. In one study, rates of PCP in patients undergoing
transplant in China was 8 % compared to 1 % in those done domestically in Korea [19]. Similar to the case of CMV, this may be due to variable
practices in prescribing prophylaxis [11, 14]. Parasitic
Infections The parasitic infection that has been reported most
commonly in the setting of transplant tourism is malaria. It has been most frequently described in
patients who received their transplants in India with a rate of 6–11 % [20, 23, 39–41]. Infections usually occur at a
mean of 44 days (range 20–83) after transplantation and have been described with Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, and
Plasmodium malariae [41]. In general, patients do well with rapid recovery following the initiation of antimalarial therapy [41]. It is presumed
that the infection is acquired via the organ itself, in the setting of blood transfusion peri-operatively, or by mosquito bites within the foreign
country [23].
This is ensured by a lack of medical follow-up and corrupt physician networks

Macias and Ma 17 (Macias-Konstantopoulos W., Ma Z.B. (2017) Physical Health of Human Trafficking
Survivors: Unmet Essentials. In: Chisolm-Straker M., Stoklosa H. (eds) Human Trafficking Is a Public
Health Issue. Springer, Cham//sabín)
A 2002 study of individuals who had undergone paid kidney removal in India found that 86%
of those exploited for organ
removal reported deterioration in their health [66]. Factors identified as contributing to their decline in
health included insufficient prior medical screening and pre-existing compromising health conditions. Commonly
reported complications of organ removal included the development of chronic pain and cramping at the
site of incision, inability to lift heavy objects or perform labor-intensive work, swelling of legs,
hypertension, loss of appetite, insomnia, and considerable fatigue [66–69]. One study found that the vast majority
(78%) of persons trafficked for organ removal did not receive medical follow-up care after kidney
removal. Many cited hesitance in consulting a doctor due to the association of physicians with their
exploitation and instead relied upon non-prescribed pain medicine from local pharmacies. Of the
minority of those who did receive post-removal care, it was never by the medical professional(s) who
performed the kidney removal, but rather by health care providers in local low-cost clinics. Additionally,
89% of those who disclosed the financial repercussions of their organ removal reported they could not
return to their labor-intensive jobs, thus limiting their ability to generate future income and leading to
further incurred debt. Finally, it is worth noting that all study participants unanimously regretted the
commercial removal of a kidney and would advise others against it [67]
Current donor screening fails

Franco-Paredes 10 (Carlos Franco-Paredes- Division of Infectious Diseases, Emory University School
of Medicine. March 2010, "Transplantation and tropical infectious diseases," International Journal of
Infectious Diseases. Volume 14, Issue 3, Pages e189-e196
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971209002045//sabín)
4. Recipient and donor screening for tropical infections Given

the urgency of non-elective transplantation protocols
once an organ donor has been identified, screening the donor for multiple diseases is often logistically
difficult and therefore having a low threshold for some of the above discussed tropical infections is
critical among those transplant recipients with different clinical syndromes.8, 110, 133, 134 The potential for
infectious disease transmission from a donor to a transplant recipient as the cause of illness may not be
initially considered in the clinical evaluation. Persistent fever without an etiology, atypical neurological, gastrointestinal, or
pulmonary presentations should alert clinicians to the possibility of the potential for some tropical infectious disease transmission from a donor
to a transplant recipient as the cause of illness. Investigation of
potential donor-transmitted infections requires
communication among physicians in multiple transplantation centers, public health authorities, and
organ procurement and transplantation networks.94, 101, 104 In this manner, emerging tropical viral, parasitic, bacterial,
and fungal pathogens have been identified and traced back to donors.6, 22, 94, 101, 104
Specifically, transplant tourism spreads tropical diseases
Franco-Paredes 10 (Carlos Franco-Paredes- Division of Infectious Diseases, Emory University School
of Medicine. March 2010, "Transplantation and tropical infectious diseases," International Journal of
Infectious Diseases. Volume 14, Issue 3, Pages e189-e196
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971209002045//sabín)
3.1. Viral infections and transplantation Many

transplanted patients may live or travel to regions where some of
the most frequent viral tropical infections are prevalent. Transplant recipients traveling to resource-
constrained settings endemic for tropical infections including yellow fever, dengue, rabies, and other
viral pathogens should seek expert pretravel medical advice to maximally decrease their risk of infection.8, 12 This is important as
immunosuppression associated with transplantation may affect the outcome of acute viral infections or
the course of virus latency, with potential life-threatening consequences.84 There are reports of HIV,11,
20, 21 hepatitis B,11, 20, 21 hepatitis C,20, 21 measles,85, 86 human T-lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1)
infection,87, 88, 89 dengue,90, 91, 92 and other viral pathogens being responsible for significant sequelae and
mortality in transplant recipients.93 In this regard, yellow fever presents a risk to transplant recipients who
are traveling to endemic areas in part because the vaccine is live and therefore should be avoided.8, 12
Transplant tourism has been responsible for a significant number of patients acquiring hepatitis B,
hepatitis C, or HIV-infection in those transplanted overseas.11, 20, 21, 93 There may also be an increased
risk of West Nile virus infection, lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, or some hemorrhagic fever virus in
many tropical areas of the world, including some parts of the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa,
and Latin America, but there are only recent descriptions, mostly in non-tropical settings.94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101,
102 It remains to be determined if other similar flaviviruses such as Japanese encephalitis virus may pose an increased risk of complications in
transplant recipients.103 Rabies is rarely observed after transplantation with only a few cases acquired from infected donors in industrialized
countries.3, 104, 105 However, with increasing travel of transplant recipients to areas where rabies may be
more prevalent and also due to transplant tourism, rabies becomes a potential pathogen for transplant
recipients. In addition, live rabies vaccine for use in wildlife has caused human disease and presents a potential risk to transplant recipients
who come into direct contact with wildlife.3 We discuss below, in more detail, some HTLV-1, measles, and dengue virus infections in transplant
recipients. Although these infections may be acquired in non-tropical settings, the risk of their acquisition is higher in developing tropical areas
of the world.
New diseases and globalization ensure extinction—assumes new advances

Franca 13 (R. F. O. França—Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto,
University of São Paulo. 22 January 2013. "Recent advances in molecular medicine techniques for the
diagnosis, prevention, and control of infectious diseases." European Journal of Clinical Microbiology &
Infectious Diseases, https://link-springer-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10096-013-
1813-0.pdf//sabín)
Despite the great advances in medicine, particularly in new therapeutic drugs, diagnostic tools, and even
ways to prevent diseases, the human species still faces serious health problems. Among these problems, those
that draw the most attention are infectious diseases, especially in poor regions. An important feature of
infectious disease is its potential to arise globally, as exemplified by known devastating past and
present pandemics such as the bubonic–pneumonic plague, Spanish flu (1918 influenza pandemic), and the
present pandemic of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), in which an estimated 33.3 million persons were living with
the HIV infection worldwide at the end of 2009 [1–3]. In addition, other non-viral diseases are significant public health
problems, as exemplified by tuberculosis (TB). This infectious disease accounts for one third of the
world’s bacterial infections (TB infected), and in 2010 a total of 8.8 million people worldwide became sick with TB [1, 4]. In recent
years, new forms of infectious diseases have become significantly important to medical and scientific
communities; these forms are now widely known as emergent and re-emergent infectious diseases.
With the appearance of new transmissible diseases, such as SARS, West Nile and H5N1/H1N1 Influenza
viruses, in addition to reemerging diseases like dengue fever, the concerns about a global epidemic are
not unfounded [5]. Moreover, in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world, parasitic infections are a
common cause of death. Since one of the major characteristics of infectious diseases is its inter-individual
transmission, advances in personal protection, effective public policy, and immunological procedures are efficient means of controlling the
spread of these diseases. Thus, improvement of pre-existing technologies commonly used to monitor, prevent, and treat infectious diseases is
of crucial importance not only to the medical community, but also to humankind.
Solvency
The TVPA excludes organ trafficking victims from protections—expanding the
definition allows for equal treatment
Pugliese 07 (Elizabeth Pugliese- graduate of the Catholic University Columbus School of Law. She is
licensed to practice law in the state of Maryland. She holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in
International Relations. 2007, "Organ Trafficking and the TVPA: Why One Word Makes a Difference in
International Enforcement Efforts" 24 J. Contemp. Health L. & Pol'y 181,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/75b4/31fd0e9726d1dc8137c8b9084f09542b90a2.pdf//sabín)
B. Lack of Inclusion Denies TVPA Protection to the Victims of Trafficking Brought to this Country While
the United States has an organ trafficking law, it does not provide for any protections for the victim of
organ trafficking.' 33 The trafficking law is a criminal statute focused on punishing the criminal. A victim
of a trafficker convicted under this law would not be eligible for any benefits or protections guaranteed
to victims under the TVPA.13 A person who is trafficked into this country is entitled to the same benefits as any refugee once the
victim is certified by the Department of Health and Human Services.' 35 This certification process requires that the victim had
been subjected to a severe form of trafficking as defined in the TVPA.1 36 Only those who are victims of
a severe form of trafficking may be certified and may then receive federal and/or state benefits. 137 A
victim of organ trafficking brought to the United States would not meet this definition
since organ trafficking is not found in the TVPA. While a victim could claim refugee status under another
standard, 138 few victims of trafficking are denied continuing presence status in the United States. 139 Without
this certification, a victim of organ trafficking can be held in a detention facility while a certified victim of
another form of trafficking would not.1 40 Certification grants a victim access to federal and state benefits denied to those who
are not legally in this country and/or are subject to deportation.'14 A victim of organ trafficking cannot prove a credible
fear of persecution upon return to his/her home country. A non-certified victim could not get housing,
access to job training, or even health care. 143 A victim of organ trafficking especially needs access to
health care because of the special health problems related to organ removal. 144 By changing the TVPA
to include organ trafficking, the victims of this form of human trafficking would be eligible for the same
benefits as those subject to other forms of human trafficking. There should be no discrimination
between victims of trafficking based on the form. All are victims and all are equally deserving of
protection. Extending the protection to the few victims of organ trafficking who might be trafficked into
this country probably would not overwhelm refugee services. There are few enough that they could most likely be easily
fit into the existing system. There is currently a cap of 5000 T-visas a year. 145 Thousands of T-visas remain available every
year. 146 Therefore, it is unlikely that extending the TVPA protections to organ trafficking victims will put
any further strain on a system designed to handle 5000 that in reality handles far less. Inclusion of organ
trafficking in human trafficking would enable all victims of any form of trafficking to be treated the
same, which would allow for easier delivery of services.
The aff challenges the victimized meta-narrative of human trafficking by recognizing

organ trafficking as its own form of violence
Columb 15 (Seán Columb- Lecturer in Law at the Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice. His
primary research area is on human trafficking and transnational crime. Seán's current research examines
how the organ trade fits into the anti-trafficking framework at national (UK), international and regional
(EU) levels; its link to organised crime and the wider political economy. "Beneath the Organ Trade: A
Critical Analysis of the Organ Trafficking Discourse." Crime, Law and Social Change, vol. 63, no. 1-2, 2015,
pp. 21-47. ProQuest, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1673866379?accountid=36312,
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10611-014-9548-0.//sabín)
The meta-narrative of human trafficking The prevailing discourse or the meta-narrative of human
trafficking is premised on a number of assumptions put forward by government authorities, human
rights advocates, and NGOs. In general, human trafficking is constructed as a global crime and a grave violation of human
rights that exists on an enormous scale [117]. It is purported that human trafficking is primarily a problem of crime control that persists due to
weak regulations in ‘other’ States [116]. In response national anti-trafficking strategies should build expertise in law enforcement and
strengthen legislation to protect victims [118]. Victims are generally portrayed as un-educated, poor and vulnerable.
The following account taken from the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report (US Department of State, 2012) is said to illustrate the
‘myriad forms of exploitation that comprise trafficking and the variety of cultures in which trafficking victims are found’ ([119]: 9). Uta was 7
years old when she was sent from Romania to work as a domestic servant in the United Kingdom. Her family thought this was an opportunity to
get Uta away from poverty, but the Romanian couple who recruited her physically and verbally abused her daily and forced her to sleep on the
floor. The couple also enslaved and raped another victim, Razvan, a 53-year-old Romanian man. After being severely beaten and seeing the way
the couple treated Uta, Razvan escaped and reported the offenses to the police. When the police rescued Uta she was dressed in filthy clothes,
had scabs covering her head, and her teeth were so rotten they had to be removed. She had never been to school and could not even count to
ten in her own language. The Romanian couple was found guilty of trafficking and was sentenced to a maximum of 14 years in prison [119].
Victim accounts, like the one above, are found in news media, captured in documentary films, feature on NGO
websites and are published in international government reports. The grim image of a beaten, raped and/or enslaved
individual is typically juxtaposed with a foreboding statistic reporting that "millions" of people are trafficked each year
[119]. 7 Extrapolating from the most extreme cases, an idealized image of victim suffering and criminality
becomes representative of the phenomenon as a whole, despite evidence based research indicating
otherwise [1, 122, 37]. Attitudes are adjusted and resources are allocated according to a particular regime
of truth, belonging to the meta-narrative of human trafficking. Other factors or variables, such as human
agency, migration patterns, cultural difference and socio-economic conditions are all overlooked.
While there is no doubt that trafficked persons can and do suffer from extreme forms of violence a
selective focus on exceptional cases of human trafficking, predominantly with a strong sexual
component, does not account for the diverse circumstances and environments that foster exploitation
of various kinds. In short, this discourse or meta-narrative represents a standard vision and approach to the
problem, despite important intersections of agency, identity, culture and politics. The genealogy of the
major international instruments that deal with human trafficking is revealing in this regard. Both the Protocol to
Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention on
Transnational Organized Crime [112] (hereinafter the Trafficking Protocol) and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA 2000) were,
largely, established in response to the persistent lobbying of abolitionist feminist groups and conservative Christian
groups opposed to sex-work [6, 123, 7]. For these groups the phenomenon of trafficking was assimilated
into a moral crusade to abolish ‘prostitution’. Advocates of this particular strand of feminism argue that women only resort to
selling sex because they lack the same socio-economic opportunities as men [123]; therefore prostitution represents female subjugation to
male dominance. Whereas the religious right is concerned with the threat commercial sex poses to marriage, family and moral order [123].
Integral to the construction of the meta-narrative was the belief that all sex-workers were in fact passive
victims of predatory men whose subjugation had reduced them to the lowest form of moral deprivation:
prostitution. As Laura Agustin reveals in her incisive book Sex at the Margins this narrative feeds into the governmentality (the techniques
and/or strategies by which the population is rendered governable) of regulatory agencies and politically motivated NGOs who respectively aim
to tighten migration control and abolish the sex trade [1]. 8 Without the sort of pressure described above, it is unlikely that trafficking as a
phenomenon would have been elevated beyond the margins of political debate to the mainstream of political concern. 9 A similar "moral
panic" precipitated the movement to make the illegal organ trade an object of international concern (see
Introduction). In this instance the meta-narrative of human trafficking is being instrumentalised to advance 7 It is unsurprising then that the TIP
report 2012 ‘estimates’ that there are currently around 27 million people trafficked around the world. A seemingly static figure alluded to by
several authors and advocates since Kevin Bale’s account of modern slavery in 2000. 8 This is evident in the legislative bias of
domestic human trafficking laws targeting trafficking for sexual exploitation ([8, 22]). 9 While originally
spearheaded by a moral campaign to abolish sex-trafficking the final draft of the Trafficking Protocol includes human trafficking in various
forms, i.e. organ removal. The TVPA does not directly recognise organ trafficking or the removal of organ(s) as a
form of exploitation. See, Pugliese, E. (2007). Organ Trafficking and the TVPA: Why One Word Makes a Difference in International
Enforcement Efforts. J. Contemp. Health L. & Poly, 24, 181. 24 S. Columb the interests of the transplant industry, 10 concerned that the illegal
organ trade will undermine the integrity/reputation of transplantation and essentially its economic validity. While it is important that organ
trafficking is recognized as a trafficking offence, evidence based research ([130, 85, 55, 12, 83, 128, 80]) indicates that
the majority
of organ sellers 11 do not conform to the typical victim profile popularized by the meta-narrative of
human trafficking.
The separation of organ trafficking from human trafficking prevents effective solutions
Vol. 36, Iss. 2,,
Despite the UN/COE Study’s conclusion that existing legally binding instruments adequately address human
trafficking for organ removal, these instruments have not actually yielded successful results.310 Commentators
have criticized the placement of human trafficking within the scope of organized crime because it does not
adequately reflect the contours of such a complex problem.311 This line of criticism is further validated when considered
in tandem with the fact that organ trafficking is buried under the scope of both organized crime and human
trafficking in the Trafficking Protocol.312 The UN/COE Study correctly notes that the Protocol establishes a means for
criminalizing human trafficking for organ removal, but most countries have failed to do so because the
Protocol focuses more on other forms of human trafficking.313 For example, the U.S. TVPA fails to include
organ trafficking in its definition of human trafficking.314 As a result, the U.S. State Department’s 2011
Trafficking in Persons Report does not even mention organ trafficking.315 Because nations that receive unfavorable
evaluations are subject to mandatory sanctions from the United States, countries focus on forms of trafficking that fall
within the U.S. definition while ignoring human trafficking for organ removal.316 A new independent
instrument that includes human trafficking for organ removal would clarify the scope of the issue and
prompt countries to adequately address all aspects of organ trafficking.317 The UN/COE Study’s conclusion that the
two manifestations of organ trafficking require different solutions exposes the underlying bias toward a criminal law approach.318 The need
to differentiate between OTC trafficking and human trafficking for organ removal only arises in a
criminal law context because of the desire to criminalize the different actions resulting from each.319
Nevertheless, even in a criminal law context, the UN/COE Study notes that the two types of organ trafficking often
“overlap . . . in scope.”320 Thus, while the proposed instrument should address these differences when
delineating penal definitions, the broader purpose of eradicating the causes of organ trafficking would
not benefit from such bifurcation.321 The instrument’s requirement that countries revise organ
procurement systems to reduce the organ shortage, if successful, would diminish the demand for all types
of organ trafficking.322
Squo organ trafficking laws fail—they’re under the commerce clause which prevents
effective prosecution and treats people like commodities
D. The United States Already Has a Law to Address Organ Trafficking There is a federal law already in existence that makes
it a crime to buy or sell an organ in such a way as to affect interstate commerce.165 An organ that is
internationally trafficked would also give Congress jurisdiction under the Commerce Clause, as this
clause concerns the regulation of commerce with foreign nations as well as between states.' 66 Therefore, it
would appear there is no need for another law regarding organ trafficking. The current organ trafficking law
prohibits anyone from acquiring, receiving or transferring any human organ. 16 On the plain face of the statute, it would
appear to cover everyone involved in organ trafficking, including any middle men who handle the organ. However, the
person who merely facilitates the meeting between the trafficker and the end user, since that person
is not actually transferring the organ, might not fall under this provision. The TVPA includes provisions
for anyone who benefits from a trafficking enterprise, even if the person is not actively involved in the
168 trafficking. Inclusion of organ trafficking in the TVPA would expand authorities' ability to prosecute
to those peripherally involved in the trafficking. The prohibition against organ trafficking only applies if it
affects interstate commerce. 169 However, this is the wrong jurisdictional hook for this crime. The TVPA was
enacted under the power given to Congress pursuant to the Thirteenth Amendment, not the Commerce
Clause. 70 The issue addressed by that amendment is the treatment of people, not the goods produced or
the effect on commerce. 17 It is the same with organ trafficking. Organ trafficking is not a commercial
venture that needs overseeing; it is a human rights violation. The scars left by organ trafficking-if the person survives
the encounter with the trafficker-are "badges and incidents of slavery."' 72 By adding organ trafficking to the TVPA, Congress would recognize
this issue for the real crime it represents. 73
IL—Black Market
The current state of organ donation explains the black market
Kuenzli 18 (Kristine D. Kuenzli- Assistant Professor of Law at the United States Air Force Academy.
Spring 2018. Journal of Law and Commerce 36 J.L. & Com. 131, "LexisNexis® Academic & Library
Solutions," http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/hottopics/lnacademic//sabín)
Every day in the United States, 20 to 30 people die waiting for an organ donation. n3 There are more than
119,000 men, women, and children on the national transplant waiting list, and more than 80% of transplant
candidates are waiting for the donation of a kidney. n4 In 2015, a total of 37,910 organs were donated, however, more than 80% of the
donations were from deceased [*134] donors. n5 Further, only 3 in every 1,000 people die in such a way as to make
them eligible for organ donation, and only 48% of adults in the United States are currently signed up as
donors. n6 Finally, this problem is not resolving itself. Each year, the number of people on the waiting list
continues to grow, while the number of donors grows slowly. In fact, the number of people on the organ
donation waitlist has more than quadrupled in the last 22 years, while the number of organ donors has
remained relatively constant. n7 In economic terms, the current system does not adequately incentivize the market to adjust supply
to demand. This situation is only going to get worse as medical technology, combined with our country's
aging population, results in citizens living longer, which creates an increase in the demand for transplant
organs. Although living donors are an important source of kidneys, living donation rates are not
increasing at a level to satisfy demand.
IL—Disease
It hurts the donor and the buyer
Huang 17 (Johnny W Huang, June 2017, "The Journey of Buying and Selling a Kidney: Is the Organ
Trade Worth it?," University of Toronto Medical Journal,
http://utmj.org/index.php/UTMJ/article/view/1803//sabín)
Discussion This hypothetical case of organ trafficking from the perspectives of the donor and recipient illustrates the dismal side of transplant
tourism. Isthis organ trade worth it? It may be wise to do a cost-benefit analysis from the perspectives of
buying and selling a kidney (Table 1). While transplant tourism may bring short-lived benefits among organ
sellers, it often leads to declined quality of life, economic loss, post-operative complications, loss of
dignity, and social stigma.9-12 Using a cross-sectional study of 305 kidney sellers, Goyal and colleagues found that
most of the monetary compensation was used to pay off personal debt. However, the average family
income declined by one third after nephrectomy (P<0.001), and the number of increased.12 For organ
buyers, transplant tourism is associated with numerous acute complications (e.g. urinary infection, acute
kidney injury, graft rejection) and chronic complications (e.g. poor kidney function, graft survival, and
overall survival) that can result in graft failure and need for dialysis.13-18 Compared to domestic transplant recipients,
transplant tourists have significantly higher cumulative incidence of acute rejection at 1-year post-
transplant (P=0.02).17 Moreover, another study reported that transplant tourists were at higher risk for developing
donor-transmitted viral diseases such as hepatitis B and cytomegalovirus infections.17
AT: Reauthorization
672 T-Visas were given out last year
DOS 18. (Department of State. June, 2o18. "Trafficking In Person Report 2018",
https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/282798.pdf//sabín)
DHS provides trafficking-specific immigration options through Continued Presence, which is temporary, and T nonimmigrant status (commonly
referred to as the T visa). T visa applicants must have been victims of a severe form of trafficking in persons, be in the United States, American
Samoa, or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or at a port of entry because of trafficking, and show cooperation with
reasonable requests from law enforcement unless they are younger than 18 years of age or unable to cooperate due to trauma suffered. They
must also demonstrate that they would suffer extreme hardship involving unusual and severe harm upon removal from the United States. T
visa applicants may petition for certain family members, including certain extended family members who face a present danger of retaliation; T
visa beneficiaries and their derivative family members are authorized to work and are eligible for certain federal public benefits and services. T
upon the completion
nonimmigrant status lasts for four years and may be extended under certain circumstances. After three years, or
of the investigation or prosecution, those with T visas may be eligible to apply for lawful permanent
resident status and eventually may be eligible for citizenship. DHS granted T nonimmigrant status to
672 victims and 690 eligible family members of victims in FY 2017, a decrease from 750 and 986 in FY
2016.
Congress allocated 300 billion dollars under 260 laws with expired authorization last year—
reauthorization doesn’t matter
Vinik 16 (Danny Vinik—Assistant Editor, The Agenda — POLITICO. 2-3-2016, "Meet your unauthorized
federal government," Agenda, https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/02/government-agencies-
programs-unauthorized-000036-000037//sabín)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives have not been reauthorized by Congress since 2009. The State Department
hasn’t been reauthorized since 2003. For the Federal Trade Commission and National Weather Service,
it’s 1998 and 1993, respectively. The Federal Election Commission has been operating with an expired
authorization since way back in 1981. Meet your unauthorized government. Every federal agency is
supposed to operate under congressional authorization—the set of rules that define the priorities and activities of the
government. When they expire, it’s a chance to reconsider an agency’s mission, modernize it and impose
some accountability on what could otherwise become multi-billion-dollar zombie government programs.
But increasingly, Congress is just letting those bills languish. Annual reports from the Congressional Budget Office show
that a growing number of agencies and programs operate each year without congressional authorization.
In the 2016 fiscal year, Congress funded more than $300 billion in programs that lawmakers have not
reauthorized—more than a quarter of discretionary spending. That’s a huge jump from two decades ago, when
unauthorized programs were closer to $35 billion, just 10 percent of the budget. On Wednesday, this growing problem will receive
congressional attention when the Senate Budget Committee holds a hearing to examine CBO’s most recent report, bringing some formal
attention to an issue that tends to languish in bureaucratic obscurity. Congress’failure to pass reauthorizations doesn’t
prevent government agencies from functioning; an agency can keep operating as long as it gets money
in the budget. But critics say the inattention demonstrates a failure to uphold one of the most basic responsibilities of the legislative
branch: oversight. This negligence, they say, has allowed ineffective programs to continue for years, wasting taxpayer money and foregoing
much-needed modernization efforts to ensure the government has the resources and legal authority to address the top issues facing the
country. “Theoversight doesn’t get done,” said Allen Schick, a professor at the University of Maryland who has written one of the
most comprehensive books on the budget process. “That’s a good part of the rationale for temporary authorizations of
appropriations. [Congress said,] ‘Let’s reauthorize them and at the point of reauthorization, let’s look over and see how they’re doing.’ But
oversight is not exactly a booming business in Congress.” The traditional way Congress creates and funds a new government program is by
passing a law, then appropriating money for it. This process dates back to the very first Congress, in 1789, which passed a law establishing the
War Department and a separate law funding it. The goal was to separate the money and policy decisions, out of worries that disagreements
over policy would delay the flow of money, and that pressure to appropriate would lead lawmakers to pass legislation without proper
scrutiny—what we called “riders” today. Implicit in this budget process is a middle step: Congress granting the
authority for money to be spent. Historically, these so-called “authorizations” were permanent, and for
many years in the 19th century, they weren’t even put in writing. They were simply assumed. It wasn’t until after World War II
that Congress began putting an expiration date on its authorizations, ensuring that lawmakers would
regularly reevaluate programs and agencies. Some programs are supposed to be reauthorized every year,
like the defense spending bill; others operate on multiyear calendars, like the farm bill, which Congress
typically reauthorizes every five years. But increasingly often, authority lapses and Congress fails to pass
reauthorizations at all. “They tried to clamp down on [permanent reauthorizations] because they thought if we quit doing that, we’ll
have to actually stop and take the time and do reauthorizations, which is really well-intended,” said Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the R Street
Institute and former analyst at the Congressional Research Service. He added: “And they just failed at it.” Each January, the Congressional
Budget Office releases a report outlining every program that is operating with unauthorized
appropriations. The budget office’s most recent report, released about two weeks ago, found that in the 2016 fiscal year, Congress
has appropriated $310 billion under 260 laws with expired authorizations.
Agencies operate effectively without reauthorization

Vinik 16 (Danny Vinik—Assistant Editor, The Agenda — POLITICO. 2-3-2016, "Meet your unauthorized
federal government," Agenda, https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/02/government-agencies-
programs-unauthorized-000036-000037//sabín)
For members of Congress, the political consequences of failing to pass these reauthorizations are almost
nonexistent. The courts have ruled that appropriations in absence of an authorization are legal,
relieving pressure on lawmakers. “The more you appropriate for an expired authorizations, the less
incentive you have to reauthorize,” said Schick. “Nothing bad happens.” The agencies themselves are affected in different ways.
Some, like the FEC, have become so accustomed to their status that they effectively operate on autopilot,
with little guidance from Congress. “If there is any impact of us not having [authorization], there would
be no way for me to know that,” said Ann Ravel, chair of the FEC, in an interview. ”But I don’t believe there is. …
Apparently, nobody has ever felt the need to try to make a change in this situation.” Ravel, in fact, said she hadn’t realized the FEC’s
authorization ran out. “I had no idea that was the case until you asked about it,” she said. “So, it’s interesting because I’ve
been in the finance committee meetings and the like and it has never been raised at the commission
level.” In fact, some agencies are not especially eager to be reauthorized because new legislation could
restrict their powers or give them more responsibilities without increased funding. And often, agencies
already feel they face enough oversight from Congress, even without an authorization.
AT: Squo Solves—WHO
WHO is ineffective—not enough credibility
There is a strong link between organ commercialism, transplant tourism and trafficking. While
these issues have to be dealt in a
comprehensive way, the WHO Guiding Principles has missed to address these global problems all
together. For instance, Article 4 of the Guiding Principles clearly prohibits the removal of organs from living minors
for the purpose of transplantation, but it does not address the issue of child organ trafficking in particular
and does not instruct the member states how to tackle this growing illegal and unethical phenomenon.
AT: Squo Solves—Professional Organizations
Professional organizations are insufficient
In 2008, an initiative
led by the Transplantation Society and the International Society of Nephrology
resulted in the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism. This initiative was
specifically intended to address the urgent and growing problems of organ sales, transplant tourism and trafficking (Istanbul Declaration 2008).
The Declaration consists of six principles and proposes several strategies to increase the donor pool and
to prevent organ trafficking, transplant commercialism and transplant tourism, and to encourage
legitimate life-saving transplantation programs. The Declaration states that organ trafficking and transplant tourism violate
the principles of equity, justice and respect for human dignity and that they should be prohibited. It calls for the development of programs to
prevent organ failure; national self-sufficiency in organ transplantation; and enhanced deceased organ donation programs. These two
documents have the potential to build consensus amongst the professional transplant community against
organ trafficking and transplant tourism around the world, however, none of them have addressed the
issue of child organ trafficking explicitly and failed to warn transplant surgeon about removing an
organ from a trafficked child.
Impact—Structural Violence
Donors do not benefit financially, face worse health conditions, and regret their
decisions
Budiani-Saberi 08 (Debra. A. Budiani-Saberi— Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA. 4-1-2008, "Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism: A Commentary on the Global
Realities," No Publication, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-
6143.2008.02200.x//sabín)
The Consequence to the Vendors What then of this emerging worldwide population of live kidney vendors? In Pakistan, the SIUT group has
carefully detailed a sample cohort of (n = 239) vendors in a follow‐up—the outcome all very troubling (12). The
majority of these CLDs (93%) who sold a kidney to repay a debt and (85%) reported no economic improvement
in their lives, as they were either still in debt or were unable to achieve their objective in selling the
kidney. The disturbing report by the SIUT group becomes not only an accounting of the Pakistani experience
but an indictment of the international transplant community because it overlooks the plight of the
donor whose interests are just as valid as the recipients. Egypt is one of the few countries that prohibits organ donation
from deceased donors. In the absence of an entity to govern allocation or standards for transplants, the market has become the distribution
mechanism. Egypt is also one of the countries in which COFS has conducted extensive field research and long‐term
outreach service programs for victims of the organ trade. In‐depth longitudinal interviews conducted
by Budiani reveal that 78% of the CLDs (n = 50) reported a deterioration in their health condition. This is likely a
result of factors such as insufficient donor medical screening for a donation, pre‐existing
compromised health conditions of CLD groups and that the majority of employed CLDs reported
working in labor‐intensive jobs. A kidney sale does not solve the most frequently given reason for being a
CLD, 81% spent the money within 5 months of the nephrectomy, mostly to pay off financial debts rather
than investing in quality of life enhancements. CLDs are not eager to reveal their identity; 91% expressed social
isolation about their donation and 85% were unwilling to be known publicly as an organ vendor.
Ninety‐four percent regretted their donation (13). The studies in Pakistan and Egypt are
consistent with findings in India (14), Iran (15) and the Philippines (16) that revealed deterioration in
the health condition of the CLDs. A long‐term financial disadvantage is evident following nephrectomy
from a compromised ability to generate a prior income level. The common experience also entails a
social rejection and regret about their commercial donation. These reports are consistent with the COFS experience in
the CLD interviews; a cash payment does not solve the destitution of the vendor.
Countries!
China majorly profits off organ trafficking—prisoners are used for open markets
China's involvement and interest in organ trafficking is unique. n30 China is one of the few countries that permit the
sale of organs taken from prisoners who are sentenced to death. n31 The government in China is involved
in organ sales for profit, domestically and internationally. n32 The Chinese government, in legalizing the use of
organs from prisoners, created an open market making organs easily available for foreign buyers . n33 Chinese
transplant specialists estimate prisoner cadavers make up about 99 percent of organs used in transplant
surgeries. n34 The more prisoners the Chinese government can execute, n35 the more organs they have at
[*459] their disposition to sell at highly escalated prices. n36 Although China's constitution requires the "government to
preserve and protect human rights," n37 in 1984, China passed the "Temporary Rules Concerning the Utilization of
Corpses or Organs from the Corpses of Executed Criminals" (TRCU) order. n38 The legal removal of organs from
prisoners sparked controversy among human rights activists. n39 One claim is that the TRCU order fails to protect the rights of
prisoners' and there are reports of prisoner abuse during the organ removal process. n40 For example, it is
common practice for prisoners to be shot in the back of the head during execution. n41 Even [*460] though
there are times when prisoners do not die immediately, the surgeons still remove the organs to ensure freshness. n42 In 2006, China
amended the TRCU order by adding the "Provisions on the Administration of Entry and Exit of Cadavers
and Treatment of Cadavers" (Provisions on Administration) in an attempt to prohibit organ trafficking. n43 However,
this amendment still fails to protect prisoners from abuse. n44 For example, the order fails to address or
regulate the organ removal procedures. n45 To avoid allegations of abuse or violations, the Chinese government
claims to have the prisoners' consent for the removal of their organs. n46 However, there are reports that
prisoners are coerced into consenting for fear of being killed prior to their execution date. n47 The
efficacy of the TRCU and Provisions on Administration is undetermined as a result of China's "lack of transparency
in the prison system." n48 Despite the Chinese government's claim that prisoners consent, Gao Pei Qi, a deputy chief of the Public
Security Bureau (PSB) in China, stated "in the 10 years that I worked for the [PSB] I never saw or heard anything to suggest that death-row
prisoners were asked for consent [*461] before donating organs." n49 Therefore, it is unlikely the Chinese government will enforce orders such
as the TRCU.
Mexico profits off organ trafficking—young women are targeted by corrupt gov
officials
Mexico is equally active in organ trafficking, with young women being the most common victims. n50
Reports indicate that organ trafficking increased the mortality rate for young women in Mexico. n51 A spokesman
for the group "We Want Our Daughters to Return Home" n52 stated, "[t]here is a sense of panic here, especially among the
mothers. Every time they see their daughters go out they are afraid they will not return." n53 Some authorities
believe these accounts are unsupported; but multiple bodies have been found in the desert outskirts of town with
organs already extracted. n54 In another case, amateur organ traffickers removed the organs of women and
[*462] disposed of their bodies in a building operating as a rehabilitation center. n55 Furthermore, the problem
is compounded by government corruption. n56 Local police officers reportedly assist traffickers by
tampering with evidence in an effort to prevent prosecution. n57 The absence of reliable data also makes it difficult to
investigate the parties involved in organ trafficking in Mexico. n58 Organ trafficking in Mexico takes various forms, and has
global implications because the organs are sold to wealthy purchasers from around the world. n59
Kosovo profits off organ trafficking—military involvement and government coverup

Organ trafficking has been a problem in Kosovo for several years. n60 Since the Kosovo War in 1999,
charges and reports against those involved have been brought forward. n61 Organ trafficking in [*463] Kosovo is different
from other countries because of the heavy involvement of the Kosovo Army. n62 Among the reported accounts, one
of the most disturbing revealed the involvement of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) taking Serbian captives to a
building referred to as the "Yellow House" where organs were extracted and sold. n63 Kosovo officials claim that
the charges against those involved in organ trafficking at the Yellow House are unfounded. n64 However, two KLA soldiers confirmed
they had taken Serbian and Albanian captives to the Yellow House for organ removal. n65 The two soldiers
vanished after stating this; one soldier was killed in an unrelated case, and the other soldier has not been seen since. n66 In 2004, it
was also reported that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) destroyed approximately
400 pieces of organ trafficking evidence, which implicated the KLA. n67 Further in 2004, officials from the United
Nations (U.N.) and [*464] Hague War Crimes Tribunal investigators, visited the Yellow House and found traces of blood on the
floor and surgical equipment in the trash disposals. n68 Despite these findings, government officials maintain
that the claims are unsubstantiated. n69 One war crimes official commented: "No bodies. No witnesses. All the
reports and media attention to this issue have not been helpful to us. In fact they have not been helpful to anyone."
n70 The government continues to reject the claims despite the testimony and reports the ICTY received from sources describing how the organ
trafficking took place. n71 Nonetheless, the European Union (EU) has had some success prosecuting some of the guilty doctors involved in
extracting organs. n72 But that success has been limited due to the involvement of the Kosovo government following the war. n73
South Africa faces organ trafficking—prosecution isn’t an effective deterrent

South Africa commonly is involved in organ trafficking as a location where other countries send organ
recipients to have the procedures conducted. n74 Last year, Netcare St. Augustine Hospital, one of the
major privately owned hospitals in Durban, South Africa, was charged with organ trafficking. n75
Investigators believe that more than 100 kidney transplants illegally took place at the hospital. n76 As a
result, government authorities were able to negotiate a plea agreement with the hospital, in which the
hospital agreed to pay approximately $ 979,689.60 (7,820,000 rand) for conducting such criminal
activity. n77 Organ trafficking has been an ongoing problem in South Africa for several years. For
example, impoverished [*466] individuals from countries such as Brazil and Romania are coerced to
travel to Durban to forfeit their kidneys for compensation. n78 One notorious case involved an
individual who murdered six children in order to sell their organs. n79 Despite such prosecution, organ
trafficking still takes place in South Africa. n80
Mozambique encourages organ trafficking—doctor discretion

Organ trafficking is also taking place in Mozambique. n81 However, it is difficult to determine its magnitude because
police officers are suspected of colluding with traffickers. n82 Reports indicate that police officers "order the
burying of corpses without ordering any autopsy or inquiry and without any legal proceedings." n83
Mozambique passed the Human Tissue Act of 1983 (HTA), n84 which permits the removal of organs from
cadavers after attempts to contact the family of the deceased have failed. n85 Additionally, the HTA gives
doctors and medical officials the discretion to use unclaimed bodies for medical use. n86 This discretion,
granted to doctors, creates a loophole in the law that has caused an [*467] increase in organ trafficking
in Mozambique. n87
India faces serious organ trafficking—entrenched poverty encourages quid-pro-quo

organ removal
India may be considered home to organ trafficking because unlike countries where people are coerced,
forced or kidnapped for their organs, in this country poor people are actually willingly providing their
bodies for organ removal in exchange for compensation. n88 The typical transaction occurs when a
person receives a promise for a certain amount of money in exchange for their organ. n89 Ironically, once
the organ has been removed they are rarely compensated as promised. n90 Many times, surgeons in India
conduct kidney transplants from their houses by convincing impoverished individuals they will be paid
for their organs. n91 Once the organs are removed, they are sold to wealthy Indians or foreigners who
travel to India to receive the transplant. n92 Additionally, allowing payment for organ donations is creating
transplant practices that give poor and inadequate treatment to the donor, causing a higher mortality
rate. n93 In February 2008, [*468] police raided an organ trafficking ring in India where men posed as doctors to
remove kidneys from migrant workers. n94 The organs were intended for patients on waiting lists in other
countries. n95 Organ trafficking in India is increasing the amount of organized crime. n96 The government's
failure to enforce laws, such as the Transplantation of Human Organs Act (THOA), n97 allows organ
traffickers to continue committing such crimes. n98 The lack of enforcement stems from police corruption,
as well as, corruption among doctors who perform the surgeries. n99
a2 Legalize CP
Catch All
Legalization fails—it’s unethical, dangerous, and furthers exploitation
Spagnoli 9 (Filip Spagnoli—earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of Brussels in
2002. He has published articles in De Standaard and De Morgen, the two leading Belgian newspapers.
11-30-2009, "The Ethics of Human Rights (25): Free Organ Trade and the Commodification of the Body,"
https://cosmologicallyinsignificant.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/free-organ-trade-and-the-
commodification-of-the-body//sabín)
However, when organs are freely tradable, many extremely poor people, especially those struggling to
survive, will be tempted and even forced to sells parts of their bodies. Moreover, the rich will be able to
benefit disproportionately from the market because prices will be high, given that demand will outstrip
supply in an ageing society. The most obvious means to balance supply and demand, and to force down prices and allow the less than
wealthy patients to participate in and benefit from the market, is to create a global market without trade restrictions, an organ-GATT if you
want. This will bring in the masses of poor people from Africa and Asia, pushing up supply of organs and hence bringing down prices. This will
supposedly benefit both the less than wealthy patients and the very poor donors. The latter will benefit even with prices for organs falling
because of increased supply, because they start at extremely low levels of income. Even the sale of a cheap kidney can mean years of income
for them. The
problem with this global market is that organ extraction will take place in sub-optimal
medical conditions, creating risks for donors (if you can still call them that), also in the case of renewable tissue
donation. Paradoxically, the poor are driven to risk their lives in the process of saving their lives. Even in
the best healthcare systems in the world, organ extraction is often very risky. In the U.S., the extraction of a
section of the liver, for example, carries a risk to the donor’s life of almost 1 percent (source). That’s not negligible. I doubt anyone would cross
a street if that were the odds of getting hit by a car. I’m convinced that an opt-out regulation for cadaveric donors (meaning that everyone’s a
donor after death unless an explicit opt-out), combined with non-financial encouragement of voluntary pre-death donation, is the best way to
solve the organ shortage problem. A
free organ market will obviously also solve the organ shortage problem, but
will create new problems instead. The distinction between renewable tissue such as bone marrow, and
non-renewable organs such as kidneys, eyes, etc. is a relevant one. If the donation of renewable tissue can take place
in medically safe conditions, I can’t see a problem with being allowed to trade, on the condition that poor patients have the same opportunity
and power to buy as rich ones (and that’s a pretty big “if”). The needs of the sick or disabled who risk dying or suffering because of a lack of
available organ, clearly outweigh any remaining concerns. One of those remaining concerns is the problem of the commodification of the body.
Organ trade is obviously commodification, and commodification is dehumanization. I don’t want to
imply that organ trade liberalization necessarily results in “organ farms”, dystopian places where people
are “cultivated” solely for the harvesting of their organs – although the Chinese criminal justice and
capital punishment system for instance comes awfully close. (I sometimes wonder if deterrent and punishment is the
real goal of executions in China). But people can commodify and dehumanize themselves. And although we
should normally respect people’s self-regarding choices, what looks like a choice may not always be a
true choices. The logic of economics tends to overtake all other domains of life, even those where it
doesn’t belong and can do serious harm. Why is it so evident to so many that body parts are something
that it supposed to be tradable? Even the most outspoken proponents of organ trade draw the line
somewhere: they won’t allow people to sell parts of their brains, I guess, or their children and wives, or the
parts of aborted fetuses (perhaps fetuses specially conceived and “harvested” for their parts), not even if this would fill a
great social need. And yet they accept as natural that non-vital body parts should be tradable and seem
to forget that irreplaceable body parts form our body and that we can hardly exist without our body. If
we allow total freedom of organ trade, we will have to accept the case in which a poor father decides
to sell off every single one of his organs for the survival of his family. After all, he is the master of his
own body, he has a right to self-determination, and the government has no right to limit what masters
of their own bodies should be allowed to do with it. If you don’t accept the legitimacy of this extreme case, you accept
limitations on the freedom to trade organs. Since most opponents of organ trade also accept certain types of trade – e.g. renewable organs
such as bone marrow and skin – the disagreement isn’t a principled one but one about degree. Underlying the argument
in favor of organ trade is the fiction of a market populated by free, equal and self-determining individuals who make free and rational economic
decisions and agreements on what to sell and buy, free from government interference. The
reality is of course that organ trade
isn’t an expression of self-determination or autonomy but rather of the absence of it. And that organ
trade, just like a lot of other trade, is radically asymmetrical: some are forced to sell in order to survive,
especially if the price and hence the reward is very high, as it will be relatively speaking for the poor.
And others will sell without rationally examining the benefits for or risks to their interests (absence of
informed consent). It’s beyond my powers of comprehension that all this can be denied: It’s true that I don’t find any of the arguments about
the coercive effects of money on peoples’ decisions particularly compelling. Megan McArdle (source) Any potential paid organ donor is always
free to decline the transaction, and is left no worse off than before. What next, will you tell me that I “coerced” Apple into sending me a
Macbook? (source) This seems to me to be more correct, or at least less outrageous: Talk of individual rights and autonomy is hollow if those
with no options must “choose” to sell their organs to purchase life’s basic necessities. … Choice requires information, options and some degree
of freedom. (source) Of course, some would say: if someone is forced by poverty to sell her organs, would you
stop her and make her worse off by imposing legal restrictions on her autonomy and “reducing her
resources”? That’s again the myth that markets always make things better. What if she does get some
money, has a better life in the short run, but gets sick because of the operation (or do we also assume the myth
of perfect healthcare for the world’s poor?) or because of the lack of an organ? Who would make her worse off? The one
allowing her to sell, or the one stopping her? And anyway, there are better ways to protect the poor
than to allow them to harvest their organs. So, if we’re afraid that free organ trade might be exploitative for the poor, why
not allow free trade but exclude the poor from selling? Because the poor will be, in general, the only ones tempted to
sell. A wealthy person has no incentive to sell organs. Hence a free trade system restricted in this way
will not solve the shortage problem, the main concern of proponents of free trade.
Exploitation
Legalization magnifies exploitation
Arora 12 (Ishika Arora—contributing writor. 3-14-2012, "THE HUMAN MEAT MARKET: AN ANALYSIS
ON THE LEGALIZATION OF THE ORGAN TRADE," Prospect Journal,
https://prospectjournal.org/2012/03/14/the-human-meat-market-an-analysis-on-the-legalization-of-
the-organ-trade//sabín)
When considering the legalization of the organ trade, it is important to examine the donor’s
environmental situation. Although there are several health risks associated with organ donation, the
market is very prominent in countries such as India and Brazil where there is extreme poverty, lack of
clean water and little access to basic healthcare. In a study of India’s kidney market, 86 percent of donors had
major health issues after their surgery. Theoretically, it may seem that these risks would be minimal due to
an increase in medical technology, but an increase in health risks is inevitable in areas of poverty where
people perform extensive manual labor and have little access to clean water and food. Also, a free market
organ system would not allow these poor donors to ever be recipients, as organs would belong to the
highest bidder. The destitute would not be able to afford a transplant but would disproportionately be
the ones parting with their body parts. In addition, poverty tends to create a decrease in agency. A lack of
basic necessities allows poorer individuals to be exploited through organ trading. In India, this lack of
agency causes women to become collateral damage in the organ market. The same study of kidney sales in India
revealed that 79 percent of sellers regretted their decision to donate an organ and a shocking 71 percent of
sellers were married women. Because poor women in India have little power, they can be easily forced
by their husbands to sell their organs. In this case, the libertarian idea of “my body, my choice” is not
applicable.
Their ev assumes perfectly regulated markets—they won’t be, markets are

unpredictable
Hentrich 14 (Michael Hentrich—Medical Scholar, December 20, 2o14. “Health Matters: Human Organ
Donations, Sales, and the Black Market.” SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2541113//sabín)
Even if organ sales were legalized, it is not clear what effect this would actually have on the shortage of
organs for transplant. Predictions of price and market behavior are highly uncertain. If sales of kidneys
were permitted, would the supply of kidneys catch up with the demand? What would happen to kidney
prices? Unregulated, it is difficult to imagine that prices would be affordable to all those in need (Corwin
2011). Contemporary sociologists have been quick to suggest that the supplyside shortage may be cured by legalizing sales; the truth of
such claims rests on whether the supply would increase enough to provide an organ for everyone in
need (Corwin 2011, Ben-David 2005). Of course, demand can only increase inasmuch as there are people in need of organs, while the
numbers who can give organs is practically limitless. Contingency theorists contend that there are limits to organizing society
because there is no single best way to make decisions; organizations need to remain flexible to respond
to changing environmental demands. The appropriate form of organization depends on the kind of task or environment one is
dealing with, and management must be free to adapt the organization to fit current circumstances. In the case of organ transplants,
management consists of government officials and politicians who control the laws pertaining to organ
procurement as well as OPOs and the doctors and hospitals who perform transplantation. Recent
advancements in medical technology used to preserve and transport organs demands precise and
intentionally exacted management about the issue at hand; achieving greater awareness of an issue that
has global significance is critical to changing the procurement system (Becker and Elias 2007, Harris and Alcorn 2000-
2001). Another related point of contingency theory explicitly stresses the role of management because in any group it is the managers
who make the decisions that most profoundly influence the rest of the population and who have the
greatest control over circumstance
Empirics
The most vulnerable members of society are the ones who donated—Iran proves
Houser 17 (Kristin Houser—Senior Editor of Futurism. 11-6-2017, "Black market bodies: legalizing the
sale of human organs could save lives," Futurism, https://futurism.com/sale-human-organ//sabín)
While the Iranian system does speed up the process of organ donation for patients — the average wait between
reaching out to the foundation and receiving a kidney is five months — Fatemi said the legal kidney market is not without
its shortcomings. One issue is that doctors often fail to follow up with donors post-surgery. It’s
important to follow donors for several decades after donation to see how the process affects them,
Fatemi stressed, but said doing so would be difficult, as donors often try to hide their identity to avoid the
stigma associated with selling a kidney. Educating the public on the benefits of donation, paid or not, could help solve this
problem, Fatemi said. Fatemi also noted that, just like the illegal kidney market, the poorest, more vulnerable
members of society are still the ones donating in Iran’s legal market, and they typically only do so
because they feel they have no other option to escape poverty. “I have been to the foundation. The people who
are donating are young and full of energy, but they are poor and selling a part of their body to solve
what may amount to very small problems in their everyday lives,” Fatemi said. Given the lack of follow-up,
no one even knows for sure if these vulnerable citizens benefit from the sale.
Legalization is insufficient—Iran proves—altruism empirically works to eliminate

shortages
Defenders of an organ market also reference Iran’s monopsony in which the government is the only
legal buyer of organs. In this model, all middlemen and medical professionals involved are not paid for
the transplant. The patients rely heavily on government-subsidized treatment and on the kindness of the
volunteers involved. This allows poor citizens to not only sell their organs but receive transplants when
in need. It also increases the umbrella of government healthcare by providing free care to those who donate organs. In addition, they
claim that sellers come from all socioeconomic classes and not disproportionately from the poor.
Because of a lack of data, however, it is unclear whether Iran’s method has truly eliminated organ waitlists
or if there are major loopholes. In an ideal environment, the Iran model would seem to be effective. However, it is important
to consider the economic culture and healthcare system of a nation before implementing such a model.
For example, could this system work in the U.S. where healthcare is not universal and economists are major
supporters of a free market system? In India, would the lack of funding for governmental regulation organizations as well as for healthcare
allow this model to be effective? The Iran model is worth consideration. Overall, it is possible that governmental regulation could, to a certain
extent help remove some of the social issues involved in organ trading. Assuming
an organ market was introduced, however,
would it solve its initial goal of increasing a healthy supply of available organs for ill patients? An analysis
of its effectiveness as a market will show that it will not be able to solve this issue and will create
additional problems. The purpose of legalizing organ trading is to save the lives of thousands of patients
on the transplant waiting lists. It is possible, however, that introducing this new market may not increase
the number of organs for transplantation. This idea can be understood by creating a parallel between the blood
market and organ trade. In Richard Titmuss’s study, The Gift Relationship, he reveals that altruistic donation is more
efficient. Titmuss claims that introducing blood markets “represses the expression of altruism [and]
erodes the sense of community.” Thus, those who would previously donate blood for purely altruistic
purposes may decline to give a part of their body for monetary compensation. If this occurred in the
organ market, it may not result in an increase of available organs. Altruistic donation is clearly a better
model.
Health
Legalization encourages dangerous donations for the sake of economic security
In addition, while
it would seem that legalization of organ trading would create national and international
quality standards, in reality it might create an “unclean” supply. Because many of the donors would be
of lower economic status, their desperation in destitution could cause them to lie about the health of
their organs. In addition, these sellers may have little access to healthcare, creating a situation in which
they may truly endanger their lives by parting with an organ their body cannot afford. Not only will an
organ market be unable to increase a healthy supply of organs, it will also create other issues. From a
purely economic perspective, legalizing the organ trade may force more poor citizens into selling their
organs. In anthropologist Lawrence Cohen’s study of the organ belt in rural India, he found that most of the money that sellers
received was used to paying back loans they had previously taken to feed their families. An increased
prevalence in the organ trade will cause organs to be considered an economic asset that everyone can
part with. This will cause an increase in loan collaterals and people who do not want to sell their organs
will have access to fewer loans. Essentially, poor people will have to “mortgage their organs” in order to
find a reasonable loan.
a2 Resource and Training CP
2AC—CP is the Squo
The counterplan is the squo—the advantage proves this is insufficient
DOJ 17 (US Department of Justice. 9-29-2017, "Justice Department Invests More Than $47 Million to
Combat Human Trafficking and Assist Victims," Justive.Gov, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-
department-invests-more-47-million-combat-human-trafficking-and-assist-victims//sabín)
The U.S.
Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) today announced more than $47 million in
funding to combat human trafficking and provide vital services to trafficking victims throughout the
United States. As part of this announcement, Associate Attorney General Rachel L. Brand visited the national headquarters of the
International Association of Chiefs of Police this afternoon, where she met with Executive Director Vincent Talucci, Deputy Executive Director
Terrence Cunningham, and Director for Programs Domingo Herraiz. While there, she provided notification that the Bureau
of Justice Assistance (BJA) had awarded the organization a $1 million grant to support a National Anti-
Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement Task Force, which supports
criminal justice systems efforts to investigate, and prosecute all forms of human trafficking. “The Department
of Justice is committed to protecting the victims of human trafficking,” said Associate Attorney General Brand. “DOJ grants provide
training and technical assistance to state and local law governments, law enforcement, and victim
service organizations.” Approximately $31 million of the funds was awarded under nine OJP grant programs. The grants aim to
support the criminal justice system’s efforts to investigate and prosecute all forms of human trafficking; offer victims services
through experienced providers; and seeks to strengthen communities’ responses to the sexual
exploitation and forced labor of victims by raising community awareness and providing training and
technical assistance. Grants awarded under Fiscal Year 2017 OJP programs include the following: Specialized Services for
Victims of All Forms of Human Trafficking; About $7.5 million to 13 victim service organizations to
enhance the quality and quantity of specialized services available to all victims of human trafficking.
Legal Access to Victims of Crime: Innovations in Access to Justice Programs; Approximately $5 million
to support an award to Equal Justice Works, which will partner with qualified nonprofit organizations to
host attorneys who will provide comprehensive and holistic legal services to survivors of human
trafficking and enforce victims' rights. Improving Outcomes for Child and Youth Victims of Human
Trafficking: A Jurisdiction Wide Approach; Nearly $5.2 million to four states to improve jurisdiction-wide
coordination and multidisciplinary collaboration to address the trafficking of children and youth.
Comprehensive Services for Victims of All Forms of Human Trafficking; Over $3.6 million to five
community agencies under this program with a demonstrated history of serving victims of human
trafficking. Specialized Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance for Service Providers; $1.7
million to the Freedom Network USA and Futures Without Violence to help victim service providers
develop and implement housing and employment practices that better serve victims of human
trafficking.
Refugees Aff Case
2ac – at: travel ban good
While non-immigrant travel might be a security risk, immigration is not
Rothschild 18 Eric Rothschild - Senior Litigation Counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church
and State “The Government Has Yet to Produce Evidence Showing the Travel Ban is About National
Security” June 21, 2018 (https://www.justsecurity.org/58256/government-produce-evidence-travel-
ban-national-security/) //wc
The very first thing that Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the court at oral argument in Hawaii v.
Trump was: “After a worldwide multi-agency review, the President’s acting Homeland Security Secretary
recommended that he adopt entry restrictions on countries that failed to provide the minimum baseline
of information needed to vet their nationals.” Francisco returned to the worldwide review time and
again, making it the linchpin in the government’s argument that the President’s Proclamation banning
entry of nationals from predominantly Muslim countries was based on a religiously neutral national-
security assessment by public servants and not the “shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”
that the president had called for during the campaign. According to the Solicitor General, if the
president’s cabinet had come to him and said, “‘Mr. President, there is honestly a national security risk
and you have to act’, I think that the President would be allowed to follow that advice even if in his
private heart of hearts he also harbored animus.”
But the government never presented any evidence about what the president’s cabinet found or
recommended—leaving the court with nothing but the government’s vague assertion that the agency
supported the president’s ban. If the court were to rule in favor of the government without requiring it
to offer proof, it would run the risk of repeating its mistake in the Japanese internment cases, the most
controversial modern decisions about the use of federal power to discriminate against one group of
people for the ostensible purpose of protecting national security. In those cases, the government relied
on a military report to support its claims about the national-security threat posed by Japanese
Americans, but that report turned out to be so riddled with misrepresentations that decades later the
United States government confessed error for having presented it to the court.
In the proclamation, the government represents that it performed an extensive analysis of the identity
systems, information practices, and security situation of every country in the world to determine which
ones should be subject to entry restrictions. If that’s true, the government’s findings should be reflected
in the two reports that DHS made to the president before he issued the proclamation. Those reports
have never been made public or produced in court. But according to an index produced in Freedom of
Information Act litigation brought by the Brennan Center (for whom this author is one of the counsel),
the worldwide review’s findings in their entirety comprise a three-page attachment to DHS’s first report
to the president and a one-page attachment to the agency’s final report—documents so short that they
could hardly even name all the countries of the world, much less set forth thorough assessments of
whether they pose national security risks befitting a bar on entry by their nationals to the United States.
Even more troubling: a close reading of the limited public record about the supposed worldwide review
suggests that the president imposed restrictions that may be materially different from what the then-
Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Eliane Duke recommended—indeed, that the acting secretary
may have specifically recommended against measures that the president took.
The ban comprises two different types of restrictions on entry visas. The first are restrictions on non-
immigrant visas to travel to the United States for a limited period for reasons such as education,
business, or pleasure. The second type are restrictions on immigrant visas to become a permanent legal
resident or citizen. The non-immigrant restrictions (which vary among the affected countries) are
characterized in the proclamation as a “tailored approach” adopted “in accordance withthe
recommendations of the Secretary of Homeland Security.” (Emphasis mine.)
The restrictions on immigrant visas, however, are not tailored—at least not for the Muslim-majority
countries that are banned. The poclamation imposes an absolute ban on immigrant visas for all those
countries even while acknowledging that “immigrants generally receive more extensive vetting than
nonimmigrants.” (Emphasis mine.) And unlike the travel restrictions, the immigrant-visa restrictions are
not described in the proclamation as having been made “in accordance with the recommendations of
the Secretary of Homeland Security.” Further supporting the inference that DHS didn’t recommend
immigration restrictions but that the president imposed them anyway, an affidavit submitted by a DHS
official in the Freedom of Information Act litigation represents that the agency’s second report to the
president “summarized DHS’s recommendations concerning which countries’ nationals should be
subject to travel restrictions or other lawful actions.” (Emphasis mine.) Nowhere does the official say
anything about recommendations by the agency concerning immigration restrictions.
In other words, DHS may have recommended restrictions on non-immigrant travel from specific
countries, but it appears not to have done so for immigration—which just makes sense, because federal
law prohibits it from doing so. 8 U.S.C. § 1152(a)(1)(A) provides that “no person shall receive any
preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of . . .
nationality.” (No such express prohibition exists for non-immigrant travel visas.) It is quite possible that
DHS felt legally barred from recommending country-specific restrictions for immigrant visas—the agency
may have even recommended against them for this precise reason—but the president was undeterred.
Travel ban doesn’t improve national security

Stottlemyer 18 Patricia Stottlemyer -- Rule of Law and Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights First
“Ex-Military, Intelligence, and Foreign Policy Officials: Travel Ban Harms National Security” April 4, 2018
(https://www.justsecurity.org/54506/ex-military-intelligence-foreign-policy-officials-travel-ban-harms-
national-security/) //wc
micus brief, twenty-six retired generals and admirals urge the Court to invalidate the ban,
In one a
alternatively called Travel Ban 3.0, Muslim Ban 3.0, and EO-3 (disclaimer: I personally worked on this brief as part of the team at Human Rights First that helped
prepare it). The Ninth Circuit invalidated EO-3, which the administration argues has “severely restricted the ability of this and future Presidents to protect the nation.” As amici curiae, the nonpartisan group of retired flag officers of
They say it harms U.S. national security interests by perpetuating the

the U.S. Armed Forces submit that the travel ban won’t protect the nation.
perception that the United States is hostile to Muslims and Muslim-majority nations, frustrating
relationships with locals in foreign countries and partner governments, undermining U.S. military
operations, and “fuel[ing] the propaganda narrative spread by terrorists and others who seek to harm
U.S. interests.” A bipartisan group of fifty-two former national security, foreign policy, and intelligence
officials agrees. In a separate amicus brief, the officials contend the travel ban is not “an exercise of the Executive’s foreign policy and national security judgment” that warrants the Court’s customary deference.
The government, the former officials point out, has been unable to articulate any national security or foreign policy basis for the ban. EO-3 At issue in Trump v. Hawaii is the Presidential Proclamation Enhancing Vetting Capabilities
and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry Into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats. Signed on September 24, 2017, the proclamation purports to differ from the two earlier versions of the ban, including
the January 2017 executive order that caused chaos, an influx of attorneys, and days-long protests at the nation’s airports. The present version indefinitely bars the entry of nationals from six Muslim-majority countries— Chad,
Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—as well as North Koreans and some Venezuelan government officials. It also subjects individuals from the Muslim-majority nation of Iraq to heightened vetting procedures. The two previous
bans faced court challenges, and before the Supreme Court could hear the merits of the second ban, its provisions expired. Then came EO-3. Procedural Posture In October 2017, the District Court of Hawaii barred the enforcement
of EO-3 against individuals from the six Muslim-majority countries. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, finding that EO-3 violates the Immigration and Nationality Act. On January 5, the administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene
in Trump v. Hawaii, presenting three questions: 1) Whether Hawaii’s challenge to the ban is justiciable, meaning whether federal courts can weigh in at all; 2) Whether the ban is a lawful exercise of the president’s authority over
immigration; and 3) Whether the district court’s injunction is impermissibly overbroad. The Court accepted those questions and also agreed to address whether the ban violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. Although
the Establishment Clause question was not before the Ninth Circuit, it was raised in a parallel case at the Fourth Circuit, International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump. The Fourth Circuit, too, invalidated the ban, and IRAP’s
petition for writ of certiorari, asking that its case be joined with Trump v. Hawaii, is pending before the Supreme Court. The Merits Dispute In defending the ban, the administration argues that the “Constitution and Acts of
Congress both confer on the President broad authority to suspend or restrict the entry of aliens outside the United States when he deems it in the Nation’s interest,” an authority presidents “have routinely invoked to advance
national-security and foreign-policy objectives.” This ban is different from its predecessors, the administration says, because it was based on the findings of a review of worldwide vetting procedures. The countries subject to the
ban, the administration argues, do not adequately share information with the United States, or they pose other national security threats. The ban, the administration claims, should “induce those governments to improve their
cooperation.” What’s more, the administration argues that the court should not review Hawaii’s claims, as separation of powers principles preclude judicial review of political branch decisions to exclude the entry of aliens. The
government also argues that the Court’s deference is especially warranted on matters of national security. Hawaii argues that EO-3 is a direct descendent—bearing the same intent and similar effects—of the prior bans. The ban,
Hawaii contends, exceeds the president’s authority over immigration, and raises “grave constitutional concerns.” Agreeing with the government’s line of argument, respondents assert, would result in granting the executive
“unbridled power.” Amicus Brief of Retired Generals and Admirals My colleagues at Human Rights First and I, in collaboration with pro-bono counsel at the law firm Debevoise and Plimpton, prepared the amicus brief on behalf of a
The brief argues that despite EO-3’s stated national-security rationale, the
group of retired generals and admirals of the U.S. armed forces.
ban harms U.S. national security by perpetuating the perception that the United States is pursuing an
anti-Muslim foreign policy agenda. This perception, amici write, is well-founded, not only because of the countries targeted (newly added Chad is also a Muslim-majority country, and
restrictions on North Korea and Venezuela have little effect on travel from those countries), but also because of the administration’s public commentary surrounding the bans. Because of this perception, the generals and admirals
The premise of the retired military leaders’

warn, EO-3 undermines relationships with key allies and individuals whose trust is critical to the success of U.S. military objectives.
brief is that discrimination against Muslims and Muslim-majority countries—and the perception of such
discrimination—discourages cooperation with the U.S. military. The erosion of cooperation, from both
locals in foreign countries and foreign governments, makes it more difficult to achieve our military’s
strategic objectives. Local individuals in Muslim-Majority countries are discouraged from assisting U.S. troops, for example, as translators and intelligence resources, and the goodwill of local communities
where U.S. troops are deployed recedes. The alienation of local individuals and communities, the generals and admirals write, can prolong the presence of U.S. troops in the theater and prevent the reduction of violence in zones of
conflict. Special Forces, for instance, rely on the creation of “force multipliers,” a process through which the U.S. military builds the capacity of local partners, with a view to ceding control over security to those forces. The U.S.
Army Field Manual on counterinsurgency also emphasizes the importance of building trust with local networks, security forces, and community leaders, in order to displace enemy networks. (That manual was notably coauthored
Trust-based relationships with our allies, the 2018 National Defense Strategy
by Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. James Mattis.)
states, enhance “access to critical regions, supporting a widespread basing and logistics system.” In that vein, the
generals and admirals note that relationships with partner governments and militaries are not without challenge, including when those allies violate international human rights norms. But EO-3, they argue, adds an additional and
unnecessary hurdle to our strategic objectives. In the wake of its inclusion in EO-3, Chad recalled 2,000 troops from a coalition mission against Boko Haram in Niger. The withdrawal of those troops has already had an effect on
security there—for both civilian residents and the remaining troops. The brief also argues that EO-3 endangers deployed U.S. service
members by encouraging the perception that the United States will violate international norms and
ideals. U.S. compliance with and support for the rule of law enhance the legitimacy of U.S. action in the world, which in turn serves U.S. national security interests. When the United States is viewed as a scofflaw willing to
defy the rule of law and international norms, other actors are less likely to comply with those norms. The anti-Muslim sentiments embedded in the ban also
give a propaganda and recruitment victory to U.S. enemies. The Department of Defense dedicates significant resources to battling enemy messaging, and EO-
3 feeds directly into the rhetoric of groups like ISIS. Less than a day after the first ban was enacted, ISIS propaganda branded it the “blessed ban.” Amicus Brief of Former National Security, Foreign Policy, and Intelligence Officials
Harold Koh of the Yale Law School Rule of Law Clinic is counsel of record for a group of 52 former public officials as amici curiae, among them senior officials from Democratic and Republican administrations. Many of these former
officials also had access to the U.S. government’s intelligence underlying national security threats until immediately prior to the implementation of the first travel ban. Amici argue that the Court should not defer to the
administration’s assertions that the ban serves national security interests. Any judicial deference to executive determinations of national security and foreign policy, they write, is not warranted in this instance. The administration,
amici point out, has presented no credible national security basis for the ban’s sweeping country-based restrictions. Furthermore, they argue, the Court should be more skeptical of the ban’s stated bases because the
administration failed to engage in an inter-agency review process for the policy—a process that provides the prudential foundation for judicial deference in some matters of executive national security policy. Not only do the travel
bans, they write, fail to serve the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, but they also do “serious damage” to those interests. Amici contend that as former senior government officials, they understand
the importance of judicial deference to properly developed national security policy. Here, they argue, such deference is unwise. “While the Orders at issue in this case may be about national security, they do not reflect a bona fide
national security judgment that merits this Court’s deference.” They worry that if the Court were to defer in this case, where the executive action at issue so clearly defies the policymaking processes and careful review necessary to
A concern about unfettered executive discretion, so long

such deference, “it is difficult to imagine a case in which national security deference would be withheld.”
as an administration invokes the magic words “national security,” animates both amicus briefs discussed
here. The former government officials argue that for such deference to be warranted, there must be
“some threshold showing that professional judgment” of national security or foreign policy officials was
exercised. Furthermore, they argue that the ban is overbroad. Systems of vetting which are more
tailored to cognizable threats are already in part of the refugee vetting process and the Visa Waiver
Program procedures. While EO-3’s blanket, country-based ban claims a justification in preventing terrorism, amici note that the ban’s provisions are ill-suited to the apparent purposes. First, they write, the
ban will likely make information-sharing more difficult “by impairing economic and political interchange and spurring anti-American sentiment.” If the administration is concerned with remedying inadequate information-sharing,
amici point out, it should have included Belgium in the ban. Instead, nationals of the countries targeted “have committed no deadly terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the last forty years.” The former U.S. officials warn that the ban
also makes domestic law enforcement more difficult, by alienating American Muslim communities who are often critical sources of intelligence. Furthermore, the ban “has had a devastating humanitarian impact” by “disrupt[ing]
the travel of numerous men, women, and children who have themselves been victimized by terrorists.” Lastly, amici argue that the ban will have a negative economic impact, especially in the defense, technology, and medical
sectors. It should go without saying (although perhaps it merits repeating in the present climate) that the human rights, dignity, and equal treatment of people from Muslim-majority countries should not hinge on the benefits they
offer to U.S. military, law enforcement, or foreign policy missions. But in light of the gratuitous invocation of “national security” as justification for the systematic vilification of Muslims—a bigotry that has found safe harbor in the
current administration’s rhetoric and policies—the arguments of the retired military leaders and former government officials defeat the administration on its own terms.
There’s no basis for National security claims

Somin 18 Ilya Somin – independent reporter “Evidence Indicates there is no "Extensive" Analysis
Backing Trump's Travel Ban” May. 24, 2018 (https://reason.com/volokh/2018/05/24/evidence-
indicates-there-is-no-extensive) //wc
Solicitor General Noel Francisco
During last month's Supreme Court oral argument on the the legal challenges to President Donald Trump's travel ban policy,
assured the justices that the president's numerous statements calling for a "Muslim ban" and equating
that with his later "territorial" policy of targeting residents Muslim-majority nations, had no connection
to the travel ban. Instead, Francisco claimed that the policy was actually based on an "extensive
worldwide process" analyzing of the security risks posed by entrants from all of the world's 200 nations, which in turn resulted in a "neutral baseline" of security criteria that
were evenly applied to "every nation in the world." Meanwhile, the administration refuses to release this supposed analysis to the courts (despite the availability of in camera proceedings
under which classified information could be released to the judges but withheld form the public), and Francisco claims that judges must accord the president "a very strong presumption that
what is set out there is the truth." But, as David Bier of the Cato Institute explains in a recent post, the evidence suggests that no such "extensive" analysis or "neutral baseline" actually exists.
All that actually exists is a perfunctory 17 page document with little or no analysis and evidence: In justifying President Trump's travel ban to the Supreme Court last month, his attorneys
repeatedly referenced a confidential report. They told the Court that this "extensive" analysis of "every country in the world" resulted from a "worldwide multi-agency review" and proves that
the president did not act with religious animus.... In response to a [Freedom of Information Act] lawsuit by the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, the government disclosed that its final
secret report filed in September was just 16 pages with a one-page attachment. Yet the president claims it reviewed "more than 200 countries," meaning it covered each country in less than a
tenth of a page.... We now know that this 60-word average is actually too generous for most countries because the government has said that the report included the information on the eight
targeted countries and the explanation for the ban contained in the president's 12-page travel ban order. If it dedicated the other five pages solely to the non-travel ban countries, this would
leave just 16 words for each... [T]he length of the report by itself gives the justices a very good reason to conclude that the government's report did not actually assess every country in the
world in 16 words or less.... Maybe the president could rebut this impression, but any presumption that he had in his favor at the outset should be forfeited based on what we know now. The
best evidence indicates that his "extensive" review simply never happened. Perhaps Trump has some other super-secret, totally terrific study that justifies the travel ban more fully. But, at this
point, there is no evidence that any such thing exists. If it did, the administration would have a strong incentive to reveal it, even if only in camera, or in some redacted form, to protect
classified information. It also did not indicate the existence of any such more extensive study in its response to the Brennan Center FOIA lawsuit. If such a thing did exist, the government
presumably would have had to reveal it in the response, even if it also claimed "presidential communication privilege" as a justification for withholding it (as it did in the case of the September
the short and perfunctory nature of the final report that supposedly justifies the travel
report). As Bier points out,
ban reinforces other evidence indicating that the security rationales offered by the administration are
not the true reason for the policy. Far from consistently applying "neutral criteria" to all the nations in the world, as Francisco claims, the administration in fact
applied its standards in a highly inconsistent manner. The security justification for the travel ban is also weakend by the fact that, in the forty year period for which we have data, no one has
ever been killed in a terrorist attack on US soil by an entrant from any of the nations covered by travel ban. Had Travel Ban 3.0 been in place since 9/11, it would not have prevented the entry
The risks posed by entrants from the nations covered by the

of a single terrorist (even one who did not commit any attacks on US soil).
travel ban are actually lower than those posed by native-born Americans. When Noel Francisco told the
Supreme Court that the the travel ban was based on a "extensive" worldwide analysis of security risks
that came up with "neutral criteria" on which the travel ban was based, it is likely that he was either
misinformed or attempting to deceive the justices. Either way the Court should not give any deference to such assurances from administration
lawyers. The paucity of evidence backing the travel ban strengthens the constitutional case against it. In cases
where there is evidence that a seemingly neutral policy was actually motivated by unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or (in this case) religion, the government must
prove that it had a legitimate basis for the policy that would have led it to adopt it anyway. The administration claims that the "extensive" worldwide study and the "neutral" criteria developed
If the supposedly extensive analysis doesn't actually exist, and the "neutral"
as a result of it qualify as such a rationale.
criteria are not being consistently applied, that makes it even more likely that Trump's true motive in
adopting the travel ban was to make good on his "Muslim ban" campaign promise. It also suggests he was telling the truth
when he repeatedly said that the "territorial" policy embodied in the travel ban is just an extension of the Muslim ban. The nations included in the ban were chosen because they are
overwhelmingly Muslim, not because entrants from those countries pose any special security risk. For reasons I summarized here, the inclusion of North Korea and a few Venezuelans in the
ban does not alter this conclusion, since their addition to the list bars almost no entrants who might otherwise have come in. The fact that the policy does not cover all the Muslims in the
The administration's defenders argue that the government deserves special

world also should not be decisive.
deference in immigration and national security cases. In an amicus brief I coauthored on behalf of several fellow constitutional law scholars, we
argue that such special deference is unwarranted because the First Amendment's restrictions on religious discrimination constrain federal power over immigration no less than all other
exercises of federal authority. A long history of cruel, abusive, and often bigoted policies also shows that it is dangerous to give special deference in immigration and national security cases.
The
But even if some degree of special deference is generally appropriate, it should not apply in a case where there is strong evidence that the government is not acting in good faith.
main justification for deference is the executive's special expertise on national security matters. But that
expertise is irrelevant in a case where national security is not the true motive for the policy in question.
2ac – biotech sector declining
Biotech innovation declining now
URMC 15 University of Rochester Medical Center “U.S. Slipping as Global Leader in Medical Research”
January 13, 2015 (https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/4233/u.s.-slipping-as-global-leader-in-
medical-research.aspx) //wc
Once the undisputed center of global innovation in medicine , the U.S. is steadily losing ground to Asia and Europe and will, if trends
continue,relinquish its leadership in the coming decade. That is the conclusion of an analysis appearing
today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “U.S. medical research remains the primary global source of new discoveries, drugs,
medical devices, and clinical procedures,” said University of Rochester neurologist Ray Dorsey, M.D., M.B.A., a co-author of the study. “However, a decade of
unprecedented growth in research activity has been followed by a decade of steady decline which now
leaves open the possibility that other nations could assume global leadership given their increasing
investment in biomedical research.” The study tracked medical research activity from 1994 to 2014 in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia, compiling
data on funding by public and private sources, the creation of intellectual property, and the size of the medical and scientific workforce. U.S. spending on medical research grew at an average
annual rate of 6 percent between 1994 and 2004. This pace fell sharply in the following decade, where the annual rate of growth decreased to 0.6 percent, falling behind the pace of inflation.
With the exception of the temporary increases brought about by federal stimulus spending in 2009 and
2010, the last five years have seen a decrease in research funding when adjusted for inflation. Overall, medical
R&D funding has declined in real terms by 13 percent since 2004. Research funding, particularly by the private sector, has also shifted to later stages development and away from basic science.
Guided primarily by the desire to realize short-term economic benefits, the share of spending by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies on phase 3 clinical trials – large
studies in people that often represent the final step before regulatory approval – grew by 36 percent between 2004 and 2012. Industry spending is also now the largest component of U.S.
he move away from investing in early stage research has

medical R&D, increasing from 46 percent in 2004 to 58 percent in 2012. T
significant long-term implications, according to the authors. They point out that new knowledge often
takes from 15 to 25 years to move from the discovery made in the lab to its clinical application in people.
With the private sector moving more resources to late-stage research, this leaves the shrinking resources provide by the federal government and often very small companies as the primary
The authors also found that the allocation of research resources does not
sources of funding for early-stage, high-risk research.
reflect the burden of disease on society. Diseases that represent more than 80 percent of all U.S. deaths receive less than half of the funding from the
National Institutes of Health. The portion of total funding for cancer and HIV/AIDS research in particular are well above the levels that these diseases inflict in terms of death and disability.
The amount of money spent by the pharmaceutical industry on finding treatments for rare diseases is
also high, driven primarily by the lower barriers to market set forth in the Orphan Drug Act of 1983. Medical research has become an increasingly global endeavor and investments by
other countries, particularly in Asia, are eroding U.S. leadership. In 2004, U.S. medical R&D spending represented 57 percent of the global total. By 2014, the U.S. share had fallen to 44 percent
with Asia – led by China, Japan, South Korea, India, and Singapore – rapidly making up ground and increasing investment by 9.4 percent per year. If current trends continue, the U.S. will be
overtaken by China as the global leader in medical R&D in the next ten years. China has already surpassed the U.S. in terms of the size of its science and technology workforce and global share
The authors point to the low levels of research

of patents for medical technologies, and is closing the gap in published biomedical research articles.
funding in the field of health services as area in particular need of remedy. Health services – which study
topics such as access to care, cost, quality of care, and efforts to promote well-being – represent only
0.3 percent of U.S. research expenditures. “The low levels of investment in health services research represent a missed opportunity to improve many
aspects of health, especially the burden of chronic illness, aging populations, and the need for more effective ways to deliver care,” said Dorsey.
Labor shortage in biotech

Szaniszlo and Dowling 5/17 Marie Szaniszlo – Staff Writer, the Boston Herald; Brian Dowling –
Journalist in the Greater Boston Area “Biotech dives deep for talent” May 17, 2018
(http://www.bostonherald.com/business/business_markets/2018/05/biotech_dives_deep_for_talent)
//wc
Biotech execs — sounding the alarm over a limited pool of talent in the Bay State — will meet tomorrow with
academic leaders to tackle the shortage of trained workers that threatens to slow growth in the
booming life sciences industry. A jobs report yesterday on the Massachusetts biotechnology sector raised concerns that positions are going
unfilled as companies wait for the right stuff, noting that two-thirds of companies surveyed said it is
taking more than 10 weeks to fill many openings — about three times the national average. Three in 10 employers
said the time-to-hire stretched to 13-plus weeks, with openings in research and development, clinical
research and regulatory compliance topping the most-difficult-to-fill list. “It’s clear we need to grow the available pool of
talent from which the industry can draw employees,” said Peter Abair, executive director of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Educational
Foundation, which authored the report. Tomorrow, more than 200 leaders from industry and academia will meet at the Life
Sciences Workforce Conference at Northeastern University to ensure that colleges and universities
understand what kind of training and specialities are needed as the industry expands. “What we’ve seen over the last
four years is the industry has grown by 20 percent, about twice the rate of the economy,” said Mark Bruso, manager of labor
market research for MassBioEd. In 2017, Massachusetts employment in the life sciences exceeded 70,000, more than at any other point in state history, Bruso said. There were also 28,000
companies are expanding, creating more job opportunities and, with them, more
biopharma job openings, he said, because
turnover than in many other industries.

2ac – biotech solves biodiversity
Biotech is key to remediate marine biodiversity loss
Kalogerakis et al. 15 Nicolas Kalogerakis - Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece , Johanne
Arff - SINTEF, Norway , Ibrahim M. Banat - University of Ulster , Ole Jacob Broch - SINTEF, Norway ,
Daniele Daffonchio - University of Milan, Italy , Torgeir Edvardsen - SINTEF, Norway , Harkaitz Eguiraun -
University of the Basque Country, Spain , Laura Giuliano - CIESM, The Mediterranean Science
Commission, Monaco , Aleksander Handa - SINTEF, Norway , Karmele Lo´pez-de-Ipin˜ - University of the
Basque Country, Spain , Ionan Marigomez University of the Basque Country, Spain , Iciar Martinez
University of the Basque Country, Spain , Gunvor Øie - SINTEF, Norway , Fernando Rojo - CSIC, Spain ,
Jorunn Skjermo - SINTEF, Norway , Giulio Zanaroli - University of Bologna, Italy and Fabio Fava -
University of Bologna, Italy “The role of environmental biotechnology in exploring, exploiting,
monitoring, preserving, protecting and decontaminating the marine environment” January 2015
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871678414000326?via%3Dihub) //wc
The most recent international strategies to re-launch global (bio)economy consider the marine
environment as the last frontier. Baseline scenarios identify successful trends for high technology
marine sectors that operate in a truly global market place. Such a fast developing and diversifying
maritime industry can seriously threaten the marine environment. Environmental biotechnology may
provide important knowledge and tools that will help to protect the resource base upon which marine-
related economic and social activities depend. Environmental biotechnology can play a significant role in
addressing marine environmental problems. These are summarized in the following paragraphs grouped
in five focus areas. Early warning systems to foresee marine threats (natural and anthropogenic) The EU
has adopted several environmental directives, strategies, recommendations, and agreements aimed at
protecting the marine environment and its resources. The EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive
(MSFD; 2008/56/ EC [1]) includes 11 qualitative descriptors for determining good environmental status
(GES). Descriptors 5 (includes harmful algae blooms), 8 (contaminants and their effects), 9
(contaminants in seafood) and 10 (marine litter) are intimately related; however, their assessments
often follow different approaches and are based on unrelated technologies. Biotechnology can provide a
bridge to harmonize procedures and optimize resources for MSFD monitoring programs as well as to
implement nearly real time early warning systems for natural and anthropogenic threats to the marine
environment. MSFD focuses on biological endpoints with ecosystem health at the center of regulation
and management decision-making. Thus, the MSFD requires criteria and methodological standards to
allow consistency in approach in evaluating the extent to which GES is being achieved [2]. Establishing
criteria and methods to determine GES is therefore a priority challenge for basic research, aimed at
establishing solid foundations to achieve harmonized assessment and monitoring procedures. More
recently, chief research efforts have been addressed toward an omics approach for the diagnosis of
environmental syndromes due to, for example, pollution and climate change in marine biota and
ecosystems [3–5]. In this case, biomedical advances are followed more closely by environmental and
marine scientists but much remains still to be done. For instance, the use of biomarkers; a biomarker, or
biological marker, refers to any characteristic, which can be measured and serves as an indicator of
some biological state or condition. Molecular biomarkers measuring gene expression alterations (e.g.
microarrays) after chemical exposure are to-date the front line of research in marine ecotoxicology [6–
9]. We need sequence information for relevant pollution sentinel species that could be employed for the
design, fabrication and commercialization of oligonucleotide high-density microarrays. One weak point
in transcriptomic studies is the lack of information on the organismal/environmental relevance of
alterations in gene expression profiles. High-throughput transcriptomic studies need to be assessed
together to functional endpoints in order to link molecular mechanisms with phenotypic alterations.
These functional endpoints should be also high throughput such as proteomics and metabolomics, and
although the application of proteomics and metabolomics in the marine environment is still in its
beginning, – omic studies are already in progress for marine flora, fauna and microorganisms [6–13].
Interestingly, – omics biomarkers represent a continuum of cellular responses to chemical exposure and
to multiple sources of environmental stress, and provide linkages to mechanisms of cell injury/cell death
or carcinogenic transformation [14]. Overall, improving mechanistic understanding, determining natural
variability and baseline values, standardizing sampling and analytical procedures, integrating biomarkers
among them and with chemical endpoints and relating biomarkers to ecological effects are issues of
major concern for implementing biotools (biomarkers and omic diagnosis data sets) for the MSFD [15].
Criteria and methodological standards are urgently needed to allow consistency in the biomarker + omic
approach for evaluating the extent to which GES is achieved [16], as well long-time series that relate
pollutant exposure to effects on organisms and ecosystems at long-term scale [17]. Learning from
biomedical sciences to speed up the development and use of advanced biomarkers and high-throughput
technologies suitable to foresee marine threats will provide scientists, environmentalists and decision-
makers with up-to-date early warning systems for the monitoring of marine chemical pollution and its
effects. MSFD descriptors 8 and 9 deal with the environmental risk assessment of chemical
contaminants. Likewise, the Water Framework Directive (WFD; 2000/60/EC [18]) and the Registration,
Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH; 2006/1907/EC [19]) deal with the
compliance of environmental quality standards established for chemical substances at European level.
Chemical monitoring can be done with a combination of chemical technology and biosensors. Two major
FP7 calls were recently launched on the development of biosensors for the marine environment for
continuous monitoring of priority pollutants, emerging contaminants and biotoxins (funded projects:
BRAAVOO and SMS). Chemical biomonitoring, that is, methylmercury contamination can also be done
by measuring the behavior of fish in response to an external stimulus; in this case, the response of the
fish is the biomarker. This is a very promising area where research is still very scarce. Whole cell
biosensors are detection tools based on a live bacteria that can sense a signal (of interest is the presence
of a petroleum hydrocarbon), and deliver an output response that can be detected and quantified using
a suitable detector device. Biosensors can be very useful for a fast and cost-effective first-line screening
of the presence of particular pollutants [20–22]. Although biosensors are not aimed at substituting
analytical techniques such as gas chromatography or high-pressure liquid chromatography, they can be
attractive complementary tools to detect pollutants in situ in a cheap and flexible way, and do not need
heavy and expensive equipment. Importantly, biosensors respond to the amount of the pollutant that is
bioavailable (available to the cells), while chemical methods detect the total amount of the compound
present (bioavailable and not bioavailable), which may overestimate the real risks in terms of toxicity
[23]. Therefore, biosensors can be very useful for measuring the ecotoxicity of contaminants, as well as
for monitoring bioremediation processes. For example, a whole-cell biosensor based on an engineered
Escherichia coli bacterial strain has been successfully shown to be useful in field tests for the detection
of arsenic salts in groundwater [24].
Planetary boundaries mean marine biodiversity loss causes extinction – but it’s
reversible
Nash et al. 17 Kirsty L. Nash – Centre for Marine Socioecology, Private Bag 129, Hobart, Tasmania
7001, Australia; Christopher Cvitanovic - Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of
Tasmania, Private Bag 129, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia; Elizabeth A. Fulton – Faculty of Law,
University of Tasmania, Private Bag 129, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia; Benjamin S. Halpern –
CSIRO, Castray Esplanade, Battery Point, Tasmania 2004, Australia; E. J. Milner-Gulland - National Centre
for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California, 735 State St, Santa Barbara, CA 93101-
5504, USA; Reg A. Watson - Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of
California, Santa Barbara, CA 93101, USA; Julia L. Blanchard – Imperial College London, Silwood Park
Campus, Burkhurst Road, Ascot SL5 7PY, UK “Planetary boundaries for a blue planet” NOVEMBER 2017
(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0319-z) //wc
The planet is subject to increasing anthropogenic impacts and is exhibiting global environmental change
at an accelerating rate, eroding the natural capital that sustains human wellbeing and prosperity1 . The
challenge of understanding these large-scale changes and their consequences for human wellbeing led to the development of a set of planetary boundaries by refs 2,3 to guide Earth system
boundaries identify key biophysical limits (Box 1; Table 1); it is proposed that by staying within these limits,
governance. These
humanity may reduce the risk of crossing thresholds that could lead to devastating and potentially
irreversible environmental change, ensuring the maintenance of critical ecosystem services2,3 . The planetary
boundaries framework has generated significant research interest, particularly within the Earth systems governance literature, for example ref. 4 . Moreover, the ideas underpinning the
framework have been incorporated into multilateral discussions and agreements regarding sustainability, such as the Sustainable Development Goals5 . This level of engagement suggests that
planetary boundaries narrative has the potential to shape future environmental policy6 and
the
technological innovation7 . Planetary boundaries integrate knowledge across the biophysical sciences and have been intimately linked to analyses of the Great
Acceleration (see glossary Supplementary Note 1)1 . To date, much of the research literature has focused on terrestrial social–ecological systems, with less emphasis placed on marine systems
. In light of (1) the global spatial dominance of marine ecosystems; (2) the
(Supplementary Note 2; Supplementary Fig. 1)
fundamental ecological differences between marine and terrestrial biomes8 ; (3) the increasing human
pressures on the world’s oceans9 ; and (4) the critical role marine systems play in supporting human
wellbeing, particularly in developing nations10, this imbalance seriously hinders the efficacy of the planetary boundaries framework in supporting Earth
system governance. Here, we provide guidance for redressing this imbalance. We explore research to support characterization of planetary boundaries for a blue planet. We discuss the ways
in which the various boundaries interact, and options for assessing these interactions to provide a more integrated and holistic understanding of global environmental change. Finally, we
To develop the
articulate a research agenda to support implementation of the framework to enhance environmental governance. Characterizing boundaries for a blue planet
boundaries for a blue planet, we outline how the existing boundaries3 could be amended through
integration of concepts, processes and data that are applicable in marine systems (Fig. 1; Table 2). We highlight
the potential implications of including marine systems in relation to our risk of crossing specific
boundaries, and where important research gaps exist. Here, we explore four boundaries in more depth,
highlighting how broadening integration with marine research has significant implications for boundary
characterization: (1) land-system change to show how the scope of a boundary might be expanded to
encompass marine systems; (2) biogeochemical flows to explore how additional marine perspectives
might support more robust tracking of regional issues in a global boundary; (3) biosphere integrity to
highlight a key knowledge gap; and (4) human-appropriated net primary production (HANPP), a new
terrestrial boundary proposed by ref. 11 to provide an example of terrestrial–marine integration for a
boundary that follows a different strategy to the original boundary framework of ref. 12. Our focus on these boundaries is
illustrative but also pragmatic, as we believe modifications could be achieved over relatively short timescales because the
necessary datasets or underlying knowledge are already in place. Land-system change. The land-system change boundary addresses links
between habitat and climate3 . Vegetation cover mediates climate through carbon storage, and by affecting the transfer of moisture and energy at the Earth’s surface13. Habitat change that
shifts vegetation type alters carbon sequestration rates, albedo and evapotranspiration (see glossary Supplementary Note 1), and is likely to drive significant climatic changes, with
deforestation — particularly of boreal and tropical forests — estimated to contribute most to these shifts (Table 2)14. However, this boundary and the underlying analyses do not account for
the influence of marine biomes on climate, including that of ice, seagrass and mangroves (see ref. 15 for the description of vegetation classification that underpins the land-system change
boundary), nor do they account for how ocean–atmosphere coupling may counteract the effect of forest loss on climate14,16. Today, forests represent about 7% of the Earth’s surface17, and
potentially up to 13% historically14, an area matched by continental shelves (6.3%) and a percentage far outweighed by the coverage of marine biomes (70.9%). Critically, just as forest biomes
, mangroves and other marine systems are characterized by biogeophyscial
influence regional carbon and energy fluxes14
processes that influence climate18 (Fig. 2). More importantly, this influence is of sufficient magnitude to warrant
consideration in analyses of the impacts of habitat change on climate. For example, several coastal
marine habitats have the highest carbon sequestration rates of any habitat on the plant (for example, salt marshes:
218 ± 24 g C m−2 yr−1 (mean ± standard error) versus tropical forests: 4.0 ± 0.5 g C m−2 yr−1 )19,20. Furthermore, it is estimated that deforestation is driving emissions of 1.2 Pg CO2 yr−1 (ref.
hereas degradation of coastal wetlands (mangroves, seagrasses and marshes) alone is estimated to be driving
21), w
emissions of 0.12–1.0 Pg CO2 yr−1 (ref. 22), despite these wetlands covering <1% of the Earth’s surface. Similarly, the difference in albedo
between boreal forest and grasslands (0.08 versus 0.2) is smaller than the difference between sea ice and open
ocean (0.1–0.81 versus 0.07)23,24. In light of the large-scale habitat changes occurring in the coastal environment, modifying the land-system change boundary to incorporate marine
systems is likely to significantly influence our understanding of the current risk of experiencing large-scale climatic effects from habitat modification. Expanding the scope of the land-system
change boundary to include marine biomes would require an alteration to the existing control variable (forest cover remaining), or addition of subboundaries demarcating the loss of marine
habitats. Relative ice cover may be a useful sub-boundary across land and sea. Focusing more specifically on habitats unique to the oceans, due to the wide variety of marine biomes, a control
variable such as threedimensional (3D) structural complexity of the habitat25,26 or area of seabed undisturbed by anthropogenic activities such as seabed mining, coastal hardening or
Biome-specific boundaries have been set for land-system change; similar biome-
fishing27,28 may be appropriate.
specific boundaries could be set for marine systems, for example ‘acceptable’ loss of 3D structure on coral reefs may differ to that considered
‘acceptable’ for kelp forests. Such approaches are already getting attention as part of the European Union Habitats Directive and Marine Strategy Framework Directive29, which has put
significant effort into determining appropriate components for its aggregate ‘sea-floor integrity’ index (see glossary Supplementary Note 1)30, and the Integrated Ecosystem Assessment
process in the USA31, which includes more than 30 potential habitat indicators. Integrating sub-boundaries on land and in the ocean to produce a coherent ‘Earth surface change’ boundary is
While some of the boundaries

likely to prove challenging but represents an essential development in the planetary boundaries framework. Biogeochemical flows.
(for example, climate) are linked to global scale tipping points, others represent processes whereby
regional scale change accumulates to such a magnitude that there are global consequences (Table 2). The
biogeochemical flows boundary, which is expressed as two sub-boundaries (nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P)), represents such aggregative
regional scale effects2 . The P boundary explicitly engages with cross-scale issues by incorporating a
regional boundary that recognizes heterogeneity in both nutrient inputs and the absorptive capacity of
freshwater systems32,33. However, the integration of regional information is inconsistently applied across systems and in relation to N. Currently, the N and P boundaries
purely focus on marine system change on the global scale (see Box 1, Table 1 and Table 2)3 . Background marine biogeochemical regimes are highly heterogeneous (horizontally and with
depth), driving differences in biogeochemical cycling, primary productivity and trophic pathways34,35. These differences cause spatial variability in the vulnerability of marine systems to
anthropogenic nutrient flows36, and suggest the need for a more nuanced treatment of this boundary to account for regional marine effects that are consistent with the existing regional
treatment of the P boundary in relation to freshwater systems. Importantly, a vast literature exists exploring the biogeochemistry of coastal and oceanic waters that could underpin such an
extension to the boundary. For example, data are available on the export of nutrients from watersheds and submarine ground water9,33,37. Furthermore, both ecosystem modelling and
. The
empirical research are supporting regionally derived water quality forecasts36 and increased understanding of the variability in nutrient biogeochemistry within the world’s oceans
implications for altered primary productivity, food web structure, ecosystem function and resilience,
and societal wellbeing have also been explored38–40. Given that eutrophication is one of the most frequently observed causes of ecosystem regime
shifts globally (see glossary Supplementary Note 1; www.regimeshifts.org), it seems that, of all the boundaries, scientists are best placed to provide quantified values for regional marine
biogeochemical boundaries. Accounting for regional marine biogeochemical flows goes beyond simply producing a more comprehensive boundary for human-derived N and P. Within the
marine system, the importance of other elements when considering the biogeochemical flows boundary has been recognized3 , but not explored further. The marine biogeochemistry
literature could inform the addition of other sub-boundaries such as iron (Fe) and silicon (Si). For example, Fe is regionally limiting within marine waters and Fe budgets are significantly
regional enrichment patterns of N, P, Si and Fe within marine systems

impacted by anthropogenic disturbances39,41. Furthermore,
have broader-scale climatic and biodiversity implications42,43. Integration of these different components into the existing framework would
help support an improved understanding of how the biogeochemical, climate and biosphere integrity boundaries interact to delimit a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity. So far, the focus of
the biogeochemical boundary has been on bottom-up anthropogenic drivers such as the addition of fertilizers. However, top-down effects such as the
influence of fisheries exploitation on biogeochemical cycles are likely to have impacts that are of
sufficient magnitude to affect the behaviour of this boundary44. While the indirect aspects of these effects are currently poorly understood,
they are, along with the effects of fishing on ecosystem structure and function, a topic of burgeoning interest. Just as with hunting on land, fishing has the potential to
influence geochemical cycling by disrupting ecosystem functioning via the removal of key species, the
redistribution of relative biomass across trophic levels and the dilution of some nutrient mediating
processes45,46. The magnitude of these effects and how they can be mitigated warrant further research
and consideration within the existing boundary framework. Biosphere integrity: functional diversity. The biosphere
integrity boundary was identified by ref. 3 as one of the two core planetary boundaries (along with climate change) as it
is central to the state of the Earth system — crossing either of these boundaries may shift the Earth into
a new state. This boundary focuses on the persistence and functioning of the biosphere. Persistence is underpinned by
genetic diversity, whereas function is determined by the diversity of functional traits (Table 2)3 . Characterizing the functional diversity sub-boundary has proved to be particularly challenging
because of the lack of a suitable control variable47. The biodiversity intactness index (BII), which estimates the proportion of biodiversity found in intact ecosystems that remains within a
corresponding human impacted ecosystem, was presented as a stopgap measure. Recently, BII has been estimated for terrestrial systems, using modelled intact area biodiversity as a
baseline3,48. Yet, there have been no studies estimating BII for marine systems. There is potential to broaden the coverage of BII studies to include the world’s oceans using marine wilderness
baselines (for example, ref. 49). However, this may prove challenging for less well studied marine ecosystems, and species level metrics such as BII are only indirectly linked to function. As a
result, we suggest directing efforts towards developing a more appropriate control variable using a trait-based metric that is more closely tied to the functions provided by communities47,50.
Size- and trait-based modelling of marine communities suggests one potentially robust avenue for
exploring trends in the functional composition of communities from the Holocene into the
Anthropocene51. Such an approach has three key advantages: (1) it allows estimation of undisturbed baseline states that are not reliant on wilderness areas that may be subject to
anthropogenic disturbance, and as such, are not representative of ‘Holocene-like’ conditions48,52; (2) the relative lack of focus on describing species within marine systems may prove
problematic when attempting to estimate biodiversity change using empirical observations alone53; and (3) recent integration of a range of traits into size-based modelling explicitly allows for
estimation of changes in function, historically and in response to future anthropogenic impacts54. Modelling changes in the functioning of ecosystems is an important step, but there is also the
need to choose specific indicators for the control variable to monitor changes empirically. This is a complex undertaking, but simulation testing, such as in fisheries indicator research, could be
used to understand which are the most informative indicators, to gain insights into current status, trends and thresholds in function55,56. For example, ecosystem models have been used in
simulations to test the efficacy of a range of indicators in the context of the effects of fishing and ecosystem state. The models are used to represent the ecosystem and its perturbation (for
example, fishing pressure and climate change scenarios) and to generate ‘data’. Indicators estimated from these data are then compared against the trajectories in the ecosystem model to see
how well they capture the true levels of change55. Regardless of the control variable used,accounting for marine systems in the functional
diversity sub-boundary is likely to have significant consequences for our understanding of the current
state of play. A previous study48 estimated that nearly 60% of terrestrial systems have crossed the
proposed functional diversity boundary to some degree, based on BII. Accounting for marine biomes,
which dominate the Earth’s surface, may give a very different picture. HANPP. Since the publication of the initial framework,
HANPP has been proposed as a new strategy that could potentially replace a number of the original
boundaries because it is relatively straightforward to measure and integrates many of the other
interacting boundaries; primary production is influenced by habitat type, climatic conditions, availability
of carbon dioxide, nutrients and freshwater, and in turn supports biosphere integrity11. The studies proposing HANPP as
a boundary have focused purely on terrestrial systems11,57, despite marine and terrestrial primary production being approximately equal in magnitude58, research suggesting that
similar proportions of productivity flow to fisheries on continental shelves as is appropriated by humans

on land59,60, and the oceans being comparable to land as a carbon sink61. However, it should be noted that the productivity estimates
focus on slightly different characterizations of primary productivity, for example marine estimates focus on surface waters and do not account for spatial variability in the vertical patterns in
primary productivity. Furthermore, terrestrial estimates represent biomass accumulation, whereas those in the ocean represent new production. If HANPP is to be used as a replacement,
integrative planetary boundary, addition of marine productivity is key and is achievable with existing knowledge (Supplementary Note 3), although further work will be needed to harmonize
HANPP highlights the highly

terrestrial and marine estimates to ensure they represent equivalent metrics. Nonetheless, preliminary mapping of terrestrial and marine
heterogeneous distribution of society’s appropriation of primary productivity; the regions of least

concern, such as the open ocean, and the regions where limits are being approached both on land and
in the sea, for example Southeast Asia (Fig. 3; Supplementary Note 3). Where fisheries catches are approaching
productivity limits, the problem is likely to be exacerbated by climate change62. Moreover, some of the geo-engineering
solutions proposed as technological options for addressing climate change involve the direct modification of marine ecosystems and production, for example via ocean fertilization63,
highlighting that planetary boundaries in the oceans may face large and increasingly pressing challenges.
2ac – yes thresholds
Criticism of planetary boundaries rely on misunderstandings
Rockström et al. 18 Johan Rockström – Faculty of Veterinary & Life Sciences, Murdoch University,
Murdoch, Western Australia, Australia; Katherine Richardson - Marine Megafauna Foundation, Truckee,
CA, USA; Will Steffen - Cetacean Research Unit, Faculty of Veterinary & Life Sciences, Murdoch
University, Murdoch, WA, Australia; Georgina Mace - Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology, Kaneohe, HI,
USA “Planetary Boundaries: Separating Fact from Fiction. A Response to Montoya et al.” April 2018
(http://www.environnement.ens.fr/IMG/pdf/rockstrom-etal-2018.pdf) //wc
A recent article by Montoya et al. [1] in Trends in Ecology and Evolution presents a vitriolic and highly opinionated critique of the planetary boundaries (PBs) framework based on a fundamental misrepresentation of the framework and a repetition of earlier ill-informed and misguided
attacks on it. Herein we set the record straight and note more positive ways forward. Planetary Boundaries and Tipping Points Montoya et al. [1] conflate PBs with tipping points . Furthermore, they
mistakenly claim that the PB framework relies on the assumption of thresholds or tipping points. They state: ‘One solution (to environmental research and policy challenges) embraces the notion of Planetary Boundaries arguing that global environmental processes very generally have
major PB papers [2,3]

“tipping points”. These are catastrophes involving thresholds beyond which there will be rapid transitions to new states that are very much less favorable to human existence than current states.’ The fact is that both
state clearly that a PB is ‘not’ a global threshold or tipping point: ‘A planetary boundary as originally
defined is not equivalent to a global threshold or tipping point [3].’ In addition, throughout their paper Montoya et al. [1] focus on knocking down the ‘straw man’ of tipping
points in relation to the biodiversity (biosphere integrity) PB. In particular, they claim that: ‘The rate of human-caused extinctions – now 100–1000-fold the natural background rate – is one of two of the nine global processes deemed to have exceeded a purported tipping point of 10-fold
The fact is that neither PB paper [2,3] has ever claimed that there is a global-level tipping point for
background.’
biodiversity. In fact, we have gone out of our way to emphasize that we do not have scientifically
established evidence of such tipping point [3]: ‘Not all Earth-system processes included in the PB approach have singular thresholds at the global/continental/ocean basin level . . . Examples of such processes are
land-system change, freshwater use, changes in biosphere integrity (rate of biodiversity loss in [2]), and changes in other biogeochemical flows in addition to carbon (e.g., nitrogen and phosphorus).’ It is absolutely clear that the Montoya et al.’s [1] ‘definition’ of the PB framework is
blatantly incorrect. Indeed, one can only conclude that they have either not read or deliberately misrepresented the PB framework as described in [2,3]. Either explanation is unacceptable for a scholarly critique in the peer-reviewed literature, and renders their critique both meaningless
, one further misrepresentation and one additional point are useful to

and not applicable to the PB framework as it actually is formulated. Nevertheless
consider The PB framework is designed explicitly for the global level

. 232 Trends in Ecology & Evolution, April 2018, Vol. 33, No. 4 Purpose of Planetary Boundaries
only (as the name clearly indicates). It is a scientific approach for (i) identifying the processes that
regulate the state ofthe Earth system, and (ii) proposing boundaries for these processes to maintain a
Holocene-like (interglacial) state of the Earth system [2,3]. The PB framework is complementary to the
myriad methods and policies for ecosystemmanagement at subglobal levels, and is not meant to either
replace or override these necessary and important approaches, as erroneously inferred throughout [ 1]. There is
no doubt, however, that attempts have been made – and continue to be made – to apply the PB framework to levels lower than, and sometimes much lower than, the global. The fact is, however, that such ‘downscaling’ has never been either proposed or encouraged in the PB framework
six of the PBs indeed have atwo-level set of control variables and boundaries, with large
papers [2,3]. By necessity,
biome/ocean basin levels in addition to the global level [3]. This subglobal level recognizes that to
understandthefunctioning and stability of a complex system such as the Earth system, the influence of
processes, particularly feedback processes, at levels below that of the system itself can play an
important role in influencing or regulating the system’s functioning [ 4]. We were certainly aware of potential misunderstanding of this point, and so included an explicit
We emphasize that our sub-global level focus is based on the necessity to consider this level to
caution in [3]: ‘
understand the functioning of theEarth system as a whole. ThePBframework is therefore meant to

complement, not replace or supersede, efforts to address local and regional environmental issues.’ Again,
. Biodiversity and Ecosystem/Earth System Functioning

Montoya et al. [1] have apparently either not read or chosen to deliberately mispresent what the PB framework actually says [3]
Montoya et al. [1] appear to be somewhat confused in taking both a linear cause– effect approach to
ecosystems (e.g., ‘ . . . which species are vital to which processes’) and systems approaches [e.g.,
‘resilience (how fast systems recover), resistance (how much they change), variability (how much they
fluctuate over time), and persistence (how long they persist)’]. While both framings have their place, it is
the complex systems approachthat is central to the PB framework [2,3]. Here we agree completely with Montoya et al. [1]: ‘ . . . mounting evidence demonstrates the
, the PB framework is concerned with the role of the

patterns and mechanisms by which biodiversity loss altersthe provision offunctions and the stability of ecosystems.’ In precisely the same way
biosphere (consisting of myriad ecosystems) in regulating the stability of the Earth system. In fact, for
most of the 4.5 billionyear history of the Earth system, the geosphere and biosphere have co-evolved as
a single, interacting system, emphasizing the very important role that the biosphere plays in the
functioning and stability of the Earth system as a whole [5]
**T Visas Neg Things
Decriminalization CP
1NC
Text: The United States federal government should legalize organ sales through an
organ matching foundation.
Organ legalization prevents organ shortages that fuel black markets

The black market for human organs derives from the demand of needy recipients. Virtually all countries
are affected by the high demand for organs and the shortage of organs that can be legally obtained.
n250 For this reason, it is vital for governmental institutions to take necessary measures to increase
voluntary organ donors by creating a legal organ donor compensation program. n251 Moreover, if the
government does not allow an organ compensation program, raising criminal sanctions may help deter traffickers. Finally, it is important to
educate the public on how to properly donate organs before or after death. As
society continues to change, there may be
growing acceptance for organ donor compensation. Scholars and government officials already have proposed ways to
increase organ donations and deter organ trafficking. Two main proposals by government officials are public compensation and organ markets.
n252 Public compensation refers to compensating the donor in various ways, either through tax credits or
cash payments. n253 When the donor is deceased, the compensation may be through reimbursing funeral
expenses. n254 Under public compensation, the government would be responsible for regulating the
type(s) of compensation legally permitted. n255 Organ markets follow a similar concept to public compensation,
without government intervention. n256 Organ markets would allow either a living person or the family of
a deceased person to openly [*492] sell their organs for cash payment. n257 The difference is that an organ market
would allow "the freedom to buy at any price as well as [the] freedom to sell at any price." n258 However, allowing
the sale of organs at any price may create discrimination amongst the different classes and allow the wealthy to have access to the organs the
less affluent will not be able to afford. Public compensation is more effective because it will ensure an increase in
organ donors without the discriminatory effects against the poor. As the current problems illustrate,
government's involvement is required in regulating the organ sales to ensure fairness and safety of the
donors. For all reasons expanded upon in this comment, my proposal would be for the United States to legalize the
selling of organs by creating an organ matching foundation. The organ matching foundation will prescreen
potential donors to test their blood type beforehand in an effort to increase the number of live organ
donors. This proposed concept is similar to how they match bone marrow donors with a recipient. n259
Essentially, the potential donors are provided with an at-home test kit, which will allow them to provide
their blood type information. The test kit will include a finger lancet, alcohol prep, plastic applicator sticks, and testing card. The
potential donor will need to lance a finger and place a finger on the testing card to absorb the blood. Once the potential donor
completes the test, the blood samples are mailed to the foundation, which will test and publish the results
on an online profile for each potential donor. The information then will be entered into a national database for
organ recipients to view online. Further screening may be necessary to ensure the potential donor is
healthy. When a recipient is in need of an organ, he or she will have access to potential donors' blood type
information, making it easier and faster to find a matching donor. This will allow organ recipients to quickly find a
matching donor under emergency situations while providing government regulation. Also, people who
sign up to have their organs donated at death should participate in the prescreening program.
Prescreening would [*493] allow the organs to be matched quickly and avoid waste. n260 With the organ matching
foundation the
government will have the ability to monitor and regulate the sale of organs for both living
and non-living donors. Non-living donors may be given the option to either donate the organs or sell the
organs and apply the money to funeral expenses. Similarly, the United States may consider entering into agreements with
the United States allows the sale of organs, it likely
other countries for transnational operations. If
will decrease the crimes involved as a result of the black market for organs. Also,
the United States will have more control in ensuring organ removal is carried out
safely.
2NC Solvency
The aff makes the impacts inevitable, but legalization solves—opposition stems from a
lack of information
Gregory 11 (Anthony Gregory—research editor at the Independent Institute. 11-9-2011, "Why
Legalizing Organ Sales Would Help to Save Lives, End Violence," Atlantic,
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/11/why-legalizing-organ-sales-would-help-to-save-
lives-end-violence/248114//sabín)
Indeed, why are organ sales illegal? Donors of blood, semen, and eggs, and volunteers for medical trials,
are often compensated. Why not apply the same principle to organs? The very idea of legalization
might sound gruesome to most people, but it shouldn't, especially since research shows it would save
lives. In the United States, where the 1984 National Organ Transplantation Act prohibits compensation for organ donating, there are
only about 20,000 kidneys every year for the approximately 80,000 patients on the waiting list. In 2008,
nearly 5,000 died waiting. A global perspective shows how big the problem is. "Millions of people suffer
from kidney disease, but in 2007 there were just 64,606 kidney-transplant operations in the entire
world," according to George Mason University professor and Independent Institute research director Alexander Tabarrok, writing in the Wall
Street Journal. Almost every other country has prohibitions like America's. In Iran, however, selling one's kidney for profit is
legal. There are no patients anguishing on the waiting list. The Iranians have solved their kidney
shortage by legalizing sales. Many will protest that an organ market will lead to exploitation and unfair
advantages for the rich and powerful. But these are the characteristics of the current illicit organ trade.
Moreover, as with drug prohibition today and alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, pushing a market underground is the way to
make it rife with violence and criminality. In Japan, for the right price, you can buy livers and kidneys harvested from executed
Chinese prisoners. Three years ago in India, police broke up an organ ring that had taken as many as 500 kidneys from poor laborers. The
World Health Organization estimates that the black market accounts for 20 percent of kidney
transplants worldwide. Everywhere from Latin America to the former Soviet Republics, from the Philippines to South Africa, a huge
network has emerged typified by threats, coercion, intimidation, extortion, and shoddy surgeries. Although not every black market
transaction is exploitative -- demonstrating that organ sales, in and of themselves, are not the problem -
- the most unsavory parts of the trade can be attributed to the fact that it is illegal. Witnessing the horror
stories, many are calling on governments to crack down even more severely. Unfortunately, prohibition drives up black-market
profits, turns the market over to organized crime, and isolates those harmed in the trade from the
normal routes of recourse. Several years ago, transplant surgeon Nadley Hakim at St. Mary's Hospital in London pointed out that
"this trade is going on anyway, why not have a controlled trade where if someone wants to donate a
kidney for a particular price, that would be acceptable? If it is done safely, the donor will not suffer."
Bringing the market into the open is the best way to ensure the trade's appropriate activity. Since the
stakes would be very high, market forces and social pressure would ensure that people are not
intimidated or defrauded. In the United States, attitudes are not so casual as to allow gross degeneracy.
Enabling a process by which consenting people engage in open transactions would mitigate the
exploitation of innocent citizens and underhanded dealing by those seeking to skirt the law. The most
fundamental case for legalizing organ sales -- an appeal to civil liberty -- has proven highly controversial. Liberals like to say, "my body, my
choice," and conservatives claim to favor free markets, but true self-ownership would include the right to sell one's body parts, and genuine
free enterprise would imply a market in human organs. In any event, studies show that this has become a matter of life and death. Perhaps
the key to progress is more widespread exposure to the facts. In 2008, six experts took on this issue is
an Oxford-style debate hosted by National Public Radio. By the end, those in the audience who favored
allowing the market climbed from 44 to 60 percent. Yet, the organ trade continues to operate in the
shadows and questionable activities occur in the medical establishment under the color of law. Even
today, doctors sometimes legally harvest organ tissue from dead patients without consent. Meanwhile,
thousands are perishing and even more are suffering while we wait for the system to change.
Organ trafficking is prohibited for the wrong reasons—exploitation happens more when its illegal
Ambagtsheer 13 (Frederike Ambagtsheer , Damián Zaitch & Willem Weimar- Department of Internal
Medicine, Kidney Transplant Unit, University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Willem
Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands (2013)
The battle for human organs: organ trafficking and transplant tourism in a global context, Global Crime,
14:1, 1-26, DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2012.753323//sabín)
4. A critical perspective: from trafficking, to commercialism, to tourism Perhaps the strongest claim of all is that transplant
commercialism is prohibited for the wrong reasons. Transplant commercialism and trafficking are
prohibited to protect those most prone to sell. Scholars have raised the question whether there is
anything intrinsically wrong with the buying and selling of organs (commercialism), or whether what is wrong
in practice is the circumstances under which it occurs and their undesirable consequences.54 They claim that harm (trafficking)
already caused to donors and recipients in prohibited black markets is sufficient proof that the protection argument is no longer valid. As
Radcliffe-Richards et al. wrote, ‘there is much more scope for exploitation and abuse when a supply of
desperately wanted goods is made illegal’.55 The point here is that prohibition does not prevent victimisation.
On the contrary, prohibition and criminalisation of sellers renders it more difficult to identify and help
potential victims of trafficking. The argument made in favour of prohibition (namely that putting a price on organs
will automatically lead to trafficking) is devoid of any empirical substance and is thus unconvincing.56 Radcliffe-
Richards et al. further argue that to justify the prohibition of kidney sales by poor vendors, it is necessary to
illustrate that organ selling must always be against the interests of potential vendors. Removing their
option to sell leaves them poor and makes their range of options smaller still. The only way to improve
their situation is to tackle the root cause of the problem (poverty) and develop effective strategies to
help vulnerable donors.57
AT: Trafficking=Unethical
Bans reinforce the problem—they increase organ profitability and don’t benefit the donor
Ambagtsheer 13 (Frederike Ambagtsheer , Damián Zaitch & Willem Weimar- Department of Internal
Medicine, Kidney Transplant Unit, University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Willem
Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands (2013)
The battle for human organs: organ trafficking and transplant tourism in a global context, Global Crime,
14:1, 1-26, DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2012.753323//sabín)
Another critique is made against the belief that selling body parts violates human integrity and dignity. It
is claimed that it has never been empirically verified whether those selling organs, eggs or sperm indeed felt diminished self-dignity or are
considered to be or feel less altruistic.58 It is said that the alarming organ shortage and resulting deaths on the wait list
justifies the exploration of a legal, regulated market in organs (especially kidneys).59 The ban on organ
sales keeps organ supply low, increases their value, their potential profitability
and thus reinforces the problem. Furthermore, the ban is ‘hypocritical’.60 In contemporary
transplant medicine, everyone profits, except the donor: the hospital benefits, the surgeon and the
medical team are paid, the transplant coordinator gets paid and the recipient receives an enormous
benefit. In an ethical, regulated organ market, organ vendors should equally benefit and be rewarded
for their gift to the recipient and society. The foregoing arguments shed a different light on the negative image of
transplant commercialism. But they are more theoretical than empirical, thus raising the need for an evidence-
based approach. Yet, this is impossible to achieve with a maintained ban on organ sales. Opponents of
regulation often point to harms committed against organ vendors, yet these harms are the result of
transactions in unregulated markets. The large number of organ vendors included in studies on outcomes of kidney vending stand
in stark contrast to the number of organ recipients included in studies on outcomes of organ purchase. Studies on transplant tourism exist, yet
the number of reported organ buyers is much lower than reported organ sellers.61 There are strong indications that transplant tourism takes
place in the same hospitals and clinics where transplants to locals and other medical procedures are carried out. Search engines lead to
websites of centres worldwide that offer organ transplantations amongst many other common medical procedures. Health insurance
companies see the benefit of outsourcing transplants to contracted centres in places including Bangkok, New Delhi and Bombay. Patients are
encouraged to bring their own ‘legitimate donor with a desire to donate’.62 Transplant tourism is increasingly referred to as a perilous
procedure involving evils and dangers for recipients and suppliers.63 The DoI declares that ‘transplant tourism violates the principles of equity,
justice and respect for human dignity and should be prohibited’.64 It
is questionable whether transplant tourism, derived
from the universally and legally accepted phenomenon of medical tourism, deserves the reputation of a
crime.65 Closer scrutiny of studies that present data about transplant tourism reveals that the majority in
fact do not present any real evidence that the organs were illegally obtained.66 An information gap exists about
micro-level interactions between physicians and their patients who opt for presumed commercial transplants abroad.
AT: Public Dissaproval
Education solves public disapproval
Houser 17 (Kristin Houser—Senior Editor of Futurism. 11-6-2017, "Black market bodies: legalizing the
sale of human organs could save lives," Futurism, https://futurism.com/sale-human-organ//sabín)
For now, Iran still stands alone in allowing citizens to legally sell their kidneys, and no other nation appears on the
cusp of doing so. However, that’s not to say a new legal kidney market couldn’t emerge. A 2015 study published
in the journal American Economic Review concluded that U.S. citizens were more open to the idea of
organ sales when presented with information on their potential benefits, so at least one barrier to
creating such a market — public disapproval — could potentially be eliminated through education
programs.
AT: Exploitation
CP solves exploitation—legal action if donor consent isn’t received
Hughes 09 (J. Andrew Hughes—Vanderbilt University Law School, May 2009; B.A., Rhodes College, "
You Get What You Pay For?: Rethinking U.S. Organ Procurement Policy in Light of Foreign Models."
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law—Volume 42, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/wp-
content/uploads/sites/78/hughes-final_x.pdf//sabín)
In light of the UAGA and NOTA ban on exchanging valuable consideration for human organs, such a pilot
program must begin with statutory authorization for an individual to dispose of his organs under a
contractual agreement in return for compensation to be paid to the donor’s estate or to his designated beneficiary.216 By
cutting the donor out of the financial benefits, this plan would minimize the risk of a donor entering into
a contract for quick cash.217 It would also reduce the potential for exploitation of the poor, though a donor
might still be motivated by an interest in providing for his family after his death.218 The decedent should also be protected by
prohibiting relatives from selling his organs without his express consent.219 This could be achieved by
including in the statutory authorization for this program an imposition of civil liability on relatives who
exert pressure while the would-be seller is alive and criminal liability for relatives who attempt to sell
organs without a decedent’s express consent.
AT: Hurts Poor
CP solve any disproportionate impacts—the government can regulate the market to
ensure access
Hughes 09 (J. Andrew Hughes—Vanderbilt University Law School, May 2009; B.A., Rhodes College, "
You Get What You Pay For?: Rethinking U.S. Organ Procurement Policy in Light of Foreign Models."
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law—Volume 42, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/wp-
content/uploads/sites/78/hughes-final_x.pdf//sabín)
The plan should eliminate concerns about inequitable organ allocation in an open market by limiting the
experiment to the supply side of the market.222 Waiting lists would continue to determine priority for
organ recipients, with organ prices capped at a flat-perorgan donation rate or otherwise determined in
advance according to a fee schedule, with an allowance for some market-driven price fluctuations.223
Moreover, inability to pay should not preclude a potential recipient from getting an organ. A
governmental funding source, such as Medicare or Medicaid, might cover the cost of the organ. In the
alternative, under the Harris and Alcorn plan, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would oversee the organ market.224 The
FDA could support the cost of governmental oversight by charging licensing fees to private companies
that would serve as organ brokerage houses.225 The FDA could also use a portion of the fees to fund
transplant opportunities for the underinsured and uninsured.226
Science CP
1NC
Text: The United States federal government should allocate funding for research and
development of artificial organs.
Prevention is the only solution to shortage-driven black markets
Glazer 11 (Sarah Glazer- a London-based freelancer, is a regular contributor to CQ Global Researcher.
Her articles on health, education and social-policy issues also have appeared in The New York Times and
The Washington Post. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in American history. 7-
19-2011, "Organ Trafficking," CQ Researcher by CQ Press,
http://library.cqpress.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqrglobal2011071900&
amp;type=hitlist&num=0//sabín)
Outlook Making Trafficking Obsolete Some experts think medical advances — such as the use of
regenerative medicine to produce artificial organs — could kill the black market in organs by reducing
the need for transplants. Although the use of artificial organs on a mass basis may not happen for at least another decade, many
experts say, surgeons in Sweden have just given a cancer patient a new windpipe, made with stem cells
from the patient's bone marrow, the BBC reported on July 7. It was the first transplant of a synthetic organ that did not require a
donor.75 “Thanks to nanotechnology, this new branch of regenerative medicine, we are now able to
produce a custom-made windpipe within two days or one week,” said Paolo Macchiarini, chairman of the Hospital Clínic
at the University of Barcelona in Spain, who led the transplant team. “This is a synthetic windpipe. The beauty of this is you
can have it immediately. There is no delay.” In addition, “This technique does not rely on a human
donation.”76 He said many other organs could be repaired or replaced in the same way. Other research
aims to use stem cells to repair defective organs or create hearts and livers from a patient's own cells by
growing cells on plastic or natural scaffolds.77 “If we pushed, we could see cell replacement in 10 years,” says bioethicist
Caplan, which he says will be far more effective in ending organ trafficking than politically charged market
proposals. “You're not going to get a solution to the needs of people in organ failure by arguing about
markets,” he says, noting that millions of patients aren't even on a transplant list “because there's no
transplant center where they live in Bolivia or Mozambique.” Other experts see an even simpler way to
reduce black market demand: better disease prevention so patients don't need a replacement organ. A
growing epidemic of obesity and the resultant growth in diabetes is a major driver of the increasing
demand for kidney transplants. In addition, “there are about to be several dramatic improvements in
treating hepatitis C — a major cause of end-stage liver disease,” which could “dramatically reduce the
need for liver transplants,” says UCLA's Danovitch. Waiting times for heart transplants have already declined, he
points out, because treatment of heart failure has improved over the past five to 10 years. “Prevention,”
Danovitch maintains, “is the best way and the only solution” to stem the shortage-driven black market and
the inevitable flow of organs from poor to rich countries. Otherwise, he says, the poor half of the world will continue
selling organs to the wealthier half.
2NC Solvency
New developments make artificial kidneys possible
Humphreys 15 (Benjamin Humphreys- a nephrologist and chief of the division of nephrology at
Washington University in St. Louis. He cares for patients with kidney disease and runs a research
laboratory aimed at developing new therapies to treat kidney disease, including stem-cell-based
therapies. "Will lab-grown kidneys fix our transplant waiting lists?" Washingtonpost.com, 31 Dec. 2015.
General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A438807749/ITOF?u=lom_umichanna&sid=ITOF&xid=be567622.//
sabín)
Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week we're talking about government compensation for
organ donors. Need a primer? Catch up here. Benjamin D. Humphreys is a nephrologist and chief of the division of nephrology at Washington University in St. Louis.
He cares for patients with kidney disease and runs a research laboratory aimed at developing new therapies to treat kidney disease, including stem-cell-based
therapies. Kidney failure is a growing problem in the United States, with more than 100,000 new cases per
year. There are not enough kidneys available to transplant all of these patients, so the majority are
treated with dialysis. The therapy is certainly life-saving but is also costly, inconvenient for patients and itself causes
accelerated heart disease. The risk of death for an average dialysis patient is 20 percent per year. Dialysis
patients make up about one percent of the Medicare population, but paying for dialysis costs seven percent of the entire Medicare budget . Clearly there is
a strong need for innovative new therapies and approaches to the problem. We already have some new
ideas being developed -- at-home and portable dialysis, for example. Yet simply improving the existing technology is an evolutionary
change, one that falls well short of what is actually needed: a new kidney that frees patients from devices entirely. [
Other perspectives: The moral case for paying kidney donors] It is here that the stem-cell revolution of the past 10 years offers a
measure of hope. To understand the challenges in growing a kidney from stem cells, it is useful to compare the stem-cell
approaches to kidney failure with those for diabetes. Patients with Type 1 diabetes suffer from the failure of a single cell type in the
pancreas, called the beta cell. Over the past 10 years, scientists have been successful in generating beta cells in the lab -- billions of them -- and now the only
remaining challenge to cure Type 1 diabetes is find a way to deliver those cells to a patient and keep them alive. Kidney
failure, on the other hand,
represents failure of an entire organ comprised of over 30 distinct cell types, all organized in an intricate
and complicated pattern. The challenge is not only to grow 30 different cell types, but also how to
arrange them in proper orientation. Until two years ago, the prospects for surmounting these challenges
appeared slim, despite decades of effort by large teams of scientists around the world. But recent breakthroughs using human
pluripotent stem cells have demonstrated that growing a kidney in a dish may be feasible. Pluripotent
stem cells are special in that they possess the ability to differentiate into any cell type in the human
body. By coaxing stem cells to differentiate into two different types, kidney-specific stem cells, then combining
them, scientists have discovered that these cells will continue to differentiate on their own, generating a wide variety of cells that are
found in a mature kidney. Moreover, the cells pattern themselves into nephrons -- the functional unit of the kidney --
and these nephrons are structurally quite similar to real nephrons in our own kidney. This remarkable and
surprising advance has, in a short time, changed the way many of us think about the problem of growing
an artificial kidney. While still an enormous undertaking, the problem may have a potential solution. Rather than the challenge of generating 30 different
cell types, we may only need to develop the two critical kidney stem cells and make sure the conditions in the dish encourage
these two cell types to do what they want to do. A powerful aspect of this human stem-cell approach is that it can be
tailored specifically for each patient. Transplant patients generally must take immunosuppressive drugs for the remainder of their lives, to
prevent rejection of their kidney by the immune system. This same problem would exist if an artificial kidney were grown in the laboratory using cells from someone
other than the patient receiving the kidney. [Generosity won't fix our shortage of organs for transplants] However, we
now have the ability to turn
any patient's cells -- from skin or blood on the inside of the mouth, for example -- into pluripotent stem cells. One can imagine
generating patient-specific stem cells from a patient with kidney failure, using these cells to generate a
kidney in a laboratory, and then transplanting that kidney into the same patient. In this scenario, there would be no a
need for immunosuppression, and limited ethical concerns.
Organ Trafficking Adv
Defense
The aff is insufficient—it ignores socioeconomic factors and only ignores international
efforts
Yousaf and Purkayastha 16 (Yousaf, Farhan N- Professor of Sociology at the International Islamic
University. and Bandana Purkayastha- Professor of Sociology at Uconn. "Social World of Organ
Transplantation, Trafficking, and Policies." Journal of Public Health Policy, vol. 37, no. 2, 2016, pp. 190-
199. ProQuest, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1784680953?accountid=36312,
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jphp.2016.2.//sabín)
Curbing Organ Trafficking International and national policies tend to focus only on individual level perpetrators and victims. They neglect
the root causes of exploitation including socio-economic-political factors that produce vulnerabilities
and marginalization leading to organ trafficking. Moazam emphasized that the phenomena of illegal transplantation
and organ trafficking cannot be reduced simply to ‘medical-scientific’ and ‘donor-recipient’
transactions.27 We agree. Previous research shows that organ traffickers easily trap vulnerable segments of the
population, those who cannot stop or break the vicious cycle of their exploitation and
marginalization.2,11 The causes of vulnerability and the cycle of exploitation further suggest that
regularizing organ transplantation alone might not be sufficient. Our previous ethnographic research on organ
trafficking in Pakistan also revealed that after the enactment of THOTA, many illegal organ transplant centers
closed, at least publically. Those seeking to sell their organs to pay debts may still have found brokers, but
very likely the brokers would pay them less because THOTA had increased brokers’ risks.2 Interventions
should not rely solely on deterrence policy. It is also critically important to develop a more integrated
approach, protecting the rights of the disadvantaged groups and empowering them. Society must assure
that persons who have been exploited for organ removal are categorized as victims of organ trafficking
and in need support and protection like victims of other forms of human trafficking.28 Government
should also invest resources to prevent kidney failure in Pakistan. According to an estimate presented at a conference of
the Pakistan Society of Nephrology, because of rapidly growing chronic kidney disease, approximately 20 000 Pakistanis die of kidney failure
every year.29 Moreover,
as organ trafficking, organ trade, and transplant commercialism crosses
geographical boundaries, more concentrated international efforts are needed to punish the
perpetrators, whether the trafficking happened within the country of residence or in a foreign country.
As the recipients of organs generally need long-term medical care and follow-up medical examinations, one possible way to identify such
patients would be to make it mandatory for the doctors to report organ transplantation to concerned law enforcement agencies, whether the
procedure is performed locally or in some other country.30
Other countries are an alt cause

Just as there is a sex tourism industry, 40 a medical tourism industry has developed. This occurs when
desperately ill and/or wealthy people from countries with no donor organ program, or one with long
waiting lists, travel to countries where organs are bought from poor people for miniscule sums of
money and then implanted in the ill person. In Thailand, the private hospitals are willing to treat
indigent accident victims because if the patient 42 dies and the family is willing to donate the victim's
organs, the hospital can have kidneys available for an expensive operation that is still much cheaper
than in the United States.43 Wealthy patients travel to Thailand and the hospital benefits. In another example, in Pakistan the
coerced donation of organs is so prevalent that the country is referred to as a "kidney bazaar. 4 The donors
arme paid up to $2,500, with the money usually going to pay off debts.45 Sometimes, the money is not enough to pay off the debts.4 6 Most
of the time, the donor receives no follow-up care; unable to work, the donor oes back into debt-
meaning the sacrifice of the kidney was meaningless. China has a thriving medical tourism industry. The
military itself runs several hospitals wherein prisoners are made involuntary donors.48 The recipients are
foreigners, many of them Canadians according to one article. 49 The practice has become so widespread that some
researchers are calling for pharmaceutical companies to stop selling anti-rejection drugs to China.50 They
also want hospitals and healthcare providers to deny postoperative care to patients when they return from medical tourism trips in the hopes
of ending the practice. 51
Solvency
Trump ended parole status—that instills fear in survivors, they won’t apply for T-Visas
De Bourmont 18 (Martin De Bourmont—editorial fellow at Foreign Policy. He previously worked as a
reporter for the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia and as a reporting intern for the New York Times in
Paris. 7-9-2018, "New U.S. Policy Raises Risk of Deportation for Immigrant Victims of Trafficking,"
Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/09/new-us-policy-raises-risk-of-deportation-for-
immigrant-victims-of-trafficking-immigration-visa//sabín)
U.S. immigration authorities issued new guidelines last month that could make immigrant victims of
human trafficking more vulnerable to deportation, according to immigration lawyers and activists. The
guidelines, issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), affect immigrants forced into labor or sex
work in the United States by criminals preying on their vulnerability. According to the National Human Trafficking
Hotline, 8,524 cases of human trafficking were reported in the United States in 2017. Under the old policy,
the victims could apply for special permits, known as T visas, that allow them to remain in the United
States, work, and access benefits, often while cooperating with police investigations against their
traffickers. Even if the visa request was denied, immigration authorities usually refrained from taking
action to deport the immigrants, according to anti-human trafficking activists. But under the new
guidelines, denial of a T visa will trigger an automatic summons for a hearing before an immigration
judge — known as a “notice to appear.” Legal experts say such a notice effectively marks the start of the
deportation process. The change marks one more way the Trump administration is making it harder for
immigrants and asylum-seekers to remain in the United States, even when their immigration is motivated
by or bound up with traumatic ordeals. The policy is spelled out in a USCIS memo dated June 28. It states that “USCIS
will issue [a notice to appear] where, upon issuance of an unfavorable decision on an application,
petition, or benefit request, the alien is not lawfully present in the United States.” Jean Bruggeman, who runs a
national alliance of advocates for human trafficking victims known as Freedom Network USA, said immigrants already face stiff
requirements for proving they were victims of trafficking. As a result, genuine victims of trafficking are
sometimes denied the visa. Now, those victims will face deportation. “Under previous policy, as a routine matter, T
visa applicants were not referred [to immigration authorities],” Bruggeman said. “What we tell applicants now: If your story is
not presented perfectly, if you can’t convince someone immediately that you are a trafficking victim
through your application, you have this one opportunity and then if you are not able to do it you will
be deported.” Other legal experts said USCIS was simultaneously making it harder to receive a T visa.
According to the State Department’s 2018 Trafficking in Persons report, the United States granted T visas to
“672 victims and 690 eligible family members of victims in FY 2017, a decrease from 750 and 986 in FY
2016.” “The office that processes these cases has been denying [more petitions] and requesting more
evidence, specifically [for] T visas, requiring more and more documentation that often doesn’t exist,” said
Alicia Kinsman, a Connecticut immigration lawyer who works with victims of human trafficking. She said this was happening with most of her
serious cases, particularly ones in which the trafficking happened long ago or intersected with another crime. In one case, she said, her client
paid smugglers to enter the United States but was then trafficked. “Because she had paid smugglers to come in and they trafficked her, what
happened to her was a long and arduous situation and an abusive situation. … They are conflating the two issues and saying, ‘You were
smuggled’.” Bruggeman said the new policy was making victims more reluctant to come forward with evidence
against their traffickers — which in turn was making it harder for police to investigate the crimes. Some
law enforcement officials are worried as well. “We’ve spent many, many years building trust with our
immigrant communities, working with agencies and nonprofits to put together very clear messaging that
when we are dealing with victims of crime, we don’t differentiate or ask questions about citizenship,” said
San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan. “We’re hearing now there is reluctance to come forward and there is fear that
their immigration status could result in unintended consequences,” she said. A municipal police officer in a
California sanctuary city who works closely with his department’s Special Victims Unit — and spoke on condition of anonymity — also
noted that cooperation with immigrant communities regarding human trafficking is down. “It’s gotten to the
point where we’re putting out PR campaigns to fix that,” he said.
Reauthorization
Reauthorization matters—long-term funding is necessary to combat trafficking profits
Abramowitz 18 (David Abramowitz—the managing director of Humanity United, which supports
efforts to change the systems that contribute to problems like human trafficking, mass atrocities, and
violent conflict. Prior to joining HU, David served as chief counsel to the House Foreign Affairs
Committee. 1-18-2018, "Fighting human trafficking, together," TheHill, http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-
rights/369635-fighting-human-trafficking-together//sabín)
Just how important is the TVPA? If Congress fails to reauthorize this trafficking law, the stability of
funding for federal agencies and programs that are critical for preventing human trafficking, providing
for protection of survivors, and prosecuting perpetrators will be shaken. At stake is funding that enables
efficient, focused coordination among federal, state and local agencies to investigate and prosecute
human trafficking crimes like this Washington forced labor case. Other funding supports agencies such as the newly-established
Department of Health and Human Services Office on Trafficking in Person, which provides support for trafficking survivors as they escape from
their perpetrators, and legal resources to prosecute their trafficking cases. Authorization of these critical programs
establishes anti-trafficking funding as a priority and bolsters the case for maintaining or increasing
federal appropriations. Moreover, long-term funding that is specifically authorized for trafficking is more
important than ever in today’s environment of sequestration and funding cuts: each budget cycle
presents a tremendous challenge to maintain — let alone build — the programs whose resources are
dwarfed by the profits traffickers bring in. But TVPA reauthorization isn’t just about money — it speaks
to our moral standing as a nation. And, if Congress fails to pass it soon, there will be troubling
international ramifications. The United States’ role as a global leader in the fight against human trafficking will also be undermined, to
the detriment of millions of people trapped in modern slavery around the world. Right now, U.S. diplomats are meeting with
countries in the lead-up to the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, which ranks countries on their
anti-trafficking efforts. This process and the report itself have proven to be tremendous diplomatic tools to encourage progress. Yet,
how can we ask other countries to make policy changes and fund implementation of anti-trafficking
programs if we can’t even reauthorize the cornerstone U.S. legislation on trafficking? This potential loss
of diplomatic leadership on human trafficking is even more worrying given other gaps in our federal
anti-trafficking infrastructure. For example, even with all the work Congress has done to move four bipartisan anti-trafficking bills,
the administration has failed to appoint an ambassador to the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking
in Persons (TIP). The lack of a credible voice that can speak to all forms of human trafficking furthers the
perception that the Trump administration is abandoning human rights as a priority. A rash of resignations at the
State Department, including just last month when highly-regarded U.S. diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford submitted a pointed resignation letter to
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, demonstrates the risk of failing to fill key human rights related positions like the TIP ambassador.
**K Things
**Settlerism Neg**
Turn – Autoethnographies
Autoethnographies ultimately reinvest in the colonial structures they criticize as the
“presence of the self” is justified via the performativity of subjugated knowledges which
turns case
Gingrich-Philbrook 05 [Craig, Professor of Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University with
expertise in Performing Arts, Communication and Media, “Autoethnography’s Family Values: Easy Access
to Compulsory Experiences,” pp. 309-311]sg
Ultimately, my concern over the vision of the aesthetic offered by autoethnography stems from my reading of an
essay by Murray Krieger, ‘‘My Travels with the Aesthetic.’’ Here, Krieger recounts the ongoing development of his sense of the place of the
aesthetic relative to the epistemic/conceptual and the political. The essay appears in The Revenge of the Aesthetic: The
Place of Literature in Theory Today, edited by Michael P. Clark. I used the volume in a performance criticism course as one answer to my
perception that students and I had
begun to view performance solely in terms of its epistemic content, what it
argued propositionally, rather
than in terms of its ability to achieve the function Krieger assigns to literature: working ... to
prove itself resistant to the conceptual (as secondary), which, coming after, sifts that primary data [of experience] in accord with
the dictates of logical, propositional, and perhaps generally didactic or specifically political schemata. The literary search was for an order, a form,
that could precede the logically guided constraints of the conceptual and yet, on the other side, did not surrender to the welter of raw
experience itself. (213) Krieger’s position about the nature of the aesthetic contrasts sharply with Ellis and Bochner’s call for a textuality that
compels a particular emotional experience (by any reader) of a particular author’s particular account of a particular experience that author
intends to share in an accessible and easily read way. Krieger maintains that he ‘‘came to understand the extent to which the artistic
medium*/language in the specific case of literary art*/together with the conventions that became attached to it over the centuries, generates a
resistance to the intentions that the artist thought he or she had going into the process’’ (213). Ellis
and Bochner’s discourse
proposes a compulsory and transparent (accessible) emotional response to a text described as literary
because it possesses discernable commonsense features associated with literature in the popular imagination,
but not necessarily developed as strategies of inquiry by literary artists. In this way, they violate what Krieger
identifies as a critical movement ‘‘from the notion of the poem as a firmly fixed aesthetic object with
objectively discoverable characteristics (as in the New Criticism) to the phenomenological notion of the text as an intentional object,
responding to the way in which the reader intends it, as his or her text, to be read’’ (223, emphasis added). Far from
imposing a compulsory emotional experience, the aesthetic ... alerts us to the illusionary, the merely arbitrary claims to reality that authoritarian
discourse would impose upon us; because, unlike authoritarian discourse, the aesthetic takes back the ‘‘reality’’ it offers us in the very act of
offering it to us. It thus provides the cues for us to view other discourse critically, to reduce the ideological claims to the merely illusionary, since
there is in other discourse no self-awareness of their textual limitations, of their duplicity*/their closures, their exclusions, their expressions.
(225) From this perspective, ‘‘the role of any text, when we allow it to function in an aesthetic mode for us, is not to counter one ideology with
another, but rather, as with the moment of carnival, to reveal the inadequacies of ideology itself, as conceptual discourse, to deal with errant
particularity’’ (227). Rather than seeing it as a transparent textuality resulting in a compulsory experience, Krieger, with a nod to Wolfgang Iser,
‘‘claim[s] for the literary a primary anthropological function in helping us see and feel beneath our systematic and generalized languages, and
thus in protecting us from being misled by them’’ (230). I
believe autoethnography hopes to provide just this function, but
cannot do so in its current assimilationist form. Those of us interested in pursuing this potential must question our sense of
gestalt in the movement of literature and its value: are we working as literary artists, expanding the potentials of that particular
artistry, or are we working for discourse in general, tied to a rational system devoted to transparent access, compulsory
experience, and the ideological coordination required for that particular synchronized swim? Krieger describes the situation in telling familial
terms: The literary has been recaptured by the large and heterogenous family of discourse, subject to the
operational rules that apply to language generally. ... In this new domestication of its arrangements, it need no longer travel
with the aesthetic, be exposed to the glories and dangers along that road, resist or succumb to the misfortunes suffered by the arts in an
inhospitable time. (231) From this perspective, the family values of general discourse have recaptured , repaired,
and converted the literary, separating it from the political fate of the arts. In a nutshell, then, my fears come
down to the consequences of how badly autoethnography wants Daddy’s approval. Why do I hold this approval in
such suspicion? My father died when I was young. I lived through a march of increasingly bizarre stepfathers, each of whom wanted to remake
our family in his image by compelling our emotional responses. I’ve seen this pattern repeated by the comings and goings of deans, university
chancellors, and politicians, finally dubbing it ‘‘patriarchy du jour’’ to mark the force that remains invariant even when the particulars appear to
transform. Then there’s the being queer, the silences and oppressions that stem from that. Anyway. You get the picture: this
kind of
approval has long seemed moot. Moot. Sure, I hunger for it. I could tell stories of coaches and advisors whose love I’ve sought, whose
recognition of others I’ve envied however much I’ve tried to resist doing so. So it’s not a value judgment, exactly, though I won’t dissemble about
the stain of judgment that comes next: the autoethnographers exercise such privilege, such luxury, in their hope for
Daddy’s approval. Personally, I think they’re wasting their time. I swear to God, if I read one more essay attempting
to justify the presence of the self in writing to the patriarchal council of self-satisfied social scientists I’ll,
well, I could say ‘‘Scream’’ or ‘‘Go to Wal-Mart after all,’’ but I think I’ll let it go with this, I think I’ll put it this way: ‘‘If I read one more
essay blah blah blah, I think I’ll put it down.’’ The customary extremity of emotion and performance of vulnerability in
autoethnography aside, it’s just not worth it. Daddy’s hard to budge. But Daddy’s also mortal, as are we, so why spend our days
numbering his? Why not write? Why not develop alternative means of circulation, such as the intimate bureaucracies identified by Craig Saper,
exchanging writing, fine art, music, and other aesthetic forms of production with one another, rather than relying on traditional means of
commodifying our artistic labor? Oh, we won’t get the big government grants, you say, or jobs at the big universities kowtowing to our
increasingly fascistic government and morally bankrupt corporate structure? Okay. When was the last time they kept a promise to an artist
anyway?
The 1AC’s autoethnographies are a move to reconciliation as their retelling of history in

relation to immigration policy does not dismantle the structures that produce that
violence, simply accepting the present as an accumulation of injuries that they believe their
settler apology can remedy.
Walcott 11 [Rinaldo Walcott, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Equity
Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Women’s and Gender
Studies Institute, “Into the Ranks of Man: Vicious Modernism and the Politics of Reconciliation,” part of
“Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity,” edited and put together by
Ashok Mathur, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagne, as part of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation
Research Series, pp. 76-77]sg
If we take Wynter and Buck-Morss seriously, the question of what constitutes European modernity is a complicated story of genocide, slavery,
ecocide, and, most strikingly, the production of a new world not just for those colonized and enslaved but for those engaged in the project of
expansion as well. The New World moniker is not a sentimental or history-denying term, but it does reference the brutal realities of life in the
Americas as the bedrock of European modernity and its satellite campuses like Canada. The Enlightenment’s naming and ordering of peoples,
places, and things has bequeathed to us those namings and orders as the very terms through which it might be challenged. The Haitian
revolution of 1791 took up liberty as its central rallying cry from the same French Revolution that sought to crush it. In
our time we have
become Black and Aboriginal, among other names we have been forced to take on, and internalized them out of the very
cartographies of Europe’s global expansion since the fifteenth century. It is indeed these names that only partially make
sense in the logics of, and appeals to, the invented genres of European Man that apologies are meant to assuage.
The question we are often faced with is: how are we to make other conceptions of being human and of traversing the globe appear? What
intellectual, political, and cultural—not to mention economical—space do different conceptions of human life have to offer our present
globalized, networked humanity? In my view the politics of reconciliation throws these questions up without offering answers. The
politics
of reconciliation ask us to come into the apology as the people Europe invented, not as people we once were. And one
cannot be romantic about a past, given that how history has intervened to be a part of the conversation
often means one must in some way work with Europe’s violently profound re-ordering of the globe and the peoples within. Thus, one is often left
asking: whatis being reconciled, with whom, and to what? Reconciliation suggests a past action. It suggests that
some wrongdoing has been done for which the possibility of forgiveness is an act of coming together
again. Reconciliation suggests a significant rupture of some kind has occurred. Above I have suggested that European colonial expansion from
the fifteenth century onwards produced a rupture in the Americas, which in part produced the settler colonial nation-state of Canada, which also
produced new states of/for being indigenous peoples and belatedly African peoples. Those kinds of collective namings—Indigenous, African,
Indian, Asian, and even European—are the cataloguing evidence of the historical rupture for which European Man comes to overrepresent itself
as if it was indeed Man. As Paul Gilroy suggests, the “[b]lood–saturated histories of colonisation and conquest are rarely allowed to disrupt that
triumphalist tale,”11 and one that apologies and the politics of reconciliation attempt to make invisible in the contemporary moment. Thus
reconciliation also suggests a certain kind of suturing is possible in the aftermath of the brutalities that makes it a necessary response in the first
place. But what reconciliation does not appear to do is dismantle the institutional basis of the present
arrangements of human life. Reconciliation does not ask us to rethink where we are; it asks us to accept
the present as an accumulation of injuries for which apologies must suffice as the entry into the flawed
ecocidal, genocidal, anti-human, late-modern world still premised on Europe’s partial conception of the human as
the only option for being human in this world. Reconciliation might provide us a view towards new and, or more, hopeful
human relations, but it does not allow us to seriously grapple with the brutalities that have brought us together in these new geo-political zones
and their multiple disadvantaged relations of Europe’s invented Others. In short, reconciliation
does not absolve histories and
practices of brutality. For the immigrant population coming out of the Caribbean who, under the rules of European modernity, had to
make themselves “not native to the place we were in,”12 and whose histories of enslavement and colonization entangle in complexly creative
and maddening ways with Indigenous cultures of the Americas, the nation-state of Canada’s and European imperial powers’—past and present—
apologies and reconciliation mark the perversity and viciousness of modernity and its incomplete promise
of human liberation.
The aff is an endeavor to reconcile settler guilt and complicity- professions of privilege and
attempts to “raise consciousness” and “produce knowledge” do nothing to dismantle
structures of oppression and only rescue settler futurity
Hurwitz & Bourque 14 [Laura Hurwitz, Environment and Community MA in Social Science, Humboldt
State University indigenous activist for Unsettling Klamath River Coyuntura, & Shawn Bourque,
community activist for Unsettling Klamath River Coyuntura, “Settler Colonialism Primer, 6/06/14,
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/settler-colonialism-primer/]sg
McIntosh’s articulate analysis of white privilege begins to carve a path towards responsibility for white people, but sadly discourse
and
actions beyond recognizing white privilege remain sorely lacking. Professions of white privilege
from settlers without actions for change are not enough. Andrea Smith maintains that, “the undoing of privilege occurs
not by individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position, but
through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the systems that enable these privileges.” In a settler
colonial context, narratives that demean and demonize people of color and discourse that assume the superiority of white people are infused
into settler psyche from birth, through children’s books, schools, social discourse and the media. The non-Indigenous might state that, “all people
are the same,” but underneath this proclamation lies an indoctrinated belief that settlers are entitled to the land, lest the settler would have
relinquished land, power and privilege long ago. For the benefactors of white supremacism and white privilege, acknowledging is a first
step. This must
be followed up with the creation of a collective ethic of accountability designed to take
these systems apart. Settler Moves to Innocence Settler identity has been built on a denial of settlers as non-Indigenous and a rejection
of Indigenous Peoples rights to the land. The initial theft of land was often justified by terra nullius, that is viewing the land as empty and virgin,
or at least not used to it’s fullest potential by Indigenous Peoples. Another complexity to settler identity is explained by wolfe: On the one hand,
settler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the symbolic level, however,
settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence—from the
mother country. A product of this schizo settler identity; simultaneously denying Indigenous Peoples rights, claiming to be “native” and also
wanting to be morally absolved of responsibility for the known atrocities that settler sovereignty rests upon, have been referred to as “moves to
innocence.” As Tuck and Yang write, There
is a long and bumbled history of non-Indigenous peoples making
moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization. We think of the enactment of these tropes as a series of moves to
innocence (Malwhinney, 1998), which problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity,
and rescue settler futurity. Some of these moves to innocence include: Settler Nativism “In this move to innocence, settlers locate or
invent a long-lost ancestor who is rumored to have had “Indian blood,” and they use this claim to mark themselves as blameless in the attempted
eradications of Indigenous peoples.” As Vine Deloria points out, the relative is almost always an Indian grandmother. Tuck and Yang explain that
the claiming of an Indian grandmother not a grandfather fits into the history of rape and sexual assault against Indian women and the racilization
and assimilation practices of settler society. Fantasizing Adoption “These fantasies can mean the adoption of Indigenous practices and
knowledge, but more, refer to those narratives in the settler colonial imagination in which the Native (understanding that he is becoming extinct)
hands over his land, his claim to the land, his very Indian-ness to the settler for safe-keeping.” Often settlers see being adopted as a way out of
guilt and creating a place for themselves on the land absolved from settler status, which as Tuck and Yang point out, “is a reaffirmation of what
the settler project has been all along.” Colonial Equivocation In this move to innocence, settler colonialism and oppression/exploitation are
conflated which, “creates a convenient ambiguity between decolonization and social justice work.” As they put it, “‘We are all colonized,’ may be
a true statement but is deceptively embracive and vague, its inference: ‘None of us are settlers.’” Conscientization
or Free Your
Mind and the Rest Will Follow This is the idea if we change our thinking social conditions will transform.
Although we all do need to decolonize our minds, this is just a start. It is more comfortable for settlers to focus on
consciousness raising then confront the more unsettling undertaking of handing over stolen land
and material privilege. Other Observed Moves to Innocence There are as many moves to innocence as there are settlers. Here we present a non-
exhaustive list of observed examples. Indians are Drunk and Violent This move to Innocence is born of both the “Natives as savages” myth and
the “degenerating/disappearing Native” myth. Settlers can justify their place by viewing Indigenous peoples as not Indigenous enough nor
productive enough to deserve their land. Here Indigenous peoples become the scapegoat and the system of settler colonialism is left
unquestioned. Often this
move extrapolates that settlers are also more suitable stewards of the land,
justifying their ownership and occupation. One Love/One People This is similar to the “colonial equivocation” move, yet it
has been depoliticized. Settlers attest to their lack of regard for the race, creed or color of people and belief that all of humanity is one people.
How could the idea of equality and unity among people be a settler move to innocence? These sweeping claims of a “color blind” world are easy
to assert from a position of power and privilege. Distinct rights of Indigenous sovereignty and claims to the land are glossed over. Despite the fact
that all people belong to the human family we cannot all be one people while settler colonial systems remain intact. Land Bridge/Migration In this
move settlers use a historical “out” describing how people have always migrated around the planet and how Indigenous people’s themselves
migrated here. What this fails to take into account—besides Indigenous accounts of their own origin—is the vast time that Indigenous Peoples
have inhabited, managed and coexisted with their homelands. Not to mention the silencing of violence which has displaced Indigenous peoples;
migrants join a culture, settlers eradicate them. Indians are not Indians anymore Here settlers turn to blood quantum as a measure of Indigeneity
and attest to the fact that both settlers and Indian societies contain mixed heritage. Another aspect of this move to innocence is that Indigenous
people do not know much of their own cultures anymore and in fact at times settlers claim to know more. The throw backs to racialization,
assimilation and cultural appropriation flushed out elsewhere in this paper are clear. This move masks the fact that Indigenous Peoples do still
exist and have retained their cultural practices despite every attempt that could be thrown at them by colonization. Doing My Best as an
Individual Often, when settlers are faced with the reality that settler colonialism is an ongoing system of oppression from which they benefit,
they fall
back to a safe place that claims a person’s role in society is limited to what they can do as an
individual. This allows settlers to continue to remain complicit to settler colonialism while declaring that
they are a good person doing the “best they can” and this is all a person can do in this life. Taking responsibility for our
role as settlers must entail working collective for material changes to settler colonialism. “Helping” Indians As the saying goes, the road to hell is
paved with good intentions. While
many settlers have the intention of “helping” Indians, which makes them feel
good about themselves, these efforts often end up as colonial projects. Historically, many of the worst things that have
happened to Indigenous People’s came from the “help” of settlers. The group “Friends of the Indian” instituted boarding schools, the Dawes Act
claimed to be “helping” Indians (leading to a “paper-trail of tears,” and creating, “a faster method of land transference than the cavalry”) and
missionaries prided themselves on “saving” Indians. Today researchers, activists, and nonprofits continue this course, assuming they know what
Indigenous Peoples’ need. This usually follows settler myths and stereotypes about Indians and imposes settler values as to how Indigenous
people should live and what is best for them, continuing the project of assimilation. While all along, material conditions are
maintained. Bluntly said, settlers might do best to look at how to “save” themselves/ourselves and get there/our own selves together
before worrying about Indians. The colonizer is in the most need of decolonizing.
Their endless critique of the Settler self’s relation to settler colonial violence sustains the
dispossession of indigeneity without repatriation and relegates natives to the “victim” role
Christian 11 [Dorothy Christian, currently in PhD studies at the University of British Columbia where she
is seeking to reconcile Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge, a member of the Secwepemc
(Shuswap) people, “Reconciling with The People and the Land,” part of “Cultivating Canada:
Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity,” edited and put together by Ashok Mathur,
Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagne, as part of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation Research Series, pp.
76-77]sg
It’s complicated, but it is all interrelated. At the University of Victoria, I also linked
Indigenous–settler relations in terms of the
environment; the lands that people have chosen to make their home. At the Victoria conference I explained how, in many
Indigenous cultures, there is a concept of giving back—it is complicated yet very simple. For instance, when we go out on the
land, we don’t take more than what is to be used for that season. If a person is being responsible, they will give back to the land by taking care of
their picking grounds, they will do what is needed to take care of those lands that provide food. Another simpler example is when we go and
harvest trees and branches to build a sweat lodge, we offer tobacco and ask the tree for its blessing as we explain what the branches are to be
used for. Of course, I acknowledge it is much more complicated in human relations. My point is, we
can’t just keep taking and taking
and taking and not give something back. Settler peoples come from all over the world to these lands to reap the
benefits of this land of milk and honey, and they send their financial and other resources to their
homelands. What do they give back to the Original Peoples of these lands? Do they ever take the time to learn about the
Indigenous people whose lands they occupy? In the healing process, once the silence is broken and each party is taking responsibility for their
part of the relationship and relating to each other as dignified, autonomous human beings, then a new relationship can begin. I see that a new
way of being in the cultural interface of Indigenous peoples and all settler communities has to begin with a shared active engagement in the
decolonizing process while simultaneously participating in a cultural healing of both communities, which I believe is necessary for both
Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous settler peoples of Canada. One of the major things I have learned from my intercultural relationships
with both white and non-white settlers is that it is critical to relate outside of the usual colonial binary of
the colonizer and the colonized. In this approach, Indigenous peoples are consistently relegated to the
“victim” role, which paralyzes our ability to assume responsibility for our actions and locks us in the perceptions of the
common stereotypes; that is, the “noble savage,” Hollywood’s monosyllabic Tonto, the stoic cigar store Indian, the rebellious Billy Jack
hero, the natural environmentalist, or the all-knowing spiritual Medicine Man or Woman. You know, the one with all that “woo-woo” spiritual
energy who can do magical things! In my intercultural work, the primary focus has been searching for and trying to understand what “peaceful
coexistence” means in the cultural interface for Indigenous peoples who want to maintain their ancestral ties to their homelands, yet work
together with the larger societies in seeking a sustainable environment where Indigenous peoples can finally realize some economic benefits.
How can we work together? How do we stand together in alliances to fend off the globalization machine that perpetuates a neocolonial
approach? The land is integral to Indigenous cultures and, I argue, is the cause for the very “LOUD silence” that sits between us
because “I believe this is founded in the fear that Indigenous peoples want the land back, that our suppressed rage compounded over centuries
will explode at any given time on any given territory.”14 Settlers know that the original peoples of Canada have a birthright to our lands and any
benefits from its resources. I truly believe the denial of this entitlement and the lack of integrity that the settler governments have in the colonial
relationship is at the core of this fear. Settler governments know they have assumed a privilege and an entitlement to these lands; yet, at the
same time they deny the privilege and entitlement of Indigenous peoples.15 Although many Canadians in the interfaith groups and cultural
activists may theoreticallyunderstand the lack of integrity of the governments assuming this privilege on the
land, it is difficult to exercise effective political actions that may change the status quo, because any real
change is neutralized by diversity policies. Over the years, I have witnessed how we come together oh-so-politely
under the diversity policies that promote being tolerant of each other. I have sat in meetings where we are working
together on a shared goal; however, when it comes to the human part of developing relationships, many people have to run to other meetings,
answer phone calls/texts, or some other more important activities. Admittedly, most of the people who are engaged in intercultural/interfaith
work are overtaxed as it is, and until we take the time to get to know each other as human beings, I see the activist community getting stuck in
the policies of regulating aversion,16 rather than engaging in a truly respectful, collaborative, and peaceful approach. In her book, Regulating
Aversion: Tolerance in an Age of Identity and Empire, Wendy Brown says, “It is noteworthy, too, that within this [tolerance] discourse the aim of
learning tolerance is not to arrive at equality or solidarity with others but, rather, to learn how to put up with others.”17 If what Brown says is
true that the tolerance discourse of Western liberalism regulates the presence of the Other both inside and outside the liberal democratic nation-
state and that the notion of tolerance “affects all levels and domains of civil engagement”18 while it acts as a “substitute for or as a supplement
to formal liberal equality [that can] block the pursuit of substantive equality and freedom,”19 then individuals and groups within the nation-state
of Canada need to formulate new models of interrelating outside a tolerance discourse (including diversity or multicultural policies) that literally
paralyzes a substantive reconciliation in this pluralistic society. For me, part of reconciliation is taking the time to build respectful relationships
and to create opportunities where we develop a new model of interrelating, a model that takes us beyond the usual multicultural sharing of food
and dance and walks towards an authentic reconciliation. This will require a complex, multi-faceted approach; however, if the political will and
desire of settler and Indigenous communities are there, I truly believe it is possible to build a peaceful coexistence with each other.
**Puar Neg**
humanism link/case turn
Their creation of a self-annihilating post-humanist subject persists as the realm of life only
through the genocide of indigenous and black life and means that their attempt to
transcend identity through affect reinstantiates the white humanism they critique
King 17 [TIFFANY LETHABO KING is currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia, and is assistant professor in the
Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Since she has lived in Atlanta, she has been able to
touch ground where her maternal and paternal ancestors survived under enslavement as well as
experience the living land of the Muscogee, Creek, and Cherokee, Spring 2017, “Humans Involved:
Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight,” pp. 177-178]sg
Within the secular human’s mode of man, the ordered self, culture, or “we” needs the chaotic, not- us, or them in the Negro and the Indian in
order to know itself as culture— Logos, Reason— and therefore as human. The human as man, in its ordered, rational, gendered, sexed,
European, bourgeois form, needs chaos in order to secure a self, even as what is human changes. While the human as
man may become elastic and more diverse (as proletariat and woman), it still requires an outside. It still requires chaos,
even if those who were previously a part of the realm of chaos enter into the zone of order. It is within this lineated orbit of chaos
and order that even nonrepresentational poststructuralist theories retain the trace of the human as a
narrow ordering line of the self (even in subjectless guise). The line is but one geo- epistemology of white
posthumanist thought. The Deleuzoguattarian “lines of flight,” even as a nomadic line though supposedly not attached to a self or a
subject, carry the specter and trace of the human in the ordering and disciplining colonial lines of flight of conquest. As Wynter argues, there are
often reversals of the order and hierarchies of structural oppositions; the reversals fail to actually overcome and annihilate the need and desire
for structural opposition as an actual order of knowledge.42 While “natural man” may prevail over ecclesiastical, clergical, or theological man,
natural or rational man still needs to create himself as the center or norm in relation to those who lack
rationality and reason (the Black and Native). Similarly, poststructuralist theory may prevail over structuralist
narratives that center the self or the “I”; however, the impulse to kill and create the Indian without ancestors
alongside crafting a new self- annihilating posthumanist subject is still part of the order of knowledge of structural
opposition. The selfless, subjectless, posthuman still persists as the realm of life because of the annihilation of
Indigenous and Black life. Within critical theories, Black and Native people are rendered structuralist (or modernist
and dead) as white selfactualizing subjects disguise themselves as rhizomatic movements that transcend
representation and the human. Epistemes such as the line segregate the chaotic realm of death (Black and
Native) from the poststructuralist realm of life (white transcendence) through structural opposition
marked with blood. The line is a humanist geo- form and geo- episteme, which makes the kinds of segmentation that structural
oppositions are based on possible.43 Humans must perceive and come to some social or human agreement that lines even exist in the social
(cultural) and natural world. Even in Deleuze and Guattari’s ideal scenario in which lines are drawn and (re)drawn again outside the state’s
mandates, someone (as a subject) must still render them as an outside to something. Poststructuralist traditions that attempt
to
transcend identity actually function as a ruse of subjectlessness. In fact, queer subjectlessness and
nonrepresentational rhizomes are an expression of a posthumanism that resuscitates normative subjects
through the death of Black and Indigenous peoples. Continental theory has not typically had the stomach for sustaining an
investigation of the kind of unspeakable violence that enabled the Marxist worker, queer, and affective subjectless discourses (one can only strive
for subjectlessness if you possess it) to exist. The
erasure of the (white) bodyas- subject- as- ontology has been more
effective in covering the bloody trail of white/human- self- actualization than it has been at successfully offering a
way around and beyond the entrapments of liberal humanism. According to Amber Jamilla Musser, even in its postidentitarian and
subjectless modes, continental theories’ transgressive moves (affective, sensational, masochistic) tend to
reinstantiate the white male (sometimes queer) subject that it hopes to overcome.44 While not throwing away
affect theory in Sensational Flesh, Musser scrutinizes white queer theory’s moves toward subjectless, futurelessnes, and masochism as gestures
that actually recover and reify a subject (often white male gay) as they seek to annihilate the subject.
The aff’s terrorist assemblages are founded in Deleuzoguattarian theory, an endeavor to
displace humanist forms of subjectivity which is made possible only through the discursive
genocide of Indigenous people
Taking a cue from Simpson and Tuck and Yang, I turn to Tuck’s 2010 critique of Deleuze’s notion of “desire” as an example of the theoretical
practice of refusal, which Simpson wonders about and which Tuck and Yang elaborated on in 2014. Eve Tuck’s 2010 article “Breaking Up with
Deleuze” refuses Deleuze’s understanding and imposition of his definition of desire for Native studies and Native resurgence in particular. Tuck
refuses the Deleuzoguattarian nomadic due to its totalizing moves and specifically its evasion and refusal of
Native and alternative notions of refusal that emerge from Native struggles for survival.24 For Tuck, paying attention to “the
continuity of ancestors,” or genealogies, in Native and in all modes of knowledge production is imperative. For Indigenous
and Native studies, it reverses the erasure enacted by continental European and settler- colonial theory, which uses a
tradition of ongoing genocide to annihilate Native thinkers and subsequently their epistemologies and theories.
Prior to Byrd’s indictment of Deleuzoguattarian laudatory accounts of America’s terrain of “Indians without Ancestry,” Tuck reroutes us back to
ancestral and genealogical thinking as a way of asserting Indigenous presence and its epistemological systems and traditions, devoid of Cartesian
boundary- making impulses and desires. Tuck’s work also prepares us in 2010 for the critique that Byrd levies in 2011, which exposes the
traditions, roots, and genealogies of Western poststructuralist theory. Such theory created the conditions of
possibility and emergence for Deleuzoguattarian genocidal forms of rhizomatic and nonrepresentational
thought. Black Caribbean feminist Michelle V. Rowley argues we need to especially attend to a theory’s “politics and conditions of
emergence.”25 In other words, we need to consider on whose backs or through whose blood a theory developed and
then circulated while hiding its own violence. Jodi Byrd in particular attends to the colonialist, genocidal, and therefore humanist
impulses of the rhizome in her book Transit of Empire.26 What is particularly instructive is the way that Byrd operationalizes her critique of
Deleuze and Guattari’s first chapter, “Rhizome,” in their tome A Thousand Plateaus.27 Byrd’s deconstruction, or picking apart, of the
poststructuralist and nonsubject- and nonobject- related Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatics are a masterful (and frankly thuggish and
rude) demonstration of refusing to adapt or “repair” colonial epistemologies and geographies. Byrd’s refusal is a moment
that further helps one distinguish between the works of postcolonial and decolonial studies. Byrd performs an outright refusal that short circuits
the colonial and postcolonial comportments of politesse, which allow genocidal Western thought to continue uninterrupted. Byrd’s interrogation
of the “colonial nostalgia” latent in poststructural and nonrepresentational forms of thought like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is an explicit
example of how the violence of white nonrepresentational theory creates an immediate space of impasse for
Indigenous, decolonial, Black, and abolitionist intellectual traditions. As Byrd argues, the Deleuzian and
Guattarian rhizome assumes its errant, untraceable, and de/reterritorializing path through Native genocide.
The rhizome obtains its metaphorical and theoretical elasticity from the discursive genocide of Indigenous peoples. The territory of
maneuver or ground that the rhizome gains its bearing on is unwittingly or perhaps indifferently anchored in the
disavowal of the Indigenous ancestral claims, history, presence, and ongoing relationship with the land in North
America. Deleuze and Guattari covet the free- range and bloody movements in the West, described as a land of “Indians
without Ancestry” primarily because they do not have to contend with the presence of Indigenous peoples and
their prior relationships (ancestors) to the land and space through which they move and clear as nomads. There are
no existing people to which Deleuze and Guattari have to be accountable. Therefore, their own and others’
selfactualizing, free- form whiteness can proceed unimpeded. The rhizomatic West— terra nullius— is without a people,
history, or a cosmology to navigate. Byrd’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s reproduction or transit of the “Indian” in their book A Thousand
Plateaus limns some of the methods in which colonialism and modes of conquest are enacted on behalf of the
selfactualization of white subjects who produce nonrepresentational theory. In fact, Byrd argues that the “Indian is
the ontological prior through which poststructuralism functions.”28 Byrd traces the appearance or deployment of the Indian as a
simulation or “present absent” in Jacques Derrida’s and then Deleuze and Guattari’s work, which creates space for the
white subject and the unending frontier. Byrd also argues that nonrepresentational theory heralded as a liberatory path beyond the subject
is colonialist. Byrd indicts Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Leslie Fiedler’s work in order to invoke the American West and the Indian as exceptional
cases that inspire rhizomatic movement through the notion of an ever- receding frontier.29 It is colonialist on (at least) two accounts: in
its need to render the Indian already and inevitably (ontologically) dead as “it” has no ancestors or living community to
whom one needs to be accountable; and in its invocation of the vanishing “Indian,” which opens up the possibility of an
“ever- receding frontier” and inspiration for the metaphor of the rhizome. This logic and mode of conquistador
thought undergirds the Deleuzian and Guattarian ethos of experimental and rhizomatic lines of flight. Their
nonrepresentational theory of lines of flight are only possible as a form of white selfactualizing posthumanism due to
the death of Indigenous peoples and their excision from the Earth/land. White posthumanism and its flows and lines of
flight are made possible through Native death. Because of this, Byrd haltingly stops the reader’s momentum as she critiques
Deleuzoguattarian and poststructuralist tendencies that often emerge in postcolonial work. Rather than allow the
preemptive rejoinder that white and some postcolonial scholars use, such as “I know that theorist X did not consider race or was racist, but he
enables us to do XYZ with his work,”30 Byrd instead cuts off Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics at the path. As Byrd anticipates that following
Deleuze and Guattari will end in genocide, she allows the reader the time and space to let this reality sink in and consider a different route than
the normative impulse and course of action that is to repair Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Byrd’s work slows us down and brings us to a point of
impasse and a resting place where one can slow down, stop, and make a choice to stay put or move forward with the dismissive, whimsical, white
conceit that tolerates Native death. Byrd’s refusal allows the reader to feel the violent puncture of the nonrepresentational gash that it tries to
disavow. Byrd gives her reader the space and time to say, “Yes, I understand your attempt to evade signification and thus
representation but it is not compelling enough for me to overlook the reality that it requires Native
genocide.” The way that Byrd’s and others’ decolonial work brings these kinds of tensions and violence to a head enables us to make other
kinds of analytic and conceptual choices. The reader is allowed to think and then say, “If this line of thought requires Indigenous
death, why even venture down it? What could one possibly repair or salvage of it?”
--------------------------
alt solvency card – set col/antiblackness
Only black and indigenous scholarship can counter the humanist tendencies of continental
theory via abolishing the need for black and Indigenous death and creating the possibility
for new humanities
Jackson argues that a

call for movement beyond always happens from a very specific place. The posthumanist’s
horn often blows from a place situated securely within the folds of humanity. This is a very different place
than the space of nonbeing from which Black and Indigenous peoples moan, sing, or speak. Native feminist
refusal and Black feminist abolitionist skepticism function as intervening comportments, dispositions, and modes of
critique that expose the violent and unself- conscious ways that Western theory attempts to move beyond the
human through the annihilation of the Other. Because the crafting of the human is a process of relations, specifically the
relations of negation, then moving beyond the violence of the human is also a relational process. Transcendence is a relational process of
accountability. White subjects cannot transcend identity (e.g., whiteness, queerness), the subject (self- writing and
autonomy), or the human (selfactualization) without ending Native genocide and anti- Black racism. Identities,
subjects, and the human as they are currently configured come into formation through processes of negation. If there is no plan to
enable Black and Indigenous life, then there is no transcending the violence of the human. The scholarship
of Native/Indigenous and Black feminists force continental theory to come outside itself and gaze on the
way even the various attempts of nonrepresentational theory to annihilate the self actually end up reinventing
the subject and the human through new forms of violent invention. This article argues that both refusal and skepticism can
work in tandem and interrupt the performance of white innocence through less- than- effective attempts to evade
representation that jettison the garb of the human without abolishing the need for Black and Indigenous death.47 So what of Black and Native
stakes in identity? If theprimary concern for Black and Native studies is to interrogate and then destroy the
structures and lineaments that make the human- as- man possible, then Black and Native people do not
necessarily seek to inhabit the space of the human or identity as they currently exist. For example, if Black Lives
Matter (BLM) is asking to be absorbed into the category of the human, then BLM’s version of the human does not yet exist. Further, if Black
lives were to be absorbed into the category of the human, the social order and the scaffolding that
upends and holds together the human would collapse. For example, if Black Lives Matter (as a variety of local chapters with
their own unique politics) is actually making an appeal to be included within humanity— as an intelligible identity of the living— the request is
also accompanied by a demand for the abolition of the police. In addition to the BLM movement and its various local chapters, the Black Youth
Project, the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee, and other voices of Black revolt are emerging from within and outside the movement and are
calling for the abolition of the police state.48 If the human is to exist in Black form, then the police state must wither
away. Reflecting on the Rodney King case and the initials N.H.I., Wynter effectively illustrates how the police state has the power to confer the
identity of “human” or “no human.”49 If the goal of Black activists to abolish the police is achieved, the police state would no longer have the
power to decide who was or who was not human. Further, if Native people were to be fully incorporated into the
category of the human, then the United States would cease to exist. The nation- state (United States) that gives
the “absolute” human (white “Americans”) excusive claims to the category of the human would have to be demolished. When the
United States, as the practice of genocide itself, ceases to exist, then Native/Indigenous peoples can exist
and identify as human. Rather than quibbling about “identity” itself, practices of Native refusal and decolonization and
Black “skepticism/pessimism” and abolition argue that the U.S. police state can no longer determine the
conditions of possibility for being considered human. Critical ethnic studies can continue to look to Black and
Native resistance against state- sanctioned killing and genocide as the praxis and theory that shift the terms of contemporary
discussions and contestations over identity.
AT: Perm
The permutation places native studies at the center of parasitic forms of situated
knowledge rather than contesting the flawed formation of their epistemology which
maintains the status quo
- AT: Perm – places native studies at center of rhizomes rather than contesting how those are
formed
Byrd’s work, which is often postcolonial and has cited Jasbir Puar’s appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari as an
example, seeks out opportunities to repair and reclaim Western modes of critique such as feminism, queer, and nonrepresentational theories.
Postcolonial work (as well as white settlercolonial studies) often goes along with the linearity and temporality of white
equivocations that attempt to excuse how the feminist, the queer (nonsubject), and Deleuzoguattarian lines of
connectivity function as parasitic forms of situated knowledge and epistemes. This kind of acquiescence makes
the epistemic revolutions internal to white European humanity possible and seem natural as they dehumanize
and kill Indigenous and Black people.31 Byrd’s indictment of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics refuses and cuts off
the colonial and postcolonial equivocations, sanitization of affects, and speed and pace of the rhizomatic and nomadic line. As an
example of how the protocols, codes of conduct, and politesse of postcolonial “business as usual” unfold in the university, I reflect on my
encounters as a student and now professor in the graduate classroom, reading scholarly texts, listening, and taking part in scholarly critique and
the collegial repartee that occurs at academic conferences. Within these scenarios, I have observed the decorum of supposedly “engaged and
rigorous” critique proceed in the following ways. Often postcolonial interventions into colonial or critical theory travel through
phases, stages of progression, and levels of engagement with continental philosophy. First, in order to demonstrate your scholarly due
diligence, capacity for rigor, and abstraction, you must learn and rehearse the origins of and become fluent in the language, idioms, and grammar
of Deleuze and Guattari or whichever white scholar is in fashion. Second, you must figuratively inhabit and empathize with the white scholar’s
very personal and particular existential and ethical questions (even if you cannot relate to her particular kind of situatedness or experience). It is
often in graduate seminars where you have been asked— and we have been trained as faculty— to have you think about what it must have been
like to be Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the moment in which they lived. Imagine
the trials and
tribulations of being a European bourgeois male maverick in the academy and civil society. In other words, you
must internalize and perform this worldview as if it applies to you. After you internalize and perform, the third thing that you are allowed but by
no means required to do is list the problems with this theory or worldview. Once
you have identified the problems, even
irreconcilable ones, you are encouraged to make an intervention or slight adjustment to the discourse or theory by
asserting that you will now put Indigenous or Black life at the center of this body of thought. The challenge or
intervention usually reads as “what if we put Native or Black studies at the center of Deleuzoguattarian thought?”
Although we may become disillusioned with and challenge a metanarrative, we are rarely encouraged to do what Eve Tuck does when she
“Break[s] Up with Deleuze.” We are often prevented from getting to this stage of exasperation or justified disgust because we are not
allowed to stop, look at, and more importantly feel the violence of Western turns in critical theory. Because of academic
respectability politics that impose a kind of bourgeois politesse on all “communicative acts,” be they in person or in writing, it is impolite and
more importantly irrational to be rendered devastated, enraged, mute, or immobile by the violent terms on which continental theory proceeds.
One must tolerate that Deleuzoguattarianrhizomatic movements require Indigenous genocide. In fact, it is a
necessary evil in order for the West to model the kind of unfettered nomadic movement that Deleuze
and Guattari privilege. The neoliberal temporality of productivity also requires that scholars keep moving
unaffected in the midst of the violence. In fact, one is required to work through and repair or do damage control for Deleuze and
Guattari. This is what a “good scholar” does: puts Black or Native studies at the center of rhizomes rather than
contesting the very terms in which lines of flight become epistemic entities. But how do we perform or act otherwise in
the face of this kind of violence? I am not arguing that academics should not read Deleuze and Guattari. As scholars committed to decolonial
thought, we should read their work and understand how genocide and colonialism flow through it. However, we can read without becoming
seduced and attached to the work. I turn again to the writings of Black and Native feminists as an example of what this critical disinterest and
refusal might look like.32 As Simpson and Tuck and Yang argue, refusal can reroute one set of concerns and questions and redirect them toward
other pursuits. Better yet, disenchantment and pessimism can compel one to perceive or think about new questions. Refusal
and
misandry can move you out of the circuit that the corporate university imposes on critical thinking: know,
internalize, perform, disagree, and then center yourself.
**Queer Migration Neg**
link – settler colonialism
Their form of queer migration creates a parasitic relation between queerness and settler
colonialism, where their flight from oppression to freedom necessitates a consumerist and
imperial project hinged on global mobility
Perez 15 [Hiram Perez, Associate Professor of English at Vassar College, BA, BS, University of Miami; MA,
PhD, Columbia University, “A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire,”
10/30/15, pp. 106-108]sg
The closet, as the primary cultural canon of mainstream gay and lesbian politics, is a spatial metaphor, yet there is insufficient
consideration of how that figurative space presupposes specific material conditions. The closet metaphor
spatially and temporally suggests access to privacy not collectively experienced by all sexual minorities . The privacy
this metaphor takes for granted requires specific economic, cultural, and familial circumstances. Likewise, the “coming out” metaphor suggests a
kind of mobility not universally available.
These canonized metaphors for gay and lesbian experience crystallize homosexual
identity within a tradition of possessive individualism. Coming out promises liberation and celebrates a species
of individualism in the form of self-determination. Conceptually and materially, that freedom and self-
determination are premised on the property of whiteness. The closet narrativizes gay and lesbian identity in a manner that
violently excludes or includes the subjects it names according to their access to specific kinds of privacy, property, and mobility. For Jasbir Kaur
Puar, as well as Hughes, the
link between travel and a specifically gay identity is also determined by
homophobia. Much of the writing on gay and lesbian travel narrativizes this movement primarily as a kind of
dislocation (a flight from oppression to freedom) without adequately examining how such movement also
constitutes an exercise in mobility and privilege. In her article on queer mobility, Puar departs from the dominant paradigms in
tourism studies, shifting her focus onto a theorization of gay and lesbian consumption. As an example of the traditional approach to
understanding gay and lesbian travel, she quotes Thomas Roth, a marketing strategist whose surveys are used by the gay and lesbian tourism
industry: “Many [tourists] are closeted, or come from repressive families, communities or societies. At least during our vacations, we should be
free to be ourselves in a welcoming environment.”14 What kinds of violences are necessary to consolidate the constituency designated by the
pronoun “we”? Roth makes it clear that the freedom “to be ourselves” requires the securing of a space. His use of the
pronoun “ourselves” signals the possessiveness of his subject, but the grammar suppresses the acquisitiveness that the
subject “we” must exercise to obtain and safeguard the possessive individuality coordinated by the infinitive phrase
“to be ourselves.” The mobility of Roth’s touristing subject is enabled by privileges of class, race, citizenship, and quite often also gender (hence
the need to also distinguish between cosmopolitan gay and lesbian mobilities). Roth’s gay travelers move not only from the domestic/repressive
to the foreign/liberating but also from isolation to publicity and, arguably, from obscurity to identity. “We”
exist so long as “we” can
freely consume abroad the pleasure that both defines and defiles us at home. Coming out of the closet, the
canonized narrative for gay and lesbian identity, hinges on mobility, a globalized consumerism, and imperialism. Before
they can be deemed “welcoming,” the “environments” Roth so vaguely references must be properly colonized to
satisfy the desires of gay and lesbian cosmopolitans. This is true not only for the international locations of gay and lesbian
tourism but also for the domestic locations of gay and lesbian gentrification. The formation of these identities,
and I focus here on the gay male cosmopolitan, demands spaces imagined as precivilized. The cosmopolitan calls upon
the native bodies to authenticate the underdevelopment (in every sense) and innocence of these
“welcoming” destinations. Puar points out that “on the one hand, there is the disruption of heterosexual space
and, on the other, the use of the exotic to transgress; in this case, the exotic is signaled by discourses of
homophobia.”15 This fantasy of the exotic is necessary to the formation of a modern gay male
cosmopolitan identity. Queer theorizing more resolutely needs to investigate how dominant Euro-American formations of gay, lesbian,
and queer cultures (not only during this era of normalization but also historically) collude with a hegemonic white masculinity.
Their analysis of queerness relies on categories of the human as gendered and sexual
power produces colonialism over those deemed Other
Morgenson 12 [Scott Lauria Morgenson, Associate Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate
Program in Cultural Studies in Queen’s University, “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism:
An Introduction,” pp.2-4]sg
The child’s interruption of ‘empty land’ reminds us that the

ontology of settler colonialism has been premised on its own
boundlessness: always capable of projecting another horizon over which it might establish and incorporate a newest
frontier. Projecting onto the moon this fiction known as the United States is a specifically settler-colonial act; and not
merely in its long-term vision, in which after taking the moon back in his suitcase, his kind intend to return here to be emplaced. For in doing so,
this act ignores and thinks to erase that both he and the moon bear a relationship to this child of her
nations – a child, perhaps, with a potential to be any gender in her nations – and, as a youth, one through
whom the people sustain a future relationship to this land, regardless of whether he notices. In its break from the settler-
colonial narrative, the image invites irruptive possibilities for imagining alternative viewpoints and passages through time and space that centre a
critical awareness among those whom settlers attempted to eliminate. Yet, Tsinhnahjinnie tells us, against amnesia: the people survive,
and do not forget. This collection extends the effort of settler colonial studies to explain the specificities of settler colonialism by centering
analysis of gender and sexuality. The insight that colonialism is produced, extended, and illuminated by gendered and
sexual power is a hallmark of colonial studies, but that body of scholarship has left the power of settler colonialism under-theorised and in
need of distinctive accounts. Gender and sexuality are intrinsic to the colonisation of indigenous peoples and the
promulgation of European modernity by settlers, whether in pursuit of what Patrick Wolfe has theorised as a logic of
indigenous ‘elimination’, or of what Lorenzo Veracini, Philip Deloria, and scholars in indigenous studies have examined as the
indigenisation of settlers. Theories of settler colonisation will remain incomplete if they do not investigate how this political and
economic formation is constituted by gendered and sexual power. Addressing this demand, contributors to this
collection critically and creatively engage knowledges generated among colonised indigenous peoples who resist settler rule. In doing so they
displace the epistemic frame of settlers and enhance theory of the relationality of indigenous and settler subjects in colonial situations.
Contributors argue that to centre the knowledges of the colonised does not posit that the colonised think uniformly or never become complicit
with or co-responsible in colonial rule. Indeed, if
we understand heteropatriarchy on stolen land to be a settler-
colonial project, then arenas for conforming to settler rule will extend beyond those typically marked by
anti-colonialism and will foreground gendered and sexual spaces. Nevertheless, the contributors share an intention to
enhance indigenous peoples’ capacity for liberation by opening the societies established by ‘invaders/settlers’ (in Brendan Hokowhitu’s
formulation) to radical change. This intention is enhanced by the collection’s array of cases theorising Palestinians under Israeli occupation
alongside Māori in New Zealand, and Creek, Ho-Chunk, and many more indigenous nations and alliances in the United States and Canada. The
essays advance knowledge of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance by examining these disparate national contexts nearby, or at times
through explicit comparison. Settler colonial studies, indigenous studies, Palestinian, Arab, and Middle East studies, and all related fields can learn
how settler colonialisms may be theorised comparatively and interdependently, and how gender and sexuality immediately inform efforts to
comprehend and challenge settler-colonial power.
FW- Set Col 1st
Our scholarship must center settler colonialism as it determines the formation of modern
sexuality and queer power relations
Morgensen 10 [Scott Lauria Morgensen, Associate Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate
Program in Cultural Studies in Queen’s University, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler
Colonialism within Queer Modernities”]sg
Queer studies must center settler colonialism and processes of settlement in order to pursue these directions in
scholarship. Settler colonialism appears in the relational of colonial and modern sexual regimes; in narratives of sexuality
and gender based on Native absence and disappearance, despite evidence of Native survival and resistance; and in the
normative formation of settler sexual subjects, cultures, and politics. I argue that queer accounts of settler colonialism will be
supported by studying the colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality. The frame of colonial biopolitics makes the discursive and
institutional relationality of Native and settler subject positions relevant to any account of modern sexuality in
the United States. While such accounts have tended to exclude Native people, biopolitics marks erasure as
meaningful to narrating settlement, even as that move can be investigated for evidence of the irruption of
Native people amid stories of their demise. The frame of colonial biopolitics will also mark how the power relations
structuring "Native" and "settler" articulate diverse people, cultures, and politics across differences of race, nation, class,
disability, gender, and sexuality that exceed these two terms and their opposition. Yet the normativity of the terms within colonial
biopolitics will still inform every U.S. formation of modern sexuality. Studying their relationality can recall that the locations
they define for Native people always are exceeded by the discrepant histories and epistemologies of Native people's interdependent and
resistant lives. In turn, the term non-Native can help mark how subjects outside Native communities incompletely fit the term settler —whether
excluded from it categorically or asked to pass through or appeal to it —as they negotiate varied non-Native lives in a settler society. Differences
among non-Native people of color, or between them and white people, thus will not be erased by marking their shared inheritance of settler
colonialism; indeed, doing so will mark those differences, even as their distinctive relationships to settler colonialism and its naturalization
become relevant to study.52 In the process, analyzing the
colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality will focus queer
studies on the work of denaturalizing settlement. I mean here not just that settler colonialism will be marked as a condition of
all modern sexual power in the United States [End Page 120] but also that the meaningfulness of its naturalization will become a major area of
study. We
need many more, and more detailed accounts of the subjects, institutions, and power relations that form
whenever settler colonialism is naturalized within modern queer projects in the United States.
AT: Perm
This debate is a question of starting points – the permutation obscures the histories of
settler colonialism as it footnotes the study of Indigenous history which only stabilizes
settler subjectivity and maintains the status quo
Morgensen 10 [Scott Lauria Morgensen, Associate Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate
Program in Cultural Studies in Queen’s University, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler
Colonialism within Queer Modernities”]sg
Denaturalizing settler colonialism will mark it as not a fait accompli but a process open to change. While settlement suggests the appropriation of
land, that history was never fixed: even the violence of allotment failed to erase collective Native land claims, just as land expropriation is being
countered by tribal governments reacquiring sovereign land. In turn, as Thomas King and Paul Carter suggest, settlement narrates the land, and,
as storytelling, it remains open to debate, [End Page 122] such as in Native activisms that sustain Indigenous narratives of land or tell new stories
to denaturalize settler landscapes.56 The processes of settler colonialism produce contradictions, as settlers try to
contain or erase Native difference in order that they may inhabit Native land as if it were their own. Doing so
produces the contortions described by Deloria, as settler subjects argue that Native people or their land claims never existed,
no longer exist, or if they do are trumped by the priority of settler claims. Yet at the same time settler subjects study Native
history so that they may absorb it as their own and legitimate their place on stolen land.57 These contradictions are
informed by the knowledge, constantly displaced, of the genocidal histories of occupation. Working to stabilize settler subjectivity
produces the bizarre result of people admitting to histories of terrorizing violence while basing their
moral systems on continuing to benefit from them. The difference between conservative and liberal positions on settlement
often breaks between whether non-Natives feel morally justified or conscionably implicated in a society based on violence. But while the first
position embraces the status quo, the second does nothing necessarily to change it. As Smith pointedly argues, "It
is a consistent
practice among progressives to bemoan the genocide of Native peoples, but in the interest of political
expediency, implicitly sanction it by refusing to question the illegitimacy of the settler nation responsible
for this genocide."58 In writing with Kehaulani Kauanui, Smith argues that this complicity continues, as progressives have critiqued the
seeming erosion of civil liberties and democracy under the Bush regime. How is this critique affected if we understand the Bush regime not as the
erosion of U.S. democracy but as its fulfillment? If we understand American democracy as predicated on the genocide of indigenous people? . . .
Even scholars critical of the nation-state often tend to presume that the United States will always exist,
and thus they overlook indigenous feminist articulations of alternative forms of governance beyond the United
States in particular and the nation-state in general.59 Smith and Kauanui remind us here that Indigenous feminists crucially theorize life beyond
settler colonialism, including by fostering terms for national community that exceed the heteropatriarchal nation-state form.60 Non-Natives who
seek accountable alliance with Native people may align themselves with these stakes if they wish to commit to denaturalizing settler colonialism.
But as noted, their more frequent effort to stabilize their identities follows less from a belief that settlement is natural than from a compulsion to
foreclose the Pandora's box of contradictions [End Page 123] they know will open by calling it into question. In U.S. queer politics, this includes
the implications of my essay: queers will invoke and repeat the terrorizing histories of settler colonialism if these
remain obscured behind normatively white and national desires for Native roots and settler citizenship. A first
step for non-Native queers thus can be to examine critically and challenge how settler colonialism conditions
their lives, as a step toward imagining new and decolonial sexual subjectivities, cultures, and politics. This
work can be inspired by historical coalition politics formed by queers of color in accountable relationship to Native queer activists. Yet this work
invites even more forms, particularly when Native queers choose to organize apart. White queers challenging racism and colonialism can join
queers of color to create new queer politics marked explicitly as non-Native, in that they will form by answering Native queer critiques. As part of
that work, non-Native queers can study the colonial histories they differently yet mutually inherit, and can trouble the colonial institutions in
which they have sought their freedom, as steps toward shifting non-Native queer politics in decolonizing directions.
**Nomadism Neg**
State Key
Doublebind – either the nomad will settle at some point, which is empirically prove, thus making the aff a
double turn OR the nomadic population will be deemed as a threat by the state and they will be hunted
down no matter how much they ‘move’
Engebrigtsen 17—(Ada Engenbrigtsen, member of the department of Norwegian Social Research, 2017, Key figure of mobility: the
nomad)//CWD
Nomads have, as long as we know, represented a threat and a source of wonder to settled populations
(Peters 2006; Cresswell 1997). There is no clear, precise definition of nomads, but the term is generally used for
pastoralists and people who depend on mobility for their livelihood and shift dwelling places according to
their movements; people without fixed settlement (Keesing 1975). But the boundaries between sedentarism
and nomadism are not neat. Some form of mobility has always been a part of settled life, and seasonal
settlement is part of the mobility patterns for most peoples termed nomadic (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013;
Kabachnik 2012; Favell 2001; Piasere 1992; Keesing 1975). Wars and conflicts have scattered people over vast territories. Peasants and fishers
have been dependent on spatial mobility for their economic activities. Wandering merchants, expatriate experts, preachers, beggars, migrants,
tourists and other drifters have always been part of the lives of settled populations (Cresswell 1997; Kabachnik 2012). The
tension
between mobility and stasis, in terms of freedom and security, and the fantasies of an independent, free-
floating existence, have perhaps always been part of European settled populations’ understanding of
themselves (Peters 2006) and the ‘other’. The figure of the nomad as the embodiment of freedom and
irresponsibility and a challenge to the order of things is thus deeply embedded in European
understandings of mobility and stasis. The threatening image of mobile peoples as destroyers of order
and progress is as old as the romantic fantasies. In Europe, Gypsies and vagabonds are the most
prominent representatives of ‘wandering threats’ who have been treated like kings and pilgrims and as
criminals and outcasts by shifting political regimes (Kabachnik 2012; Vitale 2009; Fraser 1995; Deleuze and Guattari 1986).
Although seldom nomads in the pastoral sense and even after having been settled for long periods, people called ‘Gypsies’ have been regarded
as nomadic and have been subject to forced settlement and persecution by governments (Vitale 2009; Achim 2004; Noyes 2000; Fraser 1995;
Deleuze and Guattari 1986), which gained force during modernity and nation-building processes. This nomadic figure is consequently a trope
used to frame life-worlds that do not fit into European concepts of territory and the nation-state; a form of othering or framing of the other.
Such assumptions echo descriptions by colonial observers of ‘natives’ and mobile people in most parts of
the world (Noyes 2000; Cresswell 1997). These cases illustrate how the connection between a specific mode of
production and a mental state – ‘the relationship between subjectivity and landscape’ (Noyes 2000: 48) – is
not an invention of post-modernity. As Peters notes: ‘The concept of nomadism, in short, was born
metaphorical’ (2006: 151). However, as several researchers show, nomadic adaptations and settlement, mobility and
stability have also formed parts of authorities’ political strategies in different periods and places (Noyes 2000;
Urry 2000; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). From the 14th to the late 19th century, parts of the enslaved Gypsy population in Romania were
nomadic; more or less forced to travel in groups, without fixed settlements, and served the inhabitants of their owners’ territories as artisans and
workers (Achim 2004; Fraser 1995). Forced
settlement of nomadic people all over the world was, however,
intensified and systematised in the 19th and 20th centuries. They were connected to industrialisation and
labour demands, to nation-building and the idea of the relationship between the soil and the person, and
to modernisation with authorities’ increased interest in the control of populations. The resistance to the
concentration of power is what makes stateless society a threat to state control and incorporation. The
political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1986) uses Clastres’s work as its point of
departure, founding ideas that are crucial to the development of the post-modern figure of the nomad.
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Nomad’ stands for the stateless subject and habitus that Clastres discussed. They
developed their philosophy on the idea of difference as the shattering of classification. They argue that
classification is the controlling force at the basis of hegemony and sovereignty. Instead of overcoming
differences by generalising them and rendering them subjected to control, Deleuze and Guattari develop
a notion of difference that one must embrace and acknowledge as the possibility for transformation.
They thus reject dialectics that see the negative as the power of change and instead install difference as a
negative/positive force that always has an element of what it differs from (Kristeva 1982). By rejecting
and shattering classification, difference also rejects incorporation into ‘common ground’ and thus evades
being made the object of a discourse that forces one to seek agreement or consensus. Thus, difference is
fluid, it dissolves the notion of the ‘centre’ by changing and being unpredictable.
Nomadism is abstracted from the true suffering of refugees and is a higher form of Ivory
Tower theory
nomad)//CWD
With the re-instalment of ‘imperial powers’ in Europe in terms of globalisation and the so-called free
movement of resources across boundaries, the post-modern development of the nomadic figure
advanced as a new leading paradigm. Although fantasies of mobility and nomadism always seem to have
been present in sedentary populations in Europe (Noyes 2000; Cresswell 1997), the idea of movement and
mobility became in many fields a leading metaphor and antithesis to the boundary keeping, classification
and identity-obsessed, and unifying ideology of the modern era. Thus mobility as a liberating way of being
and the nomad as a liberating figure and an agent of change fit hand in glove with the new political
ideology of globalisation in the West. The notion of sedentary metaphysics (Malkki 1992) is an expression of
this necessity to see beyond the blind spot of sedentarism in anthropology. The nomad became a figure
that condensed the feelings and thinking of the era, and thus a hero of post-modernity among European
and US intellectuals (Peters 2006). Fredrik Barth’s 21st-century recollections of his 20th-century fieldwork may be an expression of this
Zeitgeist of nomadism as freedom. However, this popular nomadic figure is not subversive to the new era of state-
instigated globalisation, which it embraces, but rather to the old era of modernity with the nation-state as
static power. Social scientists have pointed to the mismatch between the idealised idea of mobility and
the nomadic figure, and the actual regimes of mobility and settlement that both forced populations to
move and restricted the movements of others (see, for example, Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Salazar and Smart 2011; Noyes
2004; Favell 2001; Cresswell 1997). Others have discussed the ethnographic mismatch between conditions and
political organisations of living nomads and the figure of the de-territorialised free, modern nomad
(Kabachnik 2012; Cresswell 1997). Migration researchers have pointed out that most of the labour and refugee mobility of our time is the
outcome of unequal power relations and not at all a result of rebellious nomads attacking the walls of ‘the polis’ (Büscher 2014). Moreover,
it is worth adding that mobile subjects, as for instance refugees, are actually seeking a livelihood
protected by a state apparatus, are happy to, and seek to, be incorporated into that state. Those refused
as illegal migrants may, however, have no other choice than to join the hordes of vagabonds outside state
control (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2007). Critics have also pointed to the severe restriction on mobility of unwanted categories of people such
as the mobile poor populations in Europe and elsewhere (Engebrigtsen et al. 2014; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Noyes 2004; Vitale 2009;
Cunningham and Heyman 2004). Just like nomads and mobile groups in all times, they are seen as threats to state
stability today (Miller 1993 in Bogue 2010). As John Noyes has noted, one of the problems of the concept of the nomad
today lies with the dual productivity of mobile subjects: ‘mobility casts subjectivity between the ideal
freedom of the disembodied wanderer and the brute reality of the refugee’ (2004: 160). Noyes’s point seems to be
that the nomad as an analytical concept is too far removed from the reality of empirical nomads to be
analytically valid. However, the figure of the nomad is not without ethnographic grounding. Deleuze and
Guattari indeed built their nomadology on historiography, myth and ethnographic knowledge. So, the
question we need to ask with John Noyes is: ‘How do we take the conceptual model of a lifestyle, a socio-
economic regime, a mode of production, such as nomadism, as a model for critical thought?’ (2004: 164). In
other words, how closely must the figure of the nomad and the concept of nomadology represent an ethnographic reality in order to have
analytical power? The
critique of romanticising nomadism is closely connected to the critique of the lack of
correspondence between living nomad populations and figurative nomads. In Nomadology, Deleuze and
Guattari (1986: 15–17) write that one of the problems they see in Clastres’s discussion in Society against the
state (1977) is that he misinterprets the formal exteriority of ‘primitive’/nomadic peoples from the state
into a real independence. A similar misinterpretation is also the basis of much of the critique of the
romanticising of nomadic life and of the figure of the nomad and nomadology
Empirically, nomads in the exact context of the affirmative has had to use the state in order to actually
succeed in their ultimate ventures of never being pinned down. Double-bind either the affirmative must
use the state and they link to their own offense OR they don’t adhere to those standards and they have no
substantiated solvency and perceived as war machines by the state, thereby a threat to be eliminated
nomad)//CWD
However, Deleuze and Guattari never claimed that the nomad is free. It is precisely because she is
exterior and dependent on the state apparatus that she represents a war machine against the state; or in
other words a figure for critical thought. Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomad is the subject that, in line with
Michel de Certeau’s (1984) ‘tactical pedestrian’, ‘resides on the territory of the other, and always is
subject of the law of the other’ (1984: 37), but without subsuming to its power. The figurative nomad is not
defined by travel of physical movement, but in Braidotti’s words ‘by the subversion of conventions’ (1994:
5). Being a war machine means being an agent of change by challenging the conceptual ‘walls of the
polis’, the concepts and classifications that state power rests on and must preserve. Deleuze and
Guattari’s nomad is neither good nor bad, neither free nor bonded, she is both; a destructor of perfect
order. She can be seen both in the gangs of street children in Bogotá, in the offshore economies
described by John Urry (2014), in mobile and stateless jihad warriors and in peaceful nomadic groups
evading incorporation in states (Scott 2009). The conceptual gap between the figure of the nomad,
mobility, the ethnographic reality of living nomads and mobile people can best be bridged by thorough
anthropological work. In the following, I will discuss the relationship between the figure of the nomad as
it is developed in nomadology, with two cases of mobile people. My claim is that nomadology and the
figure of the nomad can enlighten our understanding of mobile people and their relations to the state
apparatus. The authorities see the Roma as a backward, conservative group that does not know what is best
for them. Seeing them as Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomads, however, opens up other interpretations; they are
struggling to keep the mental sanctuary they have developed through the centuries, in spite of
malevolent and controlling states. They are waging a silent but insistent war against state control by
consenting to it verbally and defying it in praxis. The Roma agree that wage labour is a good thing and
that they really want it, but as they are illiterate, they are not eligible. As their real earnings are by more
or less ‘shady’ business ventures, they generally do not pay taxes. To evade taxation on their earnings,
they register as unemployed and most adults are thus on social welfare. They speak Norwegian, but they speak it
broken, although most adults can speak it without an accent. They arrived in Norway as Catholics, then converted to Pentecostalism and have
now a separate Pentecostal community in Norway. They send their children to school, but only sporadically, and find reasons to take them out as
much as possible. Their
ongoing internal conflicts over respect, morality and influence make any centralised
institutions of power impossible. They only sporadically have any permanent relations with Norwegians,
and as most children only occasionally go to school, this segregation is perpetuated. They are
economically dependent on Norwegian society, but from a ‘nomadic’ perspective, they struggle to
maintain political, social and mental independence. It is important here to note that parts of the Roma
population in Norway are poor and are living a life in some sense at the fringes of society, but they are
still insisting on their autonomy, language and way of life as better than that of the non-Roma. This
complex amalgamation of consent and avoidance, of adaptation and resistance, of dependency and
autonomy is what makes these Roma difficult to control: their psychological remoteness, not their
physical remoteness. They see themselves as free from state control and consciously guard what they see
as their freedom. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) sense, this is ‘the battle’ between the nomad and the polis, and in de Certeau’s (1984)
sense between the strategies of ‘the powerful’ and the evading tactics of ‘the powerless’ (see also Vergunst 2017, this issue). Thus the living
and struggling Roma in this case present themselves in much the same romantic image as the criticised
image of the nomad; they see movement as freedom from state power, see education and wage labour
as threats to what they see as their freedom. Applying nomadology to analyse their relations to state
authorities further illuminates their position as war machine; not by waging a war, but by subtle actions
of evasion and resistance woven into their habitus and way of life. Being a living nomad means struggling
to evade extinction or territorialisation, ‘by playing along and exploiting the cracks in the enemies’ armour’
(de Certeau 1984: 37). Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the nomad and the state are thus salient for the
anthropological interpretation of the social, political and cultural relationships between the Norwegian
Roma and the state.
Although nomadism may be useful in opening up new spaces of thought and understanding, it is always
either on the brink or is incorporated with state science and statist knowledge which independently internal
link turns their understanding of self and identity
nomad)//CWD
So what about other mobile groups, such as migrants? Can nomadology shed light on their situation?
Deleuze and Guattari claim that migrants are not nomads in their sense, because they move between
places and stay; they move in order to be re-territorialised. Contrary to Deleuze and Guattari, but inspired
by their nomadology, Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassillis Tsianos illustrate how the figure of the nomad can illuminate the fate of
illegal/undocumented migrants who actually never arrive to stay. In ‘The autonomy of migration: the animals of undocumented mobility’ (2007),
they write about the increasing flows of undocumented mobility as a ‘Deleuzian force’. Not
being documented, defined and
individualised, and by being more or less forced to endless becoming, they represent the nomadic war
against sovereign control. The claim is that by perpetually changing identity and shape, by force, necessity
and/or will, illegal migrants escape control by becoming ‘nobody’, imperceptible. Papadopoulos and Tsianos give
the example of one of the interviewees they met in a refugee camp in northern Greece. He was Chinese by birth and on his way to France. On his
route, he was forced to stay in Romania where he married and received a residence permit. He then applied for an EU visa, and was first rejected,
but later got a 3-month work permit and travelled to Paris where he overstayed his visa by over 12 months. He was caught and sent back to
Romania. There he changed identity and gender, married again, now as a woman, and applied again for an EU visa. She travelled to Paris again,
changed identity again, married once more and finally got a residency permit. The researchers later received a letter from her from Canada.
Their other examples are refugees in Calais burning their identity documents and becoming ‘no-one or
everyone = imperceptible’. Given animal nicknames such as ‘coyotes’ (USA/Mexican border),
‘snakeheads’ (China), ‘sharks’ (by British sailors), ‘ravens’ (Greek/Albanian border) and ‘sheep’ (Turkey),
the traffickers/guides across national borders signify the de-humanisation of the undocumented migrant
(Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2007). The authors underline that their intention with the paper is to counteract what
they call ‘the discourse of migration as a humanitarian scandal or as a deviation from the evolutionist
human rights doctrine of western modernity, that also supply both the humanitarian discourses and the
xenophobic and racist politics of forced repatriation’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2007: 6). Instead, they employ a
nomadic perspective to ‘approach migration as a constitutive moment of the current social
transformation, a moment which is primarily sustained by cooperation, solidarity, the usage of broad
networks and resources, shared knowledge, collective anticipation’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2007: 6) Considering the
European origins of territory and its relationship with the modern nation-state (Elden 2014), and how these conceptualisations feed the
‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) still inherent in many studies of mobile people, the
alternative European
figure of the nomad creates space for different understandings of identity, movement and stasis, thus
providing perhaps the best foil to our own conceptual limitations. However, the figure of the nomad, as a
conceptual tool, does require careful ethnography to function as more than a superficial trope. Careful
ethnographic attention allows us to complicate a reductionist notion of the nomadic figure by illustrating
the relevance of mobile people’s life-worlds as challenges to state and territory-centred understandings
of humanity. Braidotti’s (1994) subversive analysis of gender relations, based on the celebration of difference as a means
to destroy hierarchical classification, the strategic situation of the Norwegian Roma as a ‘war machine’
against incorporation by the Norwegian state, and Papadopoulos and Tsianos’s (2007) ‘animals’ of illicit
migration, are only three examples of the analytical fruitfulness of nomadology and the figure of the
nomad as analytical concepts. Seeing this development as a turn towards state science questions
science’s ability to serve as a critical ‘force’ against the individualising, unifying and preserving forces of
public administration. This is especially the case in what is known as ‘migration research’. I see the concepts of
the migrant and of migration as products of state science. These concepts are based on a specific political view of the
world where nation-states make up the foundational ethos. In general, migration means movement
between nation-states. Of course, the concept also implies internal migration, but in this era of
globalisation it is transnational migration that is in focus. The concept thus presupposes that the nation-
state, its borders and thus control of it, is the frame of reference. This frame further implies the
preoccupation with crisis, with difference and labelling, with legality, with control and documentation; it
presupposes ideas of ‘them and us’, and questions about this relationship (Lithman 2004; Favell 2001; Audebert and
Doraï 2010). In migration politics, as in migration studies, integration becomes the key concept to understand
this relationship, together with concepts of identity, racism, ethnicity, discrimination, etc. Integration in
this epistemology means one-way incorporation into the core; the nation-state and its values. When the
social sciences are enmeshed in the interests and concerns of the political-administrative system, as they
are for instance in Norway, researchers are more or less driven into accepting the premises, definitions
and concepts handed down to them through this dependency. This has led to waves of similar analyses of
ethnic minorities and their ways into majority society, in integration studies and studies of different
aspects of otherness. While some illuminating research has been published inside this epistemology, the
majority only feeds into political demands without contesting them. The article on forced migration and
exile in this issue (Hackl 2017) argues for transgressing the idea of exile as bound up in territorial
displacement and suggests instead seeing the exile as ‘a certain interplay of power and identity in space
and over time’. In contrast, movement analysed from a nomadic and mobility-centred perspective, as
developed by Urry (2000), Deleuze and Guattari and others, can illuminate the relationship between state and nomadic
science, between mobility and stasis as power relations in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. Nomadic
perspectives stand for continued wonderment of social phenomena that take social, inductive processes
as their point of departure. Based on ethnographic exploration of nomads and on nomadic life, the
nomad as figure may both enrich and explore our understanding and analysis of the social world. Not by
any romantic vision of freedom and independence, but by making visible and insisting on the subversive
possibilities of social life and science. In this vein, I see the concept of mobility as a nomadic tool that has
opened up new fields of inquiry and new perspectives on today’s social world. However, as with nomadic
forces, the concept of mobility stands in a perpetual interdependency with state science and is always on
the verge of being incorporated. In order to keep their character of becoming, mobility studies should be
inspired by nomadic science by developing its critical potential as a multi-layered, vague and indefinitely
becoming concept.
**Baudrillard Neg**
Is Racist
**Most of these are specific to settlerism**
Baudrillard and Bataille’s criticizing of the modern is inherently tied to otherization. The
notion of symbolic exchange structurally tied to a productivist myth that will force native
life into the shape of being a ‘savage’ – this independently turns their critique of
informatics
***NOTE THIS TAG DOESN’T DO THIS CARD JUSTICE SO RETAG IF YOU’D LIKE
Li 6—(Victor Li, teaches courses in contemporary and postcolonial literature and theory in both the English Department and the Centre for
Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, University of Toronto Press 2006, The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity,
Culture, and Modernity)//CWD
The title of this section alludes to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition in order to make the point that the so-called
postmodern critique of the modern relies heavily on the concept of the premodern or primitive. Tomoko
Masuzawa, in her deconstructive reading of the quest for the origin of religion, uneasily observes: ‘[W]e wonder ... as to the meaning of the
curious appendage post-. Is this an extension – some kind of an afterlife, perhaps, of what it qualifies (structuralist, modern, industrial)? Or does it
indicate a reversal of some sort, an atavistic return of what once was ... a return of the pre-? These are nervous questions ...’1 Masuzawa is
understandably nervous because her questions raise the possibility that the postmodern is not only still attached to what it seeks to supersede
but that it may in fact be strangely complicit with the premodern. As I hope to show, such a preposterous convolution of the pre- and the post-
exists in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard, both of whom, though usually described as
postmodern theorists, may equally be seen as neo-primitivists. Where primitivism attempted directly to know,
appropriate, or incorporate the primitive Other to serve its own (Western) ends, Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s neo-primitivism
sees the primitive Other as that radical alterity which, by resisting universalizing Western metanarratives,
allows us to escape from what Baudrillard calls ‘the hell of the Same.’2 But the primitive Other’s resistance
also functions as a redemptive power that delivers the modern West from its own will to universality. At
once resistant alterity and redemptive force, the primitive Other has little choice or say in how it is positioned and used in neo-primitivist dis-
courses. Though critical of primitivism, neo-primitivism is, therefore, in the final analysis, similar to its predecessor in that its anti-ethnocentric
relativism reintroduces a subtler theoretical recuperation of the primitive. We see a clear example of this critical yet redemptive logic in Claude
Lévi-Strauss’s belief that in our encounter with primitive societies lies ‘the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching’ from our own.3 Lévi-Strauss’s
assertion that ‘we have a duty to free ourselves’4 from our society in order to achieve self-renewal is echoed in the following statement by
Lyotard: ‘The
real political task today, at least in so far as it is also concerned with the cultural ... is to carry
forward the resistance ... to established thought, to what has already been done, to what everyone
thinks, to what is well known, to what is widely recognized.’5 The break with established thought
advocated in Lyotard’s avant-gardist declaration finds one of its exemplifications in the challenge posed
to the modern West’s grand narratives of legitimation by the narrative pragmatics of a ‘savage’ society
such as that of Lyotard’s favourite Cashinahua (who pop up in The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming, ‘Missive on Univer- sal History,’ and The
Differend).6 Similarly, Baudrillard’s
aphorism – ‘The Other is what allows me not to repeat myself for ever’7 –
puts as much weight on the challenge posed by radical alterity (the primitive Other) as on its role in
rescuing and renewing the creativity of the modern or postmodern subject. Baudrillard has claimed that
he has ‘nothing to do with postmodern- ism.’8 We should not take this statement as a flat denial or as
self- mockery, but see in it an example of Baudrillardian reversibility in which to understand the
postmodern is to re-address the premodern. Baudril- lard’s point, argued most clearly in The Mirror of
Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death,9 is that the West, since at least the Enlightenment, has
instituted societies based on the twin myths of production and semiology – that is, respectively, a political
economy that privileges an instrumental-rational view of labour, utility, and exchange value, and a
political economy of the sign based on an abstract structural-linguistic code. The myth of production
governed modern industrial society while the myth of semiology has given rise to our postmodern, post-
industrial culture of signs and simulacra. But these societies or cultures are made possible, according to
Baudrillard, only through the denial or repression of a radical and primordial principle he calls ‘symbolic
exchange,’ a principle he finds at work in primitive societies. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s work on the social relations of the
gift, 48 The Neo-primitivist Turn Georges Bataille’s writings on expenditure and la part maudite, and Marshall
Sahlins’s substantivist economic anthropology, which challenges the orthodox economic axioms of
scarcity, need, and accumulation, Baudrillard argues that the symbolic exchange of primitive societies is
opposed to the productivist myth in so far as it bypasses material wealth, economic calculation, and
accumulation in favour of ‘symbolic wealth which, mocking natural necessity, comes conversely from
destruction, the deconstruction of value, transgression, or discharge.’10 Symbolic exchange is ‘based on
non-production, eventual destruction, and a process of continuous unlimited reciprocity between
persons.’11 In other words, in contrast to the productivist model, whose economic rationality presupposes the
threat of scarcity and the necessity of material accumulation, the symbolic exchange of primitive
societies, which privileges social reciprocity, obligation, and the ritual affirmation of community, requires
‘the consumption of the “surplus” and deliberate anti-production whenever accumulation (the thing not
exchanged, taken and not returned, earned and not wasted, produced and not destroyed) risks breaking
the reciprocity and begins to generate power.’12 Foregrounding the reciprocal, even antagonistic, relationship
between individuals in primitive symbolic exchange, Baudrillard pits its concrete, personal, and
immediate qualities against that other myth of modern or postmodern society, namely, semiology or the
political economy of the sign with its abstract structural code established on equivalence and
substitutability. The gift that is central to symbolic exchange is totally opposed to the sign’s
decontextualized abstraction and reproductivity. As Charles Levin points out: The gift is, in its purest form ...
something unique and irreplaceable, which cannot be substituted because it has no equivalent. It is
something whose very existence symbolizes the interaction which it occasions, and which likewise could
not have come into existence without the interaction ... The gift is not a sign because it cannot be
separated from its context, and transferred to any other: it simply embodies its own meaning, which is
nothing other than the way the bodies of the giver and receiver have come to exist in relation to each
other.13 The concrete reciprocity embodied in the gift takes on greater importance for Baudrillard as the semiotic order becomes increasingly
simulacral in contemporary Western society with signs breaking free from their referents and becoming free-standing and self-reproducing.
Alterity: Baudrillard, Lyotard, Torgovnick 49 The centrality of symbolic exchange to Baudrillard’s
thought has been noted by
commentators such as Gary Genosko, for example, who sees symbolic exchange as initiating a ‘revolutionary
anthropology’ that seeks ‘to destroy the prevailing semiocracy.’14 Similarly, Douglas Kellner states that symbolic
exchange ‘emerges as Baudrillard’s “revolutionary” alternative to the values and practices of capitalist
society,’15 and Julian Pefanis points out that it ‘operates as [Baudrillard’s] meta-position in the critique of political
economy and its contemporary avatar, semio- linguistics.’16 The critical standpoint provided by symbolic
exchange can be subjected, however, to a certain ironic reversal that might amuse Baudrillard but blunts
the force of his critique of Western thought. For while the principle of symbolic exchange allows
Baudrillard to critique both bourgeois and Marxist theories of social and economic organization for their
universalizing tendency, their ‘retrospective finality’17 that incorporates and assimilates the difference of
earlier societies into their own ethnocentric and teleological paradigms, symbolic exchange, as a concept,
can only function on the condition that it idealize primitive society as a positive antithesis to the West.
Such a move replicates, albeit in a different register, the primitivism and ethnocentrism that Baudrillard accuses a Marxist anthropologist like
Maurice Godelier of practising. Baudrillard
charges Godelier with inscribing primitive society in ‘the same
discourse as ours: with the same code. It means looking at primitive society from the wrong end.’18 But if
Baudrillard’s critique of Marxist anthropology is, on one level, anti-primitivist in that it seeks to correct a
certain ‘blindness about primitive societies,’19 on another level it is neo- primitivist in that it reinscribes
an all-too-familiar binary model of a debased modern West and an idealized primitive Other.
Baudrillard’s notions of radical alterity and methods of engagement that seek to dismantle
what we perceive as the modern are uniquely connected to racist perceptions of savagery,
otherization and the libidinal economy of hatred
***NOTE THIS TAG DOESN’T DO THIS CARD JUSTICE SO RETAG IF YOU’D LIKE
Among the first to point out the presence of this ironic reversal in Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange was Jean-François Lyotard. In Libidinal Economy, Lyotard
argues that Baudrillard falls into the trap of primitivism by appropriating the primitive Other as a lost referent
or elusive alibi for his own theoretical disillusionment with Western modernity. ‘How is it,’ Lyotard asks,
‘that he [Baudrillard] does not see that the whole problematic of the gift, of symbolic exchange, such as
he receives it from Mauss ... belongs in its entirety to Western racism and imperialism – that it is still
ethnology’s good savage, slightly libidinalized, which he inherits with the concept?’20 Baudrillard’s
appropriation of the primitive Other as radical critique of and alternative to Western theory becomes
for Lyotard merely the reintroduction of the Western primitivist fantasy of escaping to a ‘non-alienated
region.’21 To Lyotard, Baudrillard’s 50 The Neo-primitivist Turn critique of Western modernity ends up confirming
one of its longstanding desires – the desire to escape its own limits for a forgotten truth. Baudrillard’s
primitive ‘non-alienated region’ belongs to a utopian genre of writing that is generally careless when it
comes to verifying or documenting ethnographic details. This is a criticism that the anthropologist Robert Hefner has made of
Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Produc- tion. Hefner argues that although Baudrillard is quite right to insist that non-economic social
relations based on reciprocity, kinship, and ritual are embedded in primitive exchange, he is wrong in
ruling that the economic values of use and need are totally unheeded in primitive society. Thus, in
response to Baudrillard’s claim that to the primitives ‘survival is not a principle’ and that for them ‘eating,
drinking, and living are first of all acts that are exchanged, [and] if they are not exchanged do not
occur,’22 Hefner points out that not only is Baudrillard indulging in a ‘rather cavalier generalization’ that
would ‘leave most anthropologists perplexed if not dumbfounded,’ but that survival is not a principle
would come as a surprise to ‘the starving Tikopia of Polynesia, who increasingly restricted the breadth of
their social exchange outside minimal kin units in the face of an island-wide famine.’23 In short, Hefner argues, not
only is Baudrillard unconcerned about ‘ethnographic particulars,’ but his ‘romanticized’ image of symbolic
exchange though presenting ‘a perhaps admirable notion of reciprocity ... [is] one that never operated
anywhere simply for the sake of its own poetry.’2 Though Hefner’s criticisms of Baudrillard’s romanticized
anthropology and neglect of ethnographic particulars are cogent, they do not engage directly with the
larger theoretical project of Baudrillard’s work. Baudrillard is in fact not really interested in ethnographic
details because for him ethnographic knowledge is part of the universalizing thrust of Western thought.
As he puts it sarcastically in a critique of Lévi- Strauss’s structuralist epistemology: This is the extreme of liberal thought and the most beautiful way of preserving the
initiative and priority of Western thought within ‘dialogue’ and under the sign of universality of the human mind (as always for Enlighten- ment anthropology) ... This
harmonious vision of two thought processes renders their confrontation perfectly inoffensive, by denying the difference of the primitives as an element of rupture
with and subversion of (our) ‘objec- tified thought and its mechanisms.’25 In later works such as The Transparency of Evil and The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard’s
view of primitive difference as a rupture with Western thought develops into a full-fledged valorization of
a radical otherness that resolutely resists ethnographic comprehension.26 An anti-cognitive and anti-
representational stance is clearly evident in the distinction Baudrillard makes between difference, which
is dialectical and hence intelligible and recuperable as part of a single, universal order, and radical
otherness, which has to do with ‘radical incomparability,’ ‘eternal incomprehensibility,’ ‘ultimate
inscrutability,’ ‘unintelligibility,’ and ‘non-representability.’27 ‘Radical otherness,’ Baudrillard tells us, ‘is
simultaneously impossible to find and irreducible ... The worst thing here is understanding, which is
sentimental and useless. True knowledge is knowledge of exactly what we can never understand in the
other.’28 Advocating a form of anti-ethnography, Baudrillard recommends that one ‘be ignorant of how
one’s subjects live’ and respect ‘non-representability, the otherness of that which is foreign to ... self-
consciousness.’29 The problem with Baudrillard’s valorization of radical alterity is that its incomprehensibility and
incommensurability open up an absolute cognitive relativism that would not permit him to know or say anything about the
Other, about whom he has in fact quite a lot to say. The Other may resist ethnographic understanding but
Baudrillard not only knows about its resistance, he also confidently describes its feelings towards us.
Thus, about other non-Western cultures he has this to say: Outward conversion to Western ways
invariably conceals inward scoffing at Western hegemony. One is put in mind of those Dogons who made
up dreams to humour their psychoanalysts and then offered these dreams to their analysts as gifts. Once
we despised other cultures; now we respect them. They do not respect our culture, however; they feel
nothing but an immense condescension for it. We may have won the right by conquest to exploit and
subjugate these cultures, but they have offered themselves the luxury of mystifying us.30
Baudrillard uses the façade of critique to use the degrading language of savagery and relating it to
indigenous life. This is an independent reason to reject their scholarship
Apart from the moral and factual dubiousness of Baudrillard’s argument (it would be interesting to see
what contemporary South American Indians make of Baudrillard’s description of their ancestors’ ‘mass
self- immolation’), there is the epistemological question of how Baudrillard can know the intention
behind the Indians’ actions when these actions were precisely designed to preserve the secret of their
otherness. If the South American Indians were that radically Other, then how can Baudrillard so confidently know what they were up to?
The answer to this paradox lies in the realization that despite Baudrillard’s critique of Western
epistemology, he is not really concerned with epistemology at all. Though he may use historical and
ethnographic accounts to illustrate his theory of radical otherness, his theory does not require the actual,
living presence of the primitive Other since the Other is needed only as a discursive element of rupture, a
structural antithesis to Western thought. This is why Baudrillard is not bothered by criticism, such as
Hefner’s, that his generalizations lack ethnographic evidence, or troubled by the aporia of describing an
Other he is not supposed to know. The primitive Other functions primarily as a discursive proxy or
theoretical place-holder and the secondary question of its phenomenological or material actuality may in
fact interfere with or muddy its primary function. The real live ‘primitive’ can complicate matters with his
behaviour, whereas the discursive proxy cannot. We can now see why to Baudrillard the extinction or imminent disappearance
of the primitive Other can be turned into a theoretical advantage. The dead or disappearing Indian becomes a pure and
perfect example of the Other; through his physical death, the Indian gains theoretical immor- tality. We
have here an instance of a ‘pataphysical’ logic that Baudrillard elsewhere illustrates through the example
of Alfred Jarry’s dead cyclist who carries on cycling: ‘Rigor mortis is replaced by mobilitas mortis, and the
dead rider pedals on indefinitely, even accelerating, as a function of inertia. The energy released is
boosted by the inertia of the dead.’33 Similarly, the primitive Other’s death confers on it a greater power
to ‘destabilize Western rule.’ The dead primitive returns powerfully as a ‘phantom presence,’ its ‘viral,
spectral presence ... [infecting] the syn- apses of our [Western] brains.’34 Baudrillard’s neo-primitivism
thus ex- emplifies a bizarre logic in which the primitive dies as a presence to serve as an irreducible,
internalized idea. To be sure, Baudrillard is aware that in our time the primitive is allowed to exist only as a simulacrum, a model
constructed by the human sciences precisely to replace the vanished or vanishing original. Baudrillard argues that such a simulation of the
primitive occurred in 1971 when the government of the Philippines, on the advice of anthropologists, ordered that a few dozen Tasaday, a
newly ‘discovered’ and allegedly ‘stone age’ tribe, be cordoned off in their remote jungle home and protected from further media and
ethnological contact and attention.35 The
eth- nologists were worried that the Tasaday would lose their primitive
innocence and thus lobbied that they be sealed off from further exposure to a decomposing modernity.
But this seemingly generous and self-denying gesture on the part of the scientists constitutes, for
Baudrillard, a self- serving justification of their own discipline, allowing them to render the Tasaday into
‘simulacra Indians who proclaim at last the universal truth of ethnology.’36 Baudrillard’s argument is
worth quoting at length: Science loses a precious capital, but the object will be safe – lost to science, but
intact in its ‘virginity.’ It isn’t a question of sacrifice (science never sacrifices itself: it is always murderous),
but of the simulated sacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle. The Tasaday frozen in their
natural element, provide a perfect alibi, an eternal guarantee ... The Indian thereby driven back into the
ghetto, into the glass coffin of virgin forest, becomes the simulation model for all conceivable Indians
before ethnology. The latter thus allows itself the luxury of being incarnate beyond itself, in 54 The Neo-
primitivist Turn the ‘brute’ reality of these Indians it has entirely reinvented – Savages who are indebted to
ethnology for still being Savages: what a turn of events, what a triumph for this science which seemed
dedicated to their destruction!37
Theories of simulations are reliant upon the same ideas of natives not only being savages
but also that they are uncognible objects, such reductions of beings to fungible objects
foments mindsets of indifference and subjection towards Indigenous suffering and
experiences, their suffering must be for fronted before abstractions of totalizing theories
Simulation can thus be seen as the strategy adopted by the ethnologist, or subject of investigation, not
only to gain control and mastery over the primitive, or object of investigation, but also to dispense with
the primitive/object altogether. In the simulation model Baudrillard has sketched out, the Tasaday or
primitive/object, once cordoned off and controlled, can be entirely dispensed with since it is only their
theoretical or simulated presence that is required to prove ethnology’s importance as a science of the
primitive. But while this may appear to suggest that Baudrillard has deconstructed the concept of the primitive and shown it to be merely a
discursive construct or simulation of Western theory, a closer examination of his work reveals that far from abandoning the concept of the
primitive, he sees it as crucial and necessary to his theoretical enterprise. In fact, what Baudrillard
proposes is a simple binary
reversal in which the power of the formerly privileged ethnologist or Western subject is questioned and
replaced by the formerly disadvantaged primitive or non-Western object. What Baudrillard calls the
principle of reversibility results in the fatal revenge of the object on the subject. As he describes it, ‘The
Object and the world let themselves be surprised for an instant (a brief instant in the general cosmology)
by the subject and science, but today they are violently reasserting themselves and taking revenge ...
Such is the figure of our fatality, that of an objective turnaround, of an objective reversal of the world.’38
Though the object may appear passive, indifferent, and inert as opposed to the subject’s active will to
power and knowledge, Baudrillard points out that the object’s very indifference and passivity make it an
‘insoluble enigma,’ ‘an obstacle to all understanding,’ ‘ever more ungraspable,’ and ‘contemptuous of all
attempts to manipulate it.’39 The object is thus uncooperative and resistant to the subject’s attempt to
control and master it. Consequently, Baudrillard tells us, [s]cience has lost its interlocutor [the object],
which, like the ‘savage,’ appears not to have responded with genuine dialogue. It seems that it is not a
good object, ... that it secretly evades all attempts at scientific evangeliza- tion (rational objectification),
and that it is taking its revenge for having been ‘understood’ by surreptitiously undermining the
foundations of the edifice of science.40 Through an ironic reversal, the object, thought to be mastered by the subject, turns the
table on the latter. Baudrillard shows how such a reversal is fatal to our usual ways of thinking, which assume the centrality of the subject: The
main focus of interest has always been on the conditions in which the subject discovers the object, but
those in which the object discovers the subject have not been explored at all. We flatter ourselves that
we discover the object and conceive it as waiting there meekly to be discovered. But perhaps the cleverer
party here is not the one we think. What if it were the object which discovered us in all this? This would give us not merely an
uncertainty principle, which can be mastered by equations, but a principle of reversibility which is much more radical and more aggressive.
(Similarly, didn’t viruses discover us at least as much as we discovered them, with all the consequences that follow? And didn’t the American
Indians themselves discover us in the end?)41 According to Baudrillard’s reversibility principle, the
object, the virus, and the Indian
have the last laugh over those who had thought to master them. Similarly, returning to Baudrillard’s
comments on the Tasaday, it turns out that the primitive ultimately escapes its role as ethnology’s
simulacrum, as the alibi and guarantee of Western science, by stubbornly refusing to come alive and thus
validating its simulated role, choosing instead to remain inert and enigmatic like the dead. As Baudrillard
remarks, at the very moment of its putative triumph, ‘ethnology gives up its final and only lesson, the
secret which kills it (and which the savages understood much better): the vengeance of the dead ... It is
science which ostensibly masters the object, but it is the latter which deeply invests the former, following
an unconscious reversion, giving only dead and circular replies to a dead and circular interrogation.’42 The
primitive is thus both an ostensibly tamed or simulated object as well as a vengeful or fatal one. The
simulated primitive is a product of the assumption that, in the act of simulation, ethnology possesses
complete control and knowledge of its object. Baudrillard’s argument, however, is that the primitive as
object can never be completely knowable and, as such, can never be fully simulated. Like the object that
wreaks vengeance on the subject, the primitive exceeds and subverts the simulated model produced by
ethnology. In Baudrillard’s thought, then, the primitive as simulation is deconstructed only to be replaced
by the primitive as pure or authentic object. The primitive is a pure object, however, only if it is
unknowable. 56 The Neo-primitivist Turn As Baudrillard describes it, ‘the Object is an insoluble enigma, because it is not itself and does not
know itself. It resembles ... [a] savage, whom one could not understand for the same reason that he could not understand himself.’43 It is
precisely because the object is unknowable that it is able to master the knowing subject. There
are a couple of problems,
however, with Baudrillard’s account of the triumph of the uncognizable object. First, the object’s (or
primitive’s) victory is surely pyrrhic; because it cannot know itself, it cannot know about its overcoming of
the subject. The primitive as pure object may defeat ethnology’s attempts to understand and
manipulate it, but it has neither conscious agency nor comprehension of either its plight or its triumph.
Second, the pure primitive or object, described as being unlike the subject in that it is unknowing and
unknowable, seems nonetheless to exhibit subject-like intentions, motives, and emotions such as
vengeance, cunning, sly servility, and ‘the passion of indifference.’44 Supposed to be unknowable, the object appears
amenable to all kinds of descriptions and imputations. Perhaps the object is not as purely objective as Baudrillard thinks
it to be, and we may thus entertain the suspicion that the object may well be the most subtle theoretical
trick yet employed by the subject, the most realistic simulation currently available and one that would
offer an avant-garde edge to a theorist in the highly competitive Parisian academic scene. Douglas Kellner, for
example, has described Baudrillard in such terms, calling him a double agent who while championing the object is really in fact speaking for the
subject: [A]lthough
Baudrillard wants to present himself as the voice and advocate of the object, he is really
a double agent, secretly representing the subject as he anthropomorphizes the object world in an
amazing creative display that out-Disneys Disney. For it is clear that, ultimately, he is projecting the
categories of subjectivity, as well as his own subjective imagination, into the domain of objects (ascribing
to them as objective features his subjective projections such as revenge, indifference and so on), thus
secretly continuing in a different form the very philosophy of subjectivity that he pretends to combat.45
Post-modernism uses representations of children to show the ‘unmodern’ and naïve

aspects of indigenous life which gets replicated to produce even more situated violence
against such folks
In the end, then, despite

Baudrillard’s valorization of the object, it is the subject that continues to run the
theoretical show. Baudrillard’s theory of the fatal object turns out to be a covert theory of the subject’s
fetishistic approach to the object in the same way that his critique of ethnology’s simulation of the
primitive merely reintroduces the primitive as a pure object simulated by the theorist’s own subjective
imagination. Though in the past he declared, contra Baudrillard, that ‘there are no primitive societies,’46 in his later work Jean-François
Lyotard seems to have forgotten his own criticism in opposing the self-legitimating narrative pragmatics of a ‘savage’ society such as that of the
Cashinahua to the grand universalizing narratives of Western modernity.47 Criticizing
Baudrillard’s appropriation of the
primitive Other as a critical alternative to the West, Lyotard succumbs to the same temptation. Lyotard’s
interrogation of the universal history of the modern West is built on that same civilization’s desire for an
external, utopian space – a non-universal, particular, localized, self-enclosed, and unchanging primitive
society. To observe the differend and to do justice to the Cashinahua will demand a complete
epistemological break between Cashinahua culture and that of the West, a rupture not unlike that
described by Baudrillard between primitive and modern society. To be sure, Lyotard admits that historical
or anthropological attempts at understanding primitive cultures occur all the time. However, such
cognitive genres of discourse are ultimately incommensurable with the narrative genre of primitive cul-
tures. As Lyotard puts it: The heterogeneity between the cognitive genre and its referent, the ‘savage’
narrative genre, is not to be doubted ... There is an abyss between them. The savage thus suffers a wrong
on account of the fact that he or she is ‘cognized’ in this manner, that is, judged, both he or she and his or
her norms, according to criteria and in an idiom which are neither those which he or she obeys nor their
‘result.’ What is at stake in savage narratives is not what is at stake in the description of those
narratives.69 Lyotard’s insistence on incommensurability, on the ‘abyss’ between cognitive descriptions of
‘savage’ narratives and the narratives themselves, leads, however, to a contradiction in his work. In his
book on Lyotard, Bill Readings points out that Lyotard was concerned to show that we cannot derive a prescriptive judgment that refers to an
indeterminate idea of justice from a descriptive statement that refers to a determinate object of cognition.70 Political
injustice occurs
when this incommensurability or differend is ignored and the attempt is made ‘to establish the justice of
a prescriptive phrase by reference to a represent- able order of things (a descriptive statement).’71 We will
recall that Lyotard refers to the Cashinahua in order to establish a differend between their culture and the
Western idea of a universal history. But such an incommensurable differend is made possible only
through Lyotard’s recourse to an ethnographic description of the Cashinahua provided in André-Marcel d’Ans’s
book. Lyotard is thus faced with a debilitating contradiction. To uphold the justice of his case against
Western universality he has to commit the injustice of using descriptive statements about Cashinahua
culture to support a prescriptive critique. But if he wishes to save the Cashinahua’s differend by not
subjecting them to a descriptive or cognitive genre of discourse, then he loses the use of an important
counter-example in his criticism of the idea of universal history. In pursuing justice for the Cashinahua by
observing their differend from the West, Lyotard commits an injustice against them by re-cognizing and
describing their differend. As Allen Dunn has astutely remarked of this contradiction in Lyotard’s thought, ‘[T]he terms in which
the differend is described revive the very cognitive systems that the differend protests.’72 The primitive as
child, the child as primitive. This equation has often been made in the history of primitivism. In
evolutionary primitivism, the primitive/child is seen as undeveloped, not yet achieving the intellectual and
moral maturity (Mündigkeit) of modern man. In a more romantic vein, Lyotard inverts this evolutionary ranking to
make the primitive/ child, if not the father, then certainly the conscience of our modern civilization,
reminding it of its lack of humanity towards the ‘in-human,’ that is, the yet to be socialized, disciplined, or
civilized being. In Lyotard’s words: For Lyotard, then, the child’s undeveloped and indeterminate state, its in-
humanity, is precisely what forces the adult to question the definition of his own humanity, to see his
humanity as perhaps inhuman. But if the child, like the Aboriginal, is an in-fans, a mute, then it must
remain not only indeterminate, but also, in its silence, inaccessible and incom- prehensible. The ‘debt to
childhood’ that Lyotard says we can ‘never pay off’ can only be a debt if we attribute a certain quality to
the child, if we see the child as representing an alternative to our (in)humanity.76 Chil- dren, like
primitives, must remain indeterminate and silent so that the adult theorist can speak about the debt we
owe to them for representing the role of the differend. As Tullio Maranhao observes of Lyotard’s re-
thinking of the (in)human: ‘Although Lyotard’s “human” differs from that of empirical anthropology in
most respects, there is at least this parallel: both seem to posit an inaccessible Other (the infant, the na-
tive), who cannot bridge the gap of representation or assert his identity in such a way as to pose a radical
challenge to the constructions of the writing or describing subject (the philosopher, the
anthropologist).’77
Post-modernism’s, more specifically Baudrillard’s tales of the primitive other is only

broken down through deconstructing totalizing Western critique, which includes
Baudrillard and Psychoanalytical philosophers. This alternative is a pre-requisite to their
tautological depictions of media and technocratic society
Like the work of the theorists and critics we have examined, ‘Under- standing the Ur-Bororo’ demonstrates that the
primitive Other,
even if it does not exist, has to be imagined in order for us to entertain not only the utopian hope for
something different from our present, but also the possibility of critical reflexivity in general. In other
words, to be critical means to be able to recognize our own conceptual limits, the ethnocentric
boundaries of our world view. This requires us to challenge those limits through the postulation of an
outside, an alternative to them. Such an alternative is readily supplied by the idea of the primitive. As we
have seen, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Torgovnick, Sahlins, and Habermas all turn to the concept of the premodern to test the
limits of the modern world-picture. The primitive is thus what enables them to ward off ethnocentrism
and to be critical of their own Western world. Moreover, as we have noted, it is the idea or concept of
the primitive that is important for these theorists, not the primitive’s actual presence, which may in fact
contradict or question its conceptualization or idealization. What Dipesh Chakrabarty has said of the utopian role of the
subaltern applies equally to the primitive in the work of the theorists we have studied: ‘The subaltern here is the ideal figure ... No actual member
of the subaltern classes would resemble what I imagine here.’ The subaltern embodies ‘a utopian line that may well designate the limit of how we
are trained to think.’16 The
idealization of the primitive Other, however, leads to a number of problematic, if
unintended consequences, as we have seen in the preceding chapters. While the primitive Other
enables our theorists to expose the limits of Western thought, it also gains them a renewed epistemic
advantage that once again opens up a gap between the West and the rest. From Baudrillard to Habermas, what
we have observed is a troubling movement in which the West’s self-critical generosity to the primitive
Other returns as a greater form of Western awareness not necessarily shared by the Other. Generosity to
the Other wins for the Western thinker, but not for the incommensurable Other, theoretical insight. Thus
for Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Torgovnick the resistant Other who cannot be known is nonetheless also that which
redeems them from the Western will to universality. Conversely, for Sahlins, sensitivity to the difference of non-Western
cultures enables the Western anthropologist to escape his ethnocentrism and gain a truly universal understanding of humanity. Habermas too
urges respect for alterity, but, more openly than the others, he admits that this respect is one of the West’s greatest achievements and sets it
apart from others. In short, for
all our theorists the primitive Other who cannot be known fully and whose alterity
demands respect is nonetheless also the Other who enables the West to know its own limits, a
knowledge we cannot be sure the Other possesses. The West knows it does not know and therein lies its
epistemic advantage over other cultures that lack that reflexive knowledge. Their role appears simply to
be that of embodying a resistant alterity that makes possible Western critical reflexivity. What appears to
be an ethics of alterity that asymmetrically favours the Other turns out, on the epistemic and cultural
levels, to asymmetrically privilege the culture that produced that ethics.17 Theory’s need for a savage Other is
dramatically expressed in an interview in which Emmanuel Levinas rather casually makes the following pronouncement: ‘I often say, though it’s
a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks. All the rest can be translated: all the rest – all the exotic – is
dance.’19 Similar sentiments are expressed in another interview where Levinas, referring to television images of South African Blacks dancing at
the funeral of a murdered victim, says that while he can, as a philosopher, try to understand (or theorize) their way of life, he is nevertheless
surprised by an event that ‘gives the impression of a dancing civilization in which they cry in another way.’20 While Levinas’s philosophical
writings on alterity provide some of the most useful tools for deconstructing the Western ontological tradition, his observations on ‘dancing’
cultures show that he has not completely extricated his own thought from that tradition. Be that as it may, what is of interest for our purposes is
the suggestion that in order for the West to reflect, the savage must dance. It is as though the identity of Western theoria can be confirmed and
validated only through a contrast with the primitivist trope of dance – a trope we find everywhere in
Western writing from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Globe and Mail’s foregrounding of dancing
Aborigines in its review of Living Tribes. What Levinas’s pronouncement clearly demonstrates is that theory’s distinctive
claim to critical knowledge comes into full focus only when it is contrasted to the visceral spontaneity of
savage dance. While theory allows the West, in Levinas’s words, ‘to understand the particular cultures which never understood
themselves,’21 dance traps those particular cultures in unreflective self-ignorance. Nevertheless, Western theory does not appear
to be able to define itself or stand on its own without the ignorance of the savage Other to prove its
superior knowledge. The savage may be theoretically or cognitively deficient, but his presence, it seems,
is indispensable for Western theory’s very identity. If theory requires primitivism, then neo-primitivism
questions theory only to renew it. Unlike Levinas, neo-primitivists see the dancing savage in a positive
light as that being that resists assimilation into Western theory. The difference of the primitive marks the
limits of theorizing and rescues us from a monotonous universalism that Baudrillard calls ‘the hell of the
Same.’ From the differend of Cashinahua narrative in Lyotard’s work to Sahlins’s remark that ‘“Strange” should be the beginning of
anthropological wisdom rather than a way of putting an end to it,’22 the primitive has no other role than that of challenging
the ethnocentric universalism of Western theory. Even the empirical primitive’s disappearance, as we have seen, does not
affect its oppositional role to theory. In fact, its disappearance further empowers its opposition. For the primitive’s disappearance does not mean
the triumph of capitalist modernity or the Westernization of the world; it means just the opposite. It means that the vanished primitive has
become a counterfactual, spectral ideal. Loosened from its empirical and historical complexities, the spectral or virtual primitive
becomes a powerful presence that returns to haunt our troubled modernity. As Adam Kuper observes, the
discredited primitive has resurfaced even more powerfully in our imagination as the noble Green indigene who resists globalization and
represents ‘a world to which we should, apparently, wish to be returned, a world in which culture does not challenge nature.’ ‘As always,’ Kuper
further reminds us, ‘our conceptions of the primitive are best understood as counters in our own current ideological debates.’23 But
if neo-
primitivism uses the primitive to deconstruct Western theory, it is also the case that the primitive is used
to redeem theory. In primitivism, theory needs the savage to affirm its epistemic distinctiveness and
superiority; in neo-primitivism, the savage is needed to deconstruct theory so that it can be saved from
itself. This is captured perceptively in Baudrillard’s aphorism: ‘The Other is what allows me not to repeat
myself forever.’24 What the Other is or wants is less important than its role in delivering the Western
theorist from himself, thereby also renewing theory by preventing it from repeating itself. The savage Other
plays a similar role in the work of Lyotard, Torgovnick, and Sahlins. Challeng- ing the ethnocentric universalism of Western theory, the Other
forces it to engage in self-criticism and to rethink its premises, hence helping it to renew itself. The
Other’s ancillary role in the
drama of Western theory’s renewal is most clearly articulated by Habermas, for whom the Other that
challenges Eurocentrism is also the Other that makes possible the self-reflection and self-critical
distancing that distinguish modern West- ern thought from premodern myth.
AT: Perf Con is Edgy Tho
Performative contradictions do not justify the affirmative’s logic of linguistic racism
But, it will be asked, doesn’t such a conclusion about neo-primitivism as an unavoidable and insuperable
dilemma for contemporary theorists weaken the preceding pages’ critique of it? On the contrary, what
may appear as an undermining or self-deconstructing claim about neo- primitivism’s inescapability,
paradoxically, supports the book’s thesis about neo-primitivism’s persistence even in works that are
critical of it, that seek to go beyond it. What some readers may regard as the conclusion’s performative
contradiction can therefore be seen as the conclusion’s performative reinforcement of the book’s central
argument that even anti-primitivist discourses find themselves relying on primitivism, caught in an
aporetic logic that I have described in chapter 1 as an anti- primitivist primitivism. To admit to neo-
primitivism’s unavoidability is thus also to testify to its adaptable and persistent constitutive force. The
neo-primitivism present in certain forms of contemporary thought cannot simply be deconstructed or
dismissed. We need of course to be constantly vigilant in our examination of neo-primitivism’s shifting
traces, but this vigilance must also be accompanied by the recognition that neo- primitivism’s theoretical
power and productivity are not unrelated to that same vigilance at the heart of our critical enterprise.
Thus, it would be a failure of critical vigilance on my part were I to refuse to admit that my own book
contains the trace structure, the spectral presence of neo- primitivism itself. I cannot escape from this
aporia of at once criticizing neo-primitivism and of relying on certain of its theoretical assumptions. I can
only acknowledge my dilemma. For who would want to be a neo- primitivist uncritically, when one can at
least know critically the aporia in which one finds oneself?
**Gender K Updates**
Link- Bioterror
The national trauma of bioterror coalesces around the figure of vulnerable femininity
– those white women and children who represent the fragility and future of the nation
which must be protected from the dangers of the malicious, racialized foreign Other.
The paradoxical result is that the aff puts frontline health care workers, predominately
women, at the greatest risk of infection while normalizing the association of women
with care.
D’Arcangelis, 2009 (Gwen – Assistant Professor of Gender Studies @ Skidmore College, “The Bio
Scare: Anthrax, Smallpox, SARS, Flu and Post-9/11 U.S. Empire”, PhD dissertation, shae)
debate about smallpox immunity values and transmission rates was set in the backdrop of widespread and popular
Moreover, the scientific
characterizations of U.S. vulnerability. While the Bush Administration in particular had cultivated a heightened sense of U.S. vulnerability in reference to 9/11
and the subsequent anthrax attacks (disguising—or attempting to do so—U.S. aggression abroad and imperialist endeavors), in the backdrop of today's media culture in the U.S., most people
experienced 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks through the highly sensationalized media (Kaplan 2005). Gendered versions of the U.S. as victim
became an important lens through which this national trauma became understood—through for instance the metaphor of
sexual violation and sexually deviant perpetrators (Cole 2007; Puar 2002). In the case of smallpox, the figuring of women as representative of a
nation vulnerable to disease threats was a common theme within the usual media fanning of public fears with
regards to bioterror133 and emphasis on lack of preparation for a potential attack. National security and
public health officials bemoaned a "large, susceptible civilian population" (NTI 2001b), a country "vulnerable
to the potentially calamitous consequences of a large bioterrorist attack" (Ruppe 2002), and the "national
urgency" requiring preparedness measures especially for protecting children (McNeil 2003). Even more so than quotes, the pictures
accompanying articles on smallpox vaccine preparedness conveyed this sense of national vulnerability. These were often outdated snapshots from the 1940's (the last period in which the U.S.
saw smallpox outbreaks) of white women and children receiving the vaccine or faceless hordes clamoring for the vaccine134 that were paired with contemporary articles in 2002 and 2003
leading up to and during the Smallpox Vaccination Program, and must be seen as a deliberate attempt to promote it. (The much fewer current pictures tended to be of high-level officials
getting vaccinated, also serving the purpose of promotion of the vaccine.) Even more so than the rhetorics of vulnerability, these vaccine-affirming pictures drew on the symbolic use of women
Calling upon this typical image of white women

and children to illustrate both the desirability of the vaccine and the security it would provide135.
and children as the civilian population needing to be protected (Berlant 1997; Enloe 1993; Yuval-Davis 1997), these images
served to strategically represent the vulnerability—and humanity—of the U.S. nation. The humanity written on the vaccinees' faces could
only further illustrate the urgency of the protective measures of the State.136 These portrayals of the vulnerability of white women and
children were the complement to the threat construction of the dangerous Middle Eastern Other, and both
supported the State's arguments for vaccine preparedness. The portrayal of women and children being protected against smallpox by the vaccine
were particularly ironic considering not only the arguments by the public health community that the vaccine for smallpox induced more harm than safety, but also the fact
that it was women who were—in their role as the majority of healthcare workers—the ones who would
actually be doing the protecting under the SVP. In other words, the conscription of public health into national security
via the SVP was really the conscription of women into national security service. This is even more the case in
terms of front-line care work, which is in the majority (four-fifths) performed by women (unlike hospital administrators, doctors, and the
like which is mostly performed by males) ("Workers" 2006). In the actual SVP, it was indeed the case that the majority (approximately two-thirds) of civilian vaccinees were female (Casey et al.
2005; Poland 2005). Neither the indirect deployment of public health regimes into the service of national security nor the enlisting of women to this end is particularly unprecedented.
Throughout U.S. history, the State has enforced women's roles as gatekeepers between the disease and
health of a population, as well as treated women's bodies and feminized domains as expendable
sacrifices in times of crises139 (Enloe 2000; Grosz 1994). Women have born the brunt of public health measures and
have been asked—in their roles as formal healthcare workers and informal caretakers—to sacrifice their
own health for the good of the nation or group. For instance, during disease outbreaks, governments have not only
quarantined populations according to race but further regulated the hygiene of members of those
populations by gender—in their roles as mothers, presumed domestic keepers of the home or community, and sex
workers, women have been the targets of specific health regimes and measures (Leavitt 1997; Shah 1999; Briggs 2002; Adams and Pigg
2005). Once again the SVP bears out this sexist history of public health—sacrificing their own health in their roles as vaccine receivers, women were approximately three-quarters of the civilian
vaccinees who had adverse events140 (Casey et al. 2005; CDC 2003 a).
Link- Environment
Securitizing the environment necessitates military control- energy efficiency becomes
a ‘force multiplier’ while maintaining the coherence of the military state that absorbs
Nature under its mission
Gilbert 12
(Emily, Canadian Studies and Geography University of Toronto, The Militarization of Climate Change, ACME: An
International Journal for Critical Geographies, Volume 11 Number 1 2012, JKS)
The priorities around climate change are thus skewed by the military. As President Obama affirmed in his March 2010
speech, the primary national interest is really with energy independence, not energy reduction.25 At the same time that he was applauding the
greening of the military, the President announced the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration, including in the Bay of Mexico. (This
expansion was later suspended in wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, before being resumed.) The
military has also
presented a case for mitigating the reliance on (foreign) oil and developing renewable energy, which has
more to do with the impact on military personnel in the field than with ecological principles. In the last five
years, fuel consumption at US forward operating bases in conflict zones has increased from 50 million
gallons to 500 million gallons a year (Deloitte 2009: 15). This creates a dangerous situation for the ‘long tail’ of convoys that are
needed to supply these bases (Pew 2010: 7). Some reports indicate that more than three quarters of US casualties in war zones are the result of
supply vehicles that have been targeted by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and convoys have been identified by Commandant General
James Conway as ‘one of his most pressing problems related to risk of casualties’ (Deloitte 2009: 15; see also CNA, 2009). Shachtman (2010)
reports that in Iraq, ‘In one month, 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost.’ This is a problem that the QDR takes explicitly on board.
Whereas climate change is presented as a ‘threat multiplier,’ energy efficiency is described as a ‘force
multiplier, because it increases the range and endurance of forces in the field and can reduce the
number of combat forces diverted to protect energy supply lines, which are vulnerable to both
asymmetric and conventional attacks and disruptions’ (QDR 2010: 87). The reduction of casualties is thus propelling much
of the impetus for renewable energy, even though it is couched in climate change rhetoric (see also Warner and Singer 2009: 2; Deloitte 2009:
27). Notably, there
is no mention, across any of the policy documents that have appeared, about the
devastating environmental impact of war upon the landscapes where it takes place, and the need to
prevent or even mitigate this destruction.¶ Back at home, military personnel returning from war are being enrolled as climate
‘warriors.’ During the 2009 election campaign Obama announced a ‘Green Vets Initiative’ that would provide ‘green’ training and jobs in the
private sector for the 837,000 vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. While this exact initiative has not been introduced, the government has promoted
‘Green Energy Jobs’ through its Veterans Workforce Investment Program and through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.26 This is a
reconfiguration, and privatization, of the civilian- military pact of cradle-to-grave provision of social welfare (see Lutz 2002: 730). To this end,
programs have begun popping up across the US. The ‘Green Collar Vets’ is a non-profit organization in Texas that helps retrain and reskill vets
for the green economy.27 The organization ‘Veterans Green Jobs,’ in partnership with several educational institutions and organizations such as
Walmart, Whole Foods, and the Sierra Club, provides vets of four states with training opportunities for the ‘green’ economy. What
differentiates their program, they argue, is that their keystone course ‘Green 101,’ makes explicit the links between green programs and
national security. 28 Veterans are also taking on a more activist role to promote the shift to renewable energy. A group of US Vets, sponsored
by Operation Free (whose mission is ‘to secure America with clean energy’), travelled to Copenhagen to discuss the national security
dimensions of climate change (and groups have also travelled across the US to visit Senate Offices, and to the White House).29¶ Domestic
programs for vets, and resource and research investments for ‘greening’ the military point to some fundamental ways that domestic social
formations are being reorganized in support of the militarization of climate change. This
is part of militarism’s typical ‘double
move’: on the one hand, war is projected as being ‘over there’ while the ‘second move saturates our
daily lives with war- ness’ (Ferguson 2009: 478). Domestic measures to address energy security are put forward as calculable, rational
and even compassionate measures, while the ‘foreign’ threat is presented as non-state, elusive, and undetermined—and hence coherent with
much of the discourse around diffuse ‘new wars’ and terrorist threats (Kaldor, 2006). At the same time, there is also greater convergence
between the inside and the outside, and between the environment and the military in the ways that the discourses are mobilized and mapped
out (Cooper, 2006). Indeed, as Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen notes, there
is a coherence between pre-emptive military
doctrines and precautionary environmental strategies: both are based upon a rationale for urgent action
based on anticipated future disaster scenarios (Rasmussen 2006: 124). Notably, however, it is only when
environmental issues are harnessed to security claims that the precautionary approach gains traction.¶
Hiving climate change to national security ensures that environmental issues will garner more attention,
as is argued by many of the experts on the environment and security noted above. But as I have sought to illustrate in this paper, instead of
opening up questions regarding security or the environment, these are foreclosed by a military approach. It reduces the concept of
security to a nationalist, defensive strategy modelled on future disaster scenarios of resource conflict.
Moreover, it perpetuates an externalized concept of nature that is to be commanded and controlled, with
no real sense of ecological prioritization. Rather, energy security emerges as the primary focus for innovation and investment to
combat geopolitical concerns around the reliance on foreign oil and the threat to military personnel in the field. At the same time,
increased spending on the military is legitimized as it becomes a source of ‘green’ initiatives. Where does
this leave politics, and more precisely, as Melinda Cooper asks, ‘What becomes of an anti-war politics when the sphere of military action
infiltrates the ‘grey areas’ of everyday life, contaminating our ‘quality of life’ at the most elemental level?’ (Cooper 2006: 129). If we
support climate change initiatives, are we then pro-military? If we are anti-military, do we jeopardize
climate change action? As the militarization of climate change unfolds, it is this interpenetration that needs to be
disrupted, both with respect to martial approaches to the environment, and with respect to the
troubling attempts to use the mobilization of climate change to re-moralize war and the military.
The DOD is salivating over the aff- scientific research and ‘greening’ of the military
allows the most hypermasculine institution to redefine itself as the green masculine
protector
Nagel 15
(Joane, April, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, is the author of Race, Ethnicity,
and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, Gender, Conflict, and the Militarization of Climate
Change Policy, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 27:202–208, JKS)
A preponderance of largely male governments and male-dominated economic interests protecting the unequal status quo can be understood mainly as hindrances
to successful climate negotiations. But they are not the only important gendered features of the international system responsible for influencing climate change
policy. As we saw above, the
military is another gendered institution intimately related to national governments
and economies. National militaries are less responsible for stalling organized responses to climate
change; they are critical articulators of climate change hazards and advocates for defining climate
change as a problem not of controlling carbon emissions, but of protecting national security.¶ Despite the end
of the Cold War (characterized by a large-scale U.S.–USSR arms race) in 1990, in 2010 world military expenditures were higher than in any year since the end of the
Second World War in 1945. The United States far outpaces other countries in military expenditures. The U.S. accounted for thirty-nine percent of global military
expenditures in 2012, when military expenditures consumed more than four percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. The United States is among a handful of
the most militarized countries in the world, as measured by military expenditures per capita, including Israel, South Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia,
Jordan, Algeria, and Azerbaijan. Even the world’s poorest countries sport national armies whose weapons and training are subsidized by or purchased from the
world’s major arms dealers, most notably the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and China. The world’s militaries are
historically hyper-masculine institutions with cultures embracing honor, bravery, loyalty, strength, and
violence. Men dominate the ranks and leadership of military institutions just as they dominate national politics and economics around the world.¶ In the
United States, the military plays a critical role in scientific research, including climate change research. The U.S.
Department of Defense (DOD) has a basic scientific research and development budget that is two and a half
times greater than the National Science Foundation (NSF)—the agency tasked with funding basic research across the sciences,
mathematics, and engineering. The NSF has a broad mission of supporting transformative research on all topics and issues across disciplines. The DOD’s much
narrower mission is to protect national security. This
focus on security—food security, energy security, water security, and
environmental security—determines the research projects it supports. As a result, the DOD has been a
powerful voice in emphasizing national security dangers from and defenses against climate change and
in shaping the work of the many researchers it supports in universities, industry, and national labs and research facilities.¶ The
DOD’s agenda reflects classical military/masculine tactics for attacking climate change: large-scale
geo-engineering approaches to manage solar radiation or sequester carbon, energy research focused
on military missions, conflict scenario planning, climate forecasting and modeling, and global resource
assessments. The DOD has very limited interest in funding “softer” (feminine) research topics on the
health, social, racial, gender, or age disparities in climate change impacts, factors that promote community resilience in the face of
disasters, or strategies for reducing the carbon emissions causing climate change.
GCMs and mainstream climate science are entrenched in masculinity which distorts
their conclusions and erases the gendered nature of warming
Nagel 16
(Joane, 2016, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, is the author of Race, Ethnicity,
and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers., Gender and Climate Change: Impacts, Science,
Policy, Routledge, hardback, JKS)
Gender Critique of Climate Change Science

If gender matters in some medical research, does it matter in all medical research, or all scientific research, especially climate science? Various
critics of the research findings of the IPCC have focused on its reliance on large-scale general circulation models (GCMs).69 Feminist
scholars argue that GCMs reflect a classically masculine approach which minimizes knowledge gained
from human lived experience in favor of abstract mathematical representations of reality.7°Climate change
skeptics charge that the models are "alarmist" social constructions that generate "phantom threats" designed to satisfy environmental press
groups and to promote scientists' self-interest in fame and funding. Beyond their negative evaluations of GCMs, there is little other common
ground for proponents of these two critiques, though both likely would agree that:¶ [I]t is difficult to imagine an environmental phenomenon
less directly observable, more remote from everyday experience, and more dependent on the technical apparatus of science for con-structing
its apparent "reality" than the so-called greenhouse effect.72¶ Although GCMs are acknowledged by their designers to be complex, inaccurate,
and incomplete representations of the actual global climate system, they are the backbone of the IPCC reports.73 Climate
models rest
on the prestige of their mainly male designers (prominent scientists and engineers), advanced
technology used to create them (supercomputers), technical language (Navier-Stokes equations and computation ally
intensive numerical models), and elevated status of the institution where they are refined and tested (national
laboratories, scientific agencies, leading universities).¶ The work of climate scientists and the IPCC has been and remain
essential to understanding the physical processes associated with climate change and sounding the alarm about its seriousness. The predictions
of these models and the science that supported them were' the basis of our discussion of climate change and its impacts in the¶ previous three
chapters. In fact, we spent the last two entire chapters examining the impacts of climate change on men and women, relying largely on the
findings associated with GCMs reported in the 2013 IPCC's AR5, Climate Change 2013: 1he Physical Science Basis.
Despite the
importance of this research, there have been major blind spots weaknesses in¶ climate science and the
work of the IPCC, particularly in the area of¶ climate justice, and especially with regard to gender
inequalities related to climate change.¶ In the first three chapters of this book on gender and climate change we¶ depended on
the 1552-page IPCC Working Group I report on Climate Change 2013 - The Physical Science Basis to estimate the
gendered¶ implications of its predictions, though the words “gender” or¶ “women'' never appear in its pages. A word
search of the report does, however generate dozens of entries for "human," mostly referring to human
influence on the climate system. Apparently the IPCC's AR5 Working Group I is interested in humans, but not
men or women. A similar search of the IPCC AR5 of Working Group II's "Summary for Policymakers," which focused on climate change
"impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability," yields similar results - no men or women, only humans. The same absence of references to gender or
women characterized IPCC ARS of Working Group Ill's "Summary for Policymakers," which focused on "mitigation of climate change." Some of
the chapters of the full Working Group II and III reports do reference gender and women, but they do not discuss men, and few readers look
beyond the more succinct "Summary" documents, since presumably that is what is important for policymakers and non-specialists to know.¶
The disjuncture between "human'' causes and impacts of climate ¶ change and the gender causes and
impacts, or the class or racial or regional or age-related causes and impacts of reflects the level of
generality of much climate change science, including climate models. Climate science depicts the causes
and impacts of climate change as a universal process in which human distinctions are irrelevant. This
emphasis on "human" obscures differences between men and women, rich and poor, young and old,
educated and uneducated, urban and rural, or global North and global South as they¶ relate to the
causes and consequences of climate change. “Human" implies a common and equal contribution to and
fate in the face of climate chance.¶ “Human” ignores unequal inputs as well as unequal impacts within ¶
and across populations. A critique of this universalism is that while we all may be human, and we all
may be in this¶ together, we do not all equally contribute to the problem,¶ nor are we going to have
the same experience of climate change. The IPP acknowledges¶ that historically most greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions originated in the global North with increasingly catastrophic effects in the global South. Its
failure to deconstruct "anthropogenic” climate change, however, obscures the raced, classed, and gendered nature of both its causes and
consequences.¶
The focus of GCMs and IPCC reports on "humans" creates a comfortable "objectivity" and
distance for the model makers- a safe space that equalizes blame for the problem being studied by¶
mostly male climate scientists from developed countries. By¶ emphasizing the “human contribution" to
climate change, researchers can¶ ignore exactly which groups of humans are doing the causing and
paper over who is responsible for climate injustices and inequality. How should we understand climate modelers'
difference-erasing focus on the universal "human'' aspects of climate change? The study of gender inequalities in European molecular biology
cited above offers two possible explanations: the
emphasis on "human" is because male scientists do not see any
significant differences among humans, or because they prefer not to acknowledge differences that are
an indictment of the system in which they have not only an investment,¶ but a controlling interest. Critics make a
direct connection between¶ the overrepresentation of men in climate science and policy and the¶ gender biases
and blind spots weaknesses in both climate science and climate policy.¶ Men dominate the issue at all levels, as scientific
and economic experts, entrepeneurs, policy makers and spokespeople. Since the 1970s climate change had been identified and explained by
natural scientists... It is not irrelevant that the majority of climate scientists are men. The Intergovernmental Panel on ¶ Climate Change (IPCC) is
mostly made up of male scientists, with "chairman'' Rajendra Pachauri leading at the global level. Men also dominate in the climate policy
arena ... The most
prominent politicians associated with the issue are male ... In 2007 an Internet survey of
"global consumers" in 47 countries¶ conducted by The Nielsen Company and Oxford University found that 18 out of the
22 "most influential spokespeople on climate change” are men.
Link- Terror
Their seemingly benign understanding of terror only regenerates masculine war-
making
Athanassiou 12
(Cerelia, PhD candidate at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of
Bristol, UK. Her research is on conceptualisations of security post-9/11, focusing specifically on the discursive
strategies used by the Obama administration to disempower the Global War on Terror., ‘Gutsy’ Decisions and
Passive Processes ¶ THE WARRIOR DECISION-MAKER AFTER THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR, International
Feminist Journal of Politics, 2014, Vol. 16, No. 1, 6–25, JKS)
Analytically, the exceptionality of the GWOT most usefully serves in highlighting its continuities with ‘normal’ politics (see Grewal 2005: 197;
Puar 2007: 76; Richter-Montpetit 2007: 40; Parpart and Zalewski 2008: 5). The
effects of the Obama administration’s efforts
to roll back the GWOT’s overt militarization with a ‘return to the rule of law’ do not signify change
from the masculine ‘war machine’, but rather generate this ‘war machine’s’ very conditions of
existence. It is, after all, the warrior’s logic that is privileged and channelled through every decision, and
it is this logic that subordinates other, seemingly more passive, processes. The Washington Post editorial on the
killing of Osama bin Laden quoted Senator Lindsey Graham’s rationalization of the decision to kill and not capture: ‘From a Navy Seal
perspective, you had to believe that this guy [Osama bin Laden] was a walking IED [improvised explosive device]’ (Washington Post 2011).
A
militarized understanding and treatment of ‘national security’ continues to re-write itself into the ¶
workings of the State, enabling the hegemonic masculinity of the warrior decision-maker to keep
privileging itself, preventing meaningful change from happening. If we heed Enloe’s (2000: 3) invaluable advice on the
matter, we notice that these are exactly the workings of militarization, and through that, of a continuing
GWOT: ‘The more militarization transforms an individual or a society, the more that individual or society
comes to imagine military needs and militaristic presumptions to be not only valuable but also normal’.
It is this veneration of militarism, and its associated gender and race hierarchies, that offer the clue on
the lack of change. ¶ Obama’s insistence on reintroducing the rule of law went against the traditional
understanding of ‘security’ because masculine posturing, not feminine public negotiation, is traditionally
seen as being most effective in protecting the nation-state and its ‘women and children’ (Enloe 2007: 60–1).
However, articulations on the importance of the law also prop up the warrior’s agenda: Abdulmutallab’s
prosecution is an aspect of an operation geared precisely towards achieving the effects of the bin Laden episode (see Cohen 2011). With the
most recent debates centring on the validity of extrajudicially killing US citizens, we are shown a system in which the status of the warrior has
not diminished (see Holder 2012), despite the promise in 2008 that different attitudes might be prioritized. Carver (2008: 84) provides
valuable support here, because he points to the overarching framework of international politics that
‘incorporates a myth of a unitary, unproblematic masculinised being – “warrior man”/“economic man” –
whose world is not in fact bifurcated by a war/peace distinction, but is rather one world of competitive,
aggressive, self- interested and somewhat paranoid strategic interaction’ (emphasis in original). In such a
framework, the ‘rational decision-maker’ alone cannot deliver any meaningful change when he is so closely
correlated to the ‘warrior’; this was demonstrated by Obama’s reintroduction of the ‘rule of law’ only to
keep subor- dinating it to the demands of the GWOT’s framework of war. The hegemonic masculinity of
the executive decision-maker clearly has to privilege warrior definitions of ‘toughness’ over dangerous
forays into public deliberation and accountability; and that is the masculine reality of national
security.
Link- Health Care Affs
Their research is oversaturated with masculinity
Doyal 95
(Lesley Doyal, Emeritus Professor of Health and Social Care at the School for Policy Studies, 1995, What Makes
Women Sick, pgs 17-18, JKS)
However it is not just its narrowly biological orientation that limits the capacity of medicine to deal with
women's health problems. Even within its own terms there is growing evidence that both the priorities and the
techniques of biomedical research reflect the white male domination of the profession (Kirchstein, 1991). Bias
has been identified in the choice and the definition of problems to be studied, the methods employed to
carry out the research, and the interpretation and application of results (Cotton, 1990; Rosser, 1992, pp. 129-30). While
women are in the majority as health care providers, they continue to be in the minority as practising doctors
(Doyal, 1994a, Lorber, 1984). They hold few positions of power and therefore have little influence on how funds are allocated or
research carried out (Rosser, 1992; US National Institutes of Health, 1992; Witz, 1992). There has been relatively little basic research into non-
reproductive conditions that mainly affect women - incontinence and osteoporosis for instance. In the United
States, Congressional Hearings in 1990 showed that only 13 per cent of government research funds were spent on health
issues specific to women (US National Institutes of Health, 1992). Even the menstrual cycle itself has not been extensively
researched. Hence we have little detailed knowledge about an extremely important aspect of women's
bodily functioning that generates a large amount of distress and many medical consultations (Koblinsky et al.,
1993). Where health problems affect both men and women, few studies have explored possible differences
between the sexes in their development, symptoms and treatment (American Medical Association, 1991). , Researchers
working on coronary heart disease, for example, have continued to act as though it were only a male' problem, despite
the fact that it is the single most important cause of death in postmenopausal women, killing half a million a year in the United
States. The Physician Health Study, which demonstrated the effectiveness of daily aspirin consumption in preventing cardiovascular disease, had a sample
of 20,000 men but no women, while the sample in the "Mr. Fit' study of the relationship between heart
disease, cholesterol and lifestyle consisted of 15,000 men (Freedman and Maine, 1993, p. 165). AIDS, too, has been treated for research
purposes as a predominantly male disease. Though it is now growing faster among women than among men, we still know very little about the differential effects it may have on them (Bell,
1992; Denenberg, 1990b, Kurth, 1993). As long as most biomedical research continues to be based on male samples there
will be significant gaps in our knowledge about women. Even more importantly, treatments tested only on men
will continue to be given to women, when they may not be appropriate to their needs (Hamilton, 1985). There have
recently been indications, for example, that anti-depressant drugs can have very different effects on men and women and
may affect women differently during the various phases of the menstrual cycle. However preliminary
testing excluded women, despite the fact that they are the major users of the drugs (ibid.) It is clear that
biomedicine has generated valuable knowledge that has been used to improve the health of individual
women. But as we have seen, this understanding is often partial and sometimes erroneous. This is because research
has selectively ignored many of the biological differences between the sexes while paying little or no
attention to the particularity of women's psychological and social circumstances. Hence it can offer little help in answering
the questions posed at the beginning of this section.
Epistemology comes first for women’s health research

Cook 09
(Charlene Cook, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, Toronto, Women’s health theorizing: a call for
epistemic action, Critical Public Health Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2009, 143–154, JKS)
While debate in women’s health theorizing is not novel, an explicit epistemological analysis of the broad
field of women’s health research remains immature. In the context of rapidly shifting biomedical advances, the escalating demand for
bioethical responses, the globalization of health and illness, and an increasing cognizance of – and political resistance to – the social determinants of health, the
contribution of women’s health must be significant and dynamic. In order
to guide women’s health through the opportunities
and challenges that will frame future health research and service delivery, an epistemological debate
must be prioritized. In particular, further examination of the limits and opportunities of binarisms, the roles sex and gender play as conceptual markers
of difference, and the value of critical theory to interrogate positivist and postmodern approaches to women’s health are required. While solidarity in an
epistemological approach for women’s health may not be practical or desirable, analysis
of the theoretical and conceptual challenges
and alternatives put forward by the women’s health community over the last century is required. As such, women’s
health researchers, practitioners, and activists can move beyond one worldview in order to form an
epistemological understanding to women’s health that is reflexive, progressive, and actionable. In doing so,
the priorities that have long defined the women’s health community will be upheld.
Framework
That means framework is a new link- the call for a neutral point of deliberation is an
attempt to androgynize our argument
Hooper 2k
(Charlotte, PhD, ‘Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics’ (for which she thanks
the Economic and Social Science Research Council for financial support) and is currently involved in developing
and teaching a new master’s degree in gender and international relations in the Politics Department of Bristol
University. Recent and forthcoming publications include focus on the relationships among masculinist practices,
multiple masculinities and international relations. Youngs, Gillian. Political Economy, Power & the Body. New
York, NY, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. ProQuest ebrary., JKS)
The fantasy of disembodiment is another key feature of bourgeois rational masculinity which derives
from the mind/body split and depends on the apparent invisibility or absence of bodies in social
discourse, so that masculine reason could be separate from and untainted by the body. This apparent
invisibility has been assisted by a huge investment in the general social sanitization of bodies and bodily
functions, particularly in public spaces. There has been a gradual loss of vulgar and feminine orifices and excretions since the 17th
century so that the body becomes a mere container of rationality (Rose 1993). Even sensory perception has been altered. Take, for example,
the sense of smell. Leonard Duroche (1990) argues that with the exception of one or two designatedly ‘masculine’ smells such as tobacco and
sweat, olfactory sensibilities have gradually been increasingly associated with femininity or with ‘degeneration’ since the 18th century. This
process has been accompanied by the sanitization of smells from public places, which has led to an impoverishment of perception conducive to
impersonal relations between men. The fantasy of disembodiment is sustained by large-scale social and institutional practices as much as by
discursive conventions. Bourgeois rational masculinity employs a selective biology both to possess and repress
bodies (Rose 1993). The fantasy of disembodiment is not only produced through powerful social practices, it
also sustains bourgeois masculine privilege and makes bourgeois men appear natural leaders or rulers.
Impersonal relations are associated with objectivity and science, and the exnominated or unauthored ‘view
from nowhere’ of modernity, which appears as the disembodied ‘truth’ of power and authority.Closely
coupled to the mind/body split and the fantasy of disembodiment is the rational/emotional divide.
Emotions and desires are perceived as threatening to a bourgeois masculine subjectivity organized
around reason and control. Both Kantian thought and Protestant culture posit an inner freedom from emotionally-driven inclinations
as the ideal (Seidler 1987). Just as the body, with its involuntary processes and frailties, poses a threat to
masculinity and pure reason, so too do emotions and desires. Acting only from reason and duty serves
to strengthen the autonomy of men, otherwise they are in a position of servitude, when reason
becomes a slave to the passions. Therefore, selfcontrol over one’s emotions has come to be one of the hallmarks of masculinity.
Feelings and emotions are seen as both imperilling masculine superiority and questioning the sources of
masculine identity. Because of this, as Victor Seidler (1987: 86– 90) argues, emotional and dependency needs as well as sexual desires
are transformed into issues of performance and control. With their identity defined in opposition to ‘feminine’
dependency, emotionality and bodily enslavement, men have become by and large instrumentalist in
thought and goal-oriented in action (Seidler 1989: 12).
**Disad Things
Base
Neg
Link –Refugees
Current refugee restrictions popular amongst Trump’s white evangelical base

Newman 7/19
(Brian, professor of political science at Pepperdine University, “Why evangelical voters support Trump’s
policy on refugees — even though evangelical leaders object”, 7/19/18,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/19/in-2017-the-u-s-resettled-
fewer-refugees-than-the-rest-of-the-world-thats-a-sharp-change-and-most-evangelicals-are-fine-with-
that/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f74e166c5a79, Date Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
Every year since the passage of the U.S. Refugee Act in 1980, the United States has resettled more
refugees than the rest of the world combined. But that has changed. In 2017, the United States resettled
33,000 refugees, about one-third as many as in 2016 — and less than half the 69,000 refugees resettled
in other countries. What do evangelicals think about U.S. refugee policy? Leaders and lay people are
divided. The evangelical establishment has objected. Particularly in response to the Syrian refugee
crisis, many prominent evangelical leaders, media outlets and organizations made explicitly biblical
arguments calling on the United States to welcome more refugees. More than 500 evangelical leaders
signed an open letter opposing the Trump administration’s initial entry restrictions, which temporarily
suspended refugee resettlement. Signatories included many of the most well-known figures in the
evangelical community, including Beth Moore, Max Lucado and Tim Keller. Even the Trump-friendly
Christian Broadcasting Network discussed nine biblical passages conveying a responsibility to care for
refugees. We might expect that evangelical leaders’ Bible-based arguments would lead rank-and-file
evangelicals to welcome refugees. That’s not what’s happened. Instead, white evangelicals have
supported President Trump’s closed-door policies wholeheartedly. Early in Trump’s presidency, amid
marches and airport protests, 76 percent of white evangelicals supported his initial entry ban. There’s
been little change since. In one recent poll, 25 percent of evangelicals thought the United States has a
responsibility to accept refugees — a smaller proportion than of any other racial, age, educational or
religious group polled. Another poll found that when asked whether the United States should prevent all
refugees from coming into he country, 44 percent said no — and another 44 percent said yes. Compare
that with the public as a whole, which opposes this policy by nearly a 2-to-1 ratio, 59 to 31 percent. Why
are lay evangelicals broadly opposed to allowing refugees into the country, defying their leaders? My
research shows their position flows from three sources: loyalty to Trump, ideological conservatism, and
attention to conservative media. Those factors have led evangelicals to support a policy that their
leaders, religious identity, values and beliefs might otherwise lead them to oppose. How I did my
research I analyzed a survey from 2015 and two from 2016. I examined all respondents, but here I’ll
focus on the evangelicals surveyed. The richest of the surveys, the 2016 American National Election
Study, asked respondents how much they supported “allowing Syrian refugees to come to the United
States” on a 1-to-7 scale. Since evangelical opposition to resettling Syrians in the United States was
consistent across the surveys, answers to this question probably provide a reasonable proxy for
evangelicals’ attitudes today. White evangelical Republicans’ attitudes toward refugees are just like
those of other white Republicans White evangelicals overwhelmingly identify as Republicans.
Partisanship wins out over evangelical leaders’ biblical arguments. There is essentially no difference
between average scores of white evangelical Republicans (2.16) and other white Republicans (2.15) on
the 1-to-7 scale. Such is the overwhelming power of partisanship in today’s politics. Among white
Republican evangelicals, Trump, political conservatism and Fox News matter (a lot) White evangelical
Republicans who strongly supported Trump, identified as politically conservative and regularly watched
Fox News were especially opposed to bringing Syrian refugees onto U.S. soil. Evangelical Republicans
who regard Trump more favorably than the Republican average were 1.3 points more opposed to
resettlement than their evangelical counterparts with less favorable views of Trump. Conservatism
mattered less, but among Republican evangelicals, political conservatives favored refugee resettlement
by 0.4 points less than did other evangelical Republicans. And evangelical Republicans who said they
watched Fox News favored bringing refugees to the United States by 0.8 points less than evangelical
Republicans who didn’t watch Fox News. A single poll can’t show that Fox News causes people to feel
this way, since immigration hard-liners are probably more likely to watch the network. However, other
research finds that watching Fox News does influence political attitudes. Presumably, Fox News at least
reinforces attitudes toward refugees.
2nc – at: trade war thumper
Trump’s trade wars are turning off key supporters for the midterm elections
Merica ’18
(Dan, July 24th 2018, CNN political reporter, “'A Band-Aid on a broken leg': Farmers say Trump's aid
package isn't enough”, https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/farmers-operatives-politics-trump-
farm-aid-package/index.html, Date Accessed: 7/25/18, //EY)
The Trump administration's move on Tuesday to help farmers hurt by the trade wars has not stopped
the barrage of criticism it has faced over its underlying trade policy. President Donald Trump has taken a beating for months
over how his tit-for-tat trade wars with China and a host of friendly countries has affected farmers across America. And on Tuesday, the administration
decided to act, pledging $12 billion in aid to farmers impacted by the trade wars. In fields across the
country and even in some Republicans offices in Washington, the reaction was similar: It's not enough.
"It's a Band-Aid on a broken leg," said Michael Petefish, a 33-year-old Trump supporter and fifth generation soybean farmer in southern
Minnesota. "And to be blunt, it seems pretty political and seems like they want to shore up some midterm
support." He added: "Pretend someone smashed your car, and then someone said, 'Don't worry, I will give you a ride to the next place you have to go.' Well,
thank you, I appreciate the ride, but what am I going to do the next 10 rides I need after that?" Joel Schreurs, a soybean farmer from Tyler, Minnesota, said the plan
was a "good start" but not a fix that works in the long run. "I
firmly believe we need to either create more markets or be able
to work it out with China because we are going to produce way too many soybeans for the markets that
we have," he said. "It's a short-term fix." Schreurs said the economics of the issue make it difficult to solve. He grows about 25,000 bushels of soybeans a year,
so if the price goes down $2, that costs him around $50,000. "Not many people would like it if they took $50,000 away from their business when it is something that
they didn't have anything to do with," Schreurs said. The
decision to authorize up to $12 billion in funding for farmers hurt
by tariffs comes after months of negative headlines, primarily in communities and states Trump won in
2016. Rural voters -- many who have deep ties to farming -- helped catapult Trump to the presidency in
2016, and China's retaliatory tariffs specifically targeted politically important states and areas.
Republican leaders across the country have been raising alarm bells to the administration for months,
worried that antipathy towards the administration from base Republican voters would make an already
precarious midterm election season more dangerous for Republicans. "It's desperate," a Republican operative working on
the midterms told CNN on Tuesday. Though the Republican said they would happily welcome the political benefits that will come from the farm aid plan, they
worried the damage may already be done with growers whose farm prices and commodity prices have shrunk in recent months. "It doesn't make me feel any
better," the operative said. "The
White House is finally realizing that this isn't going to get better before ballots
are cast." Trump publicly gave those concerns little due. "Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade
negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs," Trump wrote on Tuesday. "It's as simple as that - and everybody's talking! Remember, we are the "piggy bank"
that's being robbed. All will be Great!" While the President also attempted to blame farming issue on his predecessors, inside Republican circles, operatives tasked
with keeping Republican majorities in the House and Senate privately worried. The funds, however, will not be spent until Labor Day in early September, the
Department of Agriculture said Tuesday, just months before the midterm elections. And the
general reaction from farmers, many of
whom would benefit from the payments, is that it's a short-term fix that won't work in the long run.
Nationals Farmers Union President Roger Johnson calls the Trump administration's plan to cut checks to farmers impacted by the trade war "a short-term fix to a
long-term problem." "The administration must develop a support mechanism that will mitigate the significant
damage that is being inflicted upon our most vital international markets for years to come," he said in a
statement. "They should do this by working with Congress to ensure farm bill programs provide enough
assistance to farmers when markets collapse." Soybean prices -- in the face of trade fears with China -- have
hovered around historic lows for months, leading Republican lawmakers in red states to raise red flags about the impact these tariffs could
have on Trump country. "The $12 billion in farm aid announced today will provide a short-term fix, but it's not a
long-term solution," Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said in response to the Trump announcement. "As I've said all along, nobody wins in
a trade war." South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune, whose state produces significant pork, soybeans and grains, slammed the decision to offer farmers
aid without fixing the root problem. "It's a Band-Aid," Thune told CNN's Ted Barrett. "It's a short-term solution and it doesn't solve any of the problems agriculture
has got right now." He added: "I appreciate the fact that they realize the farmers are being hurt by this, but this is
not the right remedy." And the Koch Brothers-aligned Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips poured cold water on the plan shortly after it was
announced. "$12 billion to aid farmers means the US is essentially borrowing from China to offset the costs
of tariffs imposed by China," Phillips said. "It doesn't get more Washington than that."
Trump is not withdrawing from NAFTA – their evidence is old and doesn’t assume
recent negotiations.
Rodriguez, 7/25/18 – [Jesus, Staff-writer @ The Hill, “Trump urges Mexican president-elect to wrap
up NAFTA deal 'quickly'”, (http://thehill.com/policy/finance/398895-trump-urges-mexican-president-
elect-to-wrap-up-nafta-deal-quickly)]//MM
President Trumpis telling Mexico's president elect that he wants to renegotiate the North Atlantic Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) "quickly" and warning of a "different route" otherwise. “I believe a successful
renegotiation of [NAFTA] will
lead to even more jobs and higher wages for hard-working American and Mexican workers—but only if it can go quickly,
because otherwise I must go a much different route,” Trump said in a letter to Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “It
would not be my preference, but would be far more profitable for the United States.” The letter was dated July 20, but released on Tuesday
night by López Obrador. Trump drafted the letter in response to a letter López Obrador sent to Trump. NAFTA has been in effect since 1994, but
Trump views the free trade pact as an unfair deal that benefits Mexico more than the U.S. The
U.S., Canada and Mexico have
been renegotiating the deal, but talks have been slow. López Obrador, who will be the country’s first leftist president in decades
after the July 1 election, outlined several steps his administration would take to encourage development on the Mexican side of the border,
such as raising the minimum wage and matching the local tax rates to that of the states in the U.S. side. Keeping
NAFTA and
improving development is seen as a way to stem the flow of economic migrants coming to the United
States from Mexico, a common goal for both administrations. López Obrador said in his letter, sent to Trump with
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who visited Mexico on July 13, that his administration will work “so that no Mexicans have to migrate because
of poverty or violence.” Both Trump and López Obrador also exchanged pleasantries — a sign that the pair
might find common ground. Political watchers have also drawn comparisons between the two populists.
“We both achieved electoral success by providing a clear vision for making our countries stronger and
better,” Trump said in his letter. "A stronger relationship will lead to a much stronger and more prosperous Mexico, which frankly would
make me very happy!" he added. Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo is set to meet on Thursday with U.S. Trade Representative
Robert Lighthizer. Guajardo has hinted a NAFTA deal could be reached by August. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in April the parties
needed to reach an agreement by that month for Congress to pass it before November's midterms.
Trump is halting trade wars and compensation solves the impact on farmers.
Economist, 7/28/18 – [“Donald Trump agrees to cease fire in the trade war with the EU”,
(https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/07/28/donald-trump-agrees-to-cease-fire-in-the-
trade-war-with-the-eu)]//MM
Trump agreed to hold off further tariffs halting

The meeting’s other outcomes have more immediate consequences. Mr punitive measures “ ”, the threat of on European cars
and avoiding escalation into a nastier tit-for-tat dispute for a man said to be itching to withdraw . Remarkably
from the WTO Trump announced he would work with the EU to reform it.
World Trade Organisation ( ), Mr that Rather than mindlessly bashing the WTO, Mr
Trump may have realised the benefits of using it to tackle China’s economic misdeeds. Given Mr Trump’s mercurial personality and his peeves over America’s bilateral trade deficit with the EU, the truce may prove fragile. That means the most lasting policy announcement of the week
Trump’s agriculture secretary outlined a relief package

could yet be the one made on the day before Mr Juncker’s arrival, when Sonny Perdue, Mr , of up to $12bn for
American farmers hit by retaliatory tariffs from America’s trade partners . American farmers have long worried about their position on the front line of Mr
Trump’s trade wars. Around a fifth of their production is exported, leaving them exposed to retaliation from the likes of China, Mexico and the EU; their political heft at home makes them prime targets for foreigners trying to make the Trump administration reverse course. The Trump-
Juncker deal offered American farmers little relief. Not only was agriculture conspicuously absent from their joint statement (beyond a promise to buy more soyabeans), but the EU accounts for less than 4% of the agricultural trade flows affected by the new tariffs. By contrast, $12bn is a
big increase in government support for an industry that already gets a lot. The OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, estimates that in 2016 American farms received $33bn in various types of support. As generous as Mr Perdue’s plan may be, only its outline is clear.
Producers of soyabeans, sorghum, corn, wheat, cotton, dairy and pigs can expect payments. They can
also expect the government to hoover up unexpected surpluses. Last, some of the cash will be spent
on developing new export markets for farm products.
Farmers will get back on track despite trade wars.

Collinson, 7/26/18 – [Stephen, Staff-writer @ CNN, “Why Trump blinked”,
(https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/26/politics/donald-trump-tariffs-putin/index.html)]//MM
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has spent weeks drawing battle lines for a trade war with Europe and
courting Vladimir Putin -- causing almost universal angst in Washington. On Wednesday, he blinked on both. Trump's
decisions to put trade hostilities with the European Union on hold and to delay the Russian President's visit he had
planned for the fall are likely to be widely welcomed among Republicans and among US allies who have been
concerned by his tendency to elevate US enemies while criticizing friends. At the White House, Trump declared what appeared at
first to be a stunning breakthrough in transatlantic trade amid fears of an all-out trade war. "We had a big day. Very big,"
Trump said, promising a "new phase" in the relationship in which both sides win, after meeting European Commission President Jean-Claude
Juncker. They sealed their meeting when Juncker kissed Trump, pictured in a tweet posted by Trump later Wednesday evening. It was a far cry
from the President's smoldering rage at Europe that was in evidence during his trip across the Atlantic earlier this month. "This was
a very
big day for free and fair trade. A very big day indeed." Trump said. A victory or a walk-back? Trump and top European
leader agree to work toward zero tariffs The President needed a big day. His White House reeled Wednesday over a tape
made by his former lawyer Michael Cohen aired on CNN'S "Cuomo Prime Time" that showed he knew about an effort to pay off a Playboy
model who said she had an affair with him that contradicted his previous denials. Trump refused to answer questions about the tape during an
photo-op with Juncker -- and the White House later banned CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins from the trade announcement for
asking them. The announcement on trade was dressed up as a huge victory, held in the Rose Garden, the traditional venue for big state
announcements, and in front of a group of Republican lawmakers apparently called down from Capitol Hill to serve as a backdrop. Yet in
essence, its
real effect seemed to be to disguise a step back by the President who has imposed steel and
aluminum tariffs on US allies in Europe, repeatedly threatened to slap a 25% tariff on European cars imports and blasted the
European Union in public. The two sides said that they had agreed to discuss tearing down all tariffs, trade barriers and subsidies on non-auto
industrial goods. Trump said that they had also agreed to work together to resolve the issue of "retaliatory tariffs" imposed in recent months.
The President's announcement that Europe will buy more soybeans and liquid national gas could be
good news for US agriculture and industry. And Juncker, apparently keen to flatter Trump, was eager to play along in language
that the President appreciates. "When I was invited by the President to the White House, I had one intention: I had the intention to make a deal
today. And we made a deal today," he said. It
would be huge news if the US and Europe ever agreed to get to the
zero tariffs, zero subsidies and zero barriers standard that both leaders proposed on Wednesday.
Bailout solves --- they develop new markets which solves all base concerns
Ebbs et al 7/24 ---[ Stephanie Ebbs is a political reporter for ABC, Karolina Rivas is studying Journalism
and Political Science at the University of Nevada, and Tara Palmeri is an American journalist who works
as ABC News' White House correspondent. Most recently, she was a Politico White House
correspondent, and served as a CNN Political Analyst, ‘Trump administration announces $12 billion in
emergency aid to farmers hurt by president’s trade battle with China and others”, ABC News, 7/24/18,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-announce-financial-assistance-farmers-wake-
tariffs/story?id=56780614] jk
The Trump administration will

extend billions in "temporary relief aid" to farmers who have been impacted by
an ongoing trade fight with China and other nations. The move, which includes several types of
assistance, could strengthen Trump's political position ahead of his trade negeotiations with European Commission President Jean-
Claude Juncker on Wednesday. The
U.S. Department of Agriculture said the agency will authorize $12 billion in
programs to provide payments to producers impacted by retaliatory tariffs, including soybeans, corn, wheat and
dairy farmers, implement a food purchase program to buy surplus products, and authorize a program to develop new export
markets for farm products. The USDA said in a press release the $12 billion is in line to offset the estimated $11
billion impact of the retaliatory tariffs. "The actions today are a firm statement that other nations cannot bully
our agricultural producers to force the United States to cave in," Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters. “This administration
will not stand by while our hard-working agricultural producers bear the brunt of unfriendly and illegal
tariffs." President Trump urged patience on the trade spat. "Just be a little patient. They are all aiming for anybody who likes me," Trump told the
crowd at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Kansas City on Tuesday as he spoke of foreign countries who have imposed retaliatory tariffs that
impact Trump's base.
The base supports the trade war

Hart 7/24 --- [Benjamin Hart is a journalist for the Huffington Post and New York Magazine, “Trump to
Veterans: Trust Me, Not Your Lying Eyes”, The New York Magazine, 7/24/18,
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-tells-veterans-not-to-believe-trade-war-
news.html] jk
During a stop campaigning for Missouri Senate candidate Josh Hawley at a VFW hall in Kansas City on Tuesday — which our gleefully norm-shattering commander-in-chief treated more like a
campaign rally than a taxpayer-funded event — President Trump broached the topic of tariffs. The president insisted that despite all the lost
agricultural revenue, despite the damage already done to marquee American businesses, and despite
the bad headlines, his bellicose trade policy is actually good news for everyone. Or, as he put it on Twitter earlier in the day, “Tariffs
are the greatest!” And, in a line for the ages, Trump neatly encapsulated both his entire political strategy, and his opinion of
the people who vote for him. If retaining base support is his goal, the president’s strategy of straightforward reality
distortion is working fairly well. A Pew poll last week showed that 73 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning
voters approved of the tariffs, a startling result for a party that once championed free trade as one of its defining policy planks.
Base supports the trade war

Miller and Boyer 7 /5---[S.A. Miller is the White House Correspondent at the Washington Times, and
Dave Boyer is a staff writer for the Washington Times, “China trade war kicks off: GOP base backs
Trump's get-tough tariffs”, The Washington Times, 7/5/18,
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jul/5/gop-establishment-wont-support-donald-trump-
plans-/] jk
The U.S.-China trade war is set to dramatically escalate Friday as threatened higher tariffs go into effect, and President Trump is
going into battle with virtually no support from the Republican Party establishment. But that doesn’t mean Mr.
Trump is fighting alone. The president’s get-tough stance on China is bolstered by an electoral base
that for years has been moving away from the GOP’s long-held free trade orthodoxy, according to conservative and business
leaders who themselves oppose protectionist tariffs in trade disputes. “ We’ve recognized a lot of our own base — Republican primary
voters, conservatives — they are not as favorable toward free trade anymore,” said Tim Phillips, president Americans for
Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group that steadfastly opposes higher duties. “This didn’t start with the president,” he added. “The drift started well before him, and it’s not going to end
with this tariff and protectionist move.” Americans for Prosperity plans a multiyear multi-million-dollar campaign to corral Republican voters back into the free trade stable. Mr. Trump said
Thursday that the 25 percent tariff on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods was just the beginning of his crackdown. Higher duties would hit another $16 billion worth of goods in two weeks,
telling reporters en route to a rally in Montana he is prepared to considered another $500 billion in trade duties on Chinese goods if Beijing refuses to compromise. “It’s only on China,” said
Mr. Trump. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government accused the U.S. of “firing first” in the trade war and vowed to shoot back. “China will not bow in the face of threats and blackmail, nor
will it be shaken in its resolve to defend global free trade,” said Gao Feng, spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry. Mr. Trump insists that he is a free-trader, but that for too long the U.S.
has allowed what he calls “dumb trade,” charging low tariffs at home while allowing foreign rivals to impose high tariffs and other barriers to U.S. exports, leading to huge trade deficits. With
China, critics say, the uneven playing field is further tilted by Beijing’s theft or forced transfer of American businesses’ intellectual property. The president blames Beijing’s unfair trade
In the U.S., support for the president standing up to China

practices for driving up America’s annual trade deficit with China to $375 billion.
extends to blue-collar Democratic voters who crossed party lines in 2016 to help send Mr. Trump to the
White House. It’s also a position long championed by Democrats, although they have been mostly silent since Mr. Trump took up the cause. The tariff threats have
caused wild swings on Wall Street. However, stocks were strong Thursday with the Dow Jones Industrial average
gaining 181 points to close at 24,356. Still, Mr. Trump’s resolve and that of Americans facing higher import prices will be tested in a trade clash with China and
other countries. Economists expect a tit-for-tat tariffs to drive up prices paid by U.S. consumers and force job cuts in industries that rely on raw materials from China or sales to the huge
Chinese market. The higher U.S. duties will hit products including Chinese-made machinery, auto parts, medical equipment, rare earth metals and electronic cigarette devices. Beijing is
retaliating with tariffs on such U.S. goods as soybeans, sorghum and cotton, in many cases selecting products intended to inflict pain on areas that supported Mr. Trump politically in 2016..
“We have to at some point stand up to China. I think it is better to do it now that five or 10 years from now,” said Stephen Moore, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation who is
close to the president. He said China, with 4 percent of its GDP tied to trade with the U.S., has much more to lose in a trade war. “We both lose if this gets to be a tit-for-tat situation, but China
would be thrown into a recession if it couldn’t trade with the United States,” said Mr. Moore. Recent polls have shown voters are split over the president’s trade moves and on tariffs on China.
national poll last month found that voters support the idea of tariffs on China 52 percent to 36 percent.
Quinnipiac University
Republicans overwhelmingly approved, 78 percent to 15 percent. However, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News showed that 51 percent of registered
voters were either uncomfortable or had reservations voting for a candidate in the midterms who backed tariffs on countries such as Canada, German and China. Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel
and aluminum hit all those counties, but he leveled the most sweeping new duties on China. “It’s classic Trump,” said GOP strategist and pollster Jim McLaughlin, who did work for the Trump
campaign in 2016. He credited the president with going after China without clear-cut support in the polls, as well as following through on trade policies that were a top campaign promise in
“It’s one of those things where he’s doing what he said he would do and he’s fighting for working-
2016.
class people,” said Mr. McLaughlin. “You don’t see anybody protesting other than the country-club Republicans.”
Trump’s aid to farmers has appeased base’s trade war concerns but has angered
lawmakers
Soergel 7-25-18 ( Andrew Soergel is a Senior Reporter at U.S. News, “Farmers, GOP Lawmakers
Question Trump's $12B Agriculture Lifeline”, https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2018-
07-25/farmers-gop-lawmakers-question-trumps-12b-agriculture-lifeline)//DT
"The only real factor constraining Trump's prosecution of his trade war is the potential that workers in
red states will abandon the cause and turn on him. Aid to farmers mitigates that concern," Daniel
Ikenson, director of the Cato Institute's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, said in a
statement Tuesday. Indignation among Republican lawmakers was swift once news broke that the
Trump administration would funnel $12 billion into propping up an agriculture sector that's been
increasingly targeted by China and other U.S. trade partners as Trump and his international counterparts
announce a series of tit-for-tat tariffs and barriers. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., is one of several GOP
lawmakers to frame the president's actions as equivalent to a series of "taxpayer-funded bailouts"
designed to address fallout from trade disputes in which Congress didn't formally choose to engage.
"These tariffs are a massive tax increase on American consumers and businesses, and instead of offering
welfare to farmers to solve a problem they themselves created, the administration should reverse
course and end this incoherent policy," Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said in a statement Tuesday. Sen.
Orrin Hatch, meanwhile, indicated in a tweet that the U.S. needs to "find a better approach toward
current trade challenges" that doesn't involve "giving handouts." The Utah Republican has previously
expressed interest in advancing legislation that would place greater limits on the president's ability to
enact trade barriers without consulting Congress.
Aff
Spending Bill Thumper
Trump’s spending bill thumps – his base already feels betrayed
Root 3/24
(Wayne Allyn, political commentator @ LV Review journal, “COMMENTARY: Donald Trump alienates his
base by signing an awful federal spending bill”, 03/24/18,
https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/wayne-allyn-root/commentary-donald-
trump-alienates-his-base-by-signing-an-awful-federal-spending-bill/, Date Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
President Donald Trump just made the worst mistake of his presidency. I thought he understood the
Golden Rule. Defend your base. Support your base. Love your base. Never betray your base. All that
matters is your base. The rest of the world doesn’t matter. The D.C. swamp doesn’t matter. The media
don’t matter. Liberals don’t matter. Illegal aliens don’t matter. The GOP establishment doesn’t matter.
You beat them all to win the GOP nomination against all odds. You beat them all to win the presidency
against all odds. As Sinatra said, you won because “you did it your way.” You never wavered. You never
suffered weak knees. You never gave a damn what the rest of them thought. And that was your
strength. So, what happened? Did you lose your mojo? Did the swamp finally come up with a threat or
offer you could not refuse? Who’s advising you? That someone is either corrupt or an idiot. President
Trump just signed the $1.3 trillion omnibus bill. It is a travesty. It will bankrupt America. It is filled with
pork and corruption. It sells out conservatives. It rewards liberals. It makes government far bigger and
stronger. It spends hundreds of millions on a wall … in the Middle East. But nothing on the Trump wall. It
spends billions on a tunnel between New York and New Jersey, the dream of Sen. Chuck Schumer. It
funds sanctuary cities. It gives millions in raises to Congress. Schumer and Pelosi are gloating. They
played you. They made you look like a fool, a loser. The GOP controls everything. White House. Senate.
House. Governorships. State houses. Supreme Court. And we got rolled. Your 63 million voters got
rolled. You got rolled. We voted for you, and we got nothing. Democrats lost at every level, and they just
got everything they wanted. Can anyone explain this? It may not be fatal. I sure hope it’s not fatal. But
it’s a grievous wound. President Trump had “the D.C. swamp” right where he wanted them. He had
them scared to death. Cornered. Embattled. Holding on for dear life. Lawyering up. And then strangely,
suddenly, Trump lifted his foot off the pedal. I received hundreds of emails and texts from the fans of
my national radio and TV shows on Friday morning. Here is a sampling: “Wayne, I never thought I’d say
this, but I am done. Not only am I done with Trump, I am done. Period. I’m never voting again. My votes
haven’t counted for a long time, but now they will never count, since the only votes that matter are by
illegals. He’s funding sanctuary cities, some frigging tunnel to nowhere for Chuck, and on and on. He is
neutered. He knuckled under to the Dems and the backstabbers. Impeachment is next on the agenda.
He’s a lame duck … and a member of the swamp now. What a disgrace. Have a nice day. Paula.”
“Wayne, I will no longer go to battle for Mr. Trump. As far as I’m concerned, he is just another liar, like
most of the rest of the Republicans. He has abandoned his major campaign pledges to the people who
voted for him. Just this morning I know phones were off the hook at WH w/Trump supporters stating
that if he signs the Omnibus Bill, they are all done with Trump. Sad day. Rich.” “Hi, Wayne. Today
President Trump betrayed his base by signing the Omnibus bill. No funds for a wall in the USA, but funds
for a wall in the Middle East? He totally caved to the Democrats. The Art of the Deal? I can no longer
support him or Republican candidates. If we are going to cave to the Democrats, we may as well elect
Democrats. Trump does not know the damage he has done today. He has been ROLLED. Jeff.” Trump
clearly made the worst mistake of his presidency. The question is: Can he recover? Contact Wayne Allyn
Root at Wayne@ROOTforAmerica.com. Hear or watch the nationally syndicated “WAR Now: The Wayne
Allyn Root Show” from 3 to 6 p.m. daily at 790 Talk Now and at 5 p.m. on Newsmax TV.
1AR – Farmer Bailout
Promise to increase emergency aid does nothing --- too much uncertainty and
congressional backlash
Jones 7/25 --- [Sarah Jones is a staff writer for The New Republic, The New Republic, 7/25/18,
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/150151/trump-spending-billions-help-farmers-hurt-trade-war] jk
Trump is spending billions to help farmers hurt by his trade war. The White House said on Tuesday that the administration will offer
farmers about $12 billion in emergency aid to offset the repercussions from the president’s tariffs
against China, which recently announced a 25 percent import tax on $50 billion in U.S. goods, including soybeans. Tariffs have not
been an easy sell. Members of Trump’s own party have raised objections to the policy, and they weren’t all
immediately mollified by news of aid. “This administration’s tariffs and bailouts aren’t going to make America great
again, they’re just going to make it 1929 again,” Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska told The New York Times. Like many of
Trump’s plans, the details about the emergency aid are murky; it’s not clear if the money will end up in the
pockets of soybean farmers or the agricultural conglomerates that dominate the industry. CNBC reports that
shares of John Deere went up after the news. Trump may take that as evidence that his solution worked, but he’s merely patching
holes that he himself punched.
Trumps bailout doesn’t solve --- farmers have lost too much money
Davis and Swanson 7/24 --- [Julie Hirschfield Davis is a White House correspondent at The New York
Times who graduated from Yale University and Ana Swanson writes about trade and international
economics previously covering trade, the Federal Reserve and the economy for The Washington Post,
“To Ease Pain of Trump’s Trade War: $12 Billion in Aid for Farmers”, New York Times, 7/24/18,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/us/politics/farmers-aid-trade-war.html] jk
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would provide up to $12 billion in emergency
relief for farmers hurt by the president’s trade war, moving to blunt the financial damage to American
agriculture and the political fallout for Republicans as the consequences of President Trump’s protectionist policies roll through the economy. Unveiled two days before
the president is scheduled to visit Iowa, a politically important state that is the nation’s top soybean producer, the farm aid appeared calculated to show that Mr.
Trump cares about farmers and is working to protect them from the worst consequences of his trade
war. But the relief money, announced by the Department of Agriculture, was also an indication that Mr. Trump — ignoring the concerns
of farmers, their representatives in Congress and even some of his own aides — plans to extend his tit-for-tat tariff wars. “The actions today are a firm statement that
other nations cannot bully our agricultural producers to force the United States to cave in,” Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, said during a call with reporters to unveil the program. The move drew
swift condemnation from many farm groups and lawmakers, including several in his own party, who worry about a
cascade of unintended consequences that may be just beginning. One farm-group study estimates that corn, wheat and soybean farmers in
the United States have already lost more — $13 billion — than the administration is proposing to
provide as a result of the trade war. The prospect of retaliation has upended global markets for
soybeans, meat and other American farm exports, and farmers are warning that tariffs are costing them
valuable foreign contracts that took years to win. “You have a terrible policy that sends farmers to the
poorhouse, and then you put them on welfare, and we borrow the money from other countries,” Senator Bob
Corker, Republican of Tennessee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “It’s hard to believe there isn’t an outright revolt right now in Congress.” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, asked how the president could single out
farmers for help when the manufacturing and energy industries also stand to lose in the trade war. “Where do you draw the line?” Ms. Murkowski asked reporters. Mr. Trump could be forced to prop up other domestic industries
as retaliatory taxes imposed by trading partners begin to sting automobile manufacturers, distillers and other impacted sectors. Republicans who cherish their party’s reputation as the bastion of free markets and fiscal
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to

responsibility wondered aloud on Tuesday about the president picking winners and losers in a trade war he is bent on waging. “
put a band-aid on a self-inflicted wound,” Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, wrote on Twitter. “This bailout compounds bad
policy with more bad policy.” Farmers have borne the brunt of Mr. Trump’s decision to impose tariffs,
which is already costing American producers billions of dollars and threatens to inflict political pain on
Republicans in farm states in the midterm elections in November. “Tariffs are the greatest!” Mr. Trump declared on Twitter on Tuesday morning.
“Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that — and everybody’s talking! Remember, we are the ‘piggy bank’ that’s being robbed. All
will be Great!” The European Union, Canada, Mexico, China and other countries have responded to Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum and $34 billion worth of Chinese products by imposing taxes of their own. They have often
American soybeans, pork, sugar, orange juice,

targeted farm country, the source of some of America’s biggest exports and an important political base for the president.
cherries and other products now face tariffs in foreign markets that make their products less desirable. At a
speech in Kansas City, Mo., on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said Americans should “just be a little patient” with the pain they may be feeling from the trade war, arguing that his actions were forcing other countries to the negotiating table
to cut deals that would be better for them in the long run. “They don’t want to have those tariffs put on them — they’re all coming to see us — and the farmers will be the biggest beneficiary,” Mr. Trump said at a Veterans of
Foreign Wars convention. “We’re opening up markets. You watch what’s going to happen.” Some farm groups praised the move, albeit as a short-term solution. “We are grateful for the administration’s recognition that farmers
and ranchers needed positive news now, and this will buy us some time,” said Zippy Duvall, the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “This announcement is substantial, but we cannot overstate the dire
lawmakers in both parties and many agricultural trade groups criticized the
consequences that farmers and ranchers are facing.” But
assistance program as a taxpayer-funded bailout for farmers imperiled by the president’s own policies, and
even Mr. Trump’s Republican allies made clear that they did not regard it as a genuine solution to the problems his tariffs had created. “The president’s announcement of billions of dollars in aid that will be made available to
What farmers in Iowa and throughout rural

struggling farmers later this year is encouraging for the short term,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said in a statement. “
America need in the long term are markets and opportunity, not government handouts.” Agriculture Department officials
said farmers could begin signing up to receive the federal money in September, just weeks before voters go to the polls. The package includes direct payments to the producers of soybeans, sorghum, corn, wheat, cotton, dairy and
hogs, who would be compensated according to the size of their harvests this year. It will also include government purchases of surplus products — including fruit, nuts, rice, legumes, beef, pork and dairy — that would be sent to
food banks or other nutrition programs. Some of the funding would go to a program in which the Agriculture Department works with private companies to develop new export markets for American farm products. Mr. Trump and
his advisers have argued that while American producers may feel short-term pain, ultimately they will benefit as other countries are forced to lower their barriers to American products. Meantime, the administration has sought
ways to help farmers survive the pain of retaliation. The program announced on Tuesday will be funded by the Commodity Credit Corporation, which helps shore up American farmers by buying their crops. It marked the first time
that funding from the program — created after the Great Depression — has been used to compensate farmers for losses sustained because of trade, according to an Agriculture Department spokesman. The initiative, which does
not authorize any new money and thus does not need approval from Congress, was an unmistakable signal that the president has no plans to lift his tariffs anytime soon, as Farm Belt senators have pleaded with him to do.
“This trade war is cutting the legs out from under farmers, and the White House’s ‘plan’ is to spend
$12 billion on gold crutches,” said Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. “This administration’s tariffs and bailouts aren’t
going to make America great again, they’re just going to make it 1929 again.” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said
farmers in his state “want trade, not aid.” “I support President Trump’s call for reciprocal trade and his effort to stop China’s theft of American intellectual property, but we should stop self-inflicting
permanent damage to America’s economy through tariffs and a trade war,” Mr. Johnson said. One trade group leader said farmers need contracts, not government assistance, for stability. “The best relief for
the president’s trade war would be ending the trade war,” said Brian Kuehl, the executive director of the trade group Farmers for Free Trade, adding,
“This proposed action would only be a short-term attempt at masking the long-term damage caused by
tariffs.” Administration officials argued on Tuesday that the assistance for farmers would help them absorb the pain while persuading other countries that they must offer concessions to forge trade agreements with the
United States. “What this will do is provide some hope to farmers and ranchers that the president and the secretary do have their back,” Greg Ibach, the under secretary of agriculture for marketing and regulatory programs, said of
the aid package. “We’re hoping that other countries will see that we’re serious now about negotiations.” But many farmers criticized the decision and said it would only compound the maze of federal subsidies and regulations they
already must wade through to make a living. “We don’t want to be dependent on another government program,” Casey Guernsey, a Missouri farmer and spokesman for Americans for Farmers & Families, an anti-tariff group, said
in an interview on Tuesday. “We already are very much in a situation in farming, in agriculture across the board, where we are held hostage to decisions made in Washington.” And some lawmakers argued that if he wanted to help
American farmers, Mr. Trump must simply call off his trade war. “Tariffs are taxes that punish American consumers and producers,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said on Twitter. “ If tariffs punish
farmers, the answer is not welfare for farmers — the answer is remove the tariffs.”
Trade war decks base support and bailout doesn’t solve

Wise 7/25 --- [Justin Wise is a journalist for The Hill, “Soybean growers' leader: I may not support Trump
again in 2020”, The Hill, 7/25/18, http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/398773-soybean-farmer-
group-president-i-may-not-support-trump-again-in-2020] jk
The president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association said Wednesday that he may not vote for
President Trump in 2020 if he doesn't fix current trade disputes. "It’s not about the man or the party," Michael Petefish said
on CNN's "CNN Newsroom." "It’s about specific policies. We in agriculture are very supportive of trade, and this
president has not been." Asked by CNN host Poppy Harlow what that means in regards to the 2020 presidential election, Petefish said
“the jury’s still out on that.” “Timing is critical on this trade deal,” he added. “If, in three or five years we have a
better trade agreement, that won’t matter to most farmers because we’re hurting financially now and we
won’t have the ability to run our businesses in the red for the next several years. "The trade needs to get fixed now." The
comments from Petefish come as the U.S. is involved in trade disputes with countries such as China and the European Union. Many
agricultural groups have called on Trump to stop imposing tariffs because their products, such as pork
and soybeans, are being targeted for retaliation by top U.S. trading partners. The Trump administration
announced on Tuesday that it would offer about $12 billion in emergency relief to U.S. farmers, who have been hit
hardest by the administration's protracted trade battle. But Petefish said that "$12 billion damage is just
sort of scratching the surface of the economic impact." Petefish added that an argument could be made that the trade
war has caused $12 billion worth of damage to soybean farmers alone. "What's concerning is the future"
Petefish said. "Are we going to keep pumping $12 billion into the farming economy? What we need is
markets.” Multiple GOP lawmakers have echoed Petefish's concerns. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), for example, said on Tuesday that
"America's farmers don't want to be paid to lose — they want to win by feeding the world."
Farmers support the bailout --- Iowa proves

Petroski 7/24 --- [William Petroski is a senior reporter for the Des Moines Register, “Trump's $12 billion
bailout for farmers draws mixed reactions in Iowa”, Des Moines Register, 7/24/18,
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2018/07/24/trump-tariffs-farms-bailout-iowa-
farmers/827126002/] jk
President Donald Trump administration's plan to provide $12 billion in federal aid to American farmers
hurt by a trade war drew a sharp mix of reactions Tuesday from Iowa farm groups, politicians, agricultural economists
and others. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue described the initiative as a short-term strategy that
will protect agricultural producers while Trump works on long-term trade deals to benefit agriculture
and the entire U.S. economy. But critics suggested the bailout is contrary to the traditional Republican
philosophy of free markets and smaller government. They also pointed out that while Iowa farm income has been down, agriculture
had been doing well from an export standpoint before it was negatively affected by Trump's decisions to impose tariffs and pick trade fights with China, Mexico,
Canada and other major trading partners of the United States. More: Trump will visit Dubuque in Iowa on Thursday. U.S.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, a New
Hartford farmer and a Republican, said
the president's plans to provide billions of dollars in federal aid for struggling
farmers is encouraging for the short term.
Midterms
Neg
Dem Win Good -> Investigations
Dem win in House blocks Trump’s agenda and accelerates investigations – even the
risk of a dem wave is regulating the GOP, which the plan flips
Antle 7-10-18 ( W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner's politics editor. He was previously
managing editor of the Daily Caller, associate editor of the American Spectator and senior writer for the
American Conservative. He is the author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?,
“Republicans are running out of time”, Washington Examiner, 7-10-18)//DT
Republicans are running out of time. Today they control all of Washington. Come January, they may be
confined to the White House. The loss of even just the House of Representatives after the midterm
elections in November, the likeliest scenario, would put Democrats in charge of originating tax and
spending bills as well as initiating the impeachment process. If the Senate falls, it will stymie President
Trump’s ability to fill executive and judicial branch vacancies. Either chamber falling under Democratic
control also means an uptick in congressional hearings about various scandals involving the Trump
administration and its officials. Time devoted to Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election
or potential violations of the emoluments clause will mean less time spent on Trump’s legislative
priorities. And investigations targeting the administration will be covered more sympathetically than
committee hearings on Whitewater or Benghazi. Additionally, lawmakers may augment or accelerate
investigations that are already underway. As the days tick down to the November election, incumbents
on Capitol Hill facing tough races will be increasingly reluctant to take hard votes. Note how little
Democrats did with majorities much bigger than the ones the Republicans have now after passing
Obamacare — which by itself arguably cost them the House. At-risk Republicans may decide
controversial votes to cut corporate tax rates and (mostly unsuccessfully) scuttle Obamacare are enough
for them to contend with on the campaign trail. Still, Republicans need to pass a dozen appropriations
bills with the fiscal year set to end Sept. 30. In the Senate, they will need some Democratic votes to do
so because of the filibuster rules. The more Republican defections there are, the more Democrats will be
required. Otherwise they risk a partial government shutdown just weeks out from the election.
UQ – Dems Win Now
Dems are soft favorites now – fundraising, generic ballot, forecasts – but turnout not
set in stone
Scott 7-24-18 ( Dylan Scott is a policy reporter for Vox News, “The odds that Democrats will take the
House in the 2018 midterms keep looking better”, Vox, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/7/24/17607138/2018-midterm-elections-predictions-generic-ballot-democrats)//DT
With a little more than three months left until Election Day, Democrats seem to be strengthening their
position to win control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Two data points will suffice to
explain the situation right now: On Tuesday, the University of Virginia’s Crystal Ball, one of the nation’s
premier election forecasters, changed its ratings for 17 House districts — and all of them moved in favor
of Democrats. Democrats’ lead in the generic ballot, if you go by the RealClearPolitics polling average,
has quietly doubled (and then some) since the beginning of June, from a mere 3.2 percentage points to
a healthy 7.1 points. That is roughly the margin political science nerds think they need. Real Clear Politics
If you want to add a third point, Democrats have been posting very strong fundraising numbers, with
Democratic challengers outraising GOP incumbents in some of the nation’s most competitive districts, as
Vox’s Tara Golshan recently noted. “Put it all together, and the Democrats now look like soft favorites to
win a House majority with a little more than 100 days to go,” the Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik wrote on
Tuesday. He emphasized how reluctant they have been to move the odds from 50-50, but the indicators
for Democrats keep looking better and better. A quick assessment of the House battleground further
supports the case. One GOP-held seat — in now de-gerrymandered Pennsylvania — is considered a Safe
Democratic win; two others are considered Likely Democratic pickups. Four Republican districts — three
of which are open seats with no incumbent — fall in the Lean Democratic camp, and 33 GOP-held seats
are rated as toss-ups, according to the Crystal Ball. If you added the 16 seats that merely Lean
Republican, then the 2018 House battlefield equals around 60 districts. Democrats need to flip 24
Republican seats to take back the House. By the looks of things, they could win less than half of the
competitive districts and still pull it off. Just one Democratic seat is considered a Safe Republican win
(again, a result of the Pennsylvania redistricting) and only two Democratic-held seats are rated as toss-
ups. In other words, almost the entire 2018 campaign will be fought over GOP-held territory. On the one
hand, good Democratic odds shouldn’t be such a shock. The minority party’s gains in midterm elections
are a fact of life in American politics. President Trump, in spite of relatively strong economic indicators,
is pretty unpopular. Issues like health care promise to dominate the campaign, and voters prefer
Democrats to Republicans in key policy debates. But Democrats are still facing a heavily gerrymandered
House map, and the frank reality that their (younger) supporters have historically been less reliable
voters in midterm elections than the GOP’s (older) base. Recent polling underscored the real risk that
millennial voters won’t turn out as hoped. So everything could still go wrong for Democrats in the 2018
midterms. But with about 100 days left in the campaign, they have a lot of reasons to be optimistic.
Dems win now

Breuninger and Newburger 7-24-18 ( Kevin Breuninger and Emma Nerburger are CNBC Special
associates and reporters, “Some good news for Democrats: Their odds to win the House are above 50%
for the first time, top forecaster says”, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/24/forecaster-democrats-have-
better-than-50percent-chance-to-win-house.html)//DT
For the first time this cycle, a leading elections forecaster has given Democrats a greater than 50 percent
chance to reclaim the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms. An analysis by Sabato’s Crystal
Ball, a service of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, published on Tuesday shows the House
tilting past 50-50 odds in favor of the Democrats taking it back. The party needs to flip 23 seats this fall
in order to regain the majority they haven't held since the first half of President Barack Obama's first
term. Crystal Ball's managing editor noted that it was “the first time this cycle we’ve gone beyond 50-50
odds on a House turnover.” The nonpartisan political newsletter, which tracks congressional,
presidential and gubernatorial elections, made changes in 17 House races over the past week — all in
Democrats’ favor. With under 100 days to go until the November elections, eight races labeled “Leans
Republican” were shifted to the “Toss-Up” category, including a special election in Ohio on Aug. 7. The
changes raise the total number of toss-up elections to 36. Thirty-four of those competitive races are for
seats currently held by Republicans, versus just two from Democrats. Other pollsters and analysts have
already signaled that Democrats have an edge heading into the midterms. Real Clear Politics’ generic
ballot, which averages leading polls, gives Democrats a seven-point lead over the GOP. Forecasting and
data site FiveThirtyEight estimates that Democrats have a higher chance than Republicans, 48 percent to
41 percent. The shift toward the minority party follows a week of intensely negative press for President
Donald Trump, whose performance during a press conference alongside Russian leader Vladimir Putin in
Helsinki, Finland, garnered bipartisan condemnation. The president’s approval rating is still largely stuck
in the low 40s, which analysts say is a red flag that has plagued similarly situated presidents in past
midterms. The House generic ballot, which has generally shown a Democratic lead of between six to
eight points, is currently at the higher end of the range right now. A poll by The Wall Street Journal and
NBC News that was published Sunday showed Trump’s favorables edging slightly higher in the wake of
the summit with Putin, helped almost entirely by high levels of support among Republicans. Eighty-eight
percent of members of the president’s party approve of the job he’s doing, according to that poll. In
Congress, however, Sabato’s Crystal Ball shows a less steady base of support for Republicans. A high
number of open seats in this election cycle provides Democrats with more opportunities to take back
seats than the GOP, since Republicans are defending 41 seats without an incumbent, while Democrats
are defending only 22 seats. The analysts also note that Republican incumbents in 56 districts were
badly outfunded by their Democratic challengers in the second quarter. It’s a potentially ominous sign
for the GOP, considering incumbents are generally expected to be able to handily outraise their
opponents.
UQ – Dems Win (Young Voters)
Voter enthusiasm is high – new polls
Sparks 7-13-18 ( Grace Sparks is an associate producer for CNN Politics, where she specializes in
polling and data driven political coverage, “Voters are extremely interested in the 2018 midterms”,
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/13/politics/2018-midterms-fox-poll/index.html)//DT
Seven-in-10 registered voters say they're extremely or very interested in the November elections, a
record high in Fox News polling for their midterm election tracking since 2010. More Democrats, 77%,
say they're interested in the elections, compared with 74% of Republicans and 44% of independents.
The 70% figure for extremely or very interested is a new high. Interest in previous years has come close to that, but
only right before Election Day. In late October polls in 2014 and 2010, 68% said they were interested. It's now just the start of July, and already
voters have surpassed usual levels of interest. In a follow-up question, Fox
asked if, compared with previous congressional
elections, voters thought they were more enthusiastic about casting ballots than usual, less enthusiastic
or about the same as usual. Forty-four percent said they were more enthusiastic, 43% said they were
about the same as usual and only 10% said they were less enthusiastic. Republicans were more likely to
say they were about the same as usual in terms of excitement, while Democrats believed they're more
enthusiastic. Forty-eight percent of voters said they would support the Democratic candidate in the
upcoming election and 40% reported they preferred the Republican. However, the fact that they would support that
party member in their congressional election didn't mean they believe in the party as a whole. When asked if the Democratic Party has a clear
plan for the country, fewer people agreed with that statement than those who said the Republican Party has a plan. Especially interesting,
significantly more Republicans thought their own party had a plan for the country (65%) than Democrats who felt that way about the
Democratic Party, with about half of saying so. This could be attributed to the fact that Republicans are in power and their plan can be seen in
action, but it should be a troubling figure for Democratic leaders. Not everyone is as excited about talking about their political views as they are
about voting on them, however. Fox asked whether voters in the last year have intentionally avoided talking with friends and family who have
different political views. Respondents were exactly split, with 48% saying yes and the same amount saying no. Among the most likely to say
they had avoided talking about differing political beliefs were those who lived in union households (63%), women (56%) and whites with college
degrees (56%). Men (55%), nonwhite voters (55%) and Trump voters (52%) were the least likely to avoid discussing those matters. The Fox
News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw &
Company Research (R). The poll was conducted by telephone with live interviewers July 9-11, 2018,
among a random national sample of 1,007 registered voters (RV). Results based on the full sample have
a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
UQ – AT: Black swans
Dems win now and black swans don’t thump, but major event can shift the election
Cillizza 7-25-18 ( Chris Cillizza is a CNN Politics Reporter and Editor-at-Large, covering national politics
including the White House, Congress and every district they represent, “Every sign is pointing to a
Democratic wave in November”, CNN Politics, https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/house-2018-
midterms/index.html)//DT
The 2018 election is in 105 days. And the playing field continues to tilt toward Democrats. On Tuesday,
Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia moved 17(!) House seats in Democrats' favor --
eight of which went from a "leans Republican" rating to a "toss-up." That means that of the 36 races
rated as "toss-ups" by the Center of Politics, 34 are held by Republicans. Remember that Democrats only
need a 23-seat pickup to regain the majority they lost in 2010. "Democrats are now a little better than
50-50 to win the House," concludes Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of UVA professor Larry Sabato's
Crystal Ball. "This is the first time this cycle we've gone beyond 50-50 odds on a House turnover." He
adds later: "At this point, we see the Democrats with slightly better odds to get their required share of
the 'toss-ups' based largely on the environment, but also because they appear to have well-funded and
credible challengers in these districts that can capitalize on that environment." These moves are broadly
consistent with how other non-partisan handicappers see the current state of play. The Cook Political
Report carries 34 seats that are either "toss-ups" or lean toward party that doesn't currently control the
seat; 31 of those are GOP districts. Inside Elections sees 26 Republican-held seats in serious jeopardy as
compared to just 5 for Democrats. In CNN's own ratings, there are 43 Republican-held seats in serious
jeopardy as compared to six Democratic-held seats. It's reflective of polling from swing districts. Take
Pennsylvania's 17th District in the southwestern part of the state where Reps. Conor Lamb (D) and Keith
Rothfus (R) are facing off. Even though President Donald Trump narrowly carried the seat in 2016, Lamb
leads Rothfus 51% to 39% in a new Monmouth University poll. And national generic ballot polling where
-- after a brief Republican resurgence in late spring/early summer -- Democrats' edge on the question is
now consistently in the high single digits. The building Democratic wave is also revealed in fundraising
reports filed last week. At least 55 Democratic challengers outraised their Republican incumbent
opponents during the second fundraising quarter which covers April 1 to June 30. 55! Fundraising is not,
obviously, the sole determining factor when it comes to who wins and who loses, but it does tend to be
an expression of passion and energy within the two party bases. When so many Democratic challengers
are outraising so many Republican incumbents, you can't ignore it. Candidate fundraising also matters in
another way: Expanding the playing field. While many of the more than four dozen Democratic
challengers who outraised their GOP incumbent opponents are already in targeted races, others remain
on the periphery of the landscape of what are commonly accepted as competitive districts. But if the
horizon continues to slide toward Democrats, some Republican House members who may not think they
are in trouble right now could find themselves suddenly vulnerable. And if their Democratic opponent
already has enough money in the bank to run ads and ensure voters know they have a choice, it could
be curtains for people who no one is even thinking about possibly losing right now. Add it all up -- and
throw in the weight of history that suggests the President's party loses, on average, 33 seats in midterm
elections -- and you have a devil's brew for Republicans. "Think it's safe to say the odds of a D House
takeover have never been higher this cycle," tweeted National Journal politics editor Josh Kraushaar.
"Time is running out for Rs to turn things around." But 105 days is an eternity in politics, you say! And it
is -- sort of. But the history of midterm elections won't be changing between now and November 6.
Fundraising tends to be momentum driven, meaning that if you don't have a lot of cash, it's harder to
just go and get it (unless, of course, you are independently wealthy). And once the playing field shifts in
a particular direction, it usually takes a cataclysmic event to shift it back in any meaningful way. All of
which is to say: The cake isn't totally baked on the 2018 election yet. But it's getting close to finished and
the final product isn't likely to be to Republicans' liking.
UQ - AT: Family Separation Thumps
Family separation executive order doesn’t thump
“Republicans are running out of time”, Washington
Examiner,https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/republicans-are-running-out-of-time, 7-10-
18)//DT
Already the House has failed to advance an immigration bill after considering both a conservative
proposal and the leadership-backed compromise alternative. Trump appeared equivocal in his support
for both pieces of legislation. He also vacillated on whether they should take up the issue at all.
"Republicans should stop wasting their time on immigration until after we elect more Senators and
Congressmen/women in November," Trump tweeted last month. "Dems are just playing games, have no
intention of doing anything to solve this decades old problem. We can pass great legislation after the
Red Wave!" He later deflected blame by tweeting he “never pushed the Republicans in the House to
vote for the Immigration Bill.” This month, Trump tweeted a different tune. “Congress must pass smart,
fast and reasonable Immigration Laws now,” he wrote. “Law Enforcement at the Border is doing a great
job, but the laws they are forced to work with are insane.” Images of children being separated from
their parents at the border gave Republicans a black eye. Trump signed an executive order ending the
practice without abandoning his “zero-tolerance” policy on prosecuting illegal border-crossers, but
many obstacles to implementing that order remain in the absence of congressional action.
UQ - AT: Kavanaugh Thumper
Voters don’t care about the SCOTUS confirmation
“Republicans are running out of time”, Washington Examiner,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/republicans-are-running-out-of-time, 7-10-18)
No more recess Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is keeping his troops — and vulnerable
Democrats who would prefer to be at home campaigning — in Washington to crank out last-minute
agenda items, having canceled most of the August recess. High-profile confirmation hearings to replace
retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy and former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott
Pruitt are a better bet now, since the GOP majority is a sure thing and the Democrats have no filibuster
power to stop the nominations. “Due to the historic obstruction by Senate Democrats of the president’s
nominees, and the goal of passing appropriations bills prior to the end of the fiscal year, the August
recess has been canceled. Senators should expect to remain in session in August to pass legislation,
including appropriations bills, and to make additional progress on the president’s nominees,” McConnell
said at the time. The 51-49 Republican Senate majority could grow after November, given the number of
red state Democrats running for reelection. But it could also be gone in a blue wave, making it nearly
impossible to get reliable conservatives seated at either the Supreme Court or the EPA. If Trump wants
to replace any other officials whose positions require Senate confirmation — Attorney General Jeff
Sessions has been embattled since recusing himself from the Russia investigation in favor of the deputy
who ultimately appointed special counsel Robert Mueller — now would appear to be the time.
Democrats are already arguing that a Supreme Court confirmation vote should be held off until they
may have more power. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., insists that McConnell’s decision
to block then-President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in a presidential election year
means the same logic should apply to the midterm elections. Schumer also reportedly lobbied Trump to
pick Garland himself. The initial public opinion polling wasn’t kind to this Democratic argument. One poll
by NBC News/SurveyMonkey found that 62 percent wanted an up-or-down vote on Trump’s nominee
before this year’s elections while just 33 percent favored a delay. Perhaps as a residual effect of the
Garland debate, 55 percent of Democrats wanted a pre-election vote. “The second Anthony Kennedy
retired from the Supreme Court, the agenda on Capitol Hill became about one thing — confirming a new
justice to the bench,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist. “And given the slim majority
Republicans have in the Senate, both parties will have a laser-like focus on the confirmation process,
which will likely last through September. Beyond that Republicans will be counting on President Trump
to continue to deliver on his campaign promises, but that will likely be relegated to executive orders and
the foreign policy front.” That means both pushing through must-pass legislation under the wire as well
as getting congressional Democrats on record on issues that will rally the GOP base ahead of November.
UQ - AT: Helsinki Thumper
Helsinki and family separation xo changed nothing and immigration is key – the Dems
are running on the “resistance” strategy
Cassidy 7-24-18 ( John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also writes a
column about politics, economics, and more for newyorker.com, “Trump’s Post-Helsinki Poll Ratings
Portend a Nasty and Divisive Election Season”, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-
columnists/trumps-steady-approval-polls-point-to-a-nasty-and-divisive-midterm-election-ahead)//DT
If you thought that Donald Trump’s bowing and scraping to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki would put a big
dent in his approval ratings, think again. Two new polls suggest that the President standing next to his
Russian counterpart and publicly questioning U.S. intelligence findings about Russian interference in the
2016 election didn’t change anything much. That’s a testament to the unprecedented level of
polarization in the American electorate. And it suggests that, as the midterms get closer, Trump will
descend further into race-baiting and demagoguery as a way to keep his supporters engaged. The
weekly Gallup poll, which was released on Monday afternoon, estimated Trump’s approval rating at
forty-two per cent, which represents a drop of one percentage point from the previous week. The latest
Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, which was released over the weekend, put Trump’s rating at
forty-five per cent—a one-point gain since last month. Since there are substantial margins of error
attached to both polls, the over-all picture that they draw is one of stasis. Most Americans disapprove of
the rogue President, but Trump’s base of support remains solid, and it encompasses more than eight in
ten self-identified Republicans. It isn’t that all G.O.P. supporters were blind to what took place in
Finland. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on Sunday, almost a third of
Republicans disapproved of Trump publicly expressing doubts about U.S. intelligence findings. By recent
standards, that’s a significant defection from the pro-Trump line. But any concerns that Republican
supporters had about the Helsinki summit don’t appear to have adversely affected their over-all level of
satisfaction with Trump. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, eighty-eight per cent of Republican
voters said that they approved of the job he’s doing. For this poll, that was the highest figure of his
Presidency so far. The resilience of Trump’s support among self-identified Republicans helps explain why
elected G.O.P. officials are so loath to cross him, and it can be explained in various ways. Some analysts
see it as a reaction to the negative media coverage that Trump receives, especially after controversial
incidents like his press conference with Putin. “The more Trump gets criticized by the media, the more
his base seems to rally behind him,” Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster from Hart Research Associates,
one of the firms that carried out the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, said. Doubtless, this is part
of the explanation. There may also be something of a statistical illusion at work. In many polls, the
proportion of self-identified Republicans has declined significantly since Trump was elected, suggesting
that some anti-Trump G.O.P. supporters may have left the Party, leaving him to garner a bigger share of
support among a smaller base. In this case, as FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver argued on Monday, the
headline poll figures may be misleading. But Charles Franklin, the founder of PollsandVotes.com,
pointed out that the number of self-identified Democrats has also declined, and he suggested that the
over-all impact of these shifts is likely to be pretty small. In a close election, however, they could still
prove significant. Regardless of the underlying reasons for them, the new poll figures will surely only
encourage Trump to believe that his incendiary tactics of attacking the media and fanning resentments
about immigration, race, and unfair foreign competition are working. As we get closer to Election Day,
he seems certain to escalate this strategy. Perhaps foreshadowing what is to come, Steve Bannon,
Trump’s former campaign manager and political strategist, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last month that
the midterms would be a “base-plus” contest. Bannon argued that Trump should seek to “nationalize
the election” around his signature theme of immigration. Although the White House subsequently
modified its inhumane policy of separating migrant families at the southern border, the President, in his
public appearances and on his Twitter feed, continues to emphasize “strong borders,” his proposed wall,
and the threat represented by the MS-13 gang. The scaremongering seems to be working. In a Gallup
survey published last week, thirty-five per cent of Republicans named immigration as the top problem
facing the country, the highest proportion in more than a decade. “The 35% of Republicans who say
immigration is the country’s top problem is over twice as high as the 15% who mention government,”
Frank Newport, Gallup’s editor-in-chief, noted. In addition to whipping up fears about nonwhite
immigrants, Trump appears eager to rekindle his dispute with black football players. Last Friday, after
the N.F.L. and the players’ union announced that they were taking a timeout from resolving the dispute
about some players kneeling in protest during the national anthem, Trump tweeted, “The NFL National
Anthem Debate is alive and well again - can’t believe it! Isn’t it in contract that players must stand at
attention, hand on heart? The $40,000,000 Commissioner must now make a stand. First time kneeling,
out for game. Second time kneeling, out for season/no pay!” Of course, none of this means that Trump’s
divisive tactics will necessarily succeed in helping his party in November. For all his support among self-
identified Republicans, he is still one of the most unpopular Presidents in history—if not the most
unpopular. And his party isn’t doing much better. Recent polls show the Democrats retaining a seven- or
eight-point lead in the generic congressional vote, which many experts believe is roughly the margin of
victory that the Party needs to take control of the House of Representatives. Trump’s apparent
determination to insert himself into the race and stir things up will only provide more fuel to the
Democratic “resistance,” whose entire strategy is based on turning the election into a referendum on
his Presidency. In Republican-majority states, a Trump on the rampage may help some Republican
candidates. But in left-leaning states, such as California and New Jersey, G.O.P. incumbents will be
trying to localize their races and deëmphasize Trump. But that may well prove an impossibility:
although Trump’s name won’t be on the ballots, he is set to be an all-consuming presence.
Link – Social Issues
Social issues- like the plan – mobilize turnout
BIGGERS 10
(Daniel R., PHD, Department of Government and Politics @ University of Maryland, “When Ballot Issues
Mater: Social Issue Ballot Measures and Their Impact on Turnout”, 4/1/2010, Political Behavior Journal
March 2011, Volume 33, Issue 1, pp 3–25, Date Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
Why Social Issues? While they are not the only type of issue that can mobilize turnout, social issues are
uniquely positioned to consistently do so. Such issues include abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia,
stem cell research, drug legalization, same-sex marriage, homosexual rights, and obscenity. These issues
relate to morality politics, which involves policies that attempt to regulate social norms or generate a
strong moral response from citizens (Mooney and Lee 1995) by invoking notions of right and wrong
(Haider-Markel and Kaufman 2006). These policies validate a particular set of moral values (Mooney
2001), and attitudes regarding them are based on core values rooted within an citizen’s system of
beliefs (Tatalovich et al. 1994) and primary identity, especially religion, which for many serves as the
basis of their most fundamental values (Tatalovich and Daynes 1998).4 In comparison to other ballot
measures, those that address social issues are particularly well known. Nicholson (2003) finds that 80%
or more of respondents were familiar with initiatives that dealt with social issues, as well as more likely
to be aware of initiatives addressing morality or civil liberties and rights issues than other initiatives.
Furthermore, social issues are consistently the most cited by respondents when asked about which
issues are on the ballot (Donovan et al. 2005). Many of these are “easy” issues (Carmines and Stimson
1980) in that they trigger a “gut response” and do not require a heightened level of sophistication. Such
issues are considered “easy” because they are often framed as morality based alternatives, such as the
simplification of abortion into a choice of pro-life versus pro-choice (Layman 2001). As they tap core
values that reflect deeply held beliefs (Carmines and Stimson 1980) and produce a highly emotional
response from citizens (Layman 2001), they are often seen as more meaningful to citizens than other,
more complex issues (Mooney 2001), and this technical simplicity may facilitate participation (Mooney
1999; Mooney and Lee 1995). More importantly, social issue propositions tap into existing social
cleavages, and they possess the ability to arise the passions of those in both the traditionalist and
modernist camps (Layman and Carsey 2002). Such issues heighten a sense of cultural embattlement and
feelings of religious threat for many evangelicals (Campbell 2006), while some on the other side of the
issue perceive the Christian right’s views as intolerant or extreme (Bolce and De Maio 1999). The
characteristics of these issues act to overcome key reasons as to why citizens do not participate in
politics. Individuals fail to vote because they cannot, do not want to, or are not asked (Verba et al.
1995). The religious nature of social issues, however, means that churches can play an active role in
developing the skills necessary to vote (Verba et al. 1995), and that individuals have sufficient
information (drawn from their religious identify) to participate. This nature also facilitates mobilization
on both sides of the issue (Barclay and Fisher 2003; Haider-Markel and Meier 1996; Roh and Haider-
Markel 2003), which serves to maximize participation (Wilcox and Larson 2006), lower the costs of
voting (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Verba et al. 1995), and may even partially reduce the
socioeconomic bias in participation (Verba et al. 1995). Social issue propositions are able to successfully
overcome these barriers because their significance to many voters can be explained within the
framework of expressive choice, which posits that there is a consumption benefit to voting (Brennan
and Buchanan 1984; Schuessler 2000). These measures can mobilize citizens because of their desire to
express a preference on the proposed policy, as such an expression has a direct influence on what they
consider to be their identity. To a certain degree, it is the individual’s statement, by voting, which makes
them pro-life or pro-choice. This explains why the turnout of groups attached to social issues can be
maximized when they are on the ballot, even when the outcome is certain (Donovan et al. 2005;
McDonald 2004; Witt and McCorkle 1997). The impact of social issue measures, specifically the eleven
same-sex marriage bans adopted in 2004, has received significant attention. While some scholars find
no effect on turnout (Abramowitz 2004; Burden 2004; Smith et al. 2006), others suggest that they raised
turnout in some states (Donovan et al. 2005; McDonald 2004) or among certain segments of the
population (Campbell and Monson 2008), even in the atmosphere of high information, mobilization, and
salience that characterizes presidential elections. Using aggregate-level data, Grummel (2008) finds that
turnout is higher in midterm but not presidential elections when a morality issue is on the ballot.5
Fears about ecological fallacy, however, do not allow us to determine the existence of an individual-level
relationship (see Hanushek and Jackson 1977).6 In addition, the scholar does not allow for a cumulative
effect of multiple social issues on the same ballot. While the groups that would be motivated by two
distinct social issues are likely similar, they are probably not exactly the same. Further work is needed to
establish the relationship at the individual-level and clarify the exact impact of such measures on
turnout.
Aff
AT: Plan = Win for GOP
The plan isn’t a magic wand for the GOP – unfulfilled border promises, spending bills,
trade war tariffs
“Republicans are running out of time”, Washington Examiner,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/republicans-are-running-out-of-time, 7-10-18)//DT
All the while, opportunities to get funding to build the border wall — Trump’s most familiar campaign
promise — keep passing by. Both sides balked at a deal to codify Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,
an Obama-era program offering deportation relief to a subset of young illegal immigrants, in exchange
for wall money. Time is running out, which is perhaps why Trump pressed appropriators to increase the
wall “down payment” to $5 billion from the $1.6 billion to $2 billion already planned. But this could itself
heighten the chances of a shutdown since Senate Democrats will be resistant to the change.
“Infrastructure Week” has become a punchline. "We're going to continue looking at ways to improve
the nation's infrastructure, but in terms of a specific piece of legislation, I'm not aware that that will
happen by the end of the year," White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters in May. Then
in June, the Senate rejected a modest spending cuts package advanced by the White House. It mostly
targeted unused funds. The momentum generated by the tax cut bill has stalled. “Members are scared
they’ll be targeted by the president’s tweets one day and the Resistance the next,” said a Hill Republican
source. This has left a great deal of unfinished business to be completed between now and November. “I
would hope they could at least solve the border separation issue and get a government funding bill
passed,” said Jim Dornan, a Republican strategist. “And frankly, a bill that will rein in Trump’s ridiculous
tariff fixation so that farmers and manufacturers don't leave the party in droves in November would be a
plus.”
Thumper – Health Care
Health care is the key issue for the upcoming midterms – above immigration and the
economy
Jones 7-20-18 ( Sarah Jones is a staff writer for The New Republic, “The 2018 Midterms Are All About
Health Care”, https://newrepublic.com/article/150074/2018-midterms-health-care) //DT
“Real change begins with immediately repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare,”
Donald Trump said during one of his final campaign rallies of the 2016 race. “We’re going to repeal it.
We’re going to have a really great plan that’s going to cost much less and be much better.” While Trump
has kept few of his campaign promises, this one is coming half-true—if not necessarily the way
Republicans had planned. Congress failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but Trump has attacked the
law in subtler, nonetheless devastating ways. For many Americans, Obamacare has effectively ceased to
exist. “Across the country, the details vary but the story is the same. The Trump administration has been
rolling back sections of the Obama-era health law piece by piece,” The Wall Street Journal reported on
Wednesday. “The result is that the country is increasingly returning to a pre-ACA landscape, where the
coverage you get, especially for people without employer-provided insurance, is largely determined by
where you live.” As for a “really great plan that’s going to cost much less,” Trump has been less
successful. Last month, he rolled out a rule allowing small businesses to band together to provide
cheaper health care to employees—without all of Obamacare’s coverage protections. But on Thursday,
Politico reported that the National Federation of Independent Business, a business group that has
advocated for so-called association health plans for two decades, won’t be creating such a plan because
Trump’s rule is unworkable. Other trade groups are reportedly tepid, too. In short, the health care
system in America, after modest improvements under Obama, is becoming a chaotic mess under
Trump—and his political opponents are poised to capitalize on it. On Thursday morning, 70 Democrats
in the House of Representatives launched a Medicare for All caucus. The roll includes a few expected
names—Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota—but also more recent converts to the cause, proving
the policy no longer belongs to the fringe. In 2017, 122 House Democrats co-sponsored Representative
John Conyers’s Medicare for All bill before he resigned amid a sexual harassment scandal. As Trump’s
attacks on the ACA increase, so has Democratic support for a sweeping alternative. Since Trump took
office in 2017, the administration has repealed the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and
expanded access to short-term, limited-duration health plans, which can’t be renewed and offer limited
coverage to beneficiaries. Without the individual mandate, SLDI plans can look like sensible, affordable
options for consumers—and that means fewer Americans will have health insurance that covers their
basic needs. It also influences premiums. As Axios reported in May, ACA premiums have increased by 34
percent since 2017, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that they’ll increase by another 15
percent next year. Meanwhile, the administration cut spending for ACA outreach. If people don’t know
how to enroll in the ACA, they’re less likely to do so at all. For Republicans concerned about their
electoral prospects, Obamacare is no longer such a reliable foe. In 2017, roughly 350,000 Virginians
faced the prospect of losing their ACA plans when Optima Health followed the examples of Aetna and
Anthem and threatened to pull out of the exchange market. The move would have left nearly half of all
Virginia counties without an ACA insurer, with the losses concentrated in Virginia’s western counties—
among the poorest in the state. At the time, insurance companies cited market instability for their
decisions, and they blamed the Trump administration for causing it. Trump has repeatedly threatened to
cut subsidies for the ACA, and insurers worried that would put their profit mdargins at risk. Anthem
eventually agreed to cover Virginia’s so-called bare counties. But the crisis may have pushed state
Republicans away from Trump, at least on the issue of health care. The General Assembly passed
Medicaid expansion in 2018. “When you lost all the coal jobs, a lot of people lost their healthcare,”
Republican State Representative Terry Kilgore told Belt magazine last month. “People were working but
were going to jobs paying $8 to $15 per hour with no healthcare benefits. We need more healthcare
options and a healthier workforce.” Kilgore voted for Medicaid expansion. Medicare for All’s popularity
with Democrats can be traced back to Senator Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic nomination in
2016, which brought national attention to the policy. Its appeal has only grown since then, as Democrats
have seen how easily a Republican president can weaken the signature achievement of the Obama
presidency. Single-payer health care, whether it’s Medicare for All or some other approach, hasn’t
proven to be the campaign-killer that some moderates have warned of. Insurgent candidates like
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ben Jealous have embraced the policy, and so have some Democrats
running in red states. This opening for Democrats may crack even wider as the material consequences of
gutting the ACA become clear. As the Journal reported in March, “Health-insurance premiums are likely
to jump right before the November elections, a result of Congress’s omission of federal money to shore
up insurance exchanges from its new spending package.” Fearful of the political damage, Republicans
are now scrambling to fix the problem. On Thursday, The Hill reported that the GOP House “is planning
to vote next week on several GOP-backed health-care measures that supporters say will lower
premiums.” Whether or not Republicans succeed there, they have handed Democrats an opening ahead
of the midterms, one that may crack even wider as the material consequences of gutting the ACA
become clear. That awakening is already underway, if polling is any indication. Health care topped all
issues, even the economy and immigration, in a YouGov/Huffington Post survey in April of registered
voters’ priorities ahead of the midterm elections; it consistently ranks in the top three. That’s perhaps
less surprising in light of a Navigator Research poll this week that found half of Americans say health
care is main cost concern. In an ominous sign for the GOP, independent voters said they trusted
Democrats more than Republicans, by an 18-point margin, to bring those costs down.
Thumper – Trade War
Trade war thumps
Davis and Swanson 7/24 --- [Julie Hirschfield Davis is a White House correspondent at The New York
Times who graduated from Yale University and Ana Swanson writes about trade and international
economics previously covering trade, the Federal Reserve and the economy for The Washington Post,
“To Ease Pain of Trump’s Trade War: $12 Billion in Aid for Farmers”, New York Times, 7/24/18,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/us/politics/farmers-aid-trade-war.html] jk
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would provide up to $12 billion in emergency
relief for farmers hurt by the president’s trade war, moving to blunt the financial damage to American
agriculture and the political fallout for Republicans as the consequences of President Trump’s protectionist policies roll through the economy. Unveiled two days before
the president is scheduled to visit Iowa, a politically important state that is the nation’s top soybean producer, the farm aid appeared calculated to show that Mr.
Trump cares about farmers and is working to protect them from the worst consequences of his trade
war. But the relief money, announced by the Department of Agriculture, was also an indication that Mr. Trump — ignoring the concerns
of farmers, their representatives in Congress and even some of his own aides — plans to extend his tit-for-tat tariff wars. “The actions today are a firm statement that
other nations cannot bully our agricultural producers to force the United States to cave in,” Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, said during a call with reporters to unveil the program. The move drew
swift condemnation from many farm groups and lawmakers, including several in his own party, who worry about a
cascade of unintended consequences that may be just beginning. One farm-group study estimates that corn, wheat and soybean farmers in
the United States have already lost more — $13 billion — than the administration is proposing to
provide as a result of the trade war. The prospect of retaliation has upended global markets for
soybeans, meat and other American farm exports, and farmers are warning that tariffs are costing them
valuable foreign contracts that took years to win. “You have a terrible policy that sends farmers to the
poorhouse, and then you put them on welfare, and we borrow the money from other countries,” Senator Bob
Corker, Republican of Tennessee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “It’s hard to believe there isn’t an outright revolt right now in Congress.” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, asked how the president could single out
farmers for help when the manufacturing and energy industries also stand to lose in the trade war. “Where do you draw the line?” Ms. Murkowski asked reporters. Mr. Trump could be forced to prop up other domestic industries
as retaliatory taxes imposed by trading partners begin to sting automobile manufacturers, distillers and other impacted sectors. Republicans who cherish their party’s reputation as the bastion of free markets and fiscal
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to

responsibility wondered aloud on Tuesday about the president picking winners and losers in a trade war he is bent on waging. “
put a band-aid on a self-inflicted wound,” Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, wrote on Twitter. “This bailout compounds bad
policy with more bad policy.” Farmers have borne the brunt of Mr. Trump’s decision to impose tariffs,
which is already costing American producers billions of dollars and threatens to inflict political pain on
Republicans in farm states in the midterm elections in November. “Tariffs are the greatest!” Mr. Trump declared on Twitter on Tuesday morning.
“Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that — and everybody’s talking! Remember, we are the ‘piggy bank’ that’s being robbed. All
will be Great!” The European Union, Canada, Mexico, China and other countries have responded to Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum and $34 billion worth of Chinese products by imposing taxes of their own. They have often
American soybeans, pork, sugar, orange juice,

targeted farm country, the source of some of America’s biggest exports and an important political base for the president.
cherries and other products now face tariffs in foreign markets that make their products less desirable. At a
speech in Kansas City, Mo., on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said Americans should “just be a little patient” with the pain they may be feeling from the trade war, arguing that his actions were forcing other countries to the negotiating table
to cut deals that would be better for them in the long run. “They don’t want to have those tariffs put on them — they’re all coming to see us — and the farmers will be the biggest beneficiary,” Mr. Trump said at a Veterans of
Foreign Wars convention. “We’re opening up markets. You watch what’s going to happen.” Some farm groups praised the move, albeit as a short-term solution. “We are grateful for the administration’s recognition that farmers
and ranchers needed positive news now, and this will buy us some time,” said Zippy Duvall, the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “This announcement is substantial, but we cannot overstate the dire
lawmakers in both parties and many agricultural trade groups criticized the
consequences that farmers and ranchers are facing.” But
assistance program as a taxpayer-funded bailout for farmers imperiled by the president’s own policies, and
even Mr. Trump’s Republican allies made clear that they did not regard it as a genuine solution to the problems his tariffs had created. “The president’s announcement of billions of dollars in aid that will be made available to
What farmers in Iowa and throughout rural

struggling farmers later this year is encouraging for the short term,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said in a statement. “
America need in the long term are markets and opportunity, not government handouts.” Agriculture Department officials
said farmers could begin signing up to receive the federal money in September, just weeks before voters go to the polls. The package includes direct payments to the producers of soybeans, sorghum, corn, wheat, cotton, dairy and
hogs, who would be compensated according to the size of their harvests this year. It will also include government purchases of surplus products — including fruit, nuts, rice, legumes, beef, pork and dairy — that would be sent to
food banks or other nutrition programs. Some of the funding would go to a program in which the Agriculture Department works with private companies to develop new export markets for American farm products. Mr. Trump and
his advisers have argued that while American producers may feel short-term pain, ultimately they will benefit as other countries are forced to lower their barriers to American products. Meantime, the administration has sought
ways to help farmers survive the pain of retaliation. The program announced on Tuesday will be funded by the Commodity Credit Corporation, which helps shore up American farmers by buying their crops. It marked the first time
that funding from the program — created after the Great Depression — has been used to compensate farmers for losses sustained because of trade, according to an Agriculture Department spokesman. The initiative, which does
not authorize any new money and thus does not need approval from Congress, was an unmistakable signal that the president has no plans to lift his tariffs anytime soon, as Farm Belt senators have pleaded with him to do.
“This trade war is cutting the legs out from under farmers, and the White House’s ‘plan’ is to spend
$12 billion on gold crutches,” said Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. “This administration’s tariffs and bailouts aren’t
going to make America great again, they’re just going to make it 1929 again.” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said
farmers in his state “want trade, not aid.” “I support President Trump’s call for reciprocal trade and his effort to stop China’s theft of American intellectual property, but we should stop self-inflicting
permanent damage to America’s economy through tariffs and a trade war,” Mr. Johnson said. One trade group leader said farmers need contracts, not government assistance, for stability. “The best relief for
the president’s trade war would be ending the trade war,” said Brian Kuehl, the executive director of the trade group Farmers for Free Trade, adding,
“This proposed action would only be a short-term attempt at masking the long-term damage caused by
tariffs.” Administration officials argued on Tuesday that the assistance for farmers would help them absorb the pain while persuading other countries that they must offer concessions to forge trade agreements with the
United States. “What this will do is provide some hope to farmers and ranchers that the president and the secretary do have their back,” Greg Ibach, the under secretary of agriculture for marketing and regulatory programs, said of
the aid package. “We’re hoping that other countries will see that we’re serious now about negotiations.” But many farmers criticized the decision and said it would only compound the maze of federal subsidies and regulations they
already must wade through to make a living. “We don’t want to be dependent on another government program,” Casey Guernsey, a Missouri farmer and spokesman for Americans for Farmers & Families, an anti-tariff group, said
in an interview on Tuesday. “We already are very much in a situation in farming, in agriculture across the board, where we are held hostage to decisions made in Washington.” And some lawmakers argued that if he wanted to help
American farmers, Mr. Trump must simply call off his trade war. “Tariffs are taxes that punish American consumers and producers,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said on Twitter. “ If tariffs punish
farmers, the answer is not welfare for farmers — the answer is remove the tariffs.”
UQ– AT: Dems Win
To win the midterms the dems will need to win back red pockets, romneylands, and
blue-collar workers
Brownstein 4-11-18 ( Ronald Brownstein is a CNN senior political analyst, regularly appearing across
the network's programming and special political coverage, The places that will decide the 2018 midterm
elections, https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/20/politics/house-elections-2018-midterms-control-gop-
democrats/index.html)//DT
Red pockets. Romneyland. Blue-collar blues. Those labels describe the three groups of seats in the
House of Representatives that will likely determine control of the chamber in November's midterm
election. Virtually all analysts in both parties agree that the epicenter of vulnerability for the House
Republican majority is in what could be called red pockets: These are the predominantly white-collar
suburban seats the GOP still holds in big metropolitan areas that are otherwise solidly Democratic.
Those include places such as Orange County, California; New Jersey; Miami; and suburbs outside of New
York City, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia and Minneapolis. But even if Democrats make big gains in those
districts, there aren't quite enough of them to provide the party with the net gain of 24 seats it needs to
recapture the House. That means House Democrats would also need to make inroads into the two other
large groups of vulnerable GOP seats. One is what I call Romneyland: white-collar suburban seats in
purple and even red states where Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, almost
universally performed better than Donald Trump did in 2016. The third are the "blue-collar blues":
mostly blue-collar, non-urban seats in blue states, where Trump almost without exception improved on
Romney's performance. More distantly, the Democrats are also eyeing a few Republican-held blue-collar
seats in purple and Republican-leaning states. But control of the House will likely turn on how the battle
between the parties turns in the red pockets, Romneyland and the blue-collar blues. The red pockets
will likely be the most reliable source of gains for Democrats because they compound two sources of
Republican vulnerability: They are white-collar districts in areas with large numbers of Democrats, who
appear motivated to turn out at higher-than-usual levels next fall. The big question is how far Democrats
can reach into places where only one of those advantages is present: white-collar seats in traditionally
Republican-leaning areas, or seats in Democratic states that are more rural and blue-collar. This
battlefield reflects the long-term trends that have seen Democrats demonstrate increasing strength up
and down the ballot in diverse, heavily college-educated, major metropolitan areas -- even in
Republican-leaning states. In parallel, Republicans have established dominant control over
preponderantly white non-metro and blue-collar areas, even in otherwise Democratic-leaning states. All
of these trends have accelerated under Trump. Amid improving attitudes toward the Republican tax bill,
several recent polls have shown a small but measurable uptick in President Trump's job approval rating
and a narrowing into the mid-single digits of the previously double-digit advantage Democrats have held
in the "generic" ballot test of preferences for 2018. But even with those shifts, polls still consistently find
a deeply polarized electorate. Trump and the GOP retain solid support among white men without
college degrees, if slightly less than they attracted in 2016. But they are facing intense resistance from
younger and non-white voters -- especially African-Americans -- and much lower numbers than usual
among college-educated whites, especially, but not exclusively, women. Republicans are suddenly more
optimistic about the midterms White women without a college education, whose support was critical to
Trump's 2016 victory, loom as a wild card: Polls find they have cooled on him, but Democrats still face
many obstacles with them. These diverging demographic attitudes shape the geography of the 2018
battlefield. Red pockets The clearest opportunity for Democrats is the relatively few remaining
Republican-held districts in blue metro areas with large populations of college-educated whites, and in
many cases substantial minority and youth populations as well. These are places crowded with voters
who tilt toward liberal positions on social issues and recoil from Trump's volatile persona, particularly
the way he talks about race. The renewed visibility of gun control issues after the horrific Parkland,
Florida, massacre could provide Democrats another lever in these districts, since the Republicans in
them have almost universally voted with the National Rifle Association to loosen gun regulations in
recent years. These "red pockets" include the four seats Republicans control in Orange County -- the
districts held by Mimi Walters and Dana Rohrabacher and the open seats that will be vacated by Darrell
Issa and Ed Royce -- as well as their sole remaining seat in Los Angeles County, held by Steve Knight.
Others that fit this description include the seats in the western Chicago suburbs held by Republican
Peter Roskam and in the eastern Denver suburbs held by Mike Coffman; the three suburban
Philadelphia seats held by Ryan Costello, Mike Fitzpatrick and Pat Meehan (who has announced he will
not seek re-election amid a sex scandal); the northern Virginia seat held by Barbara Comstock; two open
seats in New Jersey as well as the one defended by Rep. Leonard Lance; Lee Zeldin's seat in eastern Long
Island; the suburban Minneapolis seats now held by Jason Lewis and Erik Paulsen; the Seattle-area seat
that Dave Reichert is leaving; as well as the Miami-area seat being vacated by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and
the nearby seat held by Rep. Carlos Curbelo. Missouri Democrat wins district won by Trump Though
Romney carried many of these seats -- often narrowly -- in 2012, Hillary Clinton won all of those listed
above in 2016 except for the seats held by Lewis and Fitzpatrick, which Trump won by eyelash margins,
and Zeldin's, which Trump won more comfortably. These resemble the places where Democrats showed
the most dramatic gains in 2017, for instance in their sweep of legislative seats and the huge margins
they generated in the governor's race in northern Virginia. Compounding the GOP's vulnerability, the
new congressional map the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued Monday, after earlier ruling that the
current district lines represented an impermissible gerrymander, strengthened the Democrats' hand in
all three suburban Philadelphia seats. For Republicans, the key in these booming districts will be
whether the good economy helps them recapture voters recoiling from Trump's personal behavior. One
complication is these blue-state upper-middle-class suburbs are among the most likely losers from the
GOP tax plan, which limits the deductibility of mortgage interest and state and local taxes. Democrats
are highly unlikely to win back the House without maximizing their gains in the red pockets. Romneyland
The next bucket of seats is demographically similar to the red pockets but politically distinct because
they are in metro areas that lean much more reliably toward the GOP. I call this group of seats
Romneyland because they are filled with voters who resemble Romney demographically and
ideologically: professionals and corporate middle managers who want a president who will shrink
government and even pursue a center-right social agenda, but also exude professionalism and decorum.
Romney won virtually every seat in this category in 2012. In 2016, Trump lost ground relative to Romney
in almost all of them, though the residual Republican strength was great enough that he still carried
many, albeit often narrowly. The districts in this bucket include the Omaha-area seat held by Don Bacon;
the seats in suburban Houston and outside Dallas held by John Culberson and Pete Sessions,
respectively; the two suburban Atlanta seats held by Karen Handel and Rob Woodall; David Young's seat
outside Des Moines; the Tucson-area seat Martha McSally is vacating to run for the Senate from
Arizona; the Lexington, Kentucky-area seat held by Andy Barr; the seats outside Detroit that Dave Trott
is vacating and Mike Bishop is defending; and Kevin Yoder's seat in suburban Kansas City, Kansas. These
seats are not immune from the forces threatening the Republicans in the red pockets: Handel, for
instance, only narrowly survived last June's special election in Georgia, though her predecessor Tom
Price had carried over 60% of the vote there as recently as 2016. But as Handel's slim victory over
Democrat Jon Ossoff showed, Republicans have more of a cushion in these places than in the red
pockets. That's partly because more of the white-collar whites in them are social conservatives than
their counterparts in the Democratic-leaning metro areas. Blue-collar blues The third key test for
Democrats is the districts I call "blue-collar blues." These are the blue-collar, exurban, small town and
rural seats in states that generally lean Democratic. These include Republican seats held by John Faso,
John Katko and Claudia Tenney in upstate New York; Mike Bost, Rodney Davis and Randy Hultgren in
downstate Illinois; the northeast Iowa seat of Rod Blum; Bruce Poliquin's northern Maine district; and
the Central Valley, California, seats of Jeff Denham and David Valadao. Dems flip deep-red Missouri
state House seat These seats present an especially revealing test for Democrats. Former President
Barack Obama carried almost all of them at least once and many of them have elected Democratic
House members in the recent past. But House Democrats were routed in these places in the 2010 and
2014 midterm elections under Obama, and almost all of these districts turned further toward Trump in
2016. The 2017 results in Virginia and Alabama showed Democrats almost completely failing to crack
the GOP's hold on blue-collar and rural voters. But some Democrats argue that terrain is much tougher
for the party in the South than in the Northeastern and Midwestern states where these competitive
House seats are concentrated. Democrats see an opening in polling, such as the 2017 average of
Gallup's daily approval ratings for Trump, that shows a significant erosion in his support across the Rust
Belt among working-class white women, even as he remains very strong among blue-collar white men.
Converting that female disillusionment with Trump into votes for Democratic congressional candidates
is likely the key to seriously contesting the "blue-collar blue" seats. National Democrats stay on the
sidelines in close Pennsylvania House special election National Democrats stay on the sidelines in close
Pennsylvania House special election One early test will be March's special election in the heavily blue-
collar southwestern Pennsylvania district that Republican Rep. Tim Murphy has vacated: Democrat
Conor Lamb, a former Marine, is running competitively against Republican state Rep. Rick Saccone in a
district Trump carried by nearly 20 percentage points. Beyond the top-tier targets in the red pockets,
there's a spirited behind-the-scenes debate among Democratic strategists about which of the remaining
two buckets of seats represents the party's best opportunity in 2018. Some focus most on winning back
working-class voters in blue states, who have a recent history of voting for the party but are more
favorable to Trump. Others see more opportunity to convert white-collar suburbanites in red states,
who have a longer history of voting Republican but are also more disaffected from the President. To
recapture the House, Democrats will likely need to do a considerable amount of both. CORRECTION: This
story has been updated to note that President Donald Trump won the New York congressional district of
Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, in eastern Long Island.
UQ – No Dem Wave
Blue wave unlikely
Naughton 7-25-18 ( Keith Naughton is a public affairs consultant, “NO BLUE WAVE: A MIDTERM
ELECTION PREVIEW FOR THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES”,
http://dailycaller.com/2018/07/25/midterm-election-preview-for-house-of-representatives/)//DT
Just a few months ago Democrats envisioned a “Blue Wave,” gaining 40-50 seats. Today their
expectation have been tempered – and for good reason. Since 1946, Democrats have gained an average of 21
seats in the midterms when the president is a Republican. That gain would not be enough for a majority, where the
Democrats need to gain 25 seats. Using election data since 1946, on average the president’s party (Republican or Democratic) loses 21
seats in the first midterm election. But that average masks big swings, from a 63-seat loss in 2010 to an 8-seat gain in 2002. The median loss is
just 15 seats. The current partisan makeup is 236-193 with 6 vacancies. RealClearPolitics puts Republicans as favorites in 202 seats, Democrats
in 199 seats with 24 tossups. One thing is for certain, the president’s party struggles in midterm elections because that’s how politics works.
Presidents get elected by making a lot of promises to get elected. The result? The president’s voters can never be fully satisfied less than two
years into a given presidency. Some of those voters drop out, while the opposition becomes united, not in policy preferences, but just in
opposition to the president they didn’t vote for. Average
gains and losses are interesting, but they don’t tell the
whole story. For one thing, in three of nine first midterms the president’s party was in the minority.
Simply put: The fewer seats you have, the fewer you can lose. The average loss for the president’s party in the majority is
24 seats. However, on two occasions the president benefited from a major foreign policy bump. The successful resolution of the Cuban missile
crisis saw President Kennedy’s approval rating jump into the 70s, dampening Democratic losses to merely 4 seats. One year after the
September 11 attacks, President Bush’s approval was 68 percent, helping Republicans gain 8 seats. Taking out those two elections leaves us
with an average loss of 37 seats. So, what can we expect for a president whose approval rating is in the mid-40s and whose party is in the
majority? Superficially,
it looks like 1994 and 2010. In both cases, the incumbent president’s approval was
remarkably similar. President Clinton averaged 44 percent approval leading up to Election Day, while
President Obama averaged 45 percent. Currently, President Trump is averaging 43 percent (Rassmussen has generally had
President Trump between 45 percent and 48 percent, polling likely voters against other pollsters who either poll registered voters or have no
voter screen). It’s unlikely we should we expect Clinton/Obama-sized debacle. There are some important differences that favor the GOP. First,
in 2010 the Democrats held 256 seats, 20 more than the current Republican roster — so, more seats to lose. Entering the 1994 elections
Democrats had been the majority for 40 years and that election saw the electorate catch up with geographic and demographic changes that
had brewing for a long time. Retirements are a problem for the GOP – where 36 Republicans are departing against only 18 Democratic
retirements. But that particular headwind was not a problem in 2010 where the GOP also had more retirements (27-17) but still gained 63
seats. Democrats hope to see a repeat of the 2006 midterms where dissatisfaction with the Iraq War caused Republicans to lose their House
majority for the first time since 1994 with a Democratic gain of 31 seats. But that scenario is problematic. At that time George W. Bush’s
approval rating was 37 percent in the month prior to Election Day with a disapprove of 58 percent. Trump has a higher approval rating of 43
percent (46 percent Rassmussen) and lower disapproval rating of 53 percent. One confounding factor is Trump’s odd approval rating track. All
presidents get an initial approval rating bump followed by a steady fall. Early presidential approval ratings have averaged 73 percent. All
approvals fell at least 15 points within the first two years. Trump started out low, averaging 45 percent, and has barely moved – down to just 43
percent. These numbers indicate a more loyal base for Trump than for past presidents. Trump also polls slightly better in the likely voter
Rassmussen poll — and since elections are about who shows up, that could help Republicans. Both
current polling and the historic
data point to a very close result on Election Day. The biggest Democratic seat gain since the 1974
Watergate election (+48 seats) was the 2006 Iraq War election. With Trump polling at higher popularity
than Bush in 2006, it seems likely that the Democrats will not surpass their 31-seat gain. That leaves very
little margin for error to obtain a majority. In the end, the midterms will depend on turnout. With a
volatile electorate, a momentary downdraft on the part of the president could spell doom at the polls —
just as a jolt of good news could keep a Republican majority. One thing is for sure, whichever party ends
up in the minority is in for an orgy of recriminations and turmoil.
UQ – No Dem Wave (Fundraising)
The dems are quickly losing their fundraising advantage due to RNC donations
Vasquez and Bradner 7-26-18 ( Maegan Vazquez is a digital reporter for CNN Politics, where she
covers breaking news from Washington, Eric Bradner is a politics reporter for CNN, based in Washington
and focused on the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 Democratic presidential contest, “RNC and
Trump campaign fork over millions to keep Republican majorities”,
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/26/politics/rnc-trump-campaign-transfer-funds-
midterms/index.html)//DT
President Donald Trump is sharing some of his campaign warchest with congressional Republicans
ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, part of a joint effort with the Republican National Committee
announced Thursday to protect GOP majorities in Congress and curry favor with Republicans on Capitol
Hill. The RNC will provide the largest contribution at the start, doling out $4 million to both the National
Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. The Trump
campaign will max out contributions to nearly 100 candidates in its first found of contributions --
ensuring thousands of dollars for each candidate selected. The RNC raised more than $200 million for
this election cycle by mid-July -- the fastest the committee has reached the milestone in a midterm
period. But Thursday's cash infusion comes after another fundraising quarter in which dozens of House
Republican incumbents were outraised by their Democratic challengers. Trump has been the party's
most powerful fundraising force, helping the House GOP campaign arm haul in $32 million at a March
fundraising dinner. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have also ramped up their appearances on the
campaign trail — particularly for Republicans challenging incumbent Democratic senators in states
Trump won in 2016. Still, despite polls consistently showing Trump's approval ratings remaining high
with GOP voters, they've also shown that Democrats, angered by Trump's presidency, are much more
enthusiastic about voting in November's midterm elections — putting the House up for grabs and
leaving Republican-held Senate seats in Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, and perhaps even Texas
vulnerable. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel credited Trump and his supporters for Thursday's move,
who she said have helped provide "the resources to protect and strengthen our Republican majorities in
Congress." "Together with our sister committees, I'm confident we can deliver that positive message to
Americans all across the country and elect more Republicans so President Trump can continue to deliver
for the American people," McDaniel said in a statement. Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale also
said in a statement that the decision to assist in congressional fundraising was authorized by the
President, "because he is committed to supporting the NRSC, NRCC, and congressional candidates who
will work with him as we make America great again."
1AR – Dem Win Impossible
Even if they win their uniqueness claims that dems are winning, structural factors
mean that dems can’t get enough seats to get the majority
--- takes into account the recent Crystal Ball forecast and general ballot poll
Voorhees 7-24-18 ( Josh Voorhees is a senior politics writer for Slate, “The Hard Truth About House
Democrats Being “Soft Favorites” This Fall”, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/democrats-
standing-just-improved-in-17-house-races-according-to-a-top-polling-wonk.html)//DT
With a little more than 100 days until the midterms, things are looking increasingly bright for
Democrats’ bid to retake the House. The latest bit of good news for the party comes by way of a leading
nonpartisan handicapper, which for the first time this cycle is giving House Democrats slightly better-
than-even odds of picking up the 23 seats they need this November. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the clunkily
named newsletter run by political scientist Larry Sabato and his colleagues at the University of Virginia
Center for Politics, nudged 17 congressional races in the direction of Democrats on Tuesday, eight of
which are Republican-held seats that shifted into the toss-up column. According to the updated ratings,
a whopping 40 GOP seats are toss-ups or worse for Republicans, and another 16 “lean Republican,”
suggesting they too could flip this fall. By contrast, a total of just six Democratic seats are “lean
Democrat” or better for the GOP. As a result, when the UVA team peers into its crystal ball, they now
see Democrats as the “soft favorite” to win control of the lower chamber. Other leading handicappers
are painting similar pictures. The Cook Political Report, the most well-known of the bunch, currently
rates 86 Republican seats and only 14 Democratic ones as potentially competitive, and already had
Democrats as “narrow favorites” to retake the House before a Democratic-favoring update earlier this
month. Inside Elections, another top prognosticator, has 68 GOP seats in play, compared with just nine
Democratic seats at last count. “[N]o one believes there is any chance the Republicans come out of this
election with more seats than they hold now,” Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik wrote. “Even
just a single-digit GOP seat loss would be shocking, an outcome driven by late developments
unforeseeable at this juncture.” But that is where the hard truth of being a soft favorite comes in—one
we all would be wise to remember in the wake of 2016: The flip side of Democrats being slight favorites
is that Republicans are only slight underdogs. Democrats could post double-digit gains nationwide this
fall and still find themselves in the minority next year. Thanks to gerrymandering, geographical quirks,
and other factors, the GOP has a sizable built-in advantage in the midterms. Some experts, like those at
the Brennan Center for Justice, believe that Democrats will need to win the national vote by nearly 11
percentage points to retake control of the House, while others think the magic margin could be a low as
4 percentage points. Democrats are splitting the difference in the generic ballot at the moment. They
currently enjoy a 7.1-percentage-point lead in RealClearPolitics’ unweighted running average and a 7.5-
percentage-point lead in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted one, which prioritizes higher-rated pollsters.
Democrats have plenty of reasons to be optimistic. They’ve fared remarkably well in special elections
this year. They’re fresh off an extraordinary fundraising quarter. And they boast a diverse lineup of
credible candidates, many with compelling life stories to offer voters. Republicans, meanwhile, are
fighting historical headwinds, as well as an usually high number of retirements from their ranks. The
question that matters, though, isn’t whether Democrats pick up seats in November; it’s whether they
can pick up enough.
1AR – AT: Young Voter Turnout
Young voter turnout is volatile and empirically low – breaks the blue wave
---implicates all their polls since people could say they WOULD vote democratic but won’t turn out
Golshan 7-18-18 ( Tara Golshan is a politics reporter ar VOX and covers Congress, elections, and just
about anything in politics that needs explaining. She has written comprehensive explainers about
congressional budgets, spending fights, the immigration debate, health care and tax reform. and keeps
close tabs on the internal divisions within the Republican party., “Poll: only 28 percent of young voters
say they will certainly vote in the 2018 midterms”, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/7/18/17585898/young-voter-turnout-polls-midterms-2018)//DT
Democrats are winning over younger voters by huge numbers, but as a highly contentious, voter
turnout-dependent midterm election inches closer, there’s a serious question of whether these young
Democrats will come to the polls. A recently released poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and
the Atlantic conducted in June showed only 28 percent of young adults ages 18 to 29 say they are
“absolutely certain” they’ll vote in midterms, compared to 74 percent of seniors. In a year when
Democrats are hoping an energized base can deliver them massive gains in Congress — and possibly
the majority in one or both chambers — this poll, on its face, should give Democrats some pause. Of
course, this is only one poll. There are other surveys with varied results; a recent poll conducted by the Associated Press and University of
Chicago’s NORC found that 32 percent of young voters would certainly vote and 56 percent were likely to. Another poll by Cosmopolitan
magazine and SurveyMonkey found that 48 percent of young voters were “absolutely certain” they’d vote in the midterms. And it’s actually a
big improvement for Democrats compared to past midterms. In the 2014 midterms, when Democrats lost control of the Senate, only 23
percent of young voters participated, according to the census, which considers young voters as aged 18 to 34. But the takeaway is still serious:
While Democratic voters are more enthusiastic to vote in the 2018 midterms than in past off-year
election cycles — and recent polls show they’re more eager to get out to the polls than Republicans —
young voter turnout could make the difference in 2018. “Right now the ‘blue wave’ is being powered by
suburban professional women, but to fully capitalize on 2018, Democrats need to energize young voters
and voters of color,” Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report said. Republicans have a millennial problem. Luckily for them,
millennials don’t consistently vote. To be clear, people ages 18 to 34 overwhelmingly vote for Democrats and prefer Democratic candidates
even if they are registered as “independent.” Democrats have a 35-point advantage with young female voters in the 2018 House midterm
elections so far, according to a CIVIQS surveys. That lead narrows to 10 points for young male voters. As Vox’s Li Zhou wrote, a recent Pew
Research Center survey found young women’s preference for Democratic congressional candidates is significantly higher than that of women of
other age groups: Women overall are likely to lean blue, with 54 percent supporting or leaning toward the Democratic candidate in their district
this fall, versus 38 percent who favor the Republican candidate. But 68 percent of young women are choosing Democrats, compared to 24
percent who prefer Republicans. This is in stark contrast to older voters, who are more likely to vote Republican than young voters. Younger
voters are also notably much more diverse than older voters. But
the problem for Democrats is that young people just
don’t always vote. “They are volatile in term of their turnout,” Wasserman said. “They are the likeliest voters
to drop out of the electorate — them and Latino voters … for Democrats there is a lot of room to
grow.” Even a jump from the 23 percent that participated in 2014 could have a serious impact on elections. Wasserman says part
of the reason Donald Trump won in 2016 was the young voters didn’t turn out — and those who did
cast ballots for third-party candidates. Young voter turnout in 2016 was slightly lower than in 2012,
when President Obama’s support among millennials saw a significant drop from his first election in
2008. Now, as young voters appear more engaged in the Trump era than they were under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, they could
make a big difference in the so-called “blue wave” this midterm season. Correction: The PRRI poll classified young
voters as aged 18 to 29, not to age 34. The Census showed 23 percent of young adults voted in 2014, aged 18-34. We regret these errors.
1AR – AT: Resistance Strat Working
The democratic immigration “resistance” strategy is actually helping the GOP
Holland 7-24-18 ( Steve Holland is a political journalist for Reuters, “Trump injects immigration issue
into 2018 elections debate”, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump/trump-injects-immigration-
issue-into-2018-elections-debate-idUSKBN1KE2OZ)//DT
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he believed that the demands by some Democrats that a U.S.
government immigration enforcement agency be shut down will help Republicans in midterm
congressional elections in November. In a speech to war veterans in Kansas City, Missouri, Trump
defended the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, an arm of the Homeland Security
Department that has been responsible for arresting and deporting illegal immigrants. Some Democrats
have called for the abolishment of the agency, arguing that it has overstepped its authority. A new poll
by the Pew Research Center found that 44 percent of Americans view the agency favorably, compared
to 47 percent who view it unfavorably. Trump is fighting to help Republicans retain control of the House
of Representatives and Senate in Nov. 6 elections likely to be seen as a referendum on his presidency.
“Oh ICE, ICE, thank goodness for ICE,” Trump said. Trump’s policy of separating illegal immigrant parents
from their children added to a fierce national debate on American immigration policies. The outcry
prompted Trump to abandon the separation policy. “The Democrats want to abandon ICE. They want to
end ICE,” Trump said. “When you hear some of the things they are proposing you can’t even understand
it.” Trump said the issue will help Republicans in November and beyond, to his own re-election
campaign. “I hope they (Democrats) keep at it because we’re going to have a lot of fun in four months
and we’re going to have a lot of fun in 2020,” Trump said. Trump later attended two political events in
Kansas City to help raise money for state Attorney General Josh Hawley, the Republican candidate trying
to unseat Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri in the November elections.
1AR – Trump Endorsements
Donald Trump endorsements secure GOP seats – plan can’t change that
Glueck 7-26-18 (Katie Glueck is a National Political Correspondent at McClatchy DC, “Trump’s winning
streak with 2018 endorsements could have major impact in November”,
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article215562085.html)//DT
Donald Trump’s endorsees can’t stop winning. From Staten Island to South Carolina, Alabama to Athens,
Ga., Republicans blessed with the president’s endorsement in primary contests this summer have
notched victory after victory—proof that even when he’s not on the ballot, Trump can persuade and
turn out his base, a reality with significant implications for this fall’s midterm campaigns. When it comes
to moving Republican votes, said veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres, a Trump endorsement is
“determinative.” “At this point,” he said, ticking through a number of primary contest results, “a Trump
endorsement can totally change the complexion of a race.” Nowhere was that clearer than in this
week’s Georgia gubernatorial primary runoff, where polls showed Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s standing begin
to plummet the day Trump endorsed his opponent, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Kemp, who
had been trailing only days before according to some tracking numbers, went on to win by nearly 40
percentage points. “Simply because Donald Trump said ‘I’m supporting the other guy,’ [Cagle’s] image
took a 30-point hit,” marveled one shell-shocked national Republican strategist familiar with the Georgia
race. “If you got caught in a sex scandal or Anthony Weiner-type situation, I don’t think your numbers
move that quickly.” Now, as general election season arrives, Republican operatives in some
battleground states are working to harness the potency of a Trump endorsement to drive GOP turnout
and re-energize voters who may have turned out for Trump in 2016, but aren’t necessarily committed to
a particular political party—or to voting regularly. “He did it largely with disaffected former Democrats
and infrequent voters,” said Brad Todd, a senior GOP strategist involved in marquee Senate races. “We
have to find a way to get a good chunk of those folks out in the midterms. His endorsement, his
enthusiasm, is a good way to do that.” For many Republican House candidates running in more
moderate or Democratic-leaning districts, that strategy is fraught with peril. But, especially on the
Senate side where some of the most competitive contests are playing out in states Trump won,
Republican strategists looking to counter unbridled Democratic energy are, ever more confidently,
turning to Trump. This wasn’t always the case—indeed, Trump’s ability to juice Republican turnout was
once in question. Last year his initial favored candidate in an Alabama special election primary runoff,
Luther Strange, lost despite Trump rallying for him in one of the most pro-Trump states in the country.
Trump went on to back Roy Moore, the GOP nominee in that race accused of child molestation, who
also lost—nearly unthinkably in deep-red Alabama—to a Democrat. But more recently, his chosen
candidates have been on a winning streak, from his choice in the South Carolina gubernatorial primary
runoff to his pick in a Staten Island House primary and an Alabama House runoff. It’s evidence that,
whether with blue-collar voters on Staten Island or with evangelicals in the South, Trump has the ability
to move GOP votes. Republicans are hoping he will do just that as general elections near. Todd is an
adviser to Republican Josh Hawley, Missouri’s attorney general who is seeking to challenge Democratic
Sen. Claire McCaskill in one of the most closely-watched contests in the country. Hawley appeared with
Trump at an event with veterans, and the president headlined a fundraising luncheon for him in Kansas
City this week. “We hope he’ll come as many times as he’s willing to put the plane down,” Todd said.
Certainly, Missouri is a state Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points. While his margins were even
bigger in a number of other states with competitive Senate races—from North Dakota to West
Virginia—his favorability is also underwater in a host of competitive House districts. That creates a
challenge for candidates there who want to motivate their base—and know that there is no better GOP
motivator than Trump—without alienating centrist voters who despise the president. “In states or
districts where Trump’s job approval is above 50 percent, then obviously that’s a good move” to
embrace his endorsement, Ayres said. “In states or districts where Trump’s job approval is below 50
percent, it becomes far more problematic in those districts. Those Republicans need all of the Trump
supporters, plus a chunk of people who do not support the president. That becomes, strategically, a
finer line to walk.” Added the national GOP strategist in an interview Wednesday, referencing the
Georgia race, “where you have people like last night that will do whatever the hell he says, you also, on
the flip side, have people who are going to go out and vote, and violently vote, against anybody
endorsed by him.” But Todd said that for many Republican candidates, associations with Trump are
baked in—and it makes sense to embrace that. “Three-quarters of the way into the Democratic coalition
from left moving to the right, those voters already think every Republican is tied to Donald Trump,” he
said. “The only question becomes, can you get people who like Trump better than your candidate to
show up?”
Kavanaugh
Neg
UQ - Kavanaugh will be confirmed
Kavanaugh will be confirmed – empirics prove swing senators will support him and
midterm election means red state dems will confirm him
Stephens 7/12/18 (Bret, The New York Times Op-Ed columnist, “Just Confirm
Kavanaugh”, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/opinion/kavanaugh-
supreme-court-confirm.html, KC)
Kavanaugh will almost certainly be confirmed. Democrats who had pinned their hopes on flipping
Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski probably aren’t going to get their wish, since both Republican
moderates voted to confirm Kavanaugh to his current judgeship in 2006 and have since spoken
approvingly of his nomination. Rand Paul can also be counted on to feign political independence, but he
usually falls into line.
Of course it’s possible Kavanaugh will make a bad public impression, like Robert Bork. Or maybe there
will be a #MeToo revelation, like with Clarence Thomas. Or maybe Democrats will figure out a way to
kick a vote past the midterms. In which case, Democrats can seize their chances. For now, however, the
first question Democrats ought to ask themselves is whether they really have political capital to waste
on a losing battle.
Fierce opposition to Kavanaugh hurts Democrats. This was already going to be a difficult year for Senate
Democrats, who are defending 10 seats in states won by Trump. Everyone knows that North Dakota’s
Heidi Heitkamp, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Indiana’s Joe Donnelly are vulnerable, which is why
they voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch last year. Florida’s Bill Nelson is struggling, too, as is Missouri’s Claire
McCaskill.
So please explain the logic of convincing Democratic voters in these states that the Kavanaugh
nomination is the moral battle of our time — and then putting their senators to the choice of looking
like political sellouts if they vote for Kavanaugh, or moral cowards if they don’t (and vice versa)?
Liberals always cry wolf. In 1987, the National Organization for Women declared that Anthony Kennedy
would be a “disaster” for the rights of women and minorities. Yet the libertarian-minded Kennedy went
on to defend abortion rights in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and cast the decisive vote for
marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). In 1990, Judith Lichtman of the Women’s Legal
Defense Fund warned in a Times op-ed that “Judge Souter’s confirmation must be denied” based on his
evasiveness during his confirmation hearings. Over time, Souter emerged as a reliably liberal vote on the
court. Similar fury greeted John Roberts’s 2005 nomination — until his vote to preserve Obamacare
remade him into a consensus-oriented pragmatist.
A plurality of Americans already want Kavanaugh confirmed, according to a Rasmussen poll. The
numbers will likely improve once Americans get a closer look at this temperate, intelligent, decidedly
non-scary nominee. And Democrats will again play to type as mindless obstructionists and one-note
alarmists — the same overheated opposition that, as the Times’s Jeremy Peters reported last month,
only hardens support for Trump.
McConnell confident Kavanaugh will be confirmed
Bailey 7/13/18 (Phillip, Writer for the Courier Journal, “McConnell optimistic Trump's
Supreme Court nominee will be confirmed”, Courier Journal, https://www.courier-
journal.com/story/news/politics/2018/07/13/senator-mitch-mcconnell-speaks-louisville-brett-
kavanaugh/782408002/, KC)
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was beaming Friday at the prospect that President Trump's
nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court will be on the bench by October.
McConnell spent the majority of the nearly 30-minute press conference promoting Judge Brett
Kavanaugh, who has come under fire from Democrats and liberal advocacy groups.
If confirmed, Kavanaugh will fill the seat left vacant by Justice Anthony Kennedy and solidify the high
court's conservative majority. McConnell referred to Kavanaugh as a legal "all-star" with an impressive
resume.
"I've been trying to find anybody whose known him over the last 20 years who dislikes him and can't
find anybody," McConnell said. "In short, if you were calling up central casting and said, 'send me the
perfect Supreme Court justice' it would be Brett Kavanaugh."
Kavanaugh will be confirmed

Quinn 7/25/18 (Melissa, Supreme Court and breaking news reporter for the
Washington Examiner, “Nearly all GOP governors push for Brett Kavanaugh's
confirmation”, Washington Examiner,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/courts/nearly-all-gop-governors-push-for-brett-
kavanaughs-confirmation, KC)
Most of the country’s Republican governors are urging the Senate to swiftly confirm Judge Brett
Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Thirty-one GOP governors sent a letter Wednesday to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.,
and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., expressing their support for Kavanaugh’s
nomination and praising his credentials.
The four governors who did not sign the letter are: Bruce Rauner of Illinois, Larry Hogan of Maryland,
Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, and Phil Scott of Vermont. All four are Republican governors in blue
states.
“As Judge Kavanaugh stated in his remarks to the nation, his judicial philosophy is straightforward. He
believes a judge must be independent and open-minded and must interpret the law as written,” the
governors wrote. “As his record shows, he will interpret the Constitution as written, informed by history,
tradition, and precedent. Judge Kavanaugh will adjudicate legal disputes with impartiality, preserving
the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law.”
Kavanaugh will be confirmed by October
Correll 7/13/18 (Diana, breaking news reporter for the Washington Examiner,
“McConnell aiming to confirm Brett Kavanaugh by October”, Washington Examiner,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mcconnell-aiming-to-confirm-brett-kavanaugh-to-
supreme-court-by-october, KC)
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., signaled he is aiming for the Senate to confirm Supreme
Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by October.
"The timetable typically for recent Supreme Court justices, if we stuck to that timetable and I intend to,
would give us an opportunity to get this new justice on the court by the first of October," McConnell
said in Kentucky on Friday.
He also anticipates that confirmation hearings will begin “in late August or early September,” and
predicted that there’s “only a fairly small number of people who are genuinely undecided” and will
determine how to vote following the hearings.
McConnell’s comments come after the White House encouraged the Senate earlier this week to confirm
Kavanaugh in the next 66 days, which falls in the middle of September.
“The last two Supreme Court confirmations occurred in 66 days,” principal deputy press secretary Raj
Shah said Tuesday.
He subsequently told reporters, “We think that’s a good benchmark.” Kavanaugh will need a simple
majority to be confirmed, which McConnell believes will happen. A total of 50 votes will be needed to
confirm Kavanaugh in the event that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., remains in Arizona where he is battling
brain cancer.
Kavanaugh is the second Supreme Court justice President Trump has nominated. Neil Gorsuch was
Trump’s first pick; he was confirmed to the seat left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Kavanaugh is expected to be confirmed but it’s contentious – multiple republican

senators could break rank
Siddiqui and Jacobs 18 – Political reporters for The Guardian (Sabrina, Ben, “Senators clash over Brett Kavanaugh amid scrutiny
of his tenure under Bush”, The Guardian, 7/25/18, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/jul/25/brett-kavanaugh-us-senate-democrats-
republicans-bush) // KZ
A brewing showdown over Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, has escalated in the US Senate
amid a dispute over his record while serving in George W Bush’s White House. Democrats amplified their campaign this week
to force the release of millions of documents they say are critical to considering Kavanaugh, and accused
Republicans of stonewalling on the issue. Republicans, meanwhile, accused Democrats of resorting to a “delaying tactic” to bar
Trump’s nominee from moving forward. Kavanaugh was nominated by Trump this month to replace the retiring supreme court justice Anthony
Kennedy, setting the stage for a major battle in Washington before the 2018 midterm elections. Democrats insisted on the need for senators to
review documents from Kavanaugh’s service in the Bush White House, where he served as staff secretary. If Trump challenges the
constitutional order, will Kavanaugh defend it? Lawrence Douglas Read more There have long been concerns about whether Kavanaugh might
have misled the Senate about his role in Bush-era torture programs when he was confirmed to the DC circuit court of appeals in 2006. Also
under scrutiny is Kavanaugh’s work assisting the investigation of Bill Clinton led by the then independent counsel Ken Starr. “If Judge Kavanaugh
is the right man for the bench that the Republicans say he is, if he’s a fair-minded jurist that they claim he is, why are Republicans hiding his full
record from the Senate and from the American people?” Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
Schumer pointed out Republicans had similarly demanded documents when Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan, who served in the Clinton
White House, to the supreme court nearly a decade ago. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Schumer said. Republicans
dismissed the demands for document production as a political stunt. John Cornyn, the No 2 Republican in the Senate, told reporters: “Whatever
the demand for documents will be, you can be guaranteed it won’t be enough to satisfy the 20 Democrats who have already come out against
the nomination.” There
is little margin for error in Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, with Republicans
holding just a 51-seat majority in the Senate and John McCain absent while undergoing treatment for
brain cancer. Republicans enacted a rule change last year allowing for supreme court nominees to be approved with a simple majority
vote, paving the way for the confirmation of Trump’s first nominee, justice Neil Gorsuch. 2:31 Trump names Brett Kavanaugh as supreme court
nominee – video Democratssee a pair of moderate Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan
Collins of Maine, as their best hope for thwarting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Both Murkowski and Collins
have said any supreme court nominee would have to commit to upholding Roe v Wade, the landmark
1973 decision that legalized abortion in the US. Republicans have in turn mounted pressure on a handful
of red-state Democrats facing tough re-election battles and who voted to confirm Gorsuch last year. The
libertarian-leaning Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky, has also sounded the alarm over Kavanaugh’s
nomination, citing concerns over his record on privacy and torture. Paul, who met with Kavanaugh for more than an
hour and a half on Tuesday, has threatened to break ranks on multiple occasions during the Trump presidency but has typically fallen in line. Is
John Roberts poised to become the supreme court's key swing vote? Read more Despite the mounting rancor on Capitol Hill, the Senate
majority leader, Mitch McConnell,
made clear on Tuesday that Kavanaugh would be confirmed well before
November’s midterm elections. “We’re going to finish this nomination this fall, so let there be no misunderstanding that there will
be any kind of delaying tactic that would take us past first Tuesday in November,” he told reporters. Democrats nonetheless pressed on with
their efforts to warn of the consequences should Kavanaugh find a seat on the highest court in the land, which could recast the court in a
conservative mold for generations to come. “I’m
here to call on folks to understand that in a moral moment, there is
no neutral,” Cory Booker, a senator from New Jersey, said at a Tuesday press conference. “You are
either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.”
AT – Red State Democrats
Red state democrats won’t vote for Kavanaugh – Polls and Clarence Thomas empiric
proves that it won’t be politically helpful
Hart 18 – Benjamin Writer is a Political Writer (“Red State Democrats Have No Good Reason to Vote for Brett Kavanaugh”, Daily
Intelligencer of The New York Magazine, 7/22/18, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/red-state-dems-have-no-reason-to-vote-for-
brett-kavanaugh.html) // KZ
It’s a cold, hard truth: Republicans hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate — 50-49, taking into account John McCain’s enduring absence — so
there is no way that Senate Democrats can singlehandedly prevent Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh from settling into Anthony
Kennedy’s seat and steering the court sharply rightward. What Democrats can do is band together, as they have on Obamacare repeal and tax
cuts, and force complete Republican unanimity to squeeze Kavanaugh through, making any break in the GOP ranks, however unlikely one is to
materialize, fatal to his chances. Eight
Democratic Senators, most of whom face tough elections in November,
have not yet signaled which way they will vote on the 53-year-old conservative hero’s nomination.
(Three of these senators defected from the rest of their party to vote for Neil Gorsuch back in April.) But
while some reports have framed their dilemma as an agonizing, make-or-break choice, the stickiness of
their predicament is likely exaggerated. The available evidence — or lack thereof — shows that there is
simply no compelling reason for them to give Kavanaugh the green light. Here are five reasons why they
shouldn’t bend: 1) Kavanaugh’s nomination is not popular It’s still early going in what is likely to be a months-long
confirmation battle, but three polls taken in the days after President Trump’s announcement show Kavanaugh
as “one of the most unpopular Supreme Court nominees in recent history,” according to FiveThirtyEight,
with only slim majorities favoring his confirmation in each. Taken together, the polls, conducted by Fox News, Gallup, and the Pew Research
Center, show that Kavanaugh has a “net confirmation” rating of only five points, lower than any nominees in
recent history, with the notable exceptions of Harriet Miers and Robert Bork — neither of whom went
on to be confirmed. The second is that, unlike Neil Gorsuch, who earned marginally better initial poll numbers, Kavanaugh’s
confirmation would fundamentally change the balance of the Supreme Court. Many voters probably
view his nomination — correctly — as far more consequential. Republican voters really want Kavanaugh to be
confirmed. But Democratic Senators like Jon Tester of Montana or Claire McCaskill of Missouri should not
mistake their ardor for widespread support. And, a “yes” vote may be just as likely to alienate
Democrats and Independents who fiercely oppose Kavanaugh as it is to placate Republicans. 2) The
policies Brett Kavanaugh champions are even less popular Here is a sample of positions the potential next justice has
taken consistently over the years: He has voted to severely curtail the power of the government to regulate
climate change without explicit congressional approval. (Most Americans want stricter enforcement.) He
has endorsed a maximalist interpretation of the Second Amendment, arguing that state-level assault
weapons bans are unconstitutional. (Americans favor more stringent gun laws and the banning of semi-
automatic rifles.) He has been openly hostile to the Affordable Care Act, leading to worries that he could
help strike down the law altogether. (Obamacare is more popular with the public than ever.) And there’s
much more. The issue that may hang over Kavanaugh’s nomination most conspicuously is abortion. While Kavanagh has never
explicitly said he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, he has made it clear, through his words and actions over the years,
that that he is an avowed foe of abortion rights. Last September, he spoke approvingly of former Justice
William Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe v. Wade. Those remarks flew in the face of the convention that possible Supreme Court
nominees should at least make the right noises about upholding precedent. Anti-abortion activists are wild about Kavanaugh, a sure sign that
they see him as the man who might finally end federal legalization of abortion, or at least roll it back drastically. Polls consistently show
that a large majority of the public favors preserving Roe v. Wade. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, the two most
moderate Republican Senators, do too. It’s hard to find a policy Kavanaugh has championed that enjoys actual popularity among Americans. As
Eric Levitz wrote this week, Kavanaugh represents a well-mannered establishment conservatism that has diligently worked to “insulate the
policy preferences of reactionary elites from majoritarian opinion.” There is no vast constituency for Kavanaugh’s views, just as there isn’t one
for Paul Ryan’s. 3) There is no clear evidence that voting for Kavanaugh will help in November One reason vulnerable Democrats
have voted for some of President Trump’s most controversial judicial nominees is simple: They don’t
want to be labeled obstructionists in states where the president remains somewhat popular. (In a way, some
of those votes — like the ones to confirm torture-friendly CIA Director Gina Haspel — are less defensible than giving a nod to Kavanaugh, since
voters are very unlikely to keep in mind relatively under-the-radar confirmation fights when they’re casting their ballots.) Kavanaugh’s
case is different for two reasons. The prospect of a transformed Supreme Court make this inherently a
much higher-profile vote than anything to come down the pike in recent memory, and its proximity to
the midterm elections will automatically make it a campaign-trail talking point for conservatives. But the
New Yorker’s Jane Mayer writes that “if the past is prologue, what looks like the politically safest course now may turn out to be just the
opposite later.” She raises the example of Clarence Thomas, whose ultra-contentious 1991 confirmation hearing
taught Democrats some important and counterintuitive lessons. Centrist Democrats figured that voting
for Thomas would insulate them from Republican attacks and ease their paths to re-election the next
year. But Klain, who was an aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, recalls that, instead, the Thomas confirmation
triggered an unexpected political backlash, particularly among women who felt that the men in the
Senate had disrespected women’s rights. The following year, a wave of female candidates ran for office, much as they are
running now. In fact, 1992 came to be known as “the year of the woman.” Unexpectedly, several of the Democratic senators
who had voted to confirm Thomas, including Alan Dixon, of Illinois, and Wyche Fowler, of Georgia, found themselves
defeated. Dixon, in fact, was knocked out in the Democratic primary by a black female candidate, Carol Moseley Braun. Others, such as
Chuck Robb, of Virginia, were reelected but never fully escaped the cloud that hung over their records. Even Joe Biden, the Democratic
chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who opposed Thomas’s confirmation, but whose treatment of Thomas was
seen by critics as too deferential, continues to be dogged by it almost three decades later. Mayer also cites a Hart
Research Associates poll (admittedly conducted by two progressive groups) showing that red state voters would be forgiving of a
Democratic Senator’s “no” vote if the lawmaker framed their opposition “clearly as a matter of
conscience,” and based it on either checking the president’s power, protecting workers’ rights, or
preserving the Affordable Care Act. In the run-up to a midterm election that will mostly serve as a referendum on President
Trump, Democrats are rightly focused on turning out their base and convincing infrequent voters, many of whom disdain the president, to get
to the polls. Republicans in states like West Virginia and North Dakota who might defy their party to vote for a member of the opposition are
unlikely to alter their thinking based on good-faith opposition to Kavanaugh. And if Democrats think confirming a Supreme
Court justice will stave off vicious attacks from Trump and the GOP apparatus, they’ve got another thing
coming. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has threatened to hold a vote just weeks before the election if Democrats try to prolong
Kavanaugh’s confirmation with record requests. They should call his bluff. 4) Merrick Garland You may recall (if you haven’t blocked it
from your memory in an effort not to give in to insanity) that two years ago, Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, blocked
President Obama’s eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland from even receiving a
hearing after Antonin Scalia’s death — with the bogus justification that different rules apply during presidential election years. The
shameful episode is a salient illustration of just how little political effect Democratic resistance to voting
for Kavanaugh is likely to have. In 2016, Democrats tried (though probably not in the most effective way) to make
their unfairly spurned Supreme Court nominee into a major campaign issue. It did not work. It’s true that in
recent decades, the right has paid far closer attention than the left to matters of the judiciary; President Trump’s pre-election list of potential
Supreme Court nominees was a major reason some conservatives took a flyer on him. But
the people for whom Brett
Kavanaugh’s place on the Supreme Court takes priority over all other electoral issues are unlikely to vote
for Democrats in the first place. Red state Dems will be safe focusing on larger slices of the electorate
whose mind is on other matters, like health care, jobs, or even immigration. The Garland episode also
supplies another easy justification for Democrats to say no. Most Republicans found it in themselves to expound on a
made-up “Biden rule” with a straight face in 2016; there is no reason that Democrats should extend any courtesies to a president under a very
real investigation who appears to have tapped the nominee most likely to shield him from that investigation. 5) It’s the right thing to do If the
political survival of a Democratic Senator depended on voting for a nominee who is likely to be confirmed anyway, it would be understandable
for that senator to grudgingly get on board. And there’s certainly an argument to be made that if Collins and Murkowski signal their support for
Brett Kavanaugh, lawmakers like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota would be fools not to join them. But
beyond the midterm calculations, there are moral ones. Brett Kavanaugh may be well-liked by seemingly everyone he has come into contact
with, from his law-school students to fellow Washington carpool dads. But make no mistake: On matters of abortion, labor unions,
concentration of corporate power, the environment, and so many other issues that are near and dear to (even red state) Democrats’ hearts, he
is a radical — and one who is likely to wield extraordinary power to codify once-unrealistic conservative priorities into law. He poses a clear and
present danger to the values Democrats hold dear. Voting for him may blow up in red state Democrats’ faces politically. But it would also,
clearly, be the wrong decision for America.
AT – Rand Paul
Paul is posturing - he’s not going to vote against Kavanaugh because of political
implications and empirics prove
Kucinich and Desiderio 18 - Jackie Kucinich is the Washington Bureau Chief at The Daily Beast and Andrew Desiderio is The
Daily Beast’s congressional reporter based in Capitol Hill (Jackie, Andrew, “No One Expects Rand Paul to Actually Vote Against Brett
Kavanaugh”, The Daily Beast, 7/24/18, https://www.thedailybeast.com/no-one-expects-rand-paul-to-actually-vote-against-brett-kavanaugh) //
KZ
No One Expects Rand Paul to Actually Vote Against Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court battles have grown more contentious. But that doesn’t
mean the dramatic, last-minute holdout will actually matter. JACKIE KUCINICH ANDREW DESIDERIO 07.24.18 10:30 PM ET Supreme Court
nominations are steeped in tradition. The pageantry of the announcement of the nominee, the escorted visits around Capitol Hill for meetings
with senators, the confirmation hearing and, most of the time, the vote. With Supreme Court confirmations now growing increasingly
contentious, it may be time to add another tradition to the list: the pretend holdout. It’s
the senator who, for any reason, decides
that he or she isn’t sure about a nominee that checks almost every box that his or her respective party
wants to see in a Supreme Court justice; who prolongs the announcement of a position on confirmation,
building sometimes artificial tension in the process. This time, that senator is Kentucky Republican Rand Paul. In an
interview with Politico, Paul said he was “honestly undecided” on whether to vote for Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s choice to fill
the upcoming vacancy on the high court. Paul cited Kavanaugh’s views on the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ data, a
program the senator has long opposed. “Kavanaugh’s position is basically that national security trumps privacy. And he said it very strongly and
explicitly. And that worries me,” Paul said. RELATED IN POLITICS Dems Pounce on Trump’s ‘Extreme’ Supreme Court Pick Trump’s SCOTUS Pick
Is Probably the End of Abortion Rights Progressives Pledged Army to Fight Kavanaugh. No One Showed. If all Democrats vote against
Kavanaugh—and if Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is unable to make it back to the Senate due to his ongoing cancer treatment—Paul’s potential
“no” vote would sink Kavanaugh’s nomination. And it would put Paul on the receiving end of a
presidential tweet-storm of epic proportions. He would bear the blame for costing his party, at least
temporarily, a chance to reshape the Supreme Court for a generation. And that’s why his colleagues, on
both sides of the aisle, are under no illusion that the libertarian senator will end up voting against a
qualified, experienced, conservative nominee like Kavanaugh. “You guys get teased so easily,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) said
with a heavy laugh when asked if he thinks Paul could join most Democrats in opposing Kavanaugh. “We don’t usually count on that,” Sen. Tim
Kaine (D-VA) joked. There are reasons to be skeptical of Paul’s holdout on Kavanaugh. Recently, he vowed to do everything in his
power to block Mike Pompeo from becoming secretary of state, citing Pompeo’s positions on the Iraq war and regime
change. In the end, Paul voted to confirm Pompeo. GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX! Enter your email address By clicking
“Subscribe,” you agree to have read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy SUBSCRIBE More generally, Paul has been consistent in warning about
government overreach on issues related to privacy, data collection, and the Fourth Amendment. But even those who admire his philosophical
disposition on these fronts said they expect Paul to fall in line in the end. “On privacy, Sen. Paul has been a very consistent, very active legislator
on ensuring that Americans’ privacy is strongly protected. So this is not some new concerns of his,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said in an interview.
“Unfortunately, Sen. Paul
has a history of making a big declaration about something that will change the
outcome of an important vote, and then in the last days or hours before the vote, changing his position.” Paul’s
Republican colleagues, likewise, don’t seem to be nervous about his holdout. For that reason, they aren’t
bothering to use valuable resources to sway him. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX), who is in charge of the GOP’s
vote-counting operation, appeared unmoved by Paul’s apparent reservations about Kavanaugh. “[Privacy rights] are obviously an area of
particular concern of his, so he’s entitled to satisfy himself,” Cornyn told The Daily Beast. Paul formally sat down with Kavanaugh on Tuesday,
which an aide described as a “good meeting.” The senator’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this article. Like
Senate Republican leaders, conservative outside groups like Heritage Action and Americans for Prosperity aren’t planning on diverting any
funds to court Paul’s vote. Even so, Tim Chapman, the executive director of Heritage Action, said Paul’s exercise, as well as the efforts of
perpetual fence-sitters like Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), are important. “All of these people have specific issues that
they care a lot about as senators and they’ve staked a reputation on those issues, and so they want to make sure that people understand that
they still do care about those issues,” Chapman said. “So for Rand Paul, it’s the Fourth Amendment issue. That is part of his brand and it’s one
of the things his fiercest supporters like most about him.” “He has to kind of go through the process of making sure that Judge Kavanaugh hears
his perspective on it, I think,” Chapman added. “To me it’s a very rational process. If I were in the Senate I’d be doing the same thing on the
issues that I care about and I think that’s the important thing for the Senate to do.” So why is Paul bothering to air his reservations at all? Ron
Bonjean, a former Republican Senate leadership aide who helped usher then-Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch through the confirmation
process, said some of the GOP holdouts in the Gorsuch fight wanted to make a point to the White House. “Several Republicans seemed as if
they were on the fence last time because they wanted to make sure that the White House was not taking the nuclear option for granted and
that the Gorsuch team was doing all it could to get him confirmed,” he said, referring to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY)
decision to change the rules to apply a 50-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees. “That’s why we created the ‘no stone unturned’
campaign to showcase the effort being made to court Senate Democrat votes and how difficult it was to achieve.”
Link - Generic
Immigration is a dividing issue
Snell 5/30/18 (Kelsey, congressional reporter for NPR, “House Split On Immigration
Might Be Good Politics For Some Moderate Republicans”, NPR,
https://www.npr.org/2018/05/30/615554912/house-split-on-immigration-might-be-good-politics-for-
some-moderate-republicans, KC)
House Republican leaders are struggling to contain a growing split within their party over immigration
policy. But for some vulnerable moderates breaking from some of the GOP's hardest-line proposals
could be the key to avoiding defeat in November.
Californian Steve Knight is one of nearly two dozen House Republicans who have signed on to a petition
to force the House to vote on immigration proposals as early as next month. The plan is to allow the
House to vote on at least four bills, including a pathway to citizenship that many conservatives hate.
That plan frustrates House leaders who worry a messy fight on immigration will divide the party and
boost Democrats' chances of winning control of the House in November. But Knight said Monday in an
interview at a Memorial Day event in his home district that he is confident that it's better for him if they
at least try to pass some immigration legislation.
"This is doing probably one of the hardest things in America that we've ever tried to do," Knight said. "I
understand that, but I think we have the votes to get something done."
Knight said the best path forward is a bill to combine some measures for increased border security with
legal protections for the roughly 800,000 people who stand to lose protections under Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. He said he's heard from voters in his district and he's confident
that is what they want.
"People have said that consistently," Knight said. "If I just don't listen then I'm not listening to the
people in my district."
That position puts him at odds with many in his party, including House conservatives and President
Trump.
Trump continues to lean into the same hard-line position on immigration that was his signature in 2016
— he wants a wall along the border with Mexico and broad crackdowns on illegal immigration. He told a
crowd in Tennessee Tuesday night that Republicans need to be tough if they want to win.
"And you can say what you want, but I think border security and security in general is a great issue for
the Republican Party," Trump said. "I think it's a great issue. Not a bad issue."
But Democrats and many moderates disagree. They say a majority of Americans oppose a wall, and
point to polls like a recent ABC News/Washington Post survey that showed 86 percent of voters support
the DACA program.
The issue is even more personal in California, a state that is home to nearly 30 percent of all DACA
recipients.
Immigration divides Republicans – discharge petitions prove
Wong and Zanona 5/17/18 (Scott, Writer for the Hill, Melanie, Writer for the Hill, “GOP
Split on Immigration is a Crisis for Ryan’s Team”, The Hill,
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/388076-gop-split-on-immigration-is-a-crisis-for-ryans-team, KC)
Momentum is building for an insurgent effort by centrist Republicans to force immigration votes on the
House floor despite GOP leadership’s attempt to tamp down the rebellion.
The unfolding legislative battle is a nightmare for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his lieutenants,
because it exposes a fervent intraparty split in the GOP and pits leadership against many of the
politically vulnerable members that are key to saving the Republican majority this fall.
A pair of GOP lawmakers on Wednesday signed on to a discharge petition that would set up a series of
votes on immigration bills on the House floor later this year. The move came just hours after party
leaders pleaded with rank-and-file members to stand down.
Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), a leader of the moderate Tuesday Group, and Rep. Dave Trott (R-Mich.), who is
retiring from Congress, both signed their names to the petition, becoming the 19th and 20th
Republicans to do so.
Now, just five more Republican signatures are needed to force the immigration votes if all 193
Democrats join the effort.
“We will have more Republicans signing on this week, and a lot more Democrats signing on. I am
confident we all have the votes we need,” said Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), who is leading the effort with
Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) and Will Hurd (R-Texas). All three lawmakers are facing challenging
elections this fall.
Denham added, “I’m not saying when our timeline is. I’m saying we have enough commitments to make
sure we’re going to be successful.”
The coming days will see a battle for those remaining five votes. Denham and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.),
who are leading the discharge whip operation, will be targeting those who have spoken favorably of the
“Dreamer” issue but have yet to sign.
But those same Republicans are being whipped by GOP leadership not to sign. Ryan and House Majority
Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) reiterated during a closed-door meeting with Republicans on
Wednesday that such a petition effectively cedes control of the floor to Democrats.
McCarthy’s warning to GOP colleagues was even more dire: If a discharge petition goes forward, he said,
it could cost Republicans the House majority in the November midterm elections.
Link - Refugees
Criticism of Trump’s refugee policies proves that it’s decisive among Republicans
Fandos 17 (Nicholas, Reporter in the Washington Bureau covering Congress at the New
York Times, “Growing Number of G.O.P. Lawmakers Criticize Trump’s Refugee Policy”,
New York Times, January 29 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/us/politics/republicans-congress-trump-
refugees.html, KC)
WASHINGTON — A growing group of Republican lawmakers criticized President Trump’s refugee policy
on Sunday even as party leaders in Congress continued to show restraint.
The executive order Mr. Trump issued on Friday, which targets Syrian refugees and all travelers from
several predominantly Muslim nations, had drawn little dissent from Republicans initially even as
Democrats denounced it and protests erupted around the country and the world.
But on Sunday, several members of Mr. Trump’s party said that the process, while initiated with the
right intention, had been too hastily enacted and warned that it could backfire against United States
interests.
Two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, led the
criticism, saying in a statement that Mr. Trump’s order was not properly vetted and that it could be seen
as the United States turning its back on Muslims who had risked their lives to serve as interpreters for
the country’s military and diplomats.
Ultimately, we fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against
terrorism,” they said, adding, “That is why we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist
recruitment than improve our security.”
Mr. McCain also said the plan was carried out without proper consultation of United States allies and
that it mistakenly lumped together the country’s adversaries, like Iran, with allies, like Iraq.
Republicans have largely supported Mr. Trump’s aggressive agenda, but in his first major decision on
national security, he is finding uncharacteristic opposition from his party in the blush of his early days in
office.
Mr. Trump did not take well to the input, singling out Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham on Twitter as “sadly
weak on immigration.”
Link – GOP Unity Key
Narrow majority means that all Republicans are key to confirm Kavanaugh
Prokop 7/9/18 (Andrew, Senior Politics Reporter at Vox, “The key senators to watch for
Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation”, Vox, https://www.vox.com/2018/7/9/17549818/brett-
kavanaugh-senate-confirmation, KC)
President Trump has announced he’ll nominate Brett Kavanaugh to replace the Supreme Court’s swing
justice, Anthony Kennedy — setting up an enormously consequential confirmation battle over his
replacement in the narrowly divided Senate for later this year.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already announced that he’ll hold a confirmation vote for
Kavanaugh before this fall’s midterm elections. And after McConnell’s rules change last year, only a
simple majority is necessary to get a Supreme Court justice through the Senate.
Still, while Republicans do currently control a majority in the chamber, it’s quite a narrow one. They
have 51 seats, meaning they could theoretically confirm a new justice without any Democratic help. But
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been absent from Washington all year for health reasons. If McCain
remains in his seat but unable to show up and vote, the Senate will effectively be composed of 50
Republicans and 49 Democrats — so, if any one Republican defects in a partisan vote, he or she can
sink a nomination.
And with abortion-rights precedents that have existed for decades suddenly at stake, all eyes will be on
two swing blocs: moderate Republicans and red-state Democrats.
By far the two most important senators to watch, overall, for Kavanaugh’s confirmation chances are
Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Both are pro-abortion rights. Both have also
proven willing to buck their party — for instance, they sank Obamacare repeal last year.
Both also, however, voted in favor of confirming Neil Gorsuch. But the stakes were lower for that vote.
Since he was filling Antonin Scalia’s seat, his confirmation meant only that the Supreme Court’s
ideological makeup would be restored to approximately where it was in February 2016, before Scalia’s
death. It was widely understood that, with Gorsuch, the court would still be short of the votes to
overturn or badly weaken Roe v. Wade — because Kennedy, though a conservative, had sided with the
liberal and moderate justices to uphold it.
Yet the replacement of Kennedy with a staunch conservative like Kavanaugh would mean the
overturning of Roe is a strong possibility. This would mean a serious test for Collins and Murkowski —
one they have not yet faced. Both seem to sincerely care about women’s reproductive rights. Collins in
particular may be concerned about her own reelection in a purple state in 2020.
If Democrats unite against Trump’s nominee, and McCain remains in his seat but is unable to come to
Washington and vote, then Kavanaugh will have to win both Collins and Murkowski’s votes. He can’t
afford to lose either one of them.
As it happens, neither Collins nor Murkowski chose to attend Trump’s announcement tonight. And don’t
expect them to announce their decisions anytime soon — historically, both have often tended to hold
off announcing their decisions on controversial votes until close to the very end.
Unified republicans key to confirmation
Deaton 7/11/18 (Chris, deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard, “Here’s How
Kavanaugh Gets Confirmed”, Weekly Standard, https://www.weeklystandard.com/chris-
deaton/the-senate-math-behind-brett-kavanaughs-confirmation, KC)
(4) If only 99 senators vote, then Republicans cannot afford to lose a single one of their own, assuming
that all 49 Democrats stick together to oppose. In this instance, a vote purely on partisan lines would be
50-49 for Kavanaugh. One Republican flipping would make it 49-50. (One Republican being a troll and
voting “present” would make it 49-49-1, and Pence would come to the rescue.)
2NC- I/L
Kavanaugh is going to reduce Chevron deference to a historical footnote – past rulings
and positions proves
McGarity 18 – Thomas McGarity is a leading scholar in the fields of administrative law and environmental law at The University of
Texas at Austin School of Law (“Judge Kavanaugh’s Deregulatory Agenda”, The American Prospect, 7/25/18, http://prospect.org/article/judge-
kavanaugh%E2%80%99s-deregulatory-agenda) // KZ
Congress has assigned to the judiciary the task of reviewing agency regulations to ensure that agencies
have properly interpreted the statutes that empower them and to ensure that their decisions are supported by
substantial evidence and are not arbitrary and capricious. In the seminal case of Chevron, U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense
Council, the Supreme Court set out a two-step test for judicial review of an agency’s interpretation of a
statute. First, if the meaning of the statute is clear on its face, the court must confirm its clear meaning without deferring to the agency. If,
however, the statute is ambiguous, the court should defer to the agency’s interpretation the statute if it is reasonable. Ever since the Court
handed down that decision in 1984, some (mostly conservative) judges have chafed under its prescription for deference to agencies whose
judgment they do not trust. Kavanaugh has been one of the most forceful judicial advocates of limiting the
application of the Chevron prescription. The easiest way to avoid Chevron deference is to find the
relevant statutory language unambiguousand hold that the agency’s interpretation is inconsistent with
the statute’s unambiguous meaning. Ambiguity is, of course, a malleable concept. The deeper one probes into a statute’s
purpose, context and legislative history, the more likely one is to find ambiguity. In that regard, Kavanaugh has emulated Justice
Antonin Scalia’s formula of applying dictionary definitions to statutory terms with little regard for the
agency’s experience in working with the statute over the years. Kavanaugh has also played a leading role
in crafting a “major rules” exception to Chevron that could swallow the rule if he joins the Supreme
Court. In a controversial case involving the Food and Drug Administration’s attempt to regulate tobacco products during the Clinton
administration, the Supreme Court suggested that in “extraordinary cases” involving issues of great “economic and political magnitude,” a court
need not defer to the agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute. For a time, it appeared that the tobacco case was a one-off exception,
but Kavanaugh revived it in a case involving EPA’s attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through its “new source review” permit
program. Following a recent Supreme Court holding that the words “air pollutant” in the definition section of the Clean Air Act included
greenhouse gases, EPA interpreted the phrase “any air pollutant” in the new source review section of the statute to include those gases.
Claiming that the case was “one of exceptional importance,” Kavanaugh, in a lengthy dissenting opinion, rejected EPA’s interpretation as
unreasonable. Without a hint of deference or a mention of Chevron, he concluded that “air pollutant” had a different meaning in the new
source review section than in the definition section and that the former meaning excluded greenhouse gases. The Supreme Court rejected
EPA’s interpretation, but without relying on the “major rules” exception. Kavanaugh elaborated on the major rule exception
in considerably more detail in his dissent in a case involving FCC’s net neutrality rule. In cases involving
“major social or economic activity,” he wrote, an ambiguous grant of statutory authority to an agency “is
not enough” to warrant deference. Conceding that the “major cases” exception was malleable, he noted that “determining
whether a rule constitutes a major rule sometimes has a bit of a ‘know it when you see it’ quality.” If Kavanaugh is confirmed, we
can expect that he will continue his project of creating exceptions until the Chevron rule is reduced to a
historical footnote. We can also expect Kavanaugh to interpret statutory language to require agencies to emphasize industry costs,
rather than focusing primarily on the statute’s protective goals and public benefits. For example, in dissenting from a holding that EPA had
lawfully vetoed a Corps of Engineers permit for a proposed mountaintop removal project, Kavanaugh concluded that in deciding whether the
project would have “unacceptable adverse impacts” on wildlife in the inundated streams below the project, EPA had to consider the cost to the
industry of preventing its disastrous impact on the environment. Wiping out the streams could be “acceptable,” in Kavanaugh’s view, if
preventing the catastrophic loss would cost the coal company too much in lost profits.
AT: Roe Turn (Generic)
Roe won’t be overturned – it’s too culturally significant – even if it is, abortion
restriction is non-unique because of Casey
McCarthy 7/7 – Senior Fellow at the National Review Institute and a Contributing Editor of National
Review (Andrew C., “‘Don’t You Dare Touch Roe!’ — Judicial Confirmation Silly Season Begins”, National
Review, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/supreme-court-unlikely-to-overturn-roe-v-wade/,
July 7, 2018)//CProst
I do not mean to suggest that Roe’s core is trivial. There are, after all, well over 600,000 abortions per year in the United States. But have you
noticed that the question of Roe’s vitality seems to arise only when there is a vacancy on the High Court
during a Republican administration? That is because the question is political theater: Democrats eliciting
verbal acrobatics from solid nominees who are well aware both that Roe is atrociously reasoned and
that saying so will imperil their confirmation chances. The real action on abortion today derives from
Casey, decided 19 years after Roe. The real legal action, that is. That’s a caveat worth adding. If abortion ever gets rolled
back in this country, it will be because a cultural shift forces legal change, not the other way around.
Suffice it to say, I’m not holding my breath (see this smart column by our Michael Brendan Dougherty on the implications of Ireland’s
referendum repealing its protection of the unborn). Casey was a triple gut punch for conservatives. First, in a bitterly divided
5–4 ruling, the Court upheld the constitutional abortion right it purported to discover in Roe. Second, the
main opinion, among the most farcical in the Court’s history, was jointly crafted by Reagan appointees Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor,
along with Bush 41 pick David Souter. Third, while paring Roe back in significant ways, the trio reaffirmed a potentially limitless
“substantive due process” right to “liberty” in any matter as to which five unelected lawyers decide dignity and privacy warrant
it. Bemoaning our democracy’s impertinent resistance to judicial ukase, Kennedy & Co. proclaimed in Casey’s opening line that “liberty finds no
refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.” And who could possibly doubt the justices’ “jurisprudence”? An account of “liberty” sprung not from legal
precedent but from a metaphorical “heart” bursting with “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and
of the mystery of human life.” Huh? We’d been warned that the “Constitution” is “living” and “organic,” but who knew it was hallucinogenic? If
the Supremes were the Beatles, I’d be urging that we play Kennedy’s opinions backwards. That seems as good a way as any to divine which
“attributes of personhood” are so “central to personal dignity and autonomy” that the Court must insulate them from the formerly
autonomous People. Casey’s fortune-cookie piffle is rivaled only by its arrogance: Where, in the performance of its judicial duties, the Court
decides a case in such a way as to resolve the sort of intensely divisive controversy reflected in Roe . . . its decision has a dimension that the
resolution of the normal case does not carry. It is the dimension present whenever the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution calls the
contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution. What
would the Left say if a peer branch of government tried that? Imagine President Trump saying, “When in the performance of my executive
duties, I resolve an intensely divisive border-security issue . . .” Or what if the Court had flexed its muscles this way in, say, Dred Scott or
Korematsu? Just wondering. There is so much stunning self-regard and overwrought prose in Casey that it’s easy to miss what, for purposes of
confirmation politics, are the most salient parts: the ruling’s demolition of Roe’s capricious trimester construct and some of its post-Roe
precedents. While you wouldn’t know it from listening to Senator Collins, the ruling that saved Roe was not exactly a bulwark of stare decisis. In
any event, as moderate Republicans tremble at the studied media-Democrat hysteria over Roe, it is
important to bear in mind that Casey — more than Roe — is the law. That means Roe’s core ruling is very
likely to survive, no matter who is appointed to the Supreme Court, for two reasons. First, for all its human-
resources-speak about the penumbral right of women to self-actualize in the modern world, Casey’s
reaffirmation of Roe is highly qualified. It made clear that the state is free to adhere to a strongly pro-life policy even before
“fetal viability.” The emphasis on state interest and viability, moreover, eroded the Roe fortress around first-
semester and pre-viability abortions. Regulations discouraging abortion were permissible as long as
access to pre-viability abortion was not made burdensome to the point of being practically unavailable. And viability
is a dynamic concept, so as evolving technology made it possible to preserve and protect unborn life at earlier stages, states would
have commensurate power to restrict or even outlaw abortion throughout more of pregnancy. (See, e.g.,
our Alexandra DeSanctis’s piece on the progress of federal legislation seeking to outlaw most abortions after 20 weeks, the point at which most
unborn children are sufficiently developed to feel pain.) To be sure, this is far from a perfect state of affairs for pro-lifers. But the national
abortion debate should never have been moved to the federal courthouse for resolution, and pro-lifers cannot win it there in any event. It has
to be won in the culture, from the ground up. Roe’s survival vel non will
be a lagging indicator. The second point is more
problematic for conservatives. Roe is not a one-off. It was a dramatic but foreseeable progression in the Court’s
oxymoronic “substantive due process” jurisprudence of the “mystery of human life” realm of “personhood.” The modern
phase started with contraception (first rationalized by a theory of marital privacy, then, in fine make-it-up-as-we-go-along contradiction,
extended by a conception of equality). It
has since moved on to gay rights (including same-sex marriage, endorsed in Justice
Kennedy’s Obergefell opinion in 2015), and now we are on to LGBTQ rights, three-partner marriage (and why stop at three?), and
who knows what other transgressive erosions of bourgeois culture. Regardless of a jurist’s legal position on substantive
due process, or of the jurist’s moral or policy positions on what it has wrought, Roe is part of a doctrinal edifice. To reach
out and try to overrule it, particularly in a case in which it is not necessary to do so, would be seen as an
attack on the entire edifice. The Supreme Court is not going to take that on. A more conservative Court
would reject the promiscuous language of Justice Kennedy’s “liberty” musings and admonish that the polling station, not the
courthouse, is the place for working out most clashes between the individual and society. It is not going to
turn back the cultural clock.
AT: Roe Turn (Specific)
Kavanaugh, along with Roberts, won’t overturn Roe – most qualified sources prove
[this is also the 1NC UQ author]
Stuart & Kaplan 7/20 – Tessa Stuart is a Reporter at Rolling Stone, David A. Kaplan is a Supreme
Court expert, award-winning Contributing Editor at Newsweek, and Adjunct Faculty Member at the New
York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute (“A Supreme Court Expert on Kavanaugh’s
Confirmation Chances and the Future of Roe v. Wade”, Rolling Stone,
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/supreme-court-kavanaugh-confirmation-
701550/, July 20, 2018)//CProst
If Kavanaugh is confirmed, do you think the court will overturn Roe v. Wade? I think Roberts is troubled by
seeing the court get put in the maelstrom. And I think he recognizes that Roe v. Wade would put the court
in the maelstrom like no other ruling in modern times, even more so than Obamacare being decided in a
presidential election year. My guess would be that Roberts would not vote to explicitly overturn Roe, and my guess would
be that Kavanaugh would not do so either. If Roe v. Wade squarely came before the court in six months or
a year, my guess would be a 6-3 not to overturn it. But – and it’s a significant “but” – you can chip away at Roe without
overturning it. The Supreme Court has already upheld 24-hour waiting provisions. And you could easily imagine Kavanaugh and Roberts
upholding virtually any regulation, any restriction on abortion, short of an outright ban on abortion. Trump promised to nominate justices who
would overturn Roe – he’s not going to make good on that promise? I think if
overturning Roe was the coin of the realm in
Trump’s White House – or more accurately, in Don McGahn’s White House counsel’s office – then
Kavanaugh was the wrong pick. Virtually anybody in the judicial conservative arena in the last 20 years
is critical of Roe. But I think it is a big gap for people like Kavanaugh between saying it was a lousy decision
and taking the extraordinary step of overturning the ruling – all the more when the Supreme Court 25
years ago upheld it. But I think Don McGahn and other sophisticated lawyers in this administration and the
Federalist Society don’t particularly care about Roe. And, in some respects, [from their perspective] it’s nice to always
have Roe out there because it keeps mobilizing the base and helping you win, like in 2016. But the issue they really
care about – and for which it is legitimate, as a partisan matter, to fear a Roberts-Kavanaugh court – is the [issue of the] power of the federal
government.
Kavanaugh won’t overturn Roe – past statements prove

Lott 7/26 – Formerly chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission and columnist for
Fox News (John R., “Here's the real reason Democrats are so scared about Kavanaugh joining the
Supreme Court”, Fox News, http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/07/26/heres-real-reason-
democrats-are-so-scared-about-kavanaugh-joining-supreme-court.html, July 26, 2018)//CProst
For those on the left who insist that Kavanaugh is dangerous because he supposedly won’t follow
precedent when it comes to Roe v Wade – the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide –
it seems clear that his critics haven’t read the book he co-authored on precedent. Kavanaugh argues
that precedents are particularly binding when they have been around for a long time, have had large
majorities on the court, and have been the subject of a number of Supreme Court decisions. All those
points surely apply to Roe v. Wade. In addition, during his confirmation hearing to the D.C. Circuit Court in
2006, Kavanaugh promised, “I would follow Roe v Wade faithfully and fully.”
There’s too much at stake for Kavanaugh to overturn Roe
Smith 7/17 – Senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism (Wesley J.,
“With Kavanaugh, Roe Will Bend but not Break”, National Review,
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brett-kavanaugh-roe-v-wade-abortion-bend-not-break/, July
17, 2018)//CProst
I worry that too many pro-lifers believe that the nomination and presumed confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to
the Supreme Court will finally bring down Roe v. Wade, returning the contentious issue of abortion to the states. Color me
very dubious. The Supreme Court has always been as much a political body as a legal one. Reversing Roe
would not just bring about increased social conflict, but spark a raging cultural conflagration. As he
demonstrated in confirming Obamacare, Chief Justice Roberts will be loath to allow his beloved
Supreme Court to be in the vortex of such turmoil — even though the Roe justices created the vortex in the first place. I
think some other conservative justices — other than Thomas — might be similarly reticent. If I am right, it would
take more than the 5-4 conservative majority on the High Bench to make Roe go the way of Plessy v.
Ferguson. I do, however, believe that Kavanaugh’s elevation will lead to SCOTUS allowing greater state
regulation of abortion than it has heretofore permitted. In other words, to the fury of the increasingly openly pro-
abortion enthusiasts — and the pronounced disappointment of pro-lifers — in the near term at least, Roe will probably
bend, but it will not break.
AT: Roe (Midterms Turn)
Overturning Roe gives the dems leverage to win the midterms – it increases voter
turnout
Zimmerman 7/5 – Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and Ph.D. in
History at John Hopkins University (Jonathan, “Overturning Roe v. Wade Could Remake American
Politics”, The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/149596/overturning-roe-v-wade-remake-
american-politics, July 5, 2018)//CProst
This scenario is precisely what excited social conservatives are envisioning, now that President Trump gets to nominate a replacement for
Justice Kennedy. Kennedy’s retirement was “an answer to prayer,” according to Iowa conservative Christian leader Bob
Vander Plaats. “We have a chance to take down Roe v. Wade,” Vander Plaats told Fox News last week. “This is a historic
moment.” But polls consistently show that most Americans support abortion rights and oppose the repeal
of Roe. On July 2, Quinnipiac released a new survey demonstrating that Americans back the Roe decision
two to one: 63 percent approve of the ruling and only 31 percent disagree with it. If the Supreme Court explicitly
overturned the decision, it might provide Democrats with a way to bring new voters to the polls—just
as Roe did for the GOP. Republican judges know that, too, which is why a flat-out repeal of Roe remains improbable. The more likely
path is a continued restriction of abortion rights, of the type that we’ve already seen over the past few years: parental notification laws, stricter
requirements for clinics, and so on. But if
Roe v. Wade gets struck down, liberal Democrats will finally receive a
symbolic weapon of the same magnitude as the 1973 ruling. Whatever the case reversing Roe is called,
it will be reviled—and, most of all, remembered—by millions of voters. And in ten or twenty years’ time, we might be
remembering how the Supreme Court triggered yet another revolution in American politics.
Aff
UQ - Red State Democrats
Uq overwhelms the link – A handful of Red-State democrats will vote for Kavanaugh
which ensures confirmation even if there’s GOP splippage
Lehman 18 – Charles Lehman is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon (“Poll: Red-State Voters Waint Their Dem. Senators to
Confirm Kavanaugh”, Free Beacon, 7/23/18, https://freebeacon.com/politics/poll-red-state-voters-want-dem-senators-confirm-kavanaugh/) //
KZ
Constituents of four red-state Democrats in the Senate want to see Judge Brett Kavanaugh confirmed to
the Supreme Court, according to a new poll. The poll, administered by North Star Opinion Research on behalf of the Judicial
Crisis Network, surveyed voters in Alabama, Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia, all states with
incumbent Democratic senators which also voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
Three of those Senators—Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), and Joe Manchin (W. Va.) are up
for reelection in November. According to North Star's poll, significant majorities of voters in all four states want
to see Kavanaugh confirmed. In North Dakota, 60 percent of voters support confirmation while only 22
percent oppose it; West Virginia is 55 to 30, Alabama 54 to 30, and Indiana 52 to 34. Support for
Kavanaugh is even stronger among self-identified independents. 60 percent of independents support
confirmation in North Dakota, versus 18 percent opposing; 59 support and 23 oppose in West Virginia;
54 to 30 in Alabama; and 48 to 34 in Indiana. "Judge Kavanaugh is a fair and independent judge who bases his decisions on the
Constitution, which is why President Trump nominated him and why a lopsided majority of voters in key states support his confirmation," Said
Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director at the Judicial Crisis Network. These
results may put further pressure on red-
state Democrats facing pressure from their Republican colleagues to back Kavanaugh. Heitkamp,
Manchin, and Donnelly all voted for President Donald Trump's first Supreme Court nominee, Neil
Gorsuch; Sen. Doug Jones (Ala.) was not in the Senate at the time of the confirmation, but is likely
dealing with similar lobbying from colleagues across the aisle. "Red-state Democrats have a choice: stand with their
constituents and support President Trump's extraordinarily qualified Supreme Court nominee, or stand with Chuck Schumer and be a rubber
stamp for the extreme liberal special interests," Severino said. The North Star poll also found that two
thirds of voters in the pivotal
states approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing, including with the addition of Gorsuch. The court
has a 68 percent approval rating in North Dakota, 67 percent in Indiana, 63 percent in West Virginia, and
60 percent in Alabama.
2AC – Kavanaugh Bad (Environment)
Kavanaugh is energizing deregulation activists, lobbiests, and government officials
Dlouhy and Eidelson 18 – Jennifer Dlouhy writes about energy policy and environmental regulations for Bloomberg, Josh
Eidelson covers labor for Bloomberg, “Trump’s Deregulators Emboldened by Kavanaugh Supreme Court Pick”, Bloomberg, 7/25/18,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-23/trump-is-said-to-seek-repeal-of-california-s-smog-fighting-power) // KZ
Trump administration officials were putting the finishing touches on a strategy to roll back car pollution standards when they received a boost
from an unexpected source: the Supreme Court. The announced retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote on the court,
and the plan to replace him with a reliable conservative in Brett Kavanaugh, energized the regulators. They plan
to go with the boldest option, including a challenge to California’s ability to set its own limits, according to
people familiar with the deliberations. Similar conversations are going on at agencies across the government as
they develop plans to dial back Obama-era rules governing everything from the environment to labor relations.
Political appointees are growing more confident of prevailing in court and contemplating being more aggressive as a result, according to the
people. Their optimism is rooted in the expectation that Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Supreme Court and
bring with him the same willingness to rein in regulations that has marked his judicial career. During his
tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which hears most lawsuits challenging federal agencies, Kavanaugh
has voted to restrain regulators that stray beyond their congressional mandates. Reinforcing Confidence “The
likelihood of Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is affecting how political appointees in federal agencies think
about the deregulatory agenda right now,” said Mike McKenna, a Republican energy strategist. “It is expanding their
sense of the possible, and it is enforcing and reinforcing their confidence that more aggressive actions are
likely to withstand judicial scrutiny.” The first evidence of this new attitude may be the Trump administration’s coming proposal
to revoke California’s authority to regulate automobile greenhouse gas emissions and slam the brakes on federal rules boosting fuel efficiency.
The proposal amounts to a frontal assault on the nation’s most populous state as well as one of former President Barack Obama’s signature
efforts to combat climate change. The White House was already reviewing a draft of the vehicle standards proposal by the time Kennedy
announced his retirement June 27, and the major thrust of the measure has not been altered by subsequent interagency negotiations. But
inside the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, officials believe Kavanaugh’s
nomination gives
them more room to maneuver. Read More: Trump Is Said to Seek Repeal of California Clean-Car Powers “It has increased their level
of confidence,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. “Kavanaugh has been a
very sane voice on regulatory restraint for a very long time on the court, and I don’t see that he’s going to change his views on things.” The
new dynamic -- or, really, the prospect of it -- also could entice businesses to challenge more regulations in federal
court. “It will embolden the business community to challenge existing regulations and increase the burden and
risk for pro-labor, pro-consumer and pro-environment administrations to issue new protections in the future,” said Jordan Barab, who
previously was a deputy assistant secretary at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Read More: Kavanaugh Could Usher in New
Business-Friendly Era on High Court To be sure, Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the narrowly divided Senate is not guaranteed, nor are any of his
future votes on questions over the legitimacy of federal rules. But Kavanaugh’s record on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit indicates he is willing to restrain federal agencies when they are acting without Congress’s explicit instruction -- and likely to give them a
long leash when it comes to removing regulations. He
is a staunch advocate of the separation of powers, ensuring that
administrative agencies stay within their constitutional bounds. In cases where former President Barack Obama’s
agencies strained the bounds of legislative authority, a narrower approach by the Trump administration could be bolstered by the high court.
Slam Dunk It isn’t a slam dunk, though. Jody Freeman, a Harvard environmental law professor and an architect of the Obama administration’s
fuel efficiency pact with California, said it’s not clear how Kavanaugh would view key legal questions around the fuel economy rollback. “I don’t
think we have enough of a record on Kavanaugh’s views of state powers and federalism to be confident about how this particular challenge
would come out,” she said. At the National Labor Relations Board, which sets precedents dictating what employees have workplace organizing
rights and what kinds of worker protests are protected, Republican appointees could “shift labor law violently to the right” secure in the
knowledge that a Supreme Court majority with Kavanaugh would uphold them, said Michael Duff, a University of Wyoming law professor and
former agency attorney. The new legal landscape could discourage regulators at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from pro-
labor moves, while emboldening employers to challenge the agency’s enforcement, said Deborah Berkowitz, a former chief of staff there.
Challenge OSHA “It would encourage employers to challenge every single thing regarding worker safety and health right up to the Supreme
Court,” she said. “It would encourage employers that don’t want to provide safe conditions to thumb their nose at OSHA and the law and just
start challenging every agency action.” David Lopez, who was general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is now
incoming co-dean of Rutgers Law School - Camden, said “I know everyone in that town who practices law at the highest level knows who’s on
the court, and they count the votes on the court.” For pro-business appointees at agencies seeking to loosen regulation, “It certainly would not
be unreasonable for them to think they have a little bit more latitude in terms of what they do.” The idea is just beginning to take hold in some
federal agencies, but business lobbyists and some activists are already looking for ways to exploit Kavanaugh’s
nomination. For instance, Ebell and other conservatives could highlight the shifting legal landscape as they push
the EPA to revisit and reverse its landmark conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public
health and the environment, a ruling that provided the legal foundation for rules stemming them. The
message is that “better times are around the corner in terms of some of these court decisions,” Ebell said. “Over the coming months if
Kavanaugh is confirmed, I think we will have a stronger argument to go to the EPA and say, ‘You really need to
consider the endangerment finding.’ ”
Kavanaugh will slash and prevent regulations that help the environment
Mintz 18 - Joel A. Mintz is a Professor of Law Emeritus and the C. William Trout Senior Fellow in Public Interest Law at Nova
Southeastern University College of Law and a Member Scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform. He has taught and written extensively
about environmental laws and issues (Joel, “Kavanaugh may limit environmental protections if confirmed to Supreme Court”, The Sun Sentinel,
7/25/18) // KZ
Recent events have underscored the vital importance of effective environmental regulation for Floridians.
Blue green algae — apparently caused by releases of contaminated water from Lake Okeechobee — has blanketed significant portions of our
state’s east and west coasts, causing major economic losses and posing a threat to the health of coastal residents. Pro-active regulation and
enforcement of environmental laws could (and should) have prevented these abysmal consequences. In fact, lawsuits play a critical role in
shaping the laws that guide government regulation of the environment; and the U.S. Supreme Court— which has lately been
almost evenly divided in important environmental cases — often has the last word on the government’s
crucial ability to protect public health and the environment from the perils of pollution. President Trump’s
controversial nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace centrist Justice Anthony Kennedy on the nation’s highest court is
thus a matter of crucial importance for the future of environmental pollution control. Unfortunately, a
preliminary review of Kavanaugh’s judicial writings and votes provides little basis for optimism regarding
the positions he will take in environmental cases if his nomination to join the Court is confirmed.
Indifference leads to the sliming of a Florida river | Opinion Kavanaugh has served for 12 years as a judge on the D.C.
Circuit, an intermediate federal court that handles numerous appeals from challenges to the actions of
EPA and other federal agencies with environmental responsibilities. With only a small number of
exceptions, his opinions have narrowly construed the authority of EPA and favored polluting industries
over environmental interests. A few examples will suffice. Kavanaugh voted to strike down EPA’s Clean Air
Interstate Rule, which regulates cross-state air pollution from power plants, only to be reversed by the U.S.
Supreme Court — with conservative Justices Kennedy and Roberts joining the Court’s majority opinion. To his credit, Kavanaugh
appears to accept the scientifically supported connection between human-generated greenhouse gas emissions and climate
change. Nonetheless, he has refused to recognize EPA’s legal authority to address this grave, ever-
growing, and paramount environmental problem. Thus, Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion in a 2017
decision that struck down EPA’s regulation of hydroflourocarbons, a powerful greenhouse gas, and he expressed
skepticism regarding EPA’s efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions during oral arguments in a 2016 challenge to the agency’s Clean Power
Plan. He dissented from an opinion that upheld EPA’s decision to veto a state-proposed permit for an immense, environmentally damaging new
strip mine in West Virginia. And all that was long after the Supreme Court ruled that it was EPA’s obligation to regulate greenhouse gas
emissions. Kavanaugh’s past record in environmental cases presents a true contrast with the views of
Anthony Kennedy, the Associate Justice whose seat he would fill. While far from the most environmentally friendly justice on the Court,
Kennedy authored or signed onto opinions that reflected a sensitivity to the practical importance of vigorous environmental regulation — a
recognition that is substantially absent from Kavanaugh’s D.C. Circuit writings. Instead, Kavanaugh’s environmental opinions are more in line
with those of the late Justice Antonin Scalia and the justices who comprise the current “conservative wing” of the Supreme Court. Like Scalia,
Kavanaugh claims to adhere to a “textualist” approach to statutory analysis — the view that it is rarely necessary to look beyond the “plain
meaning” of the language of statutes and the Constitution. But as with Scalia and other textualists, the “plain meaning” seems always to agree
with Kavanaugh’s pro-industry slant. Kavanaugh also strongly favors a narrow cost-benefit analysis of new regulations — insisting that the
monetized benefits of a rule exceed the costs. The problem, of course, is that some
benefits — saving a few hundred lives, preventing
thousands of asthma attacks, and so on — aren’t so readily given to green eyeshade analysis, and they start with
the presumption that polluting industries have a right to impose all manner of health burdens on the
rest of us. Moreover, Kavanaugh has taken a narrow view of the doctrine of “standing to sue” — the
eligibility of parties to bring lawsuits to enforce environmental laws — an interpretation that tends to preclude public
interest organizations from using the courts to protect our health and the environment. Justices sometimes evolve during long judicial careers,
and predicting how any judge will vote on particular cases is a somewhat speculative enterprise. Nonetheless, at least to the extent that Judge
Kavanaugh’s prior record in environmental cases provides a guide, he appears likely to join with four other justices to
form a Supreme Court majority that takes a dim and narrow view of regulations designed to protect our
air, water and land, and all who breathe, drink, and tread the earth.
2AC - Kavanaugh Bad (Precedent)
Confirming Kavanaugh sets a harmful precedent
Brown 7/25/18 (Eleanor, professor of law and international affairs and a senior scientist
at the Rock Ethics Institute at The Pennsylvania State University, “Elite law professors
are brushing politics aside to support fellow elite Brett Kavanaugh. That’s inexcusable in
the Trump era”, Vox, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/7/25/17609844/brett-kavanaugh-
confirmation-yale-law-school-elites-supreme-court-amar, KC)
As someone from the “Third World,” I fear that legal elites are taking their country’s institutions for
granted. They see a colleague who is perhaps also a friend, with credentials very much like theirs, being
nominated for the highest court in the land, and they quite understandably want to applaud.
In less politically precarious times, we might debate whether Kavanaugh’s impressive resume should
earn him a “yes” vote, even from Democratic senators. But if anyone should realize that extraordinary
“constitutional politics” are required in these abnormal times, it is the legal elites who are now writing in
support of Kavanaugh.
As Jed Shugerman of Fordham Law School has noted, “no president [with] concrete and credible
evidence of high crimes has ever appointed a Justice to the Supreme Court.” We need to be having a
robust conversation about what it means that this is precisely what may be happening now.
And this is not a conversation for the pages of an obscure law review. Other law professors need to ask
this question persistently and loudly in the public domain. It is the minimum that legal elites owe to
their fellow citizens.
If legal elites fail to do so, they will be following a global practice where elites act to protect each other,
creating tremendous risk not only for legal institutions, but also for non-elites. And non-elites are much
more likely to need the law’s protection than are most graduates of Ivy League law schools.
2AC – Kavanaugh Bad (Generic)
Kavanaugh hinders congressional regulations

McGarity 18 – Thomas McGarity is a leading scholar in the fields of administrative law and environmental law at The University of
Texas at Austin School of Law (“Judge Kavanaugh’s Deregulatory Agenda”, The American Prospect, 7/25/18, http://prospect.org/article/judge-
kavanaugh%E2%80%99s-deregulatory-agenda) //KZ
With Kavanaugh's confirmation, it became nearly impossible for Congress to put into place programs
designed to protect the weak and vulnerable from irresponsible businesses. Most of us take for granted the
federal regulations that make our air cleaner, our drinking water purer, our food, highways, and
workplaces safer, and our economic transactions less vulnerable to fraud and abuse. And few of us realize the
extent to which those protections are subject to reversal by federal courts applying legal principles
prescribed by the Supreme Court. If confirmed to the Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh would be a fervent
vote against even well-established forms of regulation. A telling example of Kavanaugh’s ideological
aversion to even minimal government regulation is his dissent in a case in which the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA) fined SeaWorld of Florida following a tragic incident at its Orlando facility in which a killer
whale named Tilikum pulled a trainer off a platform and held her underwater until she drowned. A panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in
an opinion written by Judge Merrick Garland, upheld OSHA’s conclusions that training killer whales was a recognized occupational hazard and
that there were feasible ways to reduce that hazard. Tilikum had previously killed another trainer. The hazard could be substantially reduced by
requiring trainers to keep a greater distance from the whales or providing a clear plastic barrier that would allow them to guide the movements
of whales without risking attacks. The Court therefore upheld OSHA’s modest $7,000 penalty. Kavanaugh’s dissent did not focus
on the facts. Instead, he attacked the proposition that Congress meant to empower OSHA to regulate
the professional sports and entertainment industries. In his mind, the real questions before the court
were when “should we as a society paternalistically decide that the participants in ... sports and
entertainment activities must be protected from themselves” and, more important, “who decides that
the risk to participants is too high?” Kavanaugh argued that the participants in those activities were well aware of the risks and
elected to participate anyway, and he suggested that government efforts to make those activities safer would
cause employers to abandon them altogether. This is the same argument that employers raised in the
early 20th century when progressive state governments wanted to protect workers from the frightful
hazards of industrial workplaces. A Supreme Court committed to a limited government ideology
overturned many protective Progressive Era laws, and the carnage in the workplace continued until the
Court rejected that ideology during the New Deal and Congress created OSHA in 1970. Kavanaugh’s beef was with the very
fact of a powerful OSHA, and he hoped to limit its power by creating an exception for the sports and entertainment industries.
2AC – Roe Turn
Kavanaugh’s past decisions prove he’ll overturn Roe v. Wade – that harms women’s
abortion rights and causes violence against the most vulnerable women in society
NWLC 7/18 – Non-profit organization that advocates for women's rights through litigation and policy
initiatives (National Women's Law Center, “Judge Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Nomination Puts Roe v.
Wade and Access to Abortion At Serious Risk”, https://nwlc.org/resources/judge-kavanaughs-supreme-
court-nomination-puts-roe-v-wade-and-access-to-abortion-at-serious-risk/, July 18, 2018)//CProst
On July 9, 2018, President Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill Justice Kennedy’s seat on the United States Supreme Court.
President Trump has repeatedly promised to only nominate justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade. The
record
of Judge Kavanaugh shows extreme hostility to abortion. His confirmation to the Supreme Court would
mean that the balance of the Court would turn against the constitutional right to abortion and access
to abortion. Kavanaugh’s Anti-Abortion Record In 2017, Judge Kavanaugh issued an order allowing the Trump
Administration to continue blocking a young immigrant woman from obtaining an abortion. When the full
court overturned his order, Kavanaugh dissented, saying the majority had “badly erred.” He distorted existing
Supreme Court precedent in order to justify forcing a woman to remain pregnant against her will, and his
opinion showed disdain for a woman’s decision-making ability and a lack of concern for the hurdles placed in
the path of those seeking an abortion. Kavanaugh accused the majority of creating a new right to “immediate abortion on demand,” a phrase
that has long been a rallying cry for anti-abortion extremists. This decision was Kavanaugh’s audition for the Supreme Court. Shortly after this
decision, Kavanaugh’s name appeared on President Trump’s short list of potential Supreme Court nominees. The Supreme Court Could Review
a Challenge to Roe in the Near Future There are a number of abortion-related cases in the pipeline to the Supreme Court, and this is no
accident. It is part of a deliberate strategy by anti-abortion extremists to bring a case to a newly constituted Supreme Court. As a result, the
Supreme Court could have the opportunity to rule on abortion again as early as next term. The types of cases
most likely to make their way to the Supreme Court generally fall into three categories: Bans on abortion at a particular point in
pregnancy: States have passed laws banning abortion at various points in pregnancy, including bans on abortion starting at 6 weeks of
pregnancy, before most women even know they are pregnant. A case challenging Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion is currently before a
federal district court. Bans on a particular method of abortion: States are trying to restrict a common method of second-
trimester abortion. Challenges to method bans passed in Texas, Arkansas, and Alabama are currently pending in the 5th, 8th, and 11th Circuit
Courts of Appeals. Medically unnecessary and burdensome restrictions on abortion providers: States continue to
pass restrictions on abortion providers in an effort to shut them down, despite the Court’s 2016 Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt decision
holding such restrictions unconstitutional. A case challenging an Arkansas law that would force two of the three clinics in the state to stop
providing abortion and effectively ban medication abortion is currently working its way through the courts. Overturning
or Gutting
Roe Would be Devastating to Women’s Health, Lives, and Futures If Judge Kavanaugh were to join the
Supreme Court, he would turn the balance of the Court against a woman’s constitutional right to
abortion. If Roe were overturned, at least 20 states are poised to seek immediately to ban abortion. An
anti-abortion Congress and President could also ban abortion nationwide. Even if Roe were not
overturned, the Court with Kavanaugh as a Justice could vote to severely undermine its protections.
Allowing more abortion restrictions would create harmful barriers that delay access and increase both
the direct and indirect costs of abortion, including travel costs. For some women, these hurdles would act as a
complete obstacle, and they will be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. Women of color, young people, and
individuals in the LGBTQ community already face a host of barriers to getting health care and are
disproportionately affected by restrictions on access to abortion. Further restrictions on access to
abortion, and especially overturning Roe, will harm them the most. Judge Kavanaugh presents a dire
threat to Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion, and his nomination jeopardizes the
health, lives, equality, and dignity of individuals across the country.
1AR – Will Overturn
Kavanaugh will overturn or gut Roe – his decision on Garza v. Hargan proves
Stern 7/9 – Staff writer on courts and the law at Slate (Mark Joseph, “How Brett Kavanaugh Will Gut
Roe v. Wade”, Slate, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/how-brett-kavanaugh-will-gut-roe-v-
wade.html, July 9, 2018)//CProst
Kavanaugh is an obvious choice for Trump. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, he has maintained
staunchly conservative credentials without earning a reputation for being a bomb-thrower. Unless Republican Sen. Susan Collins grows a spine,
which she won’t, he has a clear path to Senate confirmation. During his hearings, Kavanaugh will
claim he cannot reveal his
true feelings about Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to
abortion access. But there is little doubt that Kavanaugh will gut Roe at the first opportunity. Indeed, he has
already provided a road map that shows precisely how he’ll do it. Kavanaugh was forced to confront the abortion question
in 2017 after the Trump administration barred an undocumented minor, known as Jane Doe, from
terminating an unwanted pregnancy. The American Civil Liberties Union sued on Doe’s behalf, and the dispute came before a
three-judge panel at the D.C. Circuit. Kavanaugh was joined on the panel by Judge Karen L. Henderson, an arch-conservative, and Judge Patricia
Millett, a moderate liberal. Doe, who was being held in a federally funded Texas shelter, had already obtained the necessary judicial bypass to
get an abortion. But the
Trump administration refused to let her see an abortion provider, instead sending her
to an anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy center.” The ACLU argued that the Trump administration was
violating Doe’s constitutional rights. Under current Supreme Court precedent, the government may not place an “undue burden”
on a woman’s access to abortion. And by preventing Doe from seeing an abortion provider, the ACLU asserted, the government had created
such an undue burden. The Trump administration, by contrast, alleged that it had not substantially burdened Doe’s right to an abortion,
because if she really wanted one she could just return to her home country. (In fact, abortion is outlawed in Doe’s country of origin.) The
government also asserted that Doe had the option of finding a sponsor in the U.S. who would be willing to house her and permit her to
terminate her pregnancy. Hours after hearing the case, the court issued a two-page order that reflected the views of
Kavanaugh alone. Millett would’ve ruled that Doe could receive an abortion immediately; Henderson would’ve held that, because she
entered the U.S. illegally, Doe has no constitutional rights at all. Kavanaugh, by contrast, struck what he clearly thought to be a middle
ground. First, he noted that all parties agreed that Roe v. Wade applies to undocumented minors. Second, he
gave the government nearly two weeks to find a sponsor for Doe, removing her from federal custody
and transferring responsibility to somebody else. If no sponsor could be found, then the parties could return to
court and argue the case all over again, with no assurance that Doe could get her abortion. By that point, Doe would be
about 18 weeks pregnant. Texas bans abortion after 20 weeks, and the procedure becomes more dangerous as the pregnancy advances.
Moreover, the process of finding and verifying a sponsor for an undocumented minor frequently takes
weeks or months. And Doe’s lawyers had already searched for a possible sponsor, to no avail. Kavanaugh’s ostensible
compromise, then, was nothing of the sort. At best, it would force Doe to suffer through her unwanted pregnancy for at least two
more weeks, increasing the odds of complications when she was finally able to obtain an abortion. At worst, it meant the government
could run down the clock to the point that an abortion would become illegal. Luckily for Doe, the full D.C. Circuit
swiftly reversed Kavanaugh’s decision and allowed her to terminate her pregnancy, which she did. This move prompted Kavanaugh to write
a bitter dissent explaining why the government’s bar on Doe’s abortion was not, in fact, an undue burden.
Kavanaugh began by accepting the Trump administration’s Orwellian argument that, by allowing Doe to
visit an abortion provider, the government itself was “facilitating” her abortion. He then explained, with maximum
condescension, why the Trump administration had a good reason for wanting to place Doe with a sponsor instead of allowing her to terminate
her pregnancy: The minor is alone and without family or friends. She is in a U.S. Government detention facility in a country that, for her, is
foreign. She is 17 years old. She is pregnant and has to make a major life decision. Is it really absurd for the United States to think that the
minor should be transferred to her immigration sponsor—ordinarily a family member, relative, or friend—before she makes that decision? And
keep in mind that the Government is not forcing the minor to talk to the sponsor about the decision, or to obtain consent. It is merely seeking
to place the minor in a better place when deciding whether to have an abortion. Kavanaugh believed that Doe was not mature enough to
decide on her own that she wanted an abortion. Rather, she needed the sage counsel of a family member to help her make “a major life
decision”—even though she was already so determined to make that decision that she sued the government so she could follow through with
it. In
an irate conclusion, Kavanaugh condemned his colleagues for declaring that “unlawful immigrant
minors have a right to immediate abortion on demand.” He insisted that the government should be allowed to “help
minors navigate what is undeniably a difficult situation by expeditiously transferring them to their sponsors.” By ruling for Doe, the court had
deviated from precedent “holding that the Government has permissible interests in favoring fetal life, protecting the best interests of a minor,
and refraining from facilitating abortion.” It
is laughable to pretend that the Trump administration wished to “help”
Doe “navigate” the abortion decision when it simply imposed a flat ban on her ability to terminate her
pregnancy. But it is even more absurd to claim that this ban was not an “undue burden” under Supreme Court precedent. The two
options the Trump administration presented to Doe—self-deport or find a sponsor in record time—were not real choices. They
were window dressing to conceal the obvious fact that the government was prohibiting Doe from
exercising her right to choose. Kavanaugh is far too intelligent to believe that the administration had
actually complied with Roe and other pro-choice precedent. Yet he played along with the government’s
ruse, asserting that the administration was helping Doe “navigate” her decision. And that is how the
Supreme Court will, in all probability, kill off Roe. A conservative state will pass a draconian anti-abortion
restriction—one that shutters all abortion clinics, perhaps, or outlaws abortion after a fetal “heartbeat” is detected. With
Kavanaugh providing the decisive fifth vote, the court will rule that the state law does not pose an
“undue burden” to abortion access; after all, the government has an interest in “favoring fetal life,” and
women who truly want an abortion can go to another state. The majority may not admit what it is doing. But in practice,
it will be overturning Roe. Kavanaugh is the ideal candidate to cast that fifth vote and even write the
opinion. He has already proved that he can pretend to adhere to Roe while hollowing out its core
holding. He has revealed a striking aptitude for intellectual dishonesty, pretending to follow precedent
while enshrining anti-abortion dogma into law. His disingenuousness will be an asset on the Supreme
Court. And within a few years, the United States will be a country of Jane Does.
Even if he doesn’t overturn Roe, he’ll severely restrict abortion – support of

Rehnquist’s dissent proves
Lithwick & Shugerman 7/18 – Dahlia Lithwick is a staff writer on courts and the law at Slate, Jed
Shugerman is a Professor of Law at Fordham University and the author of The People's Courts
(“Kavanaugh Already Has One of the Clearest Records Against Roe of Any Recent Supreme Court
Nominee”, Slate, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/brett-kavanaugh-has-a-clear-record-
against-roe-v-wade.html, July 18, 2018)//CProst
Ahead of those hearings, senators should be analyzing that record candidly as they prepare their questions. This is particularly true on
the
question of abortion rights, an area in which Kavanaugh has the potential to dismantle current precedent in
a way that would reshape how women experience health care in this country. While Kavanaugh has not
ever publicly said, “I will overturn Roe,” his record transparently sends this message: 1) In September,
Kavanaugh spoke approvingly of Justice William Rehnquist’s Roe dissent. Further, Kavanaugh’s opinion
this year about a detained noncitizen seeking an abortion actually raises more questions both about his
views on Roe and potentially about how he might treat the rights of families detained at the border facing
separation; 2) his speech opens up these fair questions about his specific views on Roe and an expectation for
candid answers in the nomination hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee; and 3) some of his major decisions indicate that
he is not deferential to precedents even more settled than Roe. While it’s amply clear that abortion can be
made unavailable to most women without expressly overturning Roe explicitly, Kavanaugh has now
given significant hints of his willingness to do the bolder thing. That is worthy of serious scrutiny in the weeks to come.
First, let’s review what Kavanaugh said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in September to set the context. It was during a
tribute to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whom Kavanaugh described in fawning terms as his “first judicial
hero,” that he said this: [I]n case after case after case during law school, I noticed something. After I read the assigned reading, I would
constantly make notes to myself: agree with Rehnquist majority opinion. Agree with Rehnquist dissent.
Agree with Rehnquist analysis. Rehnquist makes a good point here. Rehnquist destroys the majority’s reasoning here.
Kavanaugh then highlighted five specific aspects of Rehnquist’s legacy. The fourth was “the court’s power to recognize
unenumerated rights,” which led to a discussion of Roe and abortion rights: Rehnquist’s dissenting opinion did not
suggest that the Constitution protected no rights other than those enumerated in the text of the Bill of Rights. But he stated that under the
Court’s precedents, any such unenumerated right had to be rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people. Given the prevalence of
abortion regulations both historically and at the time, Rehnquist said he could not reach such a conclusion about abortion. He explained
that a law prohibiting an abortion, even where the mother’s life was in jeopardy, would violate the Constitution. But otherwise he stated the
states had the power to legislate with regard to this matter. … [I]t is fair to say that Justice Rehnquist was not successful
in convincing a majority of the justices in the context of abortion either in Roe itself or in the later cases such as Casey, but in the latter case
perhaps because of stare decisis. But he
was successful in stemming the general tide of freewheeling judicial
creation of unenumerated rights that were not rooted in the nation’s history and tradition. The Glucksberg case [his 5–4 majority
opinion rejecting a due process right to die] stands to this day as an important precedent, limiting the court’s role in the realm of social policy
and helping to ensure that the court operates more as a court of law and less as an institution of social policy. Does Kavanaugh say explicitly, “I
agree with Rehnquist’s Roe dissent”? Not in those precise words, but everyone in
the room understood what Kavanaugh
was signing on to. He was embracing Rehnquist’s Roe dissent and its doctrinal foundations. In so doing,
he is raising doubts about substantive due process and a general constitutional right to privacy.
1AR – Overturning Roe Bad
Overturning Roe restricts abortion and demeans women, causing death,
imprisonment, and suffering
Valenti 6/30 – Guardian US columnist, the author of multiple books on feminism, politics and culture,
and founder of Feministing.com (Jessica, “Here's what America would look like if Roe v Wade were
overturned”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/30/roe-v-wade-
anthony-kennedy-retiring-abortion, June 30, 2018)//CProst
There’s enough news this week to break your heart, and all of it is important – but in the interest of brevity, I’ll choose one thing. Roe
v
Wade is in absolute danger of being overturned, thanks to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. The right is
planning on it, and we have to move forward knowing the consequences should such a horror happen. If
the supreme court overturns the decision, nearly half the states in the country will outlaw abortion –
maybe more. Women will die from illegal abortions – as they did before – and most of those women
will the poorest, youngest, and most vulnerable among us. (As has been pointed out for years: a “pro-life” world
has a lot of dead women in it.) Women will be imprisoned for trying to end their pregnancies. Doctors
and nurses will be, too. The tangible and troubling effects will be immediate. And then there’s the simple
message the decision will send to women: you don’t matter. You don’t get a choice about what happens
to your body, your family, or your future. You will be forced to be pregnant, whether you like it or not.
This is not the future I want for my daughter – and it’s not the present I want for myself or any woman. Now is the time to plan, and
to fight.
1AR – Privacy Impact
Overturning Roe would wreck the right to privacy, causing negative ripple effects for
personal autonomy
NWLC 13 – Non-profit organization that advocates for women's rights through litigation and policy
initiatives (National Women’s Law Center, “Even More Than Abortion: The Constitutional Importance of
Roe v. Wade and the Right to Privacy”, https://nwlc.org/resources/even-more-abortion-constitutional-
importance-roe-v-wade-and-right-privacy/, January 18, 2013)//CProst
Roe did far more than establish the right to abortion; it solidified and expanded the constitutional “right
to privacy,” which has also been described as the right to autonomy or to be let alone. This right to privacy is part
of the right to liberty protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which state that no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty
or property, without due process of law.” The Constitution’s protection of liberty and privacy underlies the Supreme Court’s
recognition of fundamental rights related to contraception and procreation, marriage, family relations, child
rearing, and intimacy. Although the Supreme Court’s recognition of the right to privacy predates Roe, Roe is an important
affirmation of and foundation for a broad array of privacy rights. While not exclusively dependent on Roe, Roe
influenced privacy principles in each of these areas—principles that could be undermined if the Supreme
Court overturned Roe. The Right to Obtain Contraception and the Right to Procreate: Roe reaffirmed prior
decisions protecting individuals’ rights to obtain contraception and to decide whether to bear a child. Subsequent cases upholding the
right to obtain and use contraception, in turn, rely on Roe. For example, a 1977 Supreme Court case ruled it
unconstitutional to prohibit distribution of nonprescription contraceptives to adults by anyone other
than a pharmacist and to impose a blanket prohibition on sales or distribution of contraceptives to individuals under 16. The case
explicitly relied on Roe for its central holding that “the Constitution protects individual decisions in matters of
childbearing from unjustified intrusion by the State.” The Right to Marry: Loving v. Virginia acknowledged the constitutional right to
marry, and Roe affirmed that it is among the fundamental liberties protected by the right to privacy .
Subsequent cases protecting the right to marry have relied on Roe. For example, a 1978 Supreme Court decision upheld the
right of single parents obligated to pay child support to marry without first obtaining the permission of a judge and
based this conclusion in part on Roe. The Right to Maintain Family Relationships: The umbrella of privacy also protects family
relationships. For example, the Supreme Court relied on Roe to hold that the state cannot interfere in the realm
of family life by preventing close relatives from living together. As the Supreme Court put it, the challenged zoning
regulation, which banned a grandmother from living with her grandson, “slic[ed] deeply into the family itself . . . by select[ing] certain
categories of relatives who may live together and declar[ing] that others may not.” The Supreme Court went on to say that courts used Roe to
“consistently acknowledge[] a ‘private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.’” The
Right to Make Decisions About
How to Rear One’s Children: Yet another privacy right is the parents’ right to raise their children
according to their preferences, subject to certain limits (such as compulsory school attendance, mandatory vaccinations, or
laws criminalizing parental neglect). The Supreme Court has relied on Roe as important support for the proposition that “[a] person’s decision
whether to bear a child and a parent’s decision concerning the manner in which his child is to be educated may fairly be characterized as
exercises of familial rights and responsibilities” and thus protected by the Constitution. While these rights related to parental decision-making
were recognized before Roe, Roe relied on and strengthened the underlying principle—that parenting is best
when free from unwarranted government intrusion. The Right to Intimacy: Another privacy right profoundly
influenced by Roe is the right to form intimate relationships and the concomitant right for adults to engage in
consensual sexual relations in private. This right was first recognized in a 2003 decision striking down laws that
criminalized same-sex intimate activity. The case proclaimed that “Roe recognized the right of a woman to make certain
fundamental decisions affecting her destiny and confirmed once more that the protection of liberty under the Due
Process Clause has a substantive dimension of fundamental significance in defining the rights of the person,” such as autonomy in
decision-making about intimate relationships. Were Roe ever to be overturned, it could have ripple
effects beyond the right to an abortion. As privacy cases have recognized, “our laws and tradition afford constitutional
protection to personal decisions relating,” among other things, “to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing” and
intimacy. The
right to privacy, strengthened by Roe, supports each of these areas. Overturning Roe could
thus potentially erode the ability of individuals to make highly personal decisions free from intrusive
government regulations and harm the overall right to privacy.
AT: Chevron Impact
Kavanaugh won’t overturn Chevron – he applies it whenever possible
Reilly 7/10 – Reporter for E&E News who covers the Supreme Court, federal appellate courts and legal
issues for their Greenwire subsidy (Amanda, “Would Kavanaugh limit the Chevron doctrine?”, E&E
News, https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060088675, July 10, 2018)//CProst
Unlike Justice Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh hasn't called the Chevron doctrine entirely into
question or questioned whether the law world would be better without it. But he could side with other
conservatives on the court in limiting its application. According to Chevron, courts defer to reasonable agency
interpretations when Congress has been silent or ambiguous on a topic. It's a key doctrine in
administrative law and one that's often invoked in environmental cases. From his 12-year record on the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a review of his speeches and law articles over the last several years, Kavanaugh appears
mostly concerned with the first step of the Chevron test — discerning whether a statute is ambiguous. He
has also embraced a Supreme Court doctrine that calls for not applying Chevron to major agency rules. "I would expect him to
approach Chevron the way the chief justice does, which is to try and cabin its scope, so that agencies get deference
in a smaller category of cases, and only when there is no doubt Congress expressly intended to leave the matter to the agency's
discretion," said Jody Freeman, a law professor at Harvard Law School and a former climate adviser to President Obama. The Chevron doctrine,
which is named for a 1984 Supreme Court case, played a big role in the confirmation battle for Gorsuch, who wrote a scathing concurring
opinion slamming the doctrine shortly before he was nominated for the high court. Senators focused several questions on the doctrine during
Gorsuch's multiday hearing. While Chevron
is unlikely to make front-page news during the Kavanaugh
confirmation process, the debate over the future of the doctrine remains strong, particularly in conservative legal circles. During his
short time on the court, Gorsuch has written a handful of statements calling for limiting the doctrine. Shortly before announcing his retirement
in late June, Justice Anthony Kennedy, long the moderate of the court, expressed his own doubts (Greenwire, June 21). Kavanaugh, who
formerly clerked for Kennedy, would likely be similar to the retiring justice but "maybe a bit more muscular in language in
limiting Chevron," said Kent Barnett, a law professor at the University of Georgia who has studied the doctrine's application in the courts. "The
direction the court is likely to go is not overrule Chevron, but be really, really careful about where Congress would want
Chevron to apply," Barnett said. In his time in the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh often found that agencies don't have the authority to issue
regulations under the law, particularly in the context of the Clean Air Act. Kavanaugh wrote opinions and dissents rebuffing several of the
Obama administration's emissions regulations (E&E Daily, July 10). "Judge Kavanaugh's record suggests that he has no hesitation deciding when
agencies are out of bounds and don't deserve deference," Freeman said. When it comes to Chevron, Kavanaugh believes that it's a problem
that there's no "definitive guide" for determining whether a law is ambiguous. "Many judges do this, but sometimes he
avoids reaching
any Chevron question because he finds that the law is clear," said Lisa Heinzerling, a professor at Georgetown Law and a
former Obama EPA official. "He has a pretty pronounced tendency to find the law clear in cases where he's rejecting what the agency did."
Kavanaugh laid out his concerns in a 2017 speech at the University of Notre Dame. "How
do courts know when a statute is
clear or ambiguous?" he asked. "Quite simply, there is no good or predictable way for judges to do this," he said. "Judges go back and
forth. One judge will say it is clear. Another judge will say, 'No, it's ambiguous.' Neither judge can convince the other. Why not? The answer is
that there is no right answer." The issue has significant practical consequences, namely that "different judges will reach different
results," he said in a separate 2016 speech at George Mason University. 'Major questions' On the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh has also taken to
heart the Supreme Court's so-called major questions doctrine, which states that Chevron should not be applied to rules that are economically,
politically or socially significant. Notably, the late Justice Antonin Scalia invoked that doctrine in the Supreme Court's 2014 decision throwing
out portions of a rule requiring stationary facilities to obtain air permits for emissions of greenhouse gases. During marathon September 2016
arguments over the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration's rule for cutting carbon dioxide from existing power plants, Kavanaugh
focused several questions on whether the rule was transformative enough to warrant the special standard of review. He said then that
"Congress should be making the big policy decisions" or clearly delegate them to federal agencies in laws. Harvard's Freeman said that view
"leaves less room for agencies to adapt old laws to new public health and environmental challenges by interpreting their statutes flexibly."
Kavanaugh refined his views on the doctrine in a 2017 dissent to the D.C. Circuit ruling that upheld the Obama administration's net neutrality
rule, which he called "one of the most consequential regulations ever issued by an executive or independent agency in the history of the United
States." He wrote that the Supreme Court had required "clear congressional authorization" for major agency rules. "The major rules doctrine
helps preserve the separation of powers and operates as a vital check on expansive and aggressive assertions of executive authority,"
Kavanaugh wrote. "He's come down pretty firmly on the side of saying an agency can't issue a major rule without clear congressional
authorization," Heinzerling said. "It would be a big deal if that rule had gotten embraced." 'Consistent in applying Chevron' According to new
research exploring the doctrine's political dynamics, Kavanaugh is "pretty neutral" about how he applies Chevron,
Barnett said. In a forthcoming article in the Vanderbilt Law Review, Barnett and other law professors found that Kavanaugh
generally
applies the doctrine the same way regardless of whether the outcome could be deemed liberal versus
conservative. "He's pretty close to the middle," Barnett said. "He's consistent in applying Chevron." Dan Farber, a law
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that while Kavanaugh has "rarely been on the environmental side of a case," he goes
"out of his way to express appreciation for the goals EPA is trying to pursue." For example, in his
majority opinion striking down
the Obama administration's effort to phase out hydrofluourocarbons, which are potent greenhouse
gases, Kavanaugh wrote that the court respected the effort to order the replacement of substances found to contribute to climate
change in the absence of congressional action on the issue. But, he wrote, "however much we might sympathize or agree
with EPA's policy objectives, EPA may act only within the boundaries of its statutory authority. Here, EPA
exceeded that authority." Farber said: "He does seem to understand that agencies have a fair amount of discretion within what he
thinks are statutory bounds." At a 2017 lecture at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Kavanaugh dismissed the idea that the debate over
statutory interpretation is "all politics" and "inherently complex." "In
my view, it is a mistake to think that this current
mess in statutory interpretation is somehow the natural and unalterable order of things," he said. "Put simply,
we can do better in the realm of statutory interpretation. And for the sake of the neutral and impartial rule of law, we must do better."
Farm Bill DA
Neg – National Security
Farm bill passage is an issue of national security

Noem 7/20/18
(Kirsti Noem, house representative from South Dakota, July 20th press release,
https://noem.house.gov/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=28F66399-FDDE-42C7-89E3-
503A694409DE, Date Accessed: 7/25/18, //EY)
The Farm Bill, however, is just one aspect of agriculture policy that we're closely monitoring. For years,
China has exploited the American people, and they need to be held accountable for that. But in recent
months, farmers and ranchers have been forced to bear the burden of retaliatory tariffs. It's been a
tough few years for agriculture. Between a drought, hail, and low prices, net farm income has been cut
in half the last four years. The Farm Bill was designed to provide a safety net for our food supply during
stretches like this. In 2014, we approved a five-year Farm Bill, which offered strong crop insurance and
livestock disaster programs for producers. That legislation is now up for renewal, which we're making
steady progress on. The House's updated Farm Bill incorporates reforms I helped write to strengthen
commodity programs. It also increases CRP acreage, updates the wetland determination process, and
strengthens dairy policy. I've detailed many of these changes at noem.house.gov/FarmBill. Because the
Senate passed a separate version, we're in the process of merging the two documents into a final
proposal, and I'm hopeful we'll be able to wrap up negotiations quickly. In July, I invited Scott
VanderWal, a Volga-area farmer and president of the South Dakota Farm Bureau, to testify before
Congress about the impact of China's trade and tariff threats. "We understand other countries,
particularly China, have not played fairly, and we respect President Trump's desire to remedy those
situations," VanderWal said. "The problem is, those countries know just where to punch us back in a
dispute by targeting our agriculture products. Through no fault of our own, and unintentionally, our
industry ends up being used for leverage." I share these concerns and have personally expressed them
to top administration officials and President Trump himself. In addition to phone calls and meetings, I
wrote to President Trump this spring, warning that "All our hard-won gains in Farm Country are at
serious risk of being wiped away because China is threatening retaliation against American farmers."
Especially given the national security risks that would come if another country controls our food
supply, the administration must help provide a strong safety net for America's producers in the face of
China's retaliatory actions. Along with Senators Rounds and Thune, I urged President Trump in July to
make U.S. agriculture exports a priority with our trading partners around the world and explained how
recent market uncertainty has already cost South Dakota producers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Farmers and ranchers simply can't afford to be further entangled in global trade disputes. While there
were more than 200 rural congressional districts 50 years ago, just over 30 remain. There's no doubt
that creates a disconnect in Congress. So few understand that most producers take a loan out each year,
bury that money in the ground in the form of seed and fertilizer, and hope – not only for a good yield –
but for the right market conditions at the right time. It's a tough business.
2nc – at: recess thumper
House committee members will work during the recess to finish the Farm Bill
Ferguson 7/18 Ellyn Ferguson – appropriations, agriculture, nutrition and food safety journalist for CQ
“House Set to Start Farm Bill Talks With Senate Before Recess” Jul 17, 2018
(https://www.rollcall.com/news/policy/house-farm-bill-author-urges-support-snap-work-requirements)
//wc
The Senate is likely to respond to the motion early next week with a vote to go to conference with the
House and the naming of conferees, Conaway and Peterson said in separate interviews. The vote on the motion would be to reject Senate
changes to the House bill and request negotiations to develop a compromise bill. The goal is to produce a final bill that sets policies for farm,
conservation, crop insurance, rural development and other programs before the current farm law expires Sept. 30. Peterson said Tuesday
night he will get a motion to instruct conferees and will propose that House negotiators insist that the final farm bill authorize mandatory funding for an animal
vaccine bank and for long-term research into fever ticks, avian influenza and other diseases. Peterson
and Conaway said they will work
with their Senate counterparts, Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas and ranking Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan over the
House’s August recess with conference calls and with staff from both committees working through
details. The two House committee leaders said it is possible there could be a public session of the full
conference committee next week before recess starts.
UQ – No Pass
The Bill won’t pass – food stamps disputes forecloses any chance for reconciliation
Dandes 7/23
(Rick, contributor to the Daily Item, “Food stamps at center of Farm Bill debate”,
http://www.dailyitem.com/news/local_news/food-stamps-at-center-of-farm-bill-
debate/article_febd369e-66c1-523e-88f3-f51add8c80b2.html, Date Accessed: 7/23/18, //EY)
A showdown looms in the U.S. House of Representatives after the Senate passed a bill that makes
modest modifications to existing farm programs while largely avoiding changes to food stamps. The bill
passed 86-11 on Thursday. The legislation renews farm programs such as crop insurance and land
conservation. Farm programs are set to expire Sept. 30 unless Congress acts. Work on the legislation
comes at a time when farmers are facing low prices and a potential trade war that could depress
commodities prices further. "The Senate passage of the 2018 Farm Bill is a win for Pennsylvania
farmers, families and rural communities," said U.S. Senator Bob Casey, of Pennsylvania. "I'm pleased
that the Senate Farm Bill includes measures I have pioneered that work to improve our conservation
efforts and also to make sure our Seniors are taken care of. This is a strong bipartisan start and I look
forward to passage in the House of Representatives and ultimately reauthorization." Bipartisan perhaps,
but Casey's Senate Pennsylvania colleague, Pat Toomey, a Republican, said, “This Farm Bill is another
wasted opportunity to rein in excessive spending and end corporate welfare. It fails to reform, even
modestly, any of the numerous taxpayer subsidies for agriculture products. It also fails to include a
reasonable work requirement for adult, able-bodied food stamp recipients with no dependents, he said.
GOP aides said the farm bill is expected to go to conference, where Senate and House leadership will try
to reconcile their differences. On the food stamp front, the two sides are likely to clash. The House bill
tightens work requirements for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Currently,
able-bodied adults ages 18-49 without children are required to work 20 hours a week to maintain their
benefits. The bill raises the top age of recipients subject to work requirements from 49 to 59 and
requires parents with children older than 6 to work or participate in job training. Government auditors
estimate that in 10 years, the SNAP caseload would shrink by about 1.2 million people in an average
month if the bill becomes law. The Senate version aims to reduce fraud in SNAP, but doesn't cut funding
from the program, which helps feed more than 40 million people across the United States. The Central
Pennsylvania Food Bank applauded the Senate's version of the bill. "Not only does this Farm Bill
maintain eligibility and benefit levels for SNAP recipients," said Central Bank spokeswoman Erin Smith
Wachter, "but it also increases funding for the emergency food assistance program, contains a newly
established Farm to Food Bank program — modeled after PASS, Pennsylvania’s Ag Surplus System
Program — as well as a new Milk Donation Program to encourage the donation of milk to low-income
individuals. We are committed and eager to work with Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to
advance conference legislation that strengthens federal food-assistance programs and supports
agriculture."
AT: Will Pass Now
Non-unique – differences over SNAP creates a legislative impasse during reconciliation

Kilgore 6/28/18
(Ed, Contributor for the NYM, “ Senate Clears Farm Bill, Setting Up Fight With House GOP Over SNAP”,
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/senate-clears-farm-bill-setting-up-snap-fight-with-
house.html, Date Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
It’s an old story by now. The GOP-controlled House takes what used to be a bipartisan, consensus
legislative goal — the Farm Bill typically passed every five years — and gives it a savage ideological
twist. In this instance it’s tightening eligibility for SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program, a.k.a. food stamps) and adding more stringent work requirements for those that do qualify.
The House passed its bill on June 21 by a two-vote margin, with nary a Democratic vote, which didn’t
bother House Republicans one bit. Today the Senate, which has to operate on the basis of bipartisanship
because Democrats can filibuster legislation that doesn’t operate under some sort of special rules,
passed its own version of the Farm bill by a much broader 86-11 margin. All Democrats and a clear
majority of Republicans voted for it because it didn’t include the nasty SNAP provisions. The 11 GOP
senators voting “no” are expressing solidarity with their House counterparts. At this point the key
variable could be the ever-unpredictable president of the United States, who had earlier been signaling
strong support for the SNAP reforms. The latest word from the administration earlier this week wasn’t
so clear: The [White House] statement also said the Senate bill “misses key opportunities to reform the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Most notably, the bill does not strengthen work
requirements for able-bodied working age adults….” But the statement avoids any threat of a veto,
saying instead, “The Administration looks forward to working with the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and
Forestry Committee to address these and other issues with the farm bill as the process moves forward.”
Authorization for most major agricultural programs runs out on September 30. Farm Belt Republicans
would sure hate to see any of them lapse right before a midterm election. Sure, Congress could work
out a temporary extension while public and private wrangling over SNAP continues, with conservatives
delighting in the opportunity to play the old “welfare” politics game that “the base” enjoys so
thoroughly. Or maybe the ancient tradition of farm bills linking the arms of rural agricultural interests
and urban retailers and food-stamp beneficiaries will prevail one more time, and this farm bill will creep
across the finish line.Meanwhile, the Senate’s agriculture committee leaders from each party, Pat
Roberts (R-Kansas) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) have made it clear that the House’s SNAP
requirements will never get win a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the upper chamber. So we have
an impasse: a House that really, really wants to squeeze SNAP recipients; and a Senate determined
not to let that happen; a looming deadline (Sept. 30) before the old farm bill expires, made more urgent
by the coming August recess; and a monumental midterm election in November, which could
completely rearrange—or further entrench—the current partisan power dynamics in Congress.
Reconciliation isn’t happening – Ryan’s stance on SNAP reforms creates a stalemate

Philpott 7/25
(Tom, Food & ag correspondent @ Mother Jones, “Paul Ryan Is Holding the Farm Bill Hostage Over Food
Stamps”, 07/25/18, https://www.motherjones.com/food/2018/07/paul-ryan-is-holding-the-farm-bill-
hostage-over-food-stamps/, Date Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
The House will only approve a farm bill that squeezes SNAP recipients; the Senate won’t let that happen.
The farm bill—once-every-five-years mega-legislation that shapes US agriculture and hunger policy—is
back on the legislative agenda. The House and Senate are jockeying for position as they prepare to
reconcile their two versions, with the hope of sending a finished bill to the president’s desk before the
previous bill expires on September 30. In June, the US House narrowly passed its version, (margin: 213-
211), which essentially preserved the previous bill’s status quo except for two big things: It would add
onerous work requirements for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Program or SNAP, formerly
known as food stamps, and it would cut a key conservation program that encourages farmers to take
measures that build soil and reduce chemical runoff. President Donald Trump hailed the work
requirements, signaling that he’d love to sign the bill into law. A week later, the Senate overwhelmingly
passed its version of the farm bill (margin: 86-11). This one essentially preserved the previous bill’s
status quo but didn’t mess with SNAP or conservation. So now we have a showdown, with the SNAP
work requirements at center stage. Anti-hunger advocates are generally aghast at the House bill’s work
provisions, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would knock around 1.2 million people off
of SNAP. Under current SNAP rules, non-disabled adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who don’t have
dependents can only receive benefits for three months over a three-year period, unless they work or are
enrolled in job training for at least 80 hours per month. The House provision would extend the age
horizon to 59, and also apply to people whose dependents are over six years old. SNAP rules, here’s how
the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities describes it: Though the bill’s proponents say they want to
encourage work among more SNAP recipients, the bill is likely to leave many people who face
substantial barriers to work with neither earnings nor food assistance. Most people who participate in
SNAP are workers—most work while receiving SNAP, while many others are between jobs. The large
majority of those who aren’t working are caring for someone else, suffering from a disability or chronic
health condition that limits their ability to work, or going to school. Outgoing Speaker of the House Paul
Ryan (R.-Wisc.) has made clear he won’t budge on the SNAP changes, hailing them as part of his legacy
as a tireless proponent of “welfare reform.” That’s why long-time farm bill observers like Ferd Hoefner
of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, think the reconciliation talks will end in a stalemate,
likely forcing Congress to pass a short-term extension of the previous farm bill before it lapses. Senate
negotiators can’t cave, because they know they won’t have the votes to pass changes to SNAP. As for
the House, says Hoefner, “Ryan seems determined that legacy his reflect that he fought to the death on
what he calls ‘welfare reform,’ and what everyone else calls kicking people off SNAP.”
2ac – i/l
No internal link – summer recess means the bill won’t meet the deadline but the
current bill will be renewed
Geiger 18 David Geiger, Agribusiness Report “Farm Bill Moves to Conference Committee” Jul 20, 2018
(http://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Farm-Bill-Moves-to-Conference-Committee-488716331.html)
//wc
Another challenge is getting the bill done before the end of September, when the current farm bill
expires. If that happens, there will likely be a year renewal of the farm bill. This week, the legislature will likely
get to conference But Congress typically is out for the summer, However, Grassley says the Senate will stay in session for August,
"But if the House of Representatives is out for their summer recess during the month of August. I think it's
going to be impossible to get an agreement between the House and Senate before September."
2ac – recess thumper
Conflicting schedules make reconciliation and a vote impossible

Guebert 18 Alan Guebert – reporter for the Telegraph Herald “Guebert: Is it 2018 or 2012 or worse?”
Jul 22, 2018 (http://www.telegraphherald.com/news/agriculture/article_81a209a2-9a7c-54b2-a0c7-
218f0f9383e3.html) //wc
Trapped in this year’s pressure cooker is the 2018 Farm Bill. While the Senate and House each passed their
versions earlier this summer, neither is in a hurry to stir the two together before leaving town. Part of the
problem is the chambers’ competing calendars. House members plan to leave for “district work” July 28
and not return until Sept. 4. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, however, announced on June 5 that he would keep the Senate in session
most of August to address what he called the legislative backlog his Democratic colleagues caused by their “historic obstruction.” Baloney. McConnell’s real goal is to keep Senate Democrats
off the campaign trail for an entire month in the 10 very “red” states won by Donald J. Trump in 2016. That break might be all the crafty Senate boss needs to electorally wound a Dem or two
the joint
in the middle of a close race so he might add to his current one-vote majority. All that Senate sitting, however, will not advance the Farm Bill one inch. Here’s why: First,
Senate/House conference committee required to “reconcile” the different bills is just now getting
organized. The slowness isn’t Democratic obstruction; it’s Republican disorganization. Few in the GOP-
led House are in a hurry to move a bill that failed its first vote and squeaked by on its next. Second, even
if the conference committee is named, seated and meets before the August break — a tight, but doable
schedule — its task hits a wall when the committee’s House members head home for a month just days
thereafter. That means “there won’t be any meetings of conferees,” during August, explains an experienced Farm Bill watcher, but
there will be “an “occasional meeting of the Big Four” — the chairmen and ranking members of the Ag Committees — “behind closed doors.” Open or closed, everyone needs to hurry because
If all this sounds familiar it’s because it is almost exactly how the 2012
one month later, on Sept. 30, the 2014 Farm Bill expires.
Farm Bill became the 2014 Farm Bill: two far-apart bills sleepily tackled by a slowly convened conference committee that was then interrupted by the no-action
August break that led to a difficult reconciliation process stymied by House GOP hardliners who demanded work requirements for some food aid recipients. The standoff continued through
the 2012 November election and into the seating of a new Congress in early 2013. By law, that meant the 2012 Farm Bill process had to start over, which it did and, finally, 18 months later, the
That same pattern is emerging again because of the canyon-wide differences between the
2014 law was passed.
two bills. Again, food aid changes demanded by House Republicans face a unified wall of Senate
opposition. Again, cuts to conservation programs and the removal of virtually all program payment
limits in the House bill face strong opposition by key Senate negotiators. With these clear differences deeply rooted, are 2018 Farm
Bill talks as doomed as the 2012 effort? Not yet, but every passing day makes it increasingly likely.
2ac – reauthorization not key
If negotiations fail the current Farm bill will be extended
Ferguson 18 Ellyn Ferguson - CQ-Roll Call “Will Congress pass a new farm bill, or punt?” Jun 20, 2018
(http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180620/will-congress-pass-new-farm-bill-or-punt) //wc
The current law took three years of negotiations before going to President Barack Obama in 2014. There were fights over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program, proposed limits on crop insurance, farm subsidy payments and dairy policy. This year’s House fight over the GOP effort to restructure SNAP — formerly
known as food stamps — has overshadowed other potential areas of dispute that are likely to emerge, including whether or not big farm operations or extended
lawmakers have two options before Sept. 30,
family members on farms should get government subsidies. What is clear, however, is that
when the current farm bill expires: reach a compromise bill between the two chambers or extend
current law through an expected lame-duck session in late fall or into 2019. In the absence of a new farm bill or extending
the current law, agriculture policy would revert to 1938 and 1949 farm bill laws, ending many current farm programs and setting crop and dairy subsidy levels
higher than current levels and far above market prices. Carl Zulauf, an Ohio State University agriculture economist who has tracked farm bills since 1981, said it’s
you
likely there will be an extension of some kind before there is a new bill. “In terms of an extension versus a new bill by Sept. 30, it’s probably 50-50. I think
will have major differences between the House and Senate beyond SNAP,” Zulauf said. If negotiations stall
and the rest of Congress gets caught up in the election year calendar, an extension could last for one
year or possibly two years, Zulauf said. That’s because the task of finishing a farm bill cycle would fall to a new Congress with a new speaker of the
House or a Democratic majority.
2ac – food security turn
The Farm bill makes long term food crisis inevitable
O’Reilly 18 KATIE O'REILLY - Sierra's adventure and lifestyle editor “The Draft 2018 Farm Bill Is Good
for Big Ag, Bad for Food Systems” 4/27/2018 https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/draft-2018-farm-bill-
good-for-big-ag-bad-for-food-systems //wc
While groups representing the largest dairy, corn, wheat, and beef producers applauded the House Agriculture Committee’s work (the American Farm Bureau Federation described the approval as “great news”), the National Young
Farmers Coalition, National Farmers Union, anti-hunger groups, and environmental advocates have expressed strong opposition. Dozens of organizations including the Sierra Club are opposing the draft bill outright, out of concern
that the bill puts the environment and public health at risk and will result in a food system more dependent than ever on factory farms and chemical- and energy-intensive pesticides and fertilizers. “Yet again we see House
Republicans offering tax breaks to corporations at the expense of American families,” said Athan Manuel, director of public lands protection for the Sierra Club. “This bill takes food off the table, makes it easier for corporate
polluters to contaminate drinking water supplies, weakens commonsense protections to keep wildlife safe from toxic pesticides, logs away the future for our forests, guts water conservation programs. The public deserves safe and
healthy food, water, wildlife and forests.” While Speaker Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican, lauded the farm bill as “the precise thing we need to do to get people from welfare to work,” Democratic representative Chellie
Pingree of Maine described the farm bill as “the latest partisan battle, following in the steps of health-care and tax reform.” She stated, “The draft was written by Republicans behind closed doors, and they’re hoping it passes
quickly, before anyone even has time to read it.” Most of us won’t, indeed, have time to read the full proposed farm bill. But as taxpayers and eaters, we all have a stake in the food system. So, Sierra created a primer that lays out,
Federal programs that help farmers and ranchers improve

in broad strokes, exactly what’s at stake—and some actions you can take. Conservation Programs:
water and soil quality, decrease synthetic inputs, and protect wildlife face the biggest cutbacks—Conaway’s draft
proposes reducing them by about $7 billion over 10 years. The draft bill eliminates the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), which
helps supports holistic, multiyear management plans for 70 million acres of farm and ranchland. While the draft
does roll some of the CSP’s features into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which would grow from $1.75 billion to $3 billion annually, the EQIP is far narrower in scope. It simply provides funding for individual
projects or practices that are good for the environment (like cover cropping or planting a pollinator habitat). The problem is that CSP is actually a lot stronger than EQIP—you have to have a contract and holistic plan, the idea being
that people on-ramp from EQIP projects to CSP, which has farmers and ranchers fully adopting sustainable agriculture, not just doing little pieces here and there. Sarah Hackney, grassroots director for the National Sustainable
Its elimination means fewer

Agriculture Coalition, said, “The CSP is overwhelmingly popular with farmers for its ability to improve the health of the land’s soil, water, and profitability.
options for voluntary conservation, more pollution, and less resilient farms and ranches.” Adding insult to injury, EQIP,
unlike CSP, funds concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—a farm in which animals are raised in confinement—so critics anticipate that Conaway’s bill would result in more overall funding to CAFOs. “It sets back the
evolution of farm bill conservation by decades,” Hackney said. The House GOP proposal also weakens the Conservation Compliance Program for wetlands and fails to do what many environmentalists had hoped: to expand across
the United States that program to prevent the conversion of carbon-rich grasslands into production sites for industrial commodities. Forests, too, are at risk. The proposed farm bill would eliminate the requirement that the Forest
Service consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service or NOAA Fisheries about whether forest management activity is “not likely to adversely affect” an animal, plant, or habitat protected by the Endangered Species Act. The House
GOP’s farm bill also excludes a variety of activities from environmental reviews for certain forest management projects like logging. What You Can Do: Support the SOILS Act (HR 5188) and support clean water protections in the
farm bill. Send a message to save farm conservation programs by clicking here. Pesticides: In addition to slashing conservation programs that help farmers shift away from pesticide-intensive industrial farming, which threatens
the GOP House farm bill includes a number of outright giveaways to the pesticide
bees, butterflies, and other pollinators,
industry. It undercuts the Endangered Species Act via a provision that allows the EPA to approve
pesticides without considering the harm they pose to endangered species, such as salmon and
honeybees. The GOP bill would also preempt the rights of local governments to restrict certain uses of
pesticides and would weaken restrictions on methyl bromide, a highly toxic soil fumigant. The proposed House GOP farm
bill limits the extent to which the EPA has to consult with FWS and NOAA Fisheries before approving new pesticides. Critics say this would make it harder for public interest groups to sue federal agencies that rubberstamp
Those measures "would undercut a major procedural protection put in place to

pesticides proven to harm protected species.
ensure that you've got a disinterested and objective and sound look at the scientific evidence involving
these kinds of risks," said Bob Dreher, the senior vice president of conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife. "So this is a pretty fundamental assault on one of the major procedural protections."
Meanwhile, the House Agriculture Committee’s Republican majority defended the proposed changes, in a fact sheet, as necessary to prevent “activist-initiated litigation.” What You Can Do: Call your representatives and ask them
to oppose farm bill pesticide deregulation. Nutrition Assistance: The proposed farm bill seeks to “fix” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps. Often described as the “meat and
potatoes” of the farm bill, SNAP provides food benefits to low-income individuals and families, and nutrition funding accounts for roughly 80 percent of the bill’s funding. The GOP draft mandates new work requirements for SNAP’s
recipients: All able-bodied adults between the ages of 18 and 59 would be required to work or be enrolled in a job-training program for at least 20 hours a week beginning in 2021 (and increasing to 25 hours per week in 2026), or
risk being cut from the program for up to three years. According to the USDA, nearly two-thirds of SNAP participants are children, elderly, or people with disabilities. The USDA also reports that SNAP benefits to nonworkers
typically only occur when someone is between jobs. Critics say these proposed changes could result in as many as 1 million people being dropped from the nutrition assistance program. Representative Pingree, who’s also an
organic farmer, wrote last week in Civil Eats that studies show that those SNAP recipients who can work, do work, but that their jobs are by nature unstable. “Work requirements will do nothing but snatch away a lifeline from those
who don’t know where their next meal will come from,” Pingree wrote. “The proposals in this bill would lead to greater hunger and poverty among all types of beneficiary families, including the working poor, as well as reduced
economic growth and productivity in communities across the country,” stated James D. Weill, president of the Food Research & Action Center. The draft farm bill does call for expansion of the obscure SNAP Employment & Training
(E&T) program, from about $90 million in annual funding to $1 billion a year over three years. Little evidence, however, shows that the SNAP training program actually works, and the bill doesn’t stipulate how people would actually
be served. The 2014 farm bill gave the USDA $200 million to launch 10 state pilots to test new approaches to SNAP E&T. However, that experiment is not on track to show results in time to inform the next farm bill. There is,
however, one glimmer of hope in this arena: The 2018 draft increases funding for the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program—which is designed to incentivize SNAP recipients to boost their SNAP benefits by buying more
fruits and vegetables—from $5 million to $30 million by 2023. What you can do: Oppose the farm bill. Send a message here. Organic Agriculture and Local/Regional Food Programs: Despite America’s burgeoning love for farmers’
markets, the GOP farm bill essentially abandons the Farmers Markets Promotion Program (FMPP). Since it was first
funded in 2006, the FMPP—which awards grants that “support outreach and promotional activities that help direct
producer-to-consumer markets become self-sustaining in communities across the country”—has helped the number of
farmers’ markets in the United States to more than double. The 2018 bill strips it of mandatory funding. It also cut funding for several other programs, including Value-Added Producer Grants, a competitive program that helps
, the new farm bill would also cut more than

beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers to expand and market their products. Beginning in fiscal year 2022
$40 million a year from the Rural Energy for America program, which helps agricultural producers
purchase and install renewable energy systems and participate in energy audits. Nor does the proposed
farm bill reauthorize any part of the Organic Certification Cost Share Program, which helps thousands of
small and mid-size farmers defray the significant (and often prohibitive) costs associated with obtaining and maintaining
organic certification. Critis say this is another blow to small and family-owned farms. And now for silver linings: The draft bill
would establish a Food Waste and Recovery Liaison position at the USDA. The National Organic Program would be expanded to address the fraudulent import of industrially grown food that fail to meet USDA standards for the
coveted organic label. And the Organic Research and Extension Initiative would grow from $45 million in fiscal 2019 to $65 million by 2023. What you can do: Support the Local FARMS Act (HR3941), a bipartisan proposal meant to
chip away at the 15.6 million U.S. households lacking adequate access to healthy food while helping small and midsize farmers secure a steady demand for the food they produce (send a message by clicking here), and the Organic
Agriculture Research Act (HR 2436). Send a message by clicking here. Subsidies for Big Ag: The GOP farm bill contains no meaningful limitations on subsidy
payments to industrialized mega-farms. In fact, the bill raises Farm Service Agency loan caps, making them less available to small, midsize, and beginning farms—and likely better
serving larger farms and CAFO operations. The bill also contains loopholes that critics say help those connected to Big Ag to
get even more money out of the federal treasury. For instance, the GOP farm bill allows farm owners’ first cousins, nieces, and nephews to qualify for up to $125,000 in commodity subsidies, so long as they
earn less than $900,000 in adjusted gross income. While Representative Conaway says this is intended to keep family farms intact across generations, groups including The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and Taxpayers
“The proposal would not provide an

for Common Sense have criticized this proposal for its potential to pave the way for America’s largest farms to rake in virtually unlimited subsidies.
adequate safety net for farmers and ranchers who have seen a significant drop in net farm income over
the past five years,” said a spokesperson for the National Farmers Union. The House bill doesn’t make any changes to crop insurance
in order to help beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers access assistance. “It creates more
loopholes in subsidy payments that will continue to distort land prices and create an unfair playing field
for farmers,” Hackney of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition said. The new bill also fails to remove barriers to conservation and
stewardship activities within the federal crop insurance program, which discourages farmers from
engaging in conservation practices such as cover crops by threatening penalties or the voiding of their
coverage. Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director for Friends of the Earth’s Food and Agriculture program, in an op-ed called the bill “Robin Hood in reverse”—taking from small-scale farmers and low-income families to
further enrich agribusiness, factory farms, and crop insurance companies.” She wrote, “Limitless subsidies to mega-farms proposed in this bill will drive land costs up, small farmers out, and result in increased concentration in the
agricultural sector.” What You Can Do: Support the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Opportunity Act (HR 4316). Click here to endorse this legislation via the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Food system watchdogs agree
that this draft farm bill has a tough road ahead. Its fate on the House floor is uncertain—though many fear that all Republicans could, as we saw with December’s GOP tax plan, get browbeaten into submission. The Senate has
House
already pledged to work on a bipartisan bill that will be less controversial. Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the ranking member of the Senate agriculture committee, has stated that
Republicans “abandoned the bipartisan coalition of farmers, conservationists, nutrition advocates, and
representatives of rural communities needed to get a farm bill done.”
Ending ag subsidies leads to a more sustainable system

Worstall 17 Tim Worstall – Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London “A Decent Design For The
2018 Farm Bill - Don't Have A 2018 Farm Bill” Jul 29, 2017
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/07/29/a-decent-design-for-the-2018-farm-bill-dont-
have-a-2018-farm-bill/#78b66e7f14c0) //wc
One of the most protected areas of the US economy is the agricultural sector. That 1% of the population producing 1% or so of the country's GDP gains more aid and help from the taxpayers
Given that DC is currently discussing what should be in the

via government than any other production sector of similar size in the economy.
2018 Farm Bill here's a sensible suggestion. Simply abolish, in its entirety, the whole system of
agricultural support in the United States. Go the full New Zealand that is, no government support, no government money, taxpayers won't be gouged. In
essence, the correct design for the 2018 Farm Bill is simply not to have a 2018 Farm Bill at all: The Senate Committee on
Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry hearing held on Tuesday, July 25, was intended as a prelude to the development of a new 2018 farm bill. The hearing was visibly designed to pander to all of
the agricultural special interest groups seeking to gorge at the federal trough. A parade of farm business owners floated forward, claiming that harsh times had fallen upon them, even though
farm sector cash flows are expected to be at, or even above, their long-run averages. As I've recommended before for my native Britain the solution here is just to
abolish the entire system: We have an alternative policy framework to suggest. Let's just not have a
policy. No subsidies, no payments, no department, no Minister, nothing, nowt, zippedy dooh dah. The New Zealand option. You've had it
good for a century or more now there's yer bike and have a nice ride. As to the effects of that New Zealand option here's an academic study into it: Agricultural subsidies
are generally the policy of countries wealthy enough to afford them. By and large, the practice is
destructive to the land, distorting markets, and, in the age of a global economy, detrimental to the
livelihoods of farmers in countries without subsidies. And because subsidies promote the production of
commodity crops beyond market demand, they encourage farmers to rely on them instead of consumer
demand. This reliance on industrial production of single crops has had disastrous consequences for the environment the world over. Recognizing these pitfalls, the
government of New Zealand removed its subsidy regime in 1984. The move offers a classic illustration of the relationship between
agricultural subsidies, farming economies, and the environment. The effects? New Zealand retained 99 percent of its farms. Herds
were consolidated, and breeds that reflected market demand—producing leaner milk, for instance—
rose to prominence. And benefits to the land were dramatic. Pesticide use declined by 50 percent. Soil
erosion, land clearing, and overstocking also declined. The entire agricultural sector was forced to shift
toward better practices that increased efficiency and yield. Livestock farming, previously stimulated by
output subsidies, was curbed and, for the most part, relocated away from erodible hillsides to more
sustainable pastures. Today the agricultural sector is New Zealand’s export lifeblood, dominated by
family farms and experiencing constant, enviable growth. That all sounds quite lovely in fact. So, why don't we wean the American farmer off
the taxpayers' teat and thereby have a better, more environmentally friendly, agricultural system? That is, the correct design for the 2018 Farm Bill is not to have a 2018 Farm Bill.
2ac – farm bill bad
The Farm bill will strengthen industrial agriculture
Peterson-Rockney 18 Margiana Petersen-Rockney is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the
opinion service of High Country News. She is a Ph.D. student studying climate change adaptation in
agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley “This farm bill deregulates the rich and polices the
poor” July 24, 2018 (https://www.hcn.org/articles/opinion-this-farm-bill-deregulates-the-rich-and-
polices-the-poor) //wc
While the national eye was focused on the bill’s punitive SNAP, or food stamp, work requirements, Agriculture Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Conaway of Texas
and other Republican leaders worked hard to attack American family farmers. By drafting a more than 600-page behemoth that overwhelms even the world’s
experts, the writers of this omnibus bill hid devastating legislation in plain sight. Why is this bill so bad? The
House farm bill, which goes to conference
committee with the version passed by the Senate, is a giveaway to corporate interests at the expense of programs that
improve our environment and help family farmers. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which represents over 100
grassroots agriculture organizations across the country, said that the bill “undermines decades of work by farmers and
advocates to advance sustainable agriculture.” The House bill removes federal subsidy caps so that
mega-farms and millionaires can collect more of our tax dollars. It eliminates the enormously popular
Conservation Stewardship Program, which has helped farmers implement sustainable farming practices
on over 70 million acres of productive farm and forest land. Perhaps most troubling of all, it strays from food and
agricultural policy and into a full-frontal attack on the environment by gutting key protections in the
Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act. “They’re digging up their wish lists and trying to pass things that would be otherwise
unacceptable,” said Mark Lipson, a California farmer who has worked on organic farming policy for over 30 years, and who served in President Obama’s Agriculture
Department. “These provisions are a raw exercise of power to fulfill a long-term anti-environment agenda.” The Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act
are two of our most important environmental policies, and they are among the few that have legal teeth to protect individual species and their ecosystems.
The
House farm bill, however, allows toxic chemicals to be used even if they kill endangered species, and even if
they’re dumped directly into rivers and streams. It also eliminates our right as citizens to comment on
logging projects, and it does away with scientific review of logging proposals, no matter the potential
environmental consequences. These injurious provisions are hard to find in the voluminous House farm bill. A stand-alone bill that eviscerates the
Endangered Species Act or Clean Water Act would be unlikely to pass, but there’s so much in this bloated bill that any single destructive act gets drowned out.
Industrial agriculture causes extinction – soil erosion, deforestation, biodiversity loss,

and antibiotic overuse
Van der Zee 17 Bibi van der Zee – commissioning editor on Animals Farmed citing Philip Lymbery –
chief executive of Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) and the author of Farmageddon and more
recently Deadzone “Why factory farming is not just cruel – but also a threat to all life on the planet”
Oct 4, 2017 (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/04/factory-farming-destructive-
wasteful-cruel-says-philip-lymbery-farmageddon-author) //wc
The world desperately needs joined-up action on industrial farming if it is to avoid catastrophic impacts
on life on earth, according to the head of one of the world’s most highly regarded animal campaign groups. Philip Lymbery, chief executive of Compassion in World Farming
(CIWF) and the author of Farmageddon and more recently Deadzone, said: “Every day there is a new confirmation of how destructive,
inefficient, wasteful, cruel and unhealthy the industrial agriculture machine is. We need a total rethink of our food and farming
systems before it’s too late.” His comments came on the eve of Compassion’s Livestock and Extinction conference in London which will bring together scientists, campaigners, UN
representatives and multinational food corporations including Compass, Tesco and McDonalds. The conference aims to bring together a wide ranges of voices and connect up the many
impacts that factory farming has on our planet. The conference comes against a backdrop of alarming exposés of industrial farming. A week ago a Guardian/ITV investigation showed chicken
factory staff in the UK changing crucial food safety information on chickens, while a month ago the European commission admitted that eggs containing a harmful pesticide may have been on
campaigners identified the world’s largest ever “deadzone” – an area

sale in as many as 16 countries. In the US in August, meanwhile,
in the sea where pollutants from farms create algal blooms that kill off or disperse marine life – and
singled out the US’s heavily industrialised factory farm system as a major cause. In an interview with the Guardian, Lymbery
said that when he began campaigning on farm animals in 1990, it was still largely seen as a cruelty issue rather than something that went far beyond that. Since taking over as chief executive
of CIWF in 2005, Lymbery has focused on “moving the issue out of being a technical niche to get people to understand industrial farming as a big, global problem”. “We need to go beyond an
isolated approach,” Lymbery says. “Not just looking at the technical problems around welfare, not just looking at the technical issues around the environment, not just looking at food security
the real problem that lies at the heart of our food system –
in isolation, but putting all of these issues together, then we can see
industrial agriculture.” Lymbery argues that factory farming is not – as some contend – an efficient, space-saving way to produce the world’s food but rather a method in
which the invisible costs are actually far higher than the savings. “Factory farming is shrouded in mythology,” he said. “One of the myths is that it’s an efficient way of producing food when
actually it is highly inefficient and wasteful. “Another [myth] is that the protagonists will say that it can be good for the welfare of the animals. After all, if hens weren’t happy they wouldn’t lay
eggs. “The third myth is that factory farming saves space. On the surface it looks plausible, because, by taking farm animals off the land and cramming them into cages and confinement you
are putting an awful lot of animals into a small space. But what is overlooked in that equation is you are then having to dedicate vast acreages of relatively scarce arable land to growing the
As the global demand for cheap meat

feed. “The crops fed to industrially reared animals worldwide could feed an extra four billion [people] on the planet.”
grows, the expansion of agricultural land is putting more and pressure on our forests, rivers and oceans,
contributing to deforestation, soil erosion, marine pollution zones and the global biodiversity crisis, he said.
“The UN has warned that if we continue as we are, the world’s soils will have effectively gone within 60 years. And then
what? We shouldn’t look to the sea to bail us out because commercial fisheries are expected to be finished by 2048 … “The
rainforest homes of the likes of jaguars and the critically endangered sumatran elephants are being
razed to make way for intensive crop production and plantations that are feeding factory farm animals ...
the mixed farm habitats of once common farmland birds such as barn owls, turtle doves and skylarks are being stripped away, and ... vast
quantities of wild fish are being scooped up to feed industrially reared farmed fish and chickens and pigs, leaving the likes of
penguins, puffins and other species starving.” Antibiotic use is another red flag area. “There is now overwhelming evidence
that the routine prophylactic use of antibiotics is leading to the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, and
the World Health Organisation has issued warnings that if we don’t do something to curb antibiotic use in both human and animal
medicine we will face a post-antibiotic era where currently treatable diseases will once again kill.”
Another impact card

Johnston 17 Ian Johnston – Environment Correspondent at the Independent citing Raj Patel – award-
winning writer, activist and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of
Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin and a Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the
Humanities at the university currently known as Rhodes University“Industrial farming is driving the sixth
mass extinction of life on Earth, says leading academic” August 26, 2017
(https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/mass-extinction-life-on-earth-farming-industrial-
agriculture-professor-raj-patel-a7914616.html) //wc
Industrial agriculture is bringing about the mass extinction of life on Earth, according to a leading academic. Professor Raj Patel said
mass deforestation to clear the ground for single crops like palm oil and soy, the creation of vast dead
zones in the sea by fertiliser and other chemicals, and the pillaging of fishing grounds to make feed for
livestock show giant corporations can not be trusted to produce food for the world. The author of bestselling book The Value of
Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy will be one of the keynote speakers at the Extinction and Livestock Conference in London in October. Organised by campaign groups Compassion in World Farming
and WWF, it is being held amid rising concern that the rapid rate of species loss could ultimately result in the sixth mass extinction of life. This is just one reason why geologists are considering declaring a new epoch of the Earth,
called the Anthropocene, as the fossils of soon-to-be extinct animals will form a line in the rocks of the future. The last mass extinction, which finished off the dinosaurs and more than three-quarters of all life about 65 million years
“The footprint of
ago, was caused by an asteroid strike that sent clouds of smoke all around the world, blocking out the sun for about 18 months. Prof Patel, of the University of Texas at Austin, said:
global agriculture is vast. Industrial agriculture is absolutely responsible for driving deforestation,
absolutely responsible for pushing industrial monoculture, and that means it is responsible for species
loss. “We’re losing species we have never heard of, those we’ve yet to put a name to and industrial agriculture is very much at the spear-tip of that.” Speaking to The Independent, he pointed to a
“dead zone” – an area of water where there is too little oxygen for most marine life – in the Gulf of
Mexico that has grown to the same size as Wales because of vast amounts of fertiliser that has washed
from farms in mainland US, into the Mississippi River and then into the ocean. “That dead zone isn’t an accident. It’s a requirement of
industrial agriculture to get rid of the sh*t and the run-off elsewhere because you cannot make industrial agriculture workable unless you kick the costs somewhere else,” he said. “The story of industrial agriculture is all about
The Amazon and surrounding lands in South America are also under increasing
externalising costs and exploiting nature.”
pressure from soy plantations. “Extinction is about the elimination of diversity. What happens in Brazil and other places is you
get green deserts — monocultures of soy and nothing else. “Various kinds of chemistry is deployed to make sure it is only soy that’s grown on these mega-farms. “That’s
what extinction looks like. If you ever go to a soy plantation, animal life is incredibly rare. It’s only soy, there’s nothing there for anything to feed on.” And that soy is then turned into food for humans,
often by “passing it through cattle and chickens”, Prof Patel said. Some of the world’s most iconic animals, such as elephants, jaguars and penguins, are threatened due to these current farming practices. In Sumatra,
forests that are home to elephants and jaguars are being destroyed to make way for palm plantations,
often to make feed for livestock kept in industrial meat factories. And small fish like anchovies and
sardines are being caught on a massive scale to be ground into fishmeal for farmed salmon, pigs and chickens. That means
animals like penguins, which normally feed on them, are in trouble. The South African penguin population alone has plunged by at least 70 per cent since 2004.
Farm bill makes the worst parts of industrial ag worse

Lovera 18 Patty Lovera “House Farm Bill: Good for Big Ag and Factory Farms, Bad for Us” July 6, 2018
(https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/news/house-farm-bill-good-big-ag-and-factory-farms-bad-us)
//wc
the House bill maintains the approach of the last farm bill when it comes to commodity crops like
Overall,
corn, soy and wheat by emphasizing subsidized crop insurance as the primary farm safety net. Missing is
any discussion of the real reforms we need, including restoring grain reserve programs that could be
used to provide stability for farmers and rein in overproduction of these commodity crops that end up
as cheap feed for factory farms. Factory Farms For several Farm Bill cycles, large-scale factory farm operations have been
eligible to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from a program called the Environmental Quality
Incentives Program (EQIP) to subsidize equipment or facilities to manage the massive amounts of
manure they generate. By allowing factory farms to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize their manure management, EQIP funds have helped
corporate agribusiness consolidate the livestock industry. The House bill would continue to allow this practice, as well as increase the size of
loans to farms that the USDA will guarantee. These guaranteed loans serve as another subsidy to factory farms, which can convince banks to lend them money to expand or build new facilities,
The House bill would make dramatic changes to conservation programs,

with taxpayers taking all the risk. Conservation
ending the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and rolling some portions of CSP into EQIP. These
programs serve very different purposes and this change would not only undermine the successful CSP
program that provides support for farms that are enacting conservation improvements across their
whole operation but could also provide an opportunity for factory farms to sign up for recurring government payments for their conservation practices. (Right now, these
facilities can access EQIP, described above, for one-time payments but cannot get longer term contracts under CSP.) Organic The House bill does have some funding for important initiatives
The House bill would

like organic research and tackling fraudulent organic imports, but it aggressively changes programs that help maintain the integrity of the organic label.
make it easier for big companies to get seats on the National Organic Standards Board and weaken the
board’s authority, as well as eliminating a program that offers partial reimbursement for annual organic certification fees, used by many operations who may be starting out in
organic. Blocking Safer Agriculture Standards An amendment added to the House bill was offered by Rep. King (R-IA) that
would prohibit state and local governments from setting standards on the production of agriculture
products that are imported into the state if the standards exceed federal law. Rep. King has been pushing this amendment for years, sparked by efforts in
California to require better conditions for farm animals that were eventually applied to products coming into California from other states. Deregulation The House bill
includes several provisions that create loopholes for the pesticide industry, by allowing pesticides to be
sprayed in water without adequate oversight, making it harder to challenge approvals of pesticides that
impact endangered species and omitting worker protections in the pesticide approval process. The bill
also contains a provision that prohibits local governments from restricting pesticide use on private
property. Another piece of the bill would exempt about half of existing facilities that generate electricity from
biomass from environmental permitting of any kind, which would allow facilities that generate power by
burning materials like wood and agricultural waste to emit air pollution with no oversight.
Farm bill makes it impossible for farmers to avoid industrialization
Shepard 18 ALEX SHEPHARD - a staff writer at The New Republic “The Farm Bill Is Everything That’s
Wrong With Congress” March 18, 2018 (https://newrepublic.com/article/148461/farm-bill-everything-
thats-wrong-congress) //wc
“The farm bill and trade policies—but especially NAFTA—are geared around the idea that farmers should get big or get out
and depend on export markets to make their ends meet,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn, the director of trade and global governance at the progressive
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told NPR last year. “That undermines farmers who are trying to produce for a smaller
scale, who are trying to produce more sustainably.” One result is an American market flooded in cheap, highly unhealthy corn products. These factors,
along with polarization, have combined to create a gridlock. In 2012, the passage of the Farm Bill was delayed for two years while Republicans demanded steep cuts to SNAP—they eventually
got them in 2014, when an omnibus bill with nearly $9 billion in food stamp cuts was signed into law by President Obama. Now that they control Congress, Republicans are once again trying to
The cynical persistence of

use the Farm Bill as a stealth welfare reform bill—and if the Freedom Caucus get their way, a stealth immigration bill, too.
Republicans has put Democrats in a difficult position. They have essentially ceded the non-SNAP aspects
of the Farm Bill to the GOP and fought to preserve its critical social assistance elements. In doing so, they have
allowed politicians from both parties who represent the interests of Big Agriculture to dictate the terms
of the bill’s critical agricultural and food policies. Between 2012 and 2014, when the last Farm Bill was being written, 600 companies spent nearly half-
a-billion dollars lobbying Congress on the Farm Bill. While the public fight has focused on food stamps, these lobbyists have pushed for changes that provide even more benefits to factory
farms and corporations. Lobbyists for Big Agriculture have deep connections to the House and Senate’s agriculture
committees, which ultimately write and approve the Farm Bill. A study from the conservative Taxpayers For Common Sense found that one
in four lobbyists had previously worked for either the House or the Senate committee. As a result, the Farm Bill largely provides subsidies to farms
that don’t need them, and to farms that produce commodities, rather than food. Subsidies are meant to protect farms from
market instability—and, in recent years, the impact of free trade agreements—but the Farm Bill is now dominated by six crops: corn, wheat,
soybeans, cotton, rice, and peanuts, which receive more than 90 percent of its subsidies. And in recent years, crop
insurance has become yet another subsidy for corporate farms. One study found that large farms boosted their incomes by $13 billion because of redundancies within the 2014 bill. These
efforts are aided by the complexity of the bill itself, which resembles a hall of mirrors as much as it does a piece of legislation. Because it is an
omnibus bill and because it is considered every five years (meaning that the bill often refers back to previous iterations), it is even more difficult to comprehend than Congress’s other arcane
Hundreds of programs are covered in the legislation, many of which are good but severely
omnibus bills.
underfunded, such as a food assistance program for women, infants, and children, and the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Program. But its very
complexity is the biggest hurdle to making meaningful changes to it. It is possible to imagine a different Farm Bill, one that adequately covers food stamps, but also pushes programs that
provide aid to small- and medium-sized farms, increases access to locally grown food, and promotes environmental stability. This type of bill, a version of which is being pushed by Oregon
Representaive Earl Blumenauer, would largely align with the Democrats’ “Better Deal” push against corporate concentration and environmental degradation. But, in the fight to protect SNAP
benefits, Democratic leadership has pushed such efforts to the side.
Farm bill accelerates industrialization – failure to reauthorize solves

Lilliston 18 Ben Lilliston - Director of Rural Strategies and Climate Change at the Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy “Reject the House Factory Farm Bill” May 9th, 2018
(https://www.iatp.org/blog/reject-house-farm-bill) //wc
Farm Bill that represents corporate

Today, 34 organizations, including IATP, called on the House of Representatives to reject a deeply flawed
interests, particularly industrial livestock operations, at the expense of independent farm families and
the environment. The partisan Farm Bill (H.R. 2), written largely behind closed doors by House Agriculture Committee Chair Michael Conaway (R-
TX), ignores needed reforms to programs exploited by industrialized concentrated animal feeding
operations (CAFOs), while eliminating important programs and protections for family farmers. In a letter to
Congress, the groups highlighted the urgent need to spend public funds wisely to reach more family farmers who are protecting the environment, while struggling in
a troubled farm economy tied to low prices and over-production. “At a time when family farmers are struggling, we should make it easier for them to thrive, not
this Farm Bill is only interested in consolidating the agricultural industry and propping up
harder. It’s clear that
factory farms, which will push more family farmers out of business,” said Barb Kalbach, a member of Iowa Citizens for
Community Improvement and family farmer from Dexter, Iowa. “We expect the support of Congress – not legislation that works against us.” "Corporate-
controlled, industrial model of livestock production can’t survive without taxpayer support,” said Rhonda Perry,
livestock producer and Program Director of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center. “Taxpayers should not be footing-the-bill and fueling
the industrialization of the livestock industry at the expense of family farmers, taxpayers, rural
communities and the environment. Instead, we should be targeting our public conservation dollars to independent family farm operations and
providing a long-term investment in our economy and natural resource base."
2AC – Farm Bill Bad
Current farm bill bad
Cohen ’18
(Alison, Opinion contributor @ the Hill, “The 2018 Farm Bill is a crisis of democracy”, 7/21/18,
http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/398132-the-2018-farm-bill-is-a-crisis-of-democracy,
Date Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
The social contract between our government and its people is hanging on by a thread. If the 2018 Farm
Bill is any indication of the strength of that last thread, we are in trouble. With its origins in the New
Deal, the Farm Bill’s original three goals were to keep food prices fair for both farmers and consumers,
ensure an adequate food supply and protect and sustain the country’s natural resources. The current
iteration seeks to dramatically increase food insecurity by weakening SNAP, a proven nutritional
lifeline, harming working families and slashing support for small scale and sustainable farmers. We are
a far cry now from its original intent to link the survival and viability of farming and rural life with the
reduction of hunger and food insecurity in the cities. How the farm bill is currently shaped – who has the
most influence on the policymakers – exposes a crisis of democracy. Let’s look at the numbers. Even as
unemployment has decreased to a remarkably low 3.8 percent, the percentage of households that face
food insecurity has stayed at around 12 percent over the past three decades. Additionally, today fewer
than 2 percent of Americans are farmers and only 34 House districts (out 435) are rural. Meanwhile,
agriculture is the second largest contributor to human-made greenhouse gas emissions and is a leading
cause of deforestation, water and air pollution and biodiversity loss. Why does this matter? The Farm
Bill no longer sits on a three-legged stool of just economic, nutrition and environmental policies. Instead
it props up false solutions to hunger by supporting the overproduction of commodities and intensive
pesticide use while causing climate change and illustrating the insidious reach of corporate influence
on our policymakers. There are no long-term positive effects to the increased consolidation and
commodification of food and agriculture. The rich get richer, while the environment, soil, vulnerable
populations and consumers suffer. And tweaking the system to mitigate the ill effects of consolidated
agriculture with technological fixes is a false solution. A system that exists to make money first and turn
profit above all else, will never benefit the people or the planet.
AT: Food Security
No impact and alt case – food security is not a pressing issue and trade wars
overwhelm the bill
Washington Post 7/04/18
(Editorial board @ the Washington Post, “Congress’s latest farm bill sets a new standard of ugliness”,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/congresss-latest-farm-bill-sets-a-new-standard-of-
ugliness/2018/07/04/75aed658-7ee4-11e8-bb6b-
c1cb691f1402_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b941c5a2ef95, Date Accessed: 7/25/18, //EY)
Inevitably, the farm bill showers benefits on well-to-do business owners who don’t need or deserve
taxpayer help under the cover of deliberately obscure terms such as “federal milk marketing orders” and
“base acreage.” It’s true that farm income has dropped in each of the past four years because of falling
commodity prices, but Congress showered agribusiness with taxpayer largesse when incomes reached
all-time highs a half-decade ago, too. Clumsy ma-nipu-la-tion by government probably exacerbates
market swings. Where is it written that this one sector deserves federally guaranteed profitability? You
will hear a lot about the need for food security, but it’s mostly nonsense: A mere 6.3 percent of
Americans’ consumer expenditures were on food consumed at home in 2016, according to the
Agriculture Department. This was easily the lowest percentage in the world, as it has been for many
years. Even in the wildly unlikely event it doubled, we’d still be better off than developed countries
such as Sweden and France. If Congress really wanted to help farmers, it would do something to stop
President Trump’s trade war, which has provoked retaliatory tariffs by China and others against U.S.
farm exports.
**Translators Case Neg Things
1NC – Solvency
Translators Fail
Translators fail – half of all messages aren’t properly communicated – inherent
language barriers exist and poor translators can’t be fired because of private
companies.
Shea 10 Neil Shea is a contributing writer with National Geographic magazine, 2010, “Foreign Policy:
Losing Afghanistan In Translation,” NPR, 08/24, npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129396818
Accessed 07/25/2018 //jsaltman
At one point in Restrepo, a new documentary film about U.S. soldiers at a small combat outpost in
eastern Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, Captain Dan Kearney, the officer in command, is sitting in a shura
with the Korengal elders he is trying to win over. A frail-looking man sits before the bullish captain and
complains about the arrest of a local man. Kearney at first does not know who the elder is talking about.
Then Kearney turns to his Afghan interpreter, or "terp," and in answer to the elder says: "You're not
understanding that I don't fucking care." The F-bomb is called that for a reason: It has power to explode
a conversation and obliterate important points. But my main question after watching this scene, so
similar to many I've witnessed while reporting on America's wars abroad, was: How is an interpreter,
even a very good one, supposed to haul that statement into his own language? Translation is such an
everyday act that it is routinely omitted from most discussion of strategy and success. But, badly done, it
is fatally dangerous. And the messages lost through faulty translation in Afghanistan are sabotaging the
mission there as badly as any physical enemy ever could. U.S. troops rely on translators. There is no
alternative. On the battlefield and in the shuras, young officers like Kearney, raised in the get-down-to-
business culture of America and its military, often express themselves to their translators directly and
with heaps of slang, roughly the way they might talk to a college buddy. The terp is then expected to
decide not only how to translate the words but also how to bridge the gulf of propriety and custom. But
although this colloquial language is informal, it is still complex. And unfortunately, it assumes even more
common background and idiomatic understanding than a more formal diction would: Think of phrases
like "man up," "freedom isn't free," or even "shoulder responsibility" and "build your nation." In the best
circumstances, the most successful shuras, it would be unrealistic to expect all this meaning to pass
intact to a group of old men from another world. Try filtering it through a translator who didn't attend
college, was never your buddy, and didn't grow up surrounded by phrases Americans take for granted,
and the chances for error or insult multiply rapidly. This winter, I spent a month in the Pech Valley, next
door to the Korengal, where Restrepo was filmed. There, and in other regions of Afghanistan, I met
some pretty good terps who were able to develop the kind of rapport with the Americans that's crucial
in understanding language and intent. Many, however, were only partially educated and only passable
at their jobs. Quite a few were simply very bad. Language is far more than vocabulary and grammar -- it
is culture. Often terps weren't familiar enough with either to understand what the Americans were
saying or what it meant. And choosing candidates for this crucial job is often relegated to contractors.
When I asked officers why they worked with bad terps, they claimed they didn't have much choice;
translators are hired by private companies and bad ones are difficult to replace, partly because demand
is so high and the vetting process is slow. The effect of bad translators on the Afghan mission is difficult
to estimate -- but I believe that it's vast. Terps have a different stake from the Americans in the outcome
of the war, and by definition they're working with people who can't understand half the things they say,
meaning that there's no accountability if they're translating an English message into something totally
different. I once asked the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Korengal Valley how many messages he
thought were lost this way. I wagered that at least 40 percent of his troops' words were not getting
through to Afghans. He thought it was more like 50 percent. At the time, January 2010, his soldiers were
literally delivering U.S. President Barack Obama's new strategic message to Afghans. I watched them
announce that the United States would soon begin withdrawal and that Afghans needed to take
responsibility for their own future. If half that message were lost in translation, which half would you
want it to be?
Squo Solves
Squo solves—over 14,000 people have been admitted since 2017
Alvarez 7/25 (Priscilla, assistant editor at The Atlantic, “'How Much More Merit Do You Need Than
Saving American Lives?'”, The Atlantic, 7/25/18,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/trump-immigration-crackdown-
visas/565949/)//DL
**their ev says the backlog is around 10,000**

Two months into the Trump administration, then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson directed American embassies around the world to double down on visas and “increase scrutiny of visa applicants for potential security and non-security ineligibilities.” Since then, there’s been a stark
From January to June of 2017, 10,267 immigrants came to the U.S. on special immigrant visas.
decline in SIV arrivals.
Over the same period in 2018, the number had fallen to 4,166 by more than half, .
We have translators
Rowan 1AC Scarborough 9, graduated summa cum laude from the School of Journalism at the
University of Maryland, “EXCLUSIVE: Lack of translators hurts U.S. war on terror”,
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/31/lack-of-translators-still-hampers-intelligence/
U.S. national security agencies remain woefully short of foreign-language speakers and translators
nearly eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks resulted in a war on an enemy that often communicates in
relatively obscure dialects, current and former officials say. The necessary cadre of U.S. intelligence
personnel capable of reading and speaking targeted regional languages such as Pashto, Dari and Urdu
“remains essentially nonexistent,” the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote in a rare but stark
warning in its 2010 budget report. The gap has become critical in the war effort, especially in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, where al Qaeda and Taliban operatives text message, e-mail and talk in
languages that the intelligence community had largely ignored before 2001. Intercepting phone and
radio calls in the region’s native tongues is critical to monitoring terrorist camps and movements in
Pakistan’s tribal areas, officials said. The National Security Agency (NSA), based at Fort Meade, Md.,
channels the calls to translation centers, where linguists are supposed to quickly translate the words
into English so that they can be distributed in reports and raw transcripts to commanders and
policymakers. But such quick follow-through does not always happen. Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan,
the senior Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Washington
Times that U.S agencies remain “behind the eight ball” in catching up to dialects not deemed important
during the Cold War. “We’ve been pushing the language issue for an extended period of time. The
agencies just didn’t respond,” Mr. Hoekstra said in an interview. “They’d come in. We’d talk about
language capability. We’d beat them up. They’d leave. They’d come back a year later, and it wouldn’t be
a lot better. We’d beat them up again. “I can’t explain it. No. 1, Congress has been pestering them. No.
2, you would think it’s important for them to do their job. You could understand it immediately after
9/11. This takes a little time to do to get it right. But still talking about it in 2009 makes no sense at all,”
he said. Intelligence officials say they’ve offered significant sums of money to try to lure more
translators, but recruitment remains slow and some attractive candidates have trouble passing the
review for security clearances. “We’ve made progress on foreign languages — including Pashto, Dari and
Urdu — but there’s more to be done,” CIA spokesman George Little said. “We continue to offer
generous financial incentives to individuals with foreign-language skills, including hiring bonuses and
additional pay for current officers.” CIA Director Leon E. Panetta, who has vowed to change the culture
at Langley, sent out a message in May to employees announcing “an aggressive plan to build the truly
multilingual work force we need.” He said he wants to double the number of analysts and clandestine
service officers who speak foreign languages and “dramatically transform the way CIA trains in foreign
language capability.” A former intelligence officer who worked on methods to intercept calls while in
Afghanistan told The Times that finding or training people to speak obscure languages is easier said than
done. The former officer, who asked not to be named because the information is classified, said
intelligence agency representatives have visited polyglot locations such as Detroit to recruit native
speakers. “They were able to find many recent immigrants and first-generation U.S. citizens with needed
language skills,” he said. “But none of them could pass a background check.” To listen and translate al
Qaeda telephone calls, or interrogate a suspect, translators must attain a top-secret clearance. But
investigators often found that the candidate belonged to a mosque where extremism was preached, or
had relatives back home deemed “not trustworthy,” the former officer said. “They are likely to be
swayed by their family,” the source added. “At least that is the conventional wisdom.” He said he had
personal knowledge of tapped phone calls going untranslated for days because of personnel shortages.
There are only a handful of security-cleared Kurdish speakers in the United States, Canada and Britain —
countries that trade in intercepted communications. “Anything that goes on in northern Iraq, where
Kurdish is spoken, is really tough for us,” the former officer said. He recalled an Iraqi bomb maker in the
Kurdish north whose calls were intercepted but not translated for days, allowing him to stay on the
move. The source added that inhabitants of the Korengal Valley, in the Taliban-infested Kunar province
in Afghanistan, speak their own little-known dialect. “It is almost impossible to do anything in a timely
manner there,” he said. The Senate intelligence committee is now applying its own pressure. Its budget
report for fiscal 2010 stated, “persistent critical shortages in some languages contribute to the loss of
intelligence information and affect the ability of the intelligence community to process and exploit what
it does collect.” The report devoted only a few paragraphs to the issue and didn’t spell out in detail why
the CIA, the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency are not fully staffed with foreign-language
specialists. Without a full cadre of native speakers, the intelligence community must rely on trained
Americans. But Pashto, Dari and other dialects are difficult to learn and take years to master. Americans
cannot duplicate the intricate knowledge of native speakers. “Once they are trained that well they can
make more money elsewhere,” the former intelligence officer said. Indeed, the NSA relies on private
contractors to do some of the translating, as does the military. The FBI makes up one prong of the U.S.
intelligence community cited in the Senate panel report. The bureau contends that it has assembled a
strong cadre of regional language speakers, in-house and with private contractors. Its role is critical: It
translates thousands of al Qaeda documents seized here and abroad, and interrogates terrorism
suspects around the world. The FBI also may have a larger interrogation role now that the Obama White
House has taken control of interrogations away from the CIA. “We have recruited many more language
specialists since 9/11 as well as our part in the Virtual Translation Center,” Assistant FBI Director John
Miller said. The center is a multiagency facility intended to pull various language skills into one place.
“On the subject of the recently announced joint interrogation teams, one of the strengths of it is that
you are working off a multiagency platform, so between all the participating agencies, you should be
able to find the right speaker with the right dialect for the mission,” Mr. Miller said in an e-mail. But
Stephen Kohn, a Washington lawyer who has represented two FBI whistleblowers who have suspected
failings in the bureau’s anti-terrorism efforts, said the committee’s criticism applies to the bureau, too.
“They just don’t have the speakers, especially in any type of operational capacity,” Mr. Kohn said.
1NC – Militarism
Translators Have a Hard Time
Translators economically struggle in the US due to discrimination – they would rather
return to Afghanistan.
Sotolaroff 14 Paul Solotaroff is a former editor at The Village Voice and a journalist whose work has
twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, 2014, “Afghan Interpreters Struggle to Find a Home in the
U.S,” Men’s Journal, 06/25, https://mensjournal.com/adventure/afghan-interpreters-struggle-to-find-a-
home-in-the-u-s-20140625/ Accessed 07/25/2018 //jsaltman
Recently, I sat in Shinwari’s apartment with eight other interpreters, each in dire straits. All of them had
worked for the U.S. Army or Marines, carried glowing commendations from American captains and
colonels, and had more than enough English to land entry-level jobs at gas stations and fast-food stores.
“We don’t ask for special treatment; we start at the bottom, and that’s OK,” said Ajmal Sulaiman-Khail,
who was under siege in Korengal Valley with a battle-torn unit of the Marines. “But we go to the stores
and they say, ‘We don’t need you. You are Afghans, you are terrorists — go away.’ ” “We all have that
problem,” said Rafi Hashimi, a “terp” with Special Forces who served nine grueling years with
distinction. “I feel like I am nothing, useless to my family. I expected a better life, and it’s so much worse
here.” Roughly 13,000 refugees from our dual wars on terror have come over on special visas since
2008. Many Iraqis, raised in a land with modest infrastructure and acquaintance with modern
technology, have trod a smoother path to assimilation. But most Afghans, ravaged by decades of war,
come from dirt moonscapes of subsistence farms with no running water or power grid. To simply dump
them in big cities without backing or guidance seems the height of indifference. Yet that, says Zeller, is
exactly what’s been done by the State Department, which for years dragged its heels in issuing visas to
the terps, then brusquely turned its back once they got here. Faqiri, an Afghan translator who once
worked for numerous US military units and abruptly fled Afghanistan on two days notice, now works as
a pizza deliveryman “They contract with religious charities to give these guys the bare minimum,” says
Zeller. The terps “get three months of rent and eight months of food stamps — but zero assistance
finding a job or making the cultural leap to this century.” Most of the men here are behind on their rent
and mere weeks, or days, from being evicted with their kids, having been jettisoned by charities like the
Lutheran Social Services. “It’s been months since our case manager has come, and my daughter has a
very high fever,” says Hashimi. “I took her to the emergency room, but they won’t see her. They tell me,
‘Buy aspirin. Try that.’ ” Adds Shinwari over lunch in Virginia that day, “Most of us would have been
better off staying in Afghanistan. At least there, the graves are free.” So desperate is their plight that
two of the terps are considering the unthinkable — a possible return to Afghanistan. Zeller says, “They
see no hope here for their children.” He created a nonprofit, No One Left Behind, that has raised — and
spent — about $50,000 to keep roofs over the heads of these men and is trying to raise more, but the
funding is far outmatched by the need. “Every day, I get 10 new posts from terps reaching out to me on
Facebook,” he says. “Janis’ story [“The Friends We Left Behind”] broke the dam; they’re coming over en
masse.” If he had the cash, he’d hire these men to do casework here, then replicate that service in
places they’re sent by State. “We’re not talking about feeding ’em on the public’s dime. These are the
hardest-working people you’ve ever met, once they get their foot in the door. All they want is the thing
we promised when they put their lives on the line: a chance to start over in America. If they haven’t
earned that, who has?”
The aff doesn’t solve – they get detained or deported on arrival under Trump
NPR 17, National Public Radio is an American privately and publicly funded non-profit
membership media organization based in Washington, D.C. It serves as a national
syndicator to a network of over 1,000 public radio stations in the United States, 3-27-17,
Podcast, “Special Immigrant Visa Holders Still Face Questioning Upon Reaching U.S.”,
https://www.npr.org/2017/03/27/521537052/special-immigrant-visa-holders-still-face-questioning-
upon-reaching-u-s, -ss
Hossein Mahrammi, who helped U.S. development authorities in Kabul rebuild his war-torn country,
expected a warm welcome when he arrived in the United States this month. The economist had planned
to stay in Afghanistan but left because he feared for himself and his family. One by one, he saw that his
colleagues were assaulted or killed because they worked with Americans. But when he landed with his
wife and four young sons at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, they were detained. "I was expecting
or dreaming that they welcome in a way," Mahrammi said, "Maybe through some separate line, offering
us tea, and welcome us. But it was not like that." Mahrammi had a so-called special immigrant visa, or
SIV. This category of visa was created for people who worked with the U.S. government or contractors in
Iraq and Afghanistan, at great risk to themselves. In return, they were promised green cards. Several
such visa holders have been detained or threatened with deportation by federal immigration officers in
recent weeks. While courts have put President Trump's travel ban on hold, his administration is making
it tougher to get visas from certain parts of the world, and has vowed to ramp up screening of people
entering the U.S. And the law gives federal immigration officers broad discretion to turn away foreigners
at ports of entry, even if they have proper documentation. Immigrant rights groups say officers with U.S.
Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, have become too aggressive at airports and border crossings.
The International Refugee Assistance Project is trying to document cases of visa holders and refugees,
who had been vetted, encountering trouble getting past federal border agents. Immigration advocates
point out that it's not easy to get an SIV. The process involves extensive background checks by the State
and Homeland Security departments. In the case of Hossein Mahrammi, it took two years. Becca Heller,
director International Refugee Assistance Project, said she couldn't find a single example of anyone
holding a special immigrant visa being detained or deported by CBP officers — until this month. "I would
assume that there are dozens, if not hundreds more cases, that nobody ever finds out about," Heller
said. "It just begs the question of whether what they're doing is based on actual actionable intelligence,
or just on the fact that they are sort of running amok right now." David Aguilar, a former acting
commissioner of CBP, disputes that officers are acting improperly. "What it tells me is that Customs and
Border Protection is doing what they have been charged with doing," he said. He noted that a visa alone
doesn't guarantee entry to the US. The law specifies 60 different grounds for a border protection officer
to reject someone. Aguilar says those officers are even trained to look at body language. Aguilar said
officers are trained to heed red flags, including "if the officer believes the individual is nervous, is
evasive, eye contact is not there, or the line of questioning just does not match up with the answers." "If
they are not allowing immediate entry into the US, there is a reason for it," he said. CBP officers pulled
Mahrammi and his family aside when they got off the plane, and started asking a lot of questions.
Finally, after five hours, he and his family were allowed in. But his case could have gone very differently.
That same week, another SIV holder from Afghanistan landed at the airport in Newark, New Jersey.
SIV’s still struggle once they’re here
Magagnini 18 (Steve, independent journalist covering ethnic affairs, race relations, immigration, tribal
affairs, faith issues and human rights, has written for The Sacramento Bee, The Atlanta Journal-
Constitution, Kansas City Star, Austin American-Statesman, News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer,
Lexington Herald-Leader, Fresno Bee, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Miami Herald, and The Modesto Bee,
“These immigrants risked their lives for U.S. forces. How are we paying them back?”, The Sacramento
Bee, 3/22/18, https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article206282164.html)//DL
Afghan and Iraqi refugees who received Special Immigrant Visas after risking their lives serving alongside U.S. troops need more help
finding skilled jobs and decent affordable housing , the federal Government Accountability Office said in an audit released Thursday. These visas apply not only to people who helped the U.S. military
during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but to their immediate family members as well. The GAO said that since 2008, about 20,000 SIV recipients and 40,000 immediate family members have been resettled across the U.S., with large concentrations in Sacramento, Dallas-Fort Worth and
56 percent of Afghan SIV holders and 70 percent of Iraqi SIV holders were
Arlington, Texas, and Falls Church, Va. In its audit, the GAO found that
unemployed three months after arrival in the U.S., even though about 90 percent of Afghans and 80
percent of Iraqis had completed at least high school and spoke English well Many SIV holders have .
advanced degrees however, they only can secure employment driving for Lyft or Uber, assembling
, the report said,
cellphones, working at fast-food restaurants or in other relatively low-skilled jobs . Providing them with more upfront information about jobs and
housing costs across the U.S. “can at least help them make decisions that better align their personal situation with the economic realities of resettlement in the Unit ed States," the report stated. The report also said that a lack of longer-term data regarding SIV holders in the U.S. also is an
issue. “After their resettlement ... no outcome information exists beyond whether SIV holders are minimally self-sufficient within the first six months," it said. California has received more SIV newcomers than any other state, and Sacram ento – with more than 2,000 arrivals – has more
than any other county in California. Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, in response to a 2016 investigation of SIV holders by The Sacramento Bee, had requested the GAO to evaluate how to improve the resettlement process for Afghan refugees arriving in the United States on the visas.
“SIV holders helped service members defend our country abroad, and I believe it is our duty to ensure we help them build their lives here in the United States,” Matsui said in a statement Thursday. “This report clearly indicates that we have more work to do, particularly in collecting
additional data on the resettlement process so we can improve long term outcomes." "I also believe, based on the experiences of those in Sacramento, that we need to strengthen the employment and
housing resources we offer SIV holders ," she continued. "There is a role that Congress can play in ensuring these families have the help they need, and I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues on
difficulties some SIV holders have faced where they often were
legislative options to do so.” The Bee series, called “No Safe Place,” documented the in Sacramento,
placed in housing infested with bedbugs and roaches. People who worked as translators , engineers, doctors and lawyers for the U.S.
have found they can land little but minimum-wage work. Some have been the victims of violent
in Afghanistan
crimes .
SIV’s face a bunch of difficulties post-entry—

1. Employment
GAO 18 (Government Accountability Office, “AFGHAN AND IRAQI SPECIAL IMMIGRANTS: More
Information on Their Resettlement Outcomes Would Be Beneficial”, February 2018,
https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/690190.pdf)//DL
principal SIV holders faced

According to officials from national and local resettlement agencies, officials from advocacy groups, and SIV holder participants in all 8 focus groups conducted with principal SIV holders,
challenges obtaining employment in their previous fields or that matched their skill level . These challenges occurred even though
they had worked for the U.S. government, tended to have completed secondary education or more, and reported good levels of spoken English. Several factors may account for these challenges, some of which may also be applicable to skilled refugees or immigrants who are not SIV
SIV holders had limited opportunities for federal employment because

holders. These include: • Limited opportunities for federal employment in the United States:
most positions required U.S. citizenship as well as background investigations or security clearances that
are available only to citizens SIV holders , as we reported in 2010.44 In 6 of the 8 focus groups we conducted with principal , some participants said that they expected to be able to get jobs similar to the ones they had in
Afghanistan or Iraq, such as with the federal government, because they had previously worked for U.S. organizations. Based on the surveys they completed at the end of our focus groups, principal SIV holders reported that they had a range of jobs in Afghanistan and Iraq, including
expressed frustration with being ineligible

interpreter, information technology worker, security guard, project manager, and engineer.45 In one of our focus groups conducted in Northern Virginia, some participants
for security clearances for federal employment in the United States because they were able to obtain
clearance to work in Afghanistan, and they now had to wait 5 years to apply for U.S. citizenship , which is required for a
SIV holders
U.S. security clearance. • SIV holders’ previous work may not help with U.S. employment: Some officials we interviewed from advocacy groups and local resettlement agencies said that while principal ’ ability to speak English with a high level of proficiency
may not have the writing skills needed for professional work in the United
enabled them to work for the U.S. government overseas, they always
States SIV holders may be

. Officials from a career development organization that works directly with highly skilled immigrants, including SIV holders, to help them re-enter their fields in the United States said that sometimes
hindered in re-entering their original professional fields because during the time they worked as
interpreters, translators, or other positions they may not have been actively employed in their for the U.S. government,
original fields While SIV holders may be able to get their foreign degrees or
.46 • Barriers to foreign degree and credential recognition: and others
other credentials assessed for U.S. equivalency, these processes can be costly or time consuming , according to officials
degree recognition could be particularly challenging for

we interviewed from one national and two local resettlement agencies. Staff from two national resettlement agencies said that
Afghan SIV holders because the nature of conflict in Afghanistan made it harder for evaluators to
connect with universities there . Other research we reviewed identified the complexities of the licensing process and of available career paths as challenges for highly skilled and educated immigrants in the United States in general.47
because principal SIV holders were often unable to find employment in

Officials we interviewed from about half of the local resettlement agencies said that
their prior profession, many took “survival” or low-skilled jobs in order to cover basic expenses . Officials from local
common jobs for principal SIV holders included drivers for ride-sharing
resettlement agencies, as well as participants in our focus groups, reported that
services airport workers

like Uber and Lyft, security guards low-level information technology workers
such as luggage handling and food service, ,
or warehouse workers
such as cell phone assembly or temporary technician, such as inventory or stocking. One principal SIV holder we spoke to in our focus groups said he worked as a civil engineer for 6 years in Afghanistan, but was assembling cell
SIV holders expressed frustration about the

phones in the United States, which was disappointing for him given his years of experience and education. In almost all of our focus groups with principal , participants
barriers to re-entering their professional fields and the need to take low-skilled jobs. These
employment-related challenges did not align with the expectations of principal SIV holders , who thought that their education
and prior work experience with the U.S. government would enable them to find skilled work, according to many national and local resettlement agency officials we interviewed and SIV holders who participated in our focus groups. All 3 state refugee coordinators, representatives of 7 of 9
national resettlement agencies, and representatives of 10 of 13 local resettlement agencies we spoke to said that SIV holders tend to have high, unrealistic expectations about employment or about life in general after they arrive. As one principal SIV holder from one of our focus groups in
California stated: “I thought I would not need to worry about anything in the U.S. for years and they will take care of me and my family because I worked for their government.” SIV holders in our focus groups also expected more assistance in obtaining high-skilled employment than they
local resettlement agencies did not

generally received. In all 8 of our focus groups conducted with principal SIV holders, some participants expected more assistance getting back into thei r fields of interest, but said that
always have the technical skills or resources needed to assist them . Similarly, in 4 of the 8 focus groups with principal SIV holders, some participants reported that they
expected to receive sufficient government assistance to cover expenses while they adapted to life in the United States, spent time getting retrained or recertified, or searched for employment. Because of these high expectations, the reality of starting over was frustrating or shocking, and
made the initial resettlement process challenging, according to both staff from local resettlement agencies and SIV holders from our focus groups. Officials from a number of national and local resettlement agencies said that SIV holders’ expectations tended to be higher than other clients
they served, such as refugees. Officials we interviewed from a number of national and local resettlement agencies agreed that they would have liked to do more for SIV holders, given their sacrifice in working for the U.S. government, but that they treat all of their clients in the
national resettlement agency

resettlement program the same, in accordance with PRM’s cooperative agreements. Staff from one and one local resettlement agency agreed that while they would like to assist SIV holders and other highly-
skilled clients to obtain better or more skilled jobs, they did not have the resources or capacity to provide a significant amount of specialized
help over a longer term. False expectations about resettlement may have come through word of mouth or other sources, according to resettlement agency staff and SIV holders we interviewed. Some local resettlement agency staff said SIV holders’ high expectations may be due
managing SIV holders’ high expectations was

in part to inaccurate information from the SIV holder community through social media or word of mouth. Staff from one local r esettlement agency reported that
time-consuming for staff because there was a “mountain of misinformation” SIV holders within the community. Principal may
have also received false hope from their overseas U.S. military colleagues , who may not understand the challenges of resettlement. For example, one principal
SIV holder we spoke to in our focus groups said that his American co-workers in Afghanistan told him it would be easy to find a good job in the United States because of his skills, but he said finding employment in his previous field was challenging and he is now working for a warehouse
packing department.
2. Housing
housing challenges were common among SIV holders

While SIV holders tended to have high both and refugees,
expectations , according to staff from some local resettlement agencies. Officials from national and local resettlement agencies, as well as SIV holders from our focus groups, described several housing related challenges: • Local resettlement agencies faced barriers to
SIV holders
securing housing: lack rental or credit histories and Social Security numbers when they arrive in the
, like refugees,
United States, which limits the housing options available to local resettlement agencies who must secure their housing. Local resettlement agency staff said that they had built relationships
SIV
with landlords who were willing to forego these requirements; accordingly, some staff reported that SIV holders and refugees were often housed in certain apartment complexes. • SIV holders in our focus groups expected better housing: In 10 of 11 focus groups we conducted,
holders reported that the apartments they lived in were not of high quality, they experienced
sometimes
problems with infestation, or had concerns about safety .48 The SIV holders in our focus groups who had problems with infestation or other issues said that they reported them to the
SIV holders
landlord or local resettlement agency and the issues were generally addressed, but not always to their satisfaction. Additionally, according to staff from national and local resettlement agencies, as well as SIV holders in 5 of our 11 focus groups,
often expected better housing or to be placed in certain locations near the main SIV holder community ;
SIV holders could not afford to move to nicer

however, this was not always possible due to limited availability of affordable housing. in some of our focus groups also reported that they
apartments Housing affordability was also cited as a major challenge

. • Affordable housing was limited: , especially by local resettlement agency staff and SIV holder
the median
participants in 5 of our focus groups in Northern Virginia and Oakland, California. In Alameda County, where the city of Oakland is located, and in the city of Alexandria, where most SIV holders from our 3 focus groups in Northern Virginia lived,
rental cost for a one-bedroom apartment was about $1,400, according to U.S. Census Bureau data in 2016 . In
rising housing costs were cited as growing challenges by staff from local resettlement
Sacramento and Dallas, some
agencies and SIV holders there are no national guidelines for affordability
in 3 of our 4 focus groups in those cities.49 While , officials from one national
resettlement agency said that their general rule is to find housing that a family could afford on their expected income and have extra for other expenses.
3. Spousal Integration
female SIV spouses experienced specific barriers to

Officials we interviewed from all 9 national resettlement agencies and 12 of 13 local resettlement agencies reported that
assimilation Female SIV spouses experienced cultural adjustment challenges

. These include: • : Officials from national and local resettlement agencies
the gap between

reported that SIV holders and their spouses in terms of English proficiency, education,
male principal
work experience, or exposure to American culture, could be large and created challenges for women’s
integration SIV spouses may be less likely to
, especially for Afghan women, a few officials noted. Accordingly, male principal SIV holders may be able to more quickly integrate, while female
participate in programs, struggle to integrate, or feel isolated , according to officials from national and local resettlement agencies. Officials noted that this gap tended to be larger
than between refugee husbands and wives, who may be more evenly matched. Our analysis of PRM data confirmed that differences in education and spoken English lev els were larger between principal SIV holders and spouses than with refugee principals and spouses.50 According to
our analysis of PRM data on SIV spouses, 42 percent reported speaking no English , with those from Afghanistan much less likely to speak any English than those from Iraq. Afghan SIV spouses were also about one-third
as likely to have reported completing postsecondary education as Iraqi SIV spouses, based on available data.51 In contrast, in our focus groups some female SIV spouses and some female principal SIV holders had prior work experience and high levels of education. For example, about
one-third of the female SIV spouses in our focus groups (9 of 27) reported on their participant surveys that they had prior work experience in their home countries, including as teachers and journalists. • Lack of childcare and limited transportation options: Officials we interviewed from
barriers around childcare and transportation made it challenging for

local resettlement agencies and SIV spouses in two of our focus groups said that
female SIV spouses to leave the house for classes or employment several female SIV . For example, in one of our Sacramento focus groups,
spouses wanted to take English classes and find work, but the cost of childcare and lack of public
reported that they
transportation, including school buses for their children, were prohibitive SIV . National and local resettlement agency officials also reported that female
spouses may take longer to assimilate and feel isolated because of families’ expectations about female
spouses staying home . Officials from one national resettlement agency said that prior to arrival, many SIV holders and their families lived comfortably on one income, and therefore female spouses were often not initially willing to work, which
SIV spouses said that they would like to work, but needed to wait
strained finances and made self-sufficiency difficult. In all three of our focus groups with female , participants
until their children were older or needed to learn English first .

1NC – Afghanistan
Non-UQ
Afghan stability is non-unique
1ac Felbab-Brown 17 (Vanda, “Afghanistan’s terrorism resurgence: Al-Qaida, ISIS, and beyond”,
https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/afghanistans-terrorism-resurgence-al-qaida-isis-and-beyond/)
However, Afghanistan remains in a highly precarious condition. After more than a decade of U.S. and international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and build up the country’s governance structures, the U.N. special envoy in Afghanistan Nicholas Haysom stated in March 2016 when briefing
the U.N. Security Council that if Afghanistan merely survived 2016 the United Nations mission in the country would consider it a success.[1] Afghanistan did survive 2016 without much of the country falling into the hands of the Taliban, or the government collapsing with a protracted
But 2016 also accomplished little in reversing the multiple deleterious trends
political crisis ensuing, and without a full-blown civil war breaking out.
that motivated the special envoy’s comments. Security continued to worsen palpably. During the two
and a half years since the United States and NATO turned the fighting over to the Afghan National
Security Forces (ANSF), the Taliban has mounted and sustained its toughest military campaign yet, and
the war has become bloodier than ever the Taliban’s military energy shows no signs of fizzling . Despite internal difficulties, its
out. It has been scoring important tactical and even strategic victories. Insecurity has increased
significantly throughout the country, civilian deaths have shot up, and the Afghan security forces are
taking large, and potentially unsustainable, casualties as other ANSF deficiencies, including corruption
that affects both unit performance and sustainment capacity, persist Significant portions of .
Afghanistan’s territory, including the provincial capital of Kunduz and multiple districts of Helmand, have
fallen to the Taliban
(at least temporarily) over the past two years. Moreover, the Islamic State (IS) established itself in Afghanistan in 2015, although it faces multiple and strong countervailing forces. Although borrowing its name from the Islamic State in
the Middle East and proclaiming allegiance to it, the Islamic State in Afghanistan is not a Middle East export to the country. Rather, it consists of several splinter groups and elements expelled from the Taliban, including some too brutal and too sectarian even for the mainstream Taliban.
Eastern Nangarhar in particular has emerged as the strongest base of IS presence in Afghanistan. In other parts of the country, such as the north, foreign elements, including Uzbek and Pakistani militants, including factions of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan, relabeled
themselves IS. An IS growth in Afghanistan faces substantial obstacles: The group’s brutality, greater than even the brutality Afghans have been subjected to for decades, generates resentment. The Taliban has been better able to calibrate brutality and hide or excuse the violence it
The Taliban
perpetrates against civilians. At times, the Taliban has even temporarily reduced violence and overly-restrictive edits to generate acceptance by local populations. By contrast, like IS in the Middle East, IS in Afghanistan has chosen to rule by sheer brutality.
has also sponsored opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and the jobs and income it provides for
ordinary Afghans, thus generating political capital . IS in Afghanistan, on the other hand, has prohibited opium poppy cultivation both on grounds of ideological purity the strategic goal of ensuring that
the only employment available to local men is as IS foot soldiers. IS in Afghanistan has also drawn the attention of international actors, and the Taliban has been able to capitalize on being seen as a lesser threat by outside powers. For Russia and Iran, the Islamic State is an even greater
threat than the Taliban. Both countries have provided support to the Taliban in order to fight IS but also as part of their anti-American efforts. Far more ominous, however, than the emergence of the Afghan version of IS for the stability of Afghanistan and the long-term success of
The weakness of
counterterrorism efforts in the country is how fractious and polarized politics in Afghanistan remain. The National Unity Government (created in the wake of the highly contested presidential elections of 2014) has not yet really found its feet.
the NUG, its political dependencies and entanglements, and its other priorities, have also limited and
undermined its willingness and ability to robustly tackle the predatory criminality, illicit economies, and
organized crime that have become so intermeshed with Afghanistan’s political system and international
counterinsurgency operations illicit economies and . The country’s such as illegal mining logging and drug trafficking have financed and stimulated some aspects of the post-2001 violent conflict. But it is
predatory criminality
particularly the — involving usurpation of land, taxes, and customs, generalized extortion, thuggish monopolistic domination of international contracts and local economic markets, and usurpation of international aid – that
has even more severely undermined the stabilization and reconstruction efforts . Combined with the capricious and rapacious rule by Afghan
powerbrokers, the predatory criminality allows the Taliban, despite its brutality, to to present itself as a more predictable and less corrupt ruler and gives the insurgency critical traction and resilience.
Alt Cause
Alt causes to US failure in Afghanistan – bureaucracy, desertion, vetting, lack of
commitment
Morgan 5/4, 2018, Wesley, military affairs reporter at POLITICO, 5-4-2018, Politico,
“Trump's Afghanistan strategy stymied by vetting of local troops,”
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/04/trumps-afghanistan-strategy-local-troops-vetting-518181.
-ss
The plan to turn around the war in Afghanistan may already be running into quicksand. An extensive
effort aimed at weeding out Taliban sympathizers and terrorist infiltrators from the Afghan army has
slowed the work of a new unit of 1,000 military advisers, whose deployment was billed as a key part of
the strategy President Donald Trump authorized in August. The U.S. Army’s 1st Security Force Assistance
Brigade — a pillar of the strategy, and created with this kind of mission in mind — arrived in Afghanistan
in March and assumed its mission last month. But partly because of the decision to vet so many
partners, the brigade has not yet been able to link up with Afghan army battalions across the country,
according to military officials and contractors involved in the effort. “They’ve got to screen everybody
who’s going to be working directly with the [brigade],” said an Army officer who was involved in
preparing bases for the new adviser teams earlier this year and who, like others contacted for this story,
agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. “That means screening basically the whole damn
Afghan National Army, and we’re way behind the power curve on that.” The vetting effort is meant to
protect members of the brigade from “insider attacks” by the Afghan troops they are working with,
which for years have plagued U.S. and NATO efforts to help establish a viable Afghan force to secure the
war-torn nation. “We want to be deliberate and diligent about the way we’re partnering to ensure that
we’re being safe,” a spokesman for the U.S.-led military headquarters in Kabul, Lt. Col. Martin
O’Donnell, said. “Systems like the screening ensure that.” He added that “not everyone in a unit needs
to be vetted for advising to begin.” The adviser brigade, based at Fort Benning, Ga., consists of about
1,000 advisers and security personnel. Its deployment to Afghanistan was accelerated at the request of
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to get it in the fight in time for the warm-weather fighting season in
Afghanistan. It accounts for about a quarter of the 4,000 additional American troops dispatched to the
country since last summer — reinforcements that have brought the total U.S. contingent to about
15,000. The top commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. John Nicholson, has stressed the importance of
pushing adviser teams down to the lower levels of the Afghan army — specifically to battalions, or
kandaks, which are units of a few hundred Afghan soldiers. U.S. Special Forces have advised some elite
Afghan commando units at that level for years, but the regular Afghan army has not had advisers with
its battalions since 2014. The new advisory brigade is “made up of volunteers who are then specially
trained in a range of skills to provide combat advising at the tactical level,” Nicholson told reporters late
last year, as the brigade was preparing to deploy. “So they’ll go down to the kandak level, the battalion
level, which is really where we have operated successfully for the last couple of years with our Special
Forces advisers.” But a desire to prevent casualties among the advisers from “insider attacks” has driven
the U.S. headquarters in Afghanistan to institute a massive screening process before letting the adviser
teams move out with that part of their mission, the officials said. In 2012, such attacks accounted for a
full quarter of U.S. and NATO casualties, and the Taliban touted their effectiveness. The Afghan army has
suffered massive casualties since the U.S. and NATO military presence was significantly reduced in 2014.
Last year alone, more Afghan soldiers and police were killed than the total American death toll in the 17-
year war. Desertion is rampant. A recent U.S. government assessment found that the supposedly
334,000-strong army actually has fewer than 300,000 troops. Many recruits are illiterate and from the
same rural backgrounds as the Taliban, which has taken advantage of that fact to seed the force with
infiltrators. Nevertheless, the extensive U.S. effort to vet its allies is controversial, sparking criticism that
the American command is being overly cautious. Michael Waltz, a retired Special Forces lieutenant
colonel who has advised Afghan commandos, said the large-scale screening process suggests U.S.
commanders are too risk-averse, fearful of taking too many American casualties. “You cannot have a
zero-defect, zero-casualty mentality when it comes to an advisory effort in one of the most difficult and
complex parts of the world,” Waltz said. “You have 17 years of accumulated rules and regulations and
policies, each one of which made sense at the time they were enacted, but if you step back and look at
them in total, we’re tying our hands.” Such an extensive vetting program is “a bureaucratic solution
that fundamentally undercuts the purpose of these adviser teams and demonstrates a lack of
commitment to the mission,” added Jason Dempsey, a former Army officer who served as a combat
adviser in Afghanistan and is now with the Center for a New American Security.
SIV holders are still detained and/or deported

Rose 17 (Joel, National Desk Correspondent based at NPR's New York bureau, collaborated with NPR's
Planet Money podcast for a story on smart guns, part of NPR's award-winning coverage of Pope Francis's
visit to the US, spent six years as a reporter at member station WHYY, former producer at KQED in San
Francisco and American Routes in New Orleans, has a bachelor's degree in history and music from
Brown University, “Special Immigrant Visa Holders Still Face Questioning Upon Reaching U.S.”, NPR,
3/27/17, https://www.npr.org/2017/03/27/521537052/special-immigrant-visa-holders-still-face-
questioning-upon-reaching-u-s)//DL
**this is also a good answer to their uncertainty deficit to the temporary/parole cp
Hossein Mahrammi expected a warm welcome when he arrived in the

, who helped U.S. development authorities in Kabul rebuild his war-torn country,
United States when he

this month. The economist had planned to stay in Afghanistan but left because he feared for himself and his family. One by one, he saw that his colleagues were assaulted or killed because they worked with Americans. But
landed with his wife and four young sons they were detained at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, . "I was expecting or dreaming that they welcome in a way," Mahrammi said,
Mahrammi had a SIV

"Maybe through some separate line, offering us tea, and welcome us. But it was not like that." so-called special immigrant visa, or . This category of visa was created for people who worked with the U.S. government or contractors
such visa holders have been detained or threatened with

in Iraq and Afghanistan, at great risk to themselves. In return, they were promised green cards. Several
deportation by federal immigration officers Trump's travel ban in recent weeks. While courts have put President on hold, his administration is making it tougher to get visas
gives federal immigration officers broad discretion to turn away

from certain parts of the world, and has vowed to ramp up screening of people entering the U.S. And the law
foreigners at ports of entry, even if they have proper documentation officers with U.S. . Immigrant rights groups say
Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, have become too aggressive at airports and border crossings . The
it's not easy to get an SIV.

International Refugee Assistance Project is trying to document cases of visa holders and refugees, who had been vetted, encountering trouble getting past federal border agents. Immigration advocates point out that
The process involves extensive background checks by the State and Homeland Security departments . In the case
there
of Hossein Mahrammi, it took two years. Becca Heller, director International Refugee Assistance Project, said she couldn't find a single example of anyone holding a special immigrant visa being detained or deported by CBP officers — until this month. "I would assume that
are dozens, if not hundreds more cases, that nobody ever finds out about ," Heller said. "It just begs the question of whether what they're doing is based on
actual actionable intelligence, or just on the fact that they are sort of running amok right now." A Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman declined to comment on individual cases. David Aguilar, a former acting commissioner of CBP, disputes that officers are acting improperly.
a visa alone doesn't guarantee entry to the US. The law

"What it tells me is that Customs and Border Protection is doing what they have been charged with doing," he said. He noted that
specifies 60 different grounds for a border protection officer to reject someone officers are even . Aguilar says those
trained to look at body language officers are trained to heed red flags, including "if the officer
. Aguilar said
believes the individual is nervous, is evasive, eye contact is not there, or the line of questioning just does
not match up with the answers." "If they are not allowing immediate entry into the US, there is a reason for it," he said. CBP officers pulled Mahrammi and his family aside when they got off the plane, and started asking a lot of
SIV holder from Afghanistan landed at the airport

questions. Finally, after five hours, he and his family were allowed in. But his case could have gone very differently. That same week, another in
Once he arrived, he was put into detention, questioned without a lawyer, and forced to sign
Newark, New Jersey. "
papers he didn't want to sign ," said Alexander Shalom, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of New Jersey. He's representing the man known in court papers only as John Doe, to protect his privacy. Hours before the man was set to be
The government was planning to put him back

deported, his lawyers raced to court. One federal judge ruled against them. So they asked for an emergency hearing before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. "
on a plane officers
," Shalom says, "until we got the Third Circuit to prevent them from doing that." That man is still in detention. Federal aut horities have yet to tell the ACLU why they won't let him into the country. Also this month, in Los Angeles,
detained a family of five travelling on a special immigrant visa What seems to . They were eventually released, but only after an emergency court order. "
be going on is a tremendous amount of discretion being given to these CBP agents, without much
guidance ," said attorney Robert Blume of the firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, which is representing the family.
Aff doesn’t solve fast enough because of processing—increasing visas doesn’t

guarantee that they’re all used
Alvarez 7/25 (Priscilla, assistant editor at The Atlantic, “'How Much More Merit Do You Need Than
Saving American Lives?'”, The Atlantic, 7/25/18,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/trump-immigration-crackdown-
visas/565949/)//DL
Since their inception, the Afghan and Iraqi SIV programs have had their share of problems SIV . By law,
applications need to be processed within nine months, but oftentimes it takes years . The lag time is what drove Zeller and Shinwari, finally
the sudden
reunited in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, to start a nonprofit called No One Left Behind in 2013 that helps Afghan and Iraqi citizens obtain special immigrant visas and resettle in the United States. In five years, they’ve helped 6,000 families, but
slowdown in processing is a worrisome trend that could seriously efforts as the Trump hamper their
administration’s immigration crackdown gains momentum . Growing up in Rochester, New York, Zeller, 36, wanted to be a civil-rights attorney. Listening to him talk about his time in
Afghanistan, and No One Left Behind, where he now works full-time, it all made sense. Zeller, with his neatly combed brown hair and upright posture, is an energetic speaker. He gestures with his hands and pauses for effect, flourishes that would have worked well in court. But becoming
a lawyer wasn’t meant to be. Four months after the terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, he joined the New York Army National Guard as a sophomore at Hamilton C ollege. “I felt that this was my generation’s Pearl Harbor and I wanted to live up to
that, to that legacy of service,” he said, recalling the service of his grandfather and the generations before him. Six years later—after graduating from Hamilton, finishing graduate school at Syracuse University, and briefly working at the CIA —Zeller was deployed to Afghanistan as a newly
minted officer. Matt Zeller, left, and Janis Shinwari, right, pictured in November 2013 in Arlington, Virginia (Guillaume Meyer / AFP/ Getty Images) Shinwari, 40, grew up in Afghanistan, the son of an Afghan military officer. He was inspired at a young age to learn English by the movie
Commando, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. He had witnessed violence as a boy and envisioned a world in which his country was at peace. Becoming a linguist with the U.S. government seemed like the best way to see that through. “To be honest with you, we were tired of al Qaeda and
the Taliban,” he said. “I knew a translator does a very, very important job in the fights because without translators, the Americans can’t communicate with the villages. They don’t know how to speak with our people, our police, our army.” In 2005, Shinwari became a combat interpreter
for the U.S. military, working alongside troops and traversing Afghanistan in what would become America’s longest war, eventually landing in Ghazni. He had only met Zeller briefly before he and about a dozen American soldiers went to help Zeller’s men during the 2008 ambush. When
Shinwari spotted Zeller in the line of fire, he had to make a quick decision—lunge toward an American soldier who likely wouldn’t recognize him in old Army fatigues and risk getting shot to knock him out of harm’s way? Or hold back and let him get shot? He lunged and shouldered Zeller
to safety. I asked Shinwari the same question Zeller had the day after the incident: Why? He gave me the same answer, as if it were a no-brainer: “Because you’re a guest in my country, that’s my responsibility. I saved your life, now you’re going back to your fa mily and I’m happy for it.”
Shinwari served for eight years with the U.S. military. He speaks fondly of the soldiers with whom he served and repeatedly reminds me that that they we were all in it together. “There was no difference between us. We were fighting shoulder to shoulder,” he said. Zeller and Shinwari
were inseparable during their time serving together; Zeller asked for Shinwari to be assigned to him specifically after Shinwari saved his life. The day they parted was difficult for both of them. It was the “hardest goodbye” of their lives, they told me. For his part, Shinwari had no intention
back then of coming to the United States, instead insisting that Zeller would visit him when Afghanistan stabilized. But he was also concerned about his own safety. “I was 80 percent sure I’d get killed one day by the Taliban,” he said. During his service, Shinwari received threats from the
Taliban. It began with mysterious phone calls, then threatening strangers came by his house, and eventually he received a total of three death letters pinned to his door in Kabul. To avoid them, Shinwari lived on a military base full-time. Despite sometimes living only miles away from his
wife and two small children, a 2-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son, he could only see his family occasionally. When the threats became more persistent, Shinwari sought help from Zeller, who had already returned to the United States. But progress on his visa was maddeningly slow.
During his last few weeks in Afghanistan, Shinwari, often with his family, moved every night to evade the Taliban. He would t ext Zeller in the evening to let him know he’d reached his destination, and in the morning he’d text to tell him he had made it through the night. In 2013, Shinwari
Obtaining a special immigrant visa isn’t

and his family’s visas were finally approved after Zeller had taken their case to the upper reaches of the State Department. They arrived in the United States that October.
easy. Applicants are required to provide a slew of documents to the U.S. embassy in their home country,
then complete in-person interviews and medical and security screenings. It’s an arduous process and one that occurs
The recent
despite the fact that locals working for the U.S. government have usually already passed background checks. From fiscal years 2007 to 2017, SIVs made up roughly 1 percent of all U.S. immigrant visas granted, according to the Pew Research Center.
decline in SIV arrivals is a sure sign that the process has become even slower. “I haven’t seen anyone
come through [the special-immigrant-visa program] in the last eight months,” said an immigration Margaret Stock,
lawyer who has extensive experience in homeland-security and military matters. One of Stock’s clients, a man from Iraq who worked for the U.S. government and moved to the U.S. in 2017, is waiting for his wife and son to get approved for visas. Their
applications have been in administrative processing for more than a year . Alarmed by the slowdown, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), which
helps provide legal aid to refugees and displaced persons, and Freshfields, a multinational law firm, filed a lawsuit against the federal government in June challenging the delays experienced by Afghan and Iraqi applicants. In 2015, IRAP a nd Freshfields had sued the government on behalf
of individual Afghan and Iraqi SIV applicants. The government eventually entered a settlement and agreed to adjudicate their applications. Now they are requesting that the new lawsuit, with four Afghans and one Iraqi named as plaintiffs, become a class-action suit on behalf of all current
processing delays are “caused by the failure of the interagency process,”

visa applicants. Like the congressional committee reports, the lawsuit alleges that the
the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security

and names officials in are involved in as defendants. Both agencies
different stages of the visa-eligibility process . The lawsuit claims that the “Defendants have failed to adjudicate Plaintiffs’ and proposed class members’ SIV applications within a reasonable time, which caused
Past delays have been caused by a lack of visas

and continues to cause irreparable harm to Plaintiffs and proposed class members.” , which are typically authorized annually in defense-spending bills.
But this isn’t causing the current slowdown—there are still visas available . The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018 authorized 3,500
additional special immigrant visas for Afghan applicants. In a recent letter to the chairmen and the ranking members of the Armed Services Committees, 19 Democratic and Republican congressmen requested that an additional 4,000 visas be authorized for the Afghan SIV program. There
are more than 17,000 Afghans in the pipeline, according to a State Department official. “ We’ve seen instances where there are not visas available and delays imposed because
there’s a visa shortage But now there are visas available and we’re still seeing delays
,” said Betsy Fisher, the policy director for irap. “ .
The various reasons we might expect don’t apply here .” Democratic Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who signed the letter requesting additional visas and is a longtime supporter of
the program, is out of patience. “It continues to be frustrating for me that we go back through this movie again and again,” he said. “But now I think it’s part of the approach we see with this administration, who really are dramatically discouraging immigration even in the case of these
assurances from the State Department that the pace of issuances would
people who put their lives on the line for Americans.” Blumenauer said he had received
pick up but It’s possible that they’ll get all the way through the year and not fully use the allocated
, he added, “
visas they have this fiscal year .”
Processing takes too long

Blanchard 17 (Elise, soon-to-be journalism graduate from Columbia University in New York and
Sciences Po in Paris, “Afghan Translators Hope U.S. Visas Will Arrive Before Taliban Does”, Refugees
Deeply, 1/11/17, https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/01/11/afghan-translators-hope-
u-s-visas-will-arrive-before-taliban-does)//DL
The application process usually takes a few years. Applicants must provide a letter of recommendation
from their U.S. supervisor, document the threats they have received and take part in interviews at the
Kabul embassy, as well as biographical and biometrical security screenings . Over 11,000 visas have been issued through the program since 2008. Each year,
U.S. Congress authorizes new visas in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to prevent the program from expiring. Law makers have added 3,000-4,000 visas each year since 2014. Yet Republican lawmakers in Congress blocked a provision for 4,000 additional visas for the 2017
financial year. Instead, the final version of the NDAA that passed on December 23 renewed the Afghan SIV program for four years and authorized just 1,500 additional visas. This is likely to exacerbate a growing backlog to the program, which is still accepting new applications. As of early
there were more than 13,000 Afghan applicants (not including their family members)
December, stuck at some stage of the process,
but only 913 visas left The backlog has built up due to the thorough
, a State Department official told Refugees Deeply by email. over the years partly
screening process Several U.S. agencies . have to vet each application. Since each , including the Department of Homeland Security,
security check has an expiration date, if one agency takes too long to get to an application, others will
have to look at the files again The program also lacks resources. “There simply aren’t enough people,
.
period,” new phrasing in the NDAA, which limits

said Mac McEachin, national security policy associate at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). Advocates are also concerned that
eligibility to translators, interpreters and those who “perform sensitive and trusted activities,” could
make it more difficult for contractors or other Afghans working on a base, such as a mechanic or janitor,
to obtain a visa .
Alt Cause - Iran
Alt causes to Afghan stability—Iran Deal withdrawal and sanctions

Arsalai 5/30 (Sibghatullah, Senior Political Expert at the Office of the National Security Council of
Afghanistan, fellow at the Kabul Center for Policy and Strategy, having a specific interest in the areas of
peace, security, and geopolitics, “What Does Trump’s Withdrawal From the Iran Nuclear Deal Mean for
Afghanistan?”, The Diplomat, 5/30/18, https://thediplomat.com/2018/05/what-does-trumps-
withdrawal-from-the-iran-nuclear-deal-mean-for-afghanistan/)//DL
Tension between the United States and Iran is again on the rise after the United States withdrew from
the Iran nuclear deal and the Trump administration threatened to impose the
— formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) —
strongest sanctions in history on Iran . The threat was supplemented with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s wishful 12-point laundry list to make Iran obey. Pompeo’s expressions were inferred by many experts as a
Iran has responded in a similarly harsh tone

recipe for regime change in Iran, but he later expressed that the sanctions are not aimed at regime change but at a change in behavior. , with Iranian President Hassan
Washington’s withdrawal from the

Rouhani saying, “The world today does not accept that the United States decides for the world. Countries have their independence… Who are you to decide for Iran and the world?”
Iran nuclear deal is not good news for Afghanistan as Iran has the ability to influence the security and ,
economic situation in its neighbor the U.S. withdrawal from the deal and the threat of imposing
. In this context,
sanctions on Iran will harm Afghanistan for three reasons. First, Iran will worsen the security and main push to
economic situation in Afghanistan by supporting the Taliban insurgency. Second, Afghanistan will
become more dependent on Pakistan economically and Pakistan will gain more leverage over
Afghanistan in terms of negotiating a peace settlement with the Taliban. Third, the regional consensus
against Afghan-led peace will strengthen With the U.S. withdrawal and new sanctions, it is likely that .
Iran will increase its relations with the Taliban, contributing to worsening the security situation in the
vulnerable provinces of Afghanistan Iran enjoys a fair proportion of the Afghan
’s west and northwest, particularly Farah, Herat, Badghis, and Faryab.
consumer market that it would not like to give up on, especially when it is under harsh sanctions and in
dire need of balancing its economy Iran
. However, it is valid to argue that Iran would be willing to give up on small gains to secure big ones. This means that by giving up on its share of the market in Afghanistan,
will pressure the Afghan government to bow down to the regional vision of a power-sharing deal with
the Taliban to end the Afghan conflict Iran will be able to secure its three core
. By contributing to the worsening security and economic situation,
interests in Afghanistan. First, it will be able to dent the American claim the U.S. South Asia Strategy is a
success; second, it will seriously threaten economic projects like the (TAPI) pipeline Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India
project and Bakshabad Dam and third, Iran will contribute to emerging Shia-Sunni tensions by
that it deems a threat;
supporting conservative Shia groups that could lead to a renewed rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia
in Afghanistan Afghanistan hoped to utilize Chabahar Port in Iran to gain access to
. As far as Pakistan is concerned,
international markets The new sanctions that would be introduced could threaten this vital
, bypassing Pakistan’s Karachi.
economic project and Afghanistan will have to lean on Pakistan to access the sea for economic purposes .
Pakistan has been under immense pressure for harboring terrorist sanctuaries and sponsoring terrorism. The Trump administration has cut aid, lobbied to put Pakistan on the Financial Action Task Force grey list,
The United
and publicly asked Pakistan to stop cooperating with terrorists and support the Afghan-led peace process. In addition to that, the government of Afghanistan has also lobbied for more pressure on Pakistan so it ca n push the Taliban to the negotiating table.
States’ withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and introduction of new sanctions will release the
pressure on Pakistan and it will gain more leverage over Afghanistan and the United States, both
economically and politically in the context of Afghanistan the regional consensus on peace in . Lastly,
Afghanistan has been turning against the United States and in favor of the Taliban . Russia, Pakistan, and Iran assert that the Afghan problem is
not solvable through military means and a settlement needs to be negotiated. While the Afghan government has offered a peace deal with political inclusion for the Taliban, the regional stance can be inferred as arguing for a power sharing deal to end the Afgha n conflict. As the United
Trump’s approach to Iran

States supports an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned peace process, it supports the inclusion deal offered by the Afghan government, excluding the outright power sharing option for the Taliban. Donald
completely contradicts his South Asia Strategy, which is centered on Afghanistan . Like his tweets, his recent actions on Iran can be interpreted as
the United States’ success

either a spur of the moment decision or something more serious — he is either playing a deterrence game or is up to something darker, like regime change or regime disruption. In the context of Afghanistan,
depends on showing sticks to some regional players and carrots to others It would be extremely
, like Pakistan and Iran.
tough for the United States to achieve success in Afghanistan if it shows sticks to all parties involved
in the
Afghan conflict.
AT: Bioterror
Aff can’t solve agro-terror – US-Readiness, accidents, vulernability, lack of oversight
Tom 1AC Daschle and Richard B. Myers 16, “A Threat to the Food System”,
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-10-17/americas-food-supply-and-national-security-are-
at-risk-to-bioterrorism, -ss
THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF September 11 honored the far-too-many who lost their lives that horrific
day. Almost unnoticed was the 15th anniversary of the U.S. anthrax attacks that occurred soon
thereafter and left 5 dead, 17 infected and more than 10,000 at risk of exposure. The magnitude of
those attacks clarified the need to address bioterrorism more comprehensively in the United States.
Americans rarely consider the potential for our enemies to attack our nation's agricultural infrastructure
and food supply with biological weapons. They should. Agriculture security is national security. Fourteen
years ago, U.S. Navy SEALs found a list of pathogens and a schematic in an Afghanistan cave that al-
Qaida planned to use to produce bioweapons. In addition to six human pathogens, ten pathogens
targeted food, six targeted livestock and poultry, and four targeted crops. Clearly, al-Qaida was
considering agroterrorism. A series of reports by the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD
Proliferation and Terrorism from 2008 to 2010 stated that a biological attack in the United States was
much more likely than a nuclear attack. With their report card, they delivered a failing grade to the
nation – an "F" for bioterrorism readiness. In October 2015, the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Study Panel on
Biodefense published "A National Blueprint for Biodefense: Leadership and Major Reform Needed to
Optimize Efforts" that documented the ongoing vulnerability of the United States to biological agents,
whether naturally, accidentally or deliberately introduced. Among others, the panel discussed biological
threats to agriculture in their report, emphasizing a One Health approach to addressing animal,
environmental and human health simultaneously. The panel also recommended that the House and
Senate agriculture committees increase their oversight regarding efforts to counter agroterrorism. So,
how might a naturally occurring event or intentional attack on the crops, animals and systems that
comprise our food supply impact American's overall health and economy? Any threat to our country's
food production and security would have devastating economic, social and political impacts. The
agriculture sector in the U.S. is a $1 trillion business and employs approximately 9.2 percent of American
workers. In 2012, domestic animal agriculture – livestock and poultry production – generated
approximately 1.8 million jobs, $346 billion in total economic output and $60 billion in household
income. More than two-thirds of existing, emerging and reemerging animal pathogens can be
transmitted to people and as such, present significant threats to human health. Avian influenza, Ebola
and Rift Valley fever are just three examples. While individual animal pathogens cannot cause major
food shortages alone, combinations of livestock disease agents could. In addition, some crop diseases
could be catastrophic themselves. Wheat and rice account for an estimated 39 percent of the world's
total calorie consumption and pose worrisome terrorist targets. Food insecurity has also contributed to
major instability in the Middle East since the 1990s, and no country is immune. The minimalistic
approach to bio/agrodefense in the United States must end. The bipartisan Blue Ribbon Study Panel for
Biodefense made 33 recommendations and identified more than 80 public policy actions the Nation
needs to execute in the near-, medium- and long-term. Notably, the panel recommended that the vice
president of the United States assume responsibility for biodefense to coordinate efforts in accordance
with a unified strategy – a strategy we have yet to develop and implement. We add that the government
has artificially separated human and agricultural defense policy. Biodefense must include agrodefense to
ensure America is prepared to respond to and recover from agricultural attacks. Bio/agrodefense
threats to the United States are real. The next administration must take the opportunity – and fulfill its
responsibility – to address these threats to the nation from day one.
AT: Cyber Terror – Clarke
No cyberwar—Clarke just says they could do it someday—it’s also from 2003!! And
they haven’t done it in fifteen years.
Richard 1AC Clarke 03, Presidential Adviser for Cyberspace Security (2001-2003), “what are al qaeda’s
capabilities?”, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/vulnerable/alqaeda.html
What does this mean as far as attitude towards Al Qaeda's interest in cyber war? Well, the fact that
these people are gathering skills in cyber war capability is very troubling, combined with the fact that we
know that they're looking on the Web for hacking tools. We know that because we've seized some of
their computers. It suggests to me that Al Qaeda may be trying to grow an indigenous cyber warfare
capability. I think, it suggests that some day we may see Al Qaeda, if it's still alive and operating, use
cyberspace as a vehicle for attacking infrastructure, not with bombs but with bytes. For an organization
like Al Qaeda that is looking to leverage its investment, to have the biggest possible damage for the least
possible investment, cyberspace is a good bet because it doesn't cost a lot of money to develop these
skills. You could have an effect in a number of places simultaneously, without being in those locations,
and you can achieve a certain degree of anonymity and a certain degree of invulnerability to arrest [or]
apprehension.
They do non-threatening hacking—here’s the beginning of the article

Richard Clarke 03, Presidential Adviser for Cyberspace Security (2001-2003), “what are al qaeda’s
capabilities?”, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/vulnerable/alqaeda.html
What we found on Al Qaeda computers were two things. One, the kind of simple hacking tools that are
available to anyone who goes out on the Internet looking for them, tools such as LOphtCrack that allows
you to get into almost anyone's password if they've used a simple eight-digit password. That kind of tool
frightens most people when they learn that if they're using only an eight-digit password with standard
numbers and letters that probably anyone can get into your password in less than two minutes by
downloading a tool like LOphtCrack, which is available publicly on the Internet. It was that kind of tool
which we found, nothing terribly sophisticated.
Their card is from a FORUM where different advisors weight in—here’s what someone
else thinks:
Lewis 03—James Lewis, Center for Strategic and International Studies, “What are al-Qaeda’s
Capabilitites” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/vulnerable/alqaeda.html,
Accessed 07-25-2018)//hk
I think one of the things that's troubling about Al Qaeda, and really some of the other groups, is they're
very methodical. They're very serious. And so, I think they will work through all the options and say, "If I
do this attack, what do I get? If I do that attack, what do I get?" They're also very good at collecting
information.¶ They have taken advantage of the global communications networks that we've set up, the
global information networks that have appeared in the last decade, and learned how to use them to
become a terrorist organization that can operate almost anywhere in the world. So they're a very
thorough group. But at the end of the day, I think their first choice is always going to be some more
powerful physical weapon. Cyber weapons just aren't a good replacement for bombs.¶ You're walking
sort of out on a limb here, aren't you, because you could be proven wrong?¶ What I'm trying to do is
think about if there was a cyber attack, would it paralyze the United States? And I think that the odds of
that are very low, because it's easier to recover from a cyber attack. There's no physical damage. There's
no casualties. I think that when Al Qaeda goes through their calculations, they'll go to the same sort of
calculation I've gone through, which is they want something that's going to be successful.¶ I think there's
the psychological payoff which is these people want to do things that will allow them to attack the
United States. And both on the receiving end and on the sending end, a cyber attack doesn't have that
payoff. Going back to Osama and saying, "Hey, I launched 16,000 attacks against electrical networks and
one of them caused a blackout in Cloverdale, California for three hours," it's not going to get you there
in the martyr's hall of fame. They're going to want to do something much more damaging. And that's a
very frightening possibility, but cyber is not part of that.
AT: Drone Strikes
Your evidence concludes that drone strikes fail in Afghanistan and that status quo
counter-insurgency solves through methods the aff doesn’t increase
Brian M Downing 10, author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory:
War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam, “Hidden costs of US's drone
reliance”, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC31Df02.html, -ss
There isn't evidence that drones have been especially successful in countering the Afghan insurgency.
Occasionally, regional commanders are killed, but almost all Taliban leaders are replaceable and there
has been no discernible effect on the insurgency's ability to parley with locals and win support. And
civilian casualties from drone and other air strikes contribute to insurgent support. Drones maintain
aerial watch and ward along the AfPak frontier and make infiltration riskier than it was during the Soviet
war in the 1980s. As with the drone campaign across the frontier, local intelligence is critical; the
country is vast and the countless hiding places are well known to insurgents. Many local tribes are
supportive of the insurgents or intimidated by them, while others are indifferent but unwilling to help
outsiders. The counter-insurgency program recently begun in earnest in southern Afghanistan seeks to
establish local intelligence networks. Such programs build schools, wells, and the like in an effort to
win over the support of villagers, and are followed by efforts to set up militias and intelligence forces
to defend the area from the insurgents' return. The development of local intelligence networks will be
one of the key indicators of the counter-insurgency's progress.
The Eisenstadt evidence fails the CTRL + F test – it doesn’t even say the word drone
strikes ONCE
Their evidence isolates lots of issues with US military policy and ideology that the aff
doesn’t solve
Eisenstadt, 16 – (Michael, Kahn Fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Military and
Security Studies Program, “U.S. Military Engagement In The Broader Middle East,” The Washington
Institute For Near East Policy, Policy Focus 143, April 2016,
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/pubs/PolicyFocus143_JeffreyEisen-4.pdf) -ss
Thus, while President Obama has vowed to “degrade, and ultimately destroy,” IS,221 it is not clear what
it means to “destroy” an organization that operates as a dispersed or distributed network with affiliates
throughout the Middle East, and that wages “decentralized jihad.”222 Neither is it clear that one can
speak about “decisive operations” in the context of a protracted conflict likely to last years, if not
decades;223 about “end states” in an era of rapid, disruptive sociopolitical change;224 or about an “exit
strategy” for a conflict with no end in sight. Finally, it is not clear that the term “victory” is relevant in
the current context,225 as it lends a military cast to conflicts that the United States would prefer be
managed or resolved in the political arena—though military pressure may set the conditions for political
or diplomatic progress. Rather, U.S. decisionmakers should think in terms of influencing and shaping the
Middle East’s long-term competitions, proxy wars, and protracted conflicts in order to advance its
interests. This will require the United States to “balance, intervene, or abstain” as its interests
dictate.226 What would this mean in practice? And how can the United States succeed in this
environment? First, the United States needs to retain the ability to deal with traditional threats through
counterproliferation strikes, conventional airsea and air-land campaigns, and counterinsurgency
operations. These traditional threats have not disappeared, and the United States must preserve its
traditional competencies and overwhelming advantages in these areas. The United States also needs to
operate at variance with its preferred way of war—which has traditionally involved the rapid destruction
of the enemy at minimal cost through high-tech firepower and overwhelming force. (The American way
of war has also been characterized by closer focus on the fighting than on follow-through—with the
result that it has often failed to leverage battlefield victories to advance its policy aims.) The United
States will likewise have to break with its binary way of thinking about “war and peace,” “victory and
defeat,” and “regular and irregular” conflicts in an era of protracted gray zone and hybrid conflicts.227
Further, the United States will need to prevail against adversaries that may be nonstate actors (e.g.,
Hezbollah) equipped with high-end conventional capabilities; state-like entities (e.g., IS) that meld
terrorism, insurgency, and low-tech conventional military operations in “high art” hybrid campaigns
extending over several continents; and states (e.g., Iran) that employ transnational proxy militias,
conventional forces that use unconventional tactics (e.g., the IRGC’s guerrilla navy), and large missile
forces armed with conventional, and perhaps nonconventional warheads
Your evidence says tactical strikes fail and the goals of the aff are wrong
Eisenstadt, 16 – (Michael, Kahn Fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Military and
Security Studies Program, “U.S. Military Engagement In The Broader Middle East,” The Washington
Institute For Near East Policy, Policy Focus 143, April 2016,
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/pubs/PolicyFocus143_JeffreyEisen-4.pdf) -ss
To succeed on the Iraq and Afghanistan battlefields, the U.S. military had to alter its own institutional
and organizational mindsets and cultures—for instance, relearning counterinsurgency and transforming
the way Special Operations Forces do business.235 Yet, in many senses, major elements of the American
way of war remained unchanged: the preference for tactical and technological solutions to policy
problems; defining success as the attrition or destruction of enemy forces; and challenges translating
military success into sustainable political outcomes.
AT: Indo-Pak
Literally any example of Afghan instability in the last 2 years thumps every impact that
the Kenny evidence isolates
It’s stable now – recent moves show path towards conflict resolution
Abi-Habib and Kumar 5-30, Maria, South Asia correspondent, based in New Delhi, Hari,
reporter in the New Delhi bureau of the The New York Times, India and Pakistan Agree
to Truce on Kashmir Border, The New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/world/asia/india-pakistan-kashmir-
truce.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FIndia-
Pakistan%20Relations&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_u
nit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection, -ss
NEW DELHI — India and Pakistan have declared a cease-fire along their disputed border in Kashmir, a
move welcomed with uneasiness among the population in the area, where a series of such agreements
have failed in the past. The cease-fire was agreed to on Tuesday evening. If successful, it would temper
border hostilities between nuclear-armed neighbors in a disputed region that has recently witnessed
some of its worst violence in years. On Wednesday, a tense calm settled on the border separating the
Indian-controlled part of the region, known as Jammu and Kashmir, from the Pakistani-held area.
Civilians displaced by the violence cautiously contemplated returning to their homes on Wednesday,
waiting to see whether violence would resume. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced in
recent years along the straggling boundary, which stretches for about 1,200 miles. Cross-border shelling
has been a weekly part of life. Eager to restart their lives and return home, many were hopeful that the
truce would stick, but not confident. “For the last six to seven months the firing has been very intense
and we can’t live in our village,” Isher Singh, a 72-year-old farmer whose village is about half a mile from
the disputed border, said in a telephone interview. Mr. Singh, like thousands of others, has lived on and
off in government-run camps because of the cross-border shelling. His family has lived through decades
of violence and survived the three wars India and Pakistan have fought over Kashmir. “We can’t do our
agriculture, we can’t rear our animals and our children can’t go to school,” he said. “Our lives become
hell during the firing. We are happy with this cease-fire news and hope it will last.” The nascent
agreement follows a rare cease-fire announced by the Indian Army in Kashmir for the Muslim holy
month of Ramadan, which ends mid-June. That cease-fire is the first Ramadan truce in 18 years. On
Tuesday night, India and Pakistan’s top military commanders brokered the new truce via a telephone
hotline, promising to restore “in letter and spirit” a 2003 truce agreement, according to near-identical
statements released by both sides. That agreement fostered several years of peace but gradually
foundered, with cross-border violence re-emerging more fully in 2013.
AT: Local Trust/Cultural Competence/Cooperation
war crimes prevent any chance of local trust/cooperation
Gannon 18—Kathy Gannon, journalist for the Associated Press, 2018 (“Afghans submit 1.17 million
war crimes claims to international court,” the Independent, 02-17-2018, Available Online at
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/afghanistan-war-crimes-claims-victims-
millions-submitted-court-isis-taliban-a8214301.html, Accessed 07-25-2018)//hk
Afghans have submitted 1.17 million statements to the International Criminal Court in the three months
since it began collecting material ago for a possible war crimes case involving their homeland. ¶ The
statements include accounts of alleged atrocities. not only by groups like the Taliban and the Isis, but
also Afghan Security Forces and government-affiliated warlords, the US-led coalition, and foreign and
domestic spy agencies, said Abdul Wadood Pedram of the Human Rights and Eradication of Violence
Organisation. ¶ Based in part on the many statements, ICC judges in The Hague would then have to
decide whether to seek a war crimes investigation. It is uncertain when that decision will be made. ¶ The
statements were collected between 20 November 2017 and 31 January 2018, by organisations based in
Europe and Afghanistan and sent to the ICC, Mr Pedram said.¶ Because one statement might include
multiple victims and one organisation might represent thousands of victim statements, the number of
Afghans seeking justice from the ICC could be several million. ¶ “It is shocking there are so many,” Mr
Pedram said, noting that in some instances, whole villages were represented. “It shows how the justice
system in Afghanistan is not bringing justice for the victims and their families.” ¶ The ICC did not give
details about the victims or those providing the information. ¶ “I have the names of the organisations,
but because of the security issues, we don’t want to name them because they will be targeted,” said Mr
Pedram, whose group is based in Kabul. ¶ Many of the representations include statements involving
multiple victims, which could be the result of suicide bombings, targeted killings or air strikes, he said. ¶
Among those alleging war crimes is a man who asked to be identified only by his first name, Shoaib,
because he fears for his safety.¶ Shoaib said his father, Naimatullah, was on a bus in Dawalat Yar district
in Afghanistan’s central Ghor Province in 2014 when a band of gunmen stopped it and two other buses,
forced the passengers off and told them to hand over their identity cards. The 14 Shias among them
were separated from the rest and killed, one by one, he said. ¶ The slayings outraged the country. A
Taliban commander was soon arrested and brought before the media, but no news about a trial or
punishment was ever reported, said Shoaib, who is in his 20s. ¶ Displaying a photo of the man he
believes killed his father, Shoaib said he doesn’t go to the authorities for information about the incident
because the commander had connections with the police and the local government administration. ¶
Shoaib is still afraid. ¶ “Everybody knows that they have connection in the government,” he added. “I
think in Afghanistan, if you have money, then you can give it to anyone, anywhere, to do anything.” ¶
Several powerful warlords, many of whom came to power after the collapse of the Taliban in 2001
following the US-led intervention, are among those alleged to have carried out war crimes, said Mr
Pedram, who also is cautious about releasing any names. ¶ After receiving death threats last year, Mr
Pedram fled Kabul briefly and now keeps a lower profile, no longer speaking to local media. ¶ “The
warlords are all here. You have to be very careful,” he said. “In the morning, I kiss my little son goodbye,
I kiss my wife goodbye because I don’t know what will happen to me and when, or if I will see them
again.” ¶ Established in 2002, the ICC is the world’s first permanent court set up to prosecute war crimes,
crimes against humanity and genocide. The ICC can only investigate any crimes in Afghanistan after May
2003, when the country ratified the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court. ¶ Former
President Bill Clinton signed the treaty, but President George W Bush renounced the signature, citing
fears that Americans would be unfairly prosecuted for political reasons. ¶ In November, when ICC
prosecutor Fatou Bensouda sought judicial authorization to begin the investigation, she said the court
had been looking into possible war crimes in Afghanistan since 2006. ¶ Bensouda said in November that
“there is a reasonable basis to believe” that crimes against humanity and war crimes were committed by
the Taliban as well as the Haqqani network. She also said there was evidence that the Afghan National
Security Forces, Afghan National Police and its spy agency, known as the NDS, committed war crimes. ¶
Bensouda also said evidence existed of war crimes committed “by members of the United States armed
forces on the territory of Afghanistan, and by members of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in
secret detention facilities in Afghanistan,” as well as in countries that had signed on to the Rome
Statute. The secret detention facilities were operated mostly between 2003 and 2004, she said. ¶ It was
the first time that Bensouda has targeted Americans for alleged war crimes. Bensouda said an
investigation under the auspices of the international tribunal could break through what she called “near
total impunity” in Afghanistan. ¶ The prosecutor’s formal application to the court set up a possible
showdown with Washington. While the US is not a member state of the ICC, its citizens can be charged
with crimes committed in countries that are members. ¶ At the time of Bensouda’s announcement, a
Pentagon spokesman said the US Defense Department does not accept that such an investigation of US
personnel is warranted. The US State Department has said it opposes the court’s involvement in
Afghanistan. ¶ Another Afghan who went to the ICC is Hussain Razaee, whose fiancee, Najiba, was
among 30 people killed in July when a Taliban suicide attacker rammed a car bomb into a bus carrying
employees from the Ministry of Mines. ¶ For months, Mr Razaee said he contemplated suicide. He had
spent two years convincing Najiba’s parents to allow them to marry, and they had finally agreed. Unlike
most Afghan couples, theirs was not to be an arranged marriage. ¶ “I lost the person I loved,” he said. ¶
Mr Razaee said he went to the ICC because he wants those responsible to be punished, even if a peace
deal with the Taliban is reached. ¶ “I am pursuing this because I want the ICC to record these cases so
that if there is a peace agreement, the Taliban leaders will be required to identify the people behind the
killings,” Mr Razaee said. ¶ “I don’t trust the international community to bring any of these warlords or
Taliban to justice, but if an international legal body rules according to the law, then the government
could be forced to enforce it,” he said.
No one likes US forces—they torture people and drone strike them

Cunningham 17—Finian Cunningham, reputable journalist covering international affairs, 2017
(“Afghanistan war crimes probe a sham and cover-up for US,” RT, 11-14-2017, Available Online at
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/409848-icc-court-afghanistan-crimes-us/, Accessed 07-25-2018)//hk
US torture practices conducted during CIA interrogations and renditions could also be probed, according
to reports. An earlier announcement by the ICC said it would be looking into alleged violations
committed by three parties: US military, Afghan security forces, and Taliban militants.¶ If the ICC did
carry out an earnest probe into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, it would have its work cut out – even
if it just restricted itself to incidents involving US forces and the CIA.¶ Two years ago, in October 2015,
the northern city of Kunduz was the location of another apparent atrocity committed by the US air
force. A hospital run by the French-based Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was bombed and machine-
gunned by US aircraft, killing 42 medical staff and patients. MSF condemned the attack as a violation of
the Geneva Convention – a war crime. Though, the Pentagon maintained that its forces made a mistake
while targeting militants.¶ There is very little clarity on the number of Afghan civilians who have been
killed by US forces over the past 16 years, from gun battles, house raids, drone strikes, and airstrikes.
One estimate puts the total number of civilian deaths in the war at over 31,000. Many of them are
victims of Taliban shootings, and bombings or operations carried out by the US-backed Afghan security
forces.¶ Nevertheless, there are abundant incidents involving civilians being killed by US operations in
what could merit war crimes prosecutions. This is especially so given the renewal of American military
operations in the country ordered by President Trump in August this year – three years after the US
forces were officially supposed to wind down.
US forces support child sexual abuse in Afghanistan

Laporta and Laverty 17—James Laporta, freelance journalist and a former U.S. Marine infantry
squad leader and intelligence chief, and Rory Laverty, freelance reporter covering crime, the military,
and national security, teaches journalism at UNC Wilmington, 2017 (“Were Any U.S.-Backed Afghan
Troops Punished for Raping Kids? That’s Classified.” The Daily Beast, 11-17-2017, Available Online at
https://www.thedailybeast.com/were-any-us-backed-afghan-troops-punished-for-raping-kids-thats-
classified, Accessed 07-25-2018)//hk
Two years after it was revealed U.S. forces in Afghanistan were discouraged from reporting child rapes
by their Afghan counterparts, the Pentagon won’t say if anyone was ultimately punished. ¶ The
Department of Defense Inspector General on Thursday released its report into the military’s policies on
responding to allegations of child sex abuse by Afghan security forces. In 2015, The New York Times
reported that U.S. troops were told to ignore evidence of their Afghan allies abusing young boys. The
Daily Beast subsequently reported that troops entering Afghanistan were given almost no guidance on
what to do if they witnessed or suspected that their Afghan allies were raping children.¶ The Inspector
General report identified 16 allegations of child sexual abuse involving Afghan security forces reported
by U.S. and Afghan troops from 2010 to 2016. The report said it could not be certain these allegations
represented the total number reported “due to inconsistent DoD reporting procedures and an overall
lack of unified guidance on reporting and recordkeeping relating to child sexual abuse.”¶ Eleven of the
16 allegations were reported to the Afghan government, the report said, but did not say what Kabul did
with the reports. A classified appendix to the report “describes all the information identified (including
actions taken in response to the allegations) about each of the 16 allegations tracked by the DoD as of
November 2016.”¶ The Inspector General’s office did not respond to a question asking why the
information is classified.¶ “The whole point of the investigation was to clarify the scope and magnitude
of the alleged abuse. Classifying the results defeats the whole purpose,” said Steven Aftergood, director
of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit government
watchdog group.¶ “Classification is supposed to be used in order to protect the national security, and for
no other purpose,” he said. “It's hard to see how national security is being enhanced by classifying the
results of this investigation. It looks like an attempt to evade public accountability for criminal acts.”¶
The Inspector General’s report acknowledged that some U.S. troops were warned informally that little
could be done about the practice of child sexual abuse in Afghanistan.¶ “In some cases, personnel we
interviewed explained that they, or someone whom they knew, were told informally that nothing could
be done about child sexual abuse because of Afghanistan’s status as a sovereign nation, that it was not a
priority issue for the command, or that it was best to let the local police handle it,” the report said.¶ In
one example of informal advice given to troops, Montgomery McFate of Human Terrain Systems, a
group that advises troops on interacting with local communities, said on The Diane Rehm Show in 2007
that her team of sociologists and anthropologists had advised troops not to interfere with “man-boy
play” and other forms of child sex abuse that they witnessed or heard about in Afghanistan.¶ “Actually
that’s part of Afghan culture and there’s not really much you can do about it,” McFate said she advised.
“If you don’t like it, you can’t stop it. It’s just part of what they are. Don’t try and impose your values on
the people you’re working with because you’re not going to change them.”¶ As a result, troops were
practically discouraged from reporting abuse, namely bacha bazi (“boy play” in Dari), a term for sexual
abuse of boys by powerful Afghan men — especially troops and police. The State Department said in its
2014 human rights report that the Afghan National Police were able to molest children “with impunity.”¶
The report gathered anecdotal evidence from “several current and former U.S. servicemembers” who
said they heard about (but did not witness) instances of child sexual abuse and were informally
discouraged from reporting it.¶ “In some cases, the interviewees explained that they, or someone whom
they knew, were told that nothing could be done about child sexual abuse because of Afghanistan’s
status as a sovereign nation, that it was not a priority for the command, or that it was best to ignore the
situation and to let the local police handle it,” the report stated.¶ The spokeswoman for the Inspector
General acknowledged those anecdotal reports but says the military will leave the reporting decision up
to the individual servicemember.¶ “U.S. Forces who observe a member of the [Afghan security forces]
sexually abusing a child are not prohibited from intervening and using reasonable force as may be
necessary to prevent or stop such sexual abuse,” DoD IG spokesperson Marine Master Sgt. Dwrena Allen
said, quoting the report. “However, U.S. Forces are under no obligation to intervene.”¶ The report says
the Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs agreed with the report’s suggestions to
create a centralized database of abuses, and to implement clear reporting procedures to make sure all
American troops know how to respond if they witness child sexual abuse by Afghan security forces or
others.
AT: Nuke Terror
No extinction and the risk of nuclear terror is unlikely
1ac Bunn and Roth 17, Matthew Bunn is a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School. A
former advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, he is the author or co-author
of over 20 books or major technical reports, and over 100 articles in publications ranging from Science
to The Washington Post, Nickolas Roth is a research associate at the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing
the Atom at Harvard University. The author or co-author of dozens of articles and reports on nuclear
security, nonproliferation, and arms control, Roth is also a research fellow at the Center for International
and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, “The effects of a single terrorist nuclear bomb”,
https://thebulletin.org/2017/09/the-effects-of-a-single-terrorist-nuclear-bomb/
Brighter than a thousand suns. Imagine a crude terrorist nuclear bomb—containing a chunk of highly enriched uranium just under the size of a regulation bowling ball, or a much smaller chunk of pl utonium—suddenly detonating inside a delivery van parked in the heart of a major city.
Such a terrorist bomb would release as much as 10 kilotons of explosive energy, or the equivalent of 10,000 tons of conventional explosives, a volume of explosives large enough to fill all the cars of a mile-long train. In a millionth of a second, all of that energy would be released inside
that small ball of nuclear material, creating temperatures and pressures as high as those at the center of the sun. That furious energy would explode outward, releasing its energy in three main ways: a powerful blast wave; intense heat; and deadly radiation. The ball would expand almost
instantly into a fireball the width of four football fields, incinerating essentially everything and everyone within. The heated fireball would rise, sucking in air from below and expanding above, creating the mushroom cloud that has become the symbol of the terror of the nuclear age. The
ionized plasma in the fireball would create a localized electromagnetic pulse more powerful than lightning, shorting out communications and electronics nearby—though most would be destroyed by the bomb’s other effects in any case. (Estimates of heat, blast, and radiation effects in
this article are drawn primarily from Alex Wellerstein’s “Nukemap,” which itself comes from declassified US government data, such as the 660-page government textbook The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.) At the instant of its detonation, the bomb would also release an intense burst of
gamma and neutron radiation which would be lethal for nearly everyone directly exposed within about two-thirds of a mile from the center of the blast. (Those who happened to be shielded by being inside, or having buildings between them and the bomb, would be partly protected—in
some cases, reducing their doses by ten times or more.) The nuclear flash from the heat of the fireball would radiate in both visible light and the infrared; it would be “brighter than a thousand suns,” in the words of the title of a book describing the development of nuclear weapons—
adapting a phrase from the Hindu epic the Bhagavad-Gita. Anyone who looked directly at the blast would be blinded. The heat from the fireball would ignite fires and horribly burn everyone exposed outside at distances of nearly a mile away. (In the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum,
visitors gaze in horror at the bones of a human hand embedded in glass melted by the bomb.) No one has burned a city on that scale in the decades since World War II, so it is difficult to predict the full extent of the fire damage that would occur from the explosion of a nuclear bomb in
one of today’s cities. Modern glass, steel, and concrete buildings would presumably be less flammable than the wood-and-rice-paper housing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki in the 1940s—but many questions remain, including exactly how thousands of broken gas lines might contribute to fire
damage (as they did in Dresden during World War II). On 9/11, the buildings of the World Trade Center proved to be much more vulnerable to fire damage than had been expected. Ultimately, even a crude terrorist nuclear bomb would carry the possibility that the countless fires touched
off by the explosion would coalesce into a devastating firestorm, as occurred at Hiroshima. In a firestorm, the rising column of hot air from the massive fire sucks in the air from all around, creating hurricane-force winds; everything flammable and everything alive within the firestorm
would be consumed. The fires and the dust from the blast would make it extremely difficult for either rescuers or survivors to see. The explosion would create a powerful blast wave rushing out in every direction. For more than a quarter-mile all around the blast, the pulse of pressure
would be over 20 pounds per square inch above atmospheric pressure (known as “overpressure”), destroying or severely damaging even sturdy buildings. The combination of blast, heat, and radiation would kill virtually everyone in this zone. The blast would be accompanied by winds of
many hundreds of miles per hour. The damage from the explosion would extend far beyond this inner zone of almost total death. Out to more than half a mile, the blast would be strong enough to collapse most residential buildings and create a serious danger that office buildings would
topple over, killing those inside and those in the path of the rubble. (On the other hand, the office towers of a modern city would tend to block the blast wave in some areas, providing partial protection from the blast, as well as from the heat and radiation.) In that zone, almost anything
made of wood would be destroyed: Roofs would cave in, windows would shatter, gas lines would rupture. Telephone poles, street lamps, and utility lines would be severely damaged. Many roads would be blocked by mountains of wreckage. In this zone, many people would be killed or
injured in building collapses, or trapped under the rubble; many more would be burned, blinded, or injured by flying debris. In many cases, their charred skin would become ragged and fall off in sheets. The effects of the detonation would act in deadly synergy. The smashed materials of
buildings broken by the blast would be far easier for the fires to ignite than intact structures. The effects of radiation would make it far more difficult for burned and injured people to recover. The combination of burns, radiation, and physical injuries wo uld cause far more death and
suffering than any one of them would alone. The silent killer. The bomb’s immediate effects would be followed by a slow, lingering killer: radioactive fallout. A bomb detonated at ground level would dig a huge crater, hurling tons of earth and debris thousands of feet into the sky. Sucked
into the rising fireball, these particles would mix with the radioactive remainders of the bomb, and over the next few hours or days, the debris would rain down for miles downwind. Depending on weather and wind patterns, the fallout could actually be deadlier and make a far larger area
unusable than the blast itself. Acute radiation sickness from the initial radiation pulse and the fallout would likely affect tens of thousands of people. Depending on the dose, they might suffer from vomiting, watery diarrhea, fever, sores, loss of hair, and bone marrow depletion.
Some would survive Much of the

; some would die within days; some would take months to die. Cancer rates among the survivors would rise. Women would be more vulnerable than men—children and infants especially so.
radiation from a nuclear blast is short-lived; radiation levels even a few days after the blast would be far
below those in the first hours . For those not killed or terribly wounded by the initial explosion, the best advice would be to take shelter in a basement for at least several days. But many would be too terrified to stay. Thousands of panic-
stricken people might receive deadly doses of radiation as they fled from their homes. Some of the radiation will be longer-lived; areas most severely affected would have to be abandoned for many years after the attack. The combination of radioactive fallout and the devastation of
nearly all life-sustaining infrastructure over a vast area would mean that hundreds of thousands of people would have to evacuate. Ambulances to nowhere. The explosion would also destroy much of the city’s ability to respond. Hospitals would be leveled, doctors and nurses killed and
wounded, ambulances destroyed. (In Hiroshima, 42 of 45 hospitals were destroyed or severely damaged, and 270 of 300 doctors were killed.) Resources that survived outside the zone of destruction would be utterly overwhelmed. Hospitals have no ability to cope with tens or hundreds
of thousands of terribly burned and injured people all at once; the United States, for example, has 1,760 burn beds in hospitals nationwid e, of which a third are available on any given day. And the problem would not be limited to hospitals; firefighters, for example, would have little ability
to cope with thousands of fires raging out of control at once. Fire stations and equipment would be destroyed in the affected area, and firemen killed, along with police and other emergency responders. Some of the first responders may become casualties themselves, from radioactive
fallout, fire, and collapsing buildings. Over much of the affected area, communications would be destroyed, by both the physical effects and the electromagnetic pulse from the explosion. Better preparation for such a disaster could save thousands of lives—but ultimately, there is no way
any city can genuinely be prepared for a catastrophe on such a historic scale, occurring in a flash, with zero warning. Rescue and recovery attempts would be impeded by the destruction of most of the needed personnel and equipment, and by fire, debris, radiation, fear, lack of
communications, and the immense scale of the disaster. The US military and the national guard could provide critically important capabilities—but federal plans assume that “no significant federal response” would be available for 24-to-72 hours. Many of those burned and injured would
How many would die in such an event would depend on

wait in vain for help, food, or water, perhaps for days. The scale of death and suffering. , and how many would be terribly wounded,
where and when the bomb was detonated, what the weather conditions were at the time, how
successful the response was in helping the wounded survivors, and more . Many estimates of casualties are based on census data, which reflect where people
sleep at night; if the attack occurred in the middle of a workday, the numbers of people crowded into the office towers at the heart of many modern cities would be far higher. The daytime population of Manhattan, for example, is roughly twice its nighttime population; in Midtown on a
typical workday, there are an estimated 980,000 people per square mile. A 10-kiloton weapon detonated there might kill half a million people well —not counting those
who might die of radiation sickness from the fallout. (These effects were analyzed in great detail in the Rand Corporation’s Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack and the British Medical Journal’s “Nuclear terrorism.”) On a typical day, the wind would blow the fallout
north, seriously contaminating virtually all of Manhattan above Gramercy Park; people living as far away as Stamford, Connecticut would likely have to evacuate. Seriously injured survivors would greatly
outnumber the dead , their suffering magnified by the complete inadequacy of available help. The psychological and social effects—overwhelming sadness, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, myriad forms of anxiety—would be profound and
long-lasting. The scenario we have been describing is a groundburst. An airburst—such as might occur, for example, if terrorists put their bomb in a small aircraft they had purchased or rented—would extend the blast and fire effects over a wider area, killing and injuring even larger
numbers of people immediately. But an airburst would not have the same lingering effects from fallout as a groundburst, because the rock and dirt would not be sucked up into the fireball and contaminated. The 10-kiloton blast we have been discussing
is likely toward the high end of what terrorists could plausibly achieve with a crude, improvised bomb, but even a 1-kiloton blast would be a catastrophic event,
having a deadly radius between one-third and one-half that of a 10-kiloton blast. These hundreds of thousands of people would not be mere statistics, but countless individual stories of loss—parents, children, entire families; all religions; rich and poor alike—killed or horribly mutilated.
Human suffering and tragedy on this scale does not have to be imagined; it can be remembered through the stories of the survivors of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only times in history when nuclear weapons have been used intentionally against human beings.
The pain and suffering caused by those bombings are almost beyond human comprehension; the eloquent testimony of the Hibakusha—the survivors who passed through the atomic fire—should stand as an eternal reminder of the need to prevent nuclear weapons from ever being used
in anger again. Global economic disaster. The economic impact of such an attack would be enormous. The effects would reverberate for so far and so long that they are difficult to estimate in all their complexity. Hundreds of thousands of people would be too injured or sick to work for
weeks or months. Hundreds of thousands more would evacuate to locations far from their jobs. Many places of employment would have to be abandoned because of the radioactive fallout. Insurance companies would reel under the losses; but at the same time, many insurance policies
exclude the effects of nuclear attacks—an item insurers considered beyond their ability to cover—so the owners of thousands of buildings would not have the insurance payments needed to cover the cost of fixing them, thousands of companies would go bankrupt, and banks would be
left holding an immense number of mortgages that would never be repaid. Consumer and investor confidence would likely be dramatically affected, as worried people slowed their spending. Enormous new homeland security and military investments would be very likely. If the bomb had
come in a shipping container, the targeted country—and possibly others—might stop all containers from entering until it could devise a system for ensuring they could never again be used for such a purpose, throwing a wrench into the gears of global trade for an extended period. (And
this might well occur even if a shipping container had not been the means of delivery.) Even the far smaller 9/11 attacks are estimated to have caused economic aftershocks costing almost $1 trillion even excluding the multi-trillion-dollar costs of the wars that ensued. The cost of a
terrorist nuclear attack in a major city would likely be many times higher. The most severe effects would be local , but the effects of trade disruptions, reduced economic activity, and more would reverberate around the
world. Consequently, while some countries may feel that nuclear terrorism is only a concern for the countries most likely to be targeted—such as the United States—in reality it is a threat to everyone, everywhere. In 2005, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that these global
effects would push “tens of millions of people into dire poverty,” creating “a second death toll throughout the developing world.” One recent estimate suggested that a nuclear attack in an urban area would cause a global recession, cutting global Gross Domestic Product by some two
percent, and pushing an additional 30 million people in the developing world into extreme poverty. Desperate dilemmas. In short, an act of nuclear terrorism could rip the heart out of a major city, and cause ripple effects throughout the world. The government of the country attacked
would face desperate decisions: How to help the city attacked? How to prevent further attacks? How to respond or retaliate? Terrorists—either those who committed the attack or others—would probably claim they had more bombs already hidden in other cities (whether they did or
not), and threaten to detonate them unless their demands were met. The fear that this might be true could lead people to flee major cities in a large-scale, uncontrolled evacuation. There is very little ability to support the population of major cities in the surrounding countryside. The
potential for widespread havoc and economic chaos is very real. If the detonation took place in the capital of the nation attacked, much of the government might be destroyed. A bomb in Washington, D.C., for example, might kill the President, the Vice President, and many of the
Elaborate, classified plans for

members of Congress and the Supreme Court. (Having some plausible national leader survive is a key reason why one cabinet member is always elsewhere on the night of the State of the Union address.)
“continuity of government” have already been drawn up in a number of countries , but the potential for chaos and confusion—if almost all of a
country’s top leaders were killed—would still be enormous. Who, for example, could address the public on what the government would do, and what the public should do, to respond? Could anyone honestly assure the public there would be no further attacks? If t hey did, who would
believe them? In the United States, given the practical impossibility of passing major legislation with Congress in ruins and most of its members dead or seriously injured, some have argued for passing legislation in advance giving the government emergency powers to act—and creating
procedures, for example, for legitimately replacing most of the House of Representatives. But to date, no such legislative preparations have been made. In what would inevitably be a desperate effort to prevent further attacks, traditional standards of civil liberties might be jettisoned, at
least for a time—particularly when people realized that the fuel for the bomb that had done such damage would easily have fit in a suitcase. Old rules limiting search and surveillance could be among the first to go. The government might well impose martial law as it sought to control the
situation, hunt for the perpetrators, and find any additional weapons or nuclear materials they might have. Even the far smaller attacks of 9/11 saw the US government authorizing torture of prisoners and mass electronic surveillance. And what standards of internatio nal order and law
would still hold sway? The country attacked might well lash out militarily at whatever countries it thought might bear a portion of responsibility. (A terrifying description of the kinds of discussions that might occur appeared in Brian Jenkin s’ book, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?) With the
nuclear threshold already crossed in this scenario—at least by terrorists—it is conceivable that some of the resulting conflicts might escalate to nuclear use. International politics could become more brutish and violent, with powerful states taking unilateral action, by force if necessary, in
an effort to ensure their security. After 9/11, the United States led the invasions of two sovereign nations, in wars that have since cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, while plunging a region into chaos. Would the reaction after a far more devastating nuclear attack
be any less? In particular, the idea that each state can decide for itself how much security to provide for nuclear weapons and their essential ingredients would likely be seen as totally unacceptable following such an attack. Powerful states would likely demand that others surrender their
nuclear material or accept foreign troops (or other imposed security measures) to guard it. That could well be the first step toward a more profound transformation of the international system. After such a catastrophe, major powers may feel compelled to more freely engage in
preventive war, seizing territories they worry might otherwise be terrorist safe havens, and taking other steps they see as brutal but necessary to preserve their security. For this reason, foreign policy analyst Stephen Krasner has argued that “conventional rules of sovereignty would be
abandoned overnight.” Confidence in both the national security institutions of the country attacked and international institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, which had so manifestly failed to prevent the devastation, might erode. The effect on
nuclear weapons policies is hard to predict: One can imagine new nuclear terror driving a new push for nuclear disarmament, but one could also imagine states feeling more certain than ever before that they needed nuclear weapons. Prevention: The essential remedy. Given the
there is good news To date, there is no

horrifying consequences of such an event, while there is certainly a need to be better prepared to respond, the primary focus must be on prevention. Fortunately, on this front.
evidence that nuclear weapons or the materials needed to make them have ever fallen into the hands
of a terrorist group; even large and sophisticated terrorist groups that have tried to get nuclear
weapons have failed to do so; and the international community has taken a wide range of actions
over the past quarter-century that have drastically improved the security
(and particularly over the 2010-2016 period of the nuclear security summits)
measures for nuclear weapons and materials around the world the chance of such a nightmare . Nevertheless, while
unfolding is probably small , it is certainly not small enough to justify complacency. Al Qaeda had a focused effort to acquire nuclear weapons that reported directly to Ayman al-Zawahiri, now the group’s leader, and included multiple
attempts to get nuclear material and recruit nuclear expertise; Al Qaeda progressed as far as carrying out crude conventional explosive tests for their bomb program in the Afghan desert. The Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo—the group that launched nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo
subway in 1995— also pursued nuclear weapons. To date, there are only hints of nuclear interest from the Islamic State, but if it did turn to nuclear pursuits, even with the imminent defeat of its geographic caliphate in Iraq and Syria, it still has more money, people, and ability to recruit
experts globally than most past terrorist groups, raising a serious concern. With at least two terrorist groups having pursued nuclear weapons over the past quarter-century, and possibly more, it is unlikely they will be the last.
No nuclear terror—attacking a facility undermines the purpose of spreading

propaganda
Shellenberger 7/6 (Michael, Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner,
President of Environmental Progress, his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Washington
Post, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Nature Energy, and PLOS Biology, “If Nuclear Plants Are So
Vulnerable To Terrorist Attack, Why Don't Terrorists Attack Them?”, Forbes, 7/6/18,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/07/06/if-nuclear-plants-are-so-vulnerable-
to-terrorist-attack-why-dont-terrorists-attack-them/#7dc476ee5877)//DL
the report’s Achilles heel is its claim that nuclear plants are at serious risk of being attacked by
But French
terrorists, and that such an attack poses a serious risk terrorists who attacked nuclear to the French public. Why? Because most of the
plants in the past were anti-nuclear activists — and their attacks underscore the relative invulnerability
of nuclear plants to attack . Why Terrorists Don’t Attack Nuclear Plants The five deadliest terrorist attacks in the U.S. since the September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed 2,996 people (including the terrorist hijackers) consisted of: Running
people over with a truck in Manhattan (eight deaths); Setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon (six); Shooting people at an Army base (13), University (16), and nightclub (50). What about Europe? Same story. The five worst attacks since 9/11 consisted of: Blowing up a train in Madrid
(192 deaths); Shooting people at a school in Norway (77); Bombing the subway and a bus in London (56); Suicide bombings at a football (soccer) stadium, cafés, restaurants, and theater in Paris (137) Running people over with a truck in Nice, France (87). How many attacks were there on
there is zero evidence that any terrorist anywhere has planned an attack
nuclear plants during that time? Zero. What about foiled plots? Also, zero. In fact,
on a nuclear plant, much less tried to carry one out the 9/11 hijackers , since 9/11. But didn’t consider flying a jet plane into a nuclear plant? They did — and quickly
thought a nuclear target would be difficult because

discarded the idea, choosing instead to crash jets into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the White House. Why? “They
the airspace around it was restricted ,” reported the 9/11 Commission, “making reconnaissance flights impossible and increasing the likelihood that any plane would be shot down before impact.” The 9/11 Commission
Nor would a nuclear facility have particular symbolic value Terrorists

added, “ are, in fact, .” , noted one expert 40 years ago, “
television producers constructing a package so spectacular, so violent, so compelling that the networks, acting as
audience, cannot refuse the offer running people over, spraying them with gunfire,
executives, supplying the cameramen and the .” Where
and blowing them up offers the package the media need, attacking a nuclear plant simply does not . Since
nuclear plants are low-lying and often not visible from publicly accessible areas a terrorist , there’s a good chance that
attack on a nuclear plant wouldn't be captured on film — and that would undermine a main goal of
terrorist groups, which is to create propaganda There’s zero evidence that . What about fearful talk of terrorists wanting to attack a nuclear plant in Belgium?
terrorists ever wanted to attack a nuclear plant in Belgium. After raiding an apartment owned by a suspected terrorist, investigators found images taken of a nuclear researcher in Belgium. But he worked at
a research laboratory that made medical isotopes, not a nuclear plant. The Belgium Government determined that the threat was "to the person in question, but not the nuclear facilities." Investigators suspected the terrorists wanted to kidnap the man and use him to gain access to a
Nobody doubts that terrorist groups would love to get their hands on a nuclear weapon
research facility in Mol. . Terrorist groups,
But a nuclear
including Al Qaeda, which carried out the 9/11 attacks, have tried in the past to obtain a nuclear weapon. And preventing terrorists from getting access to nuclear materials is and should be one of the top priorities of anti-terrorist activity.
plant might be the worst place imaginable to get the materials to make a bomb. Neither the fuel used by
nuclear plants nor the nuclear waste are enriched enough to be used to make weapon. And any effort to
break into a nuclear plant would risk undermining the terrorist network . That’s why whenever terrorists try to make a nuclear bomb they instead look elsewhere
for the materials. And even if a jet plane were flown into a nuclear plant, or a bomb exploded inside, it’s unlikely any radioactive material would escape, given the heavy fortification of nuclear reactors by containment domes. In 1988, the US government crashed an F4 Phantom jet
traveling at 500 MPH into a slab of concrete the thickness of the walls of a nuclear plant. It dissolved upon impact, leaving the wall undamaged. But even if some radioactive material did escape, as occurred at Fukushima, vastly more harm would come from panic and over-evacuation, as
scientists recently emphasized, than from small amounts of radioactive material scattered from the accident. Terrorist Attacks on Nuclear Plants Demonstrate Their Relative Safety The French anti-nuclear report claims to be a comprehensive study of the alleged terrorist threat against
nuclear plants and suggests that times have changed. “Terrorism is no longer a risk,” the report warns ominously, “but a reality.” Isn’t it rather odd, then, that the 276-page report never mentions much less discusses the handful of times terrorists have actually attacked nuclear plants?
terrorist attacks against nuclear plants have been by anti-nuclear groups — and each of them
Most of the
dramatizes the relative invulnerability of nuclear plants to bombings . In 1973 in Argentina, terrorists temporarily took over a nuclear plant but caused no harm to the
plant and only managed to injure two police officers before surrendering; In 1975, French terrorists bombed a turbine at a nuclear plant and nobody was harmed; In 1977, Basque terrorists killed a security guard at a nuclear plant under construction; In 1978, Basque terrorists exploded a
bomb at the same nuclear plant, killing two workers; In 1979, Basque terrorists bombed the nuclear plant again, killing another worker; In 1979, French terrorists destroyed electric lines going to the same nuclear plant they attacked in 1975 at which point the plant shut itself down
automatically and safely, as it was designed to do; In 1981, Basque terrorists kidnapped and killed the nuclear plant’s chief engineer; In 1982, Basque terrorists killed the man’s replacement; In 1982, a Swiss anti-nuclear activist fired five armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades across
the Rhone river at an experimental French nuclear plant under construction, causing minor damage. While Al Qaeda saw no symbolic value in bombing nuclear plants , anti-nuclear
terrorist organizations saw great symbolic value. “The internal logic of terrorist strategy,” a spokesperson for the French government told a reporter for Science in 1982, “is to create a situation in which more police are required — and then to say that nuclear power is not compatible with
democracy.”
AT: Regional Responses
US agency mismanagement and overreliance on translators mean the aff fails
regardless, past attempts to correct prove
Rowan 1AC Scarborough 9, graduated summa cum laude from the School of Journalism at the
University of Maryland, “EXCLUSIVE: Lack of translators hurts U.S. war on terror”,
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/31/lack-of-translators-still-hampers-intelligence/, -
ss
Mr. Kohn said few, if any, managers, speak regional languages, so they must rely on translators. “This at
best constitutes a delay that has caused major operational problems,” he said. FBI spokesman Paul
Bresson disputed Mr. Kohn’s characterization of few managers able to speak regional languages. “That is
incorrect. 95% of our linguists are native speakers of the foreign languages who are well-versed in the
cultures and religions. We have linguist supervisors proficient in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi and Arabic — who
have been promoted from the linguist ranks,” Mr. Bresson said in an e-mail. “The bureau is well
positioned in many of the languages that support the war on terror; however, we still need linguists in
many of the less-commonly spoken languages to be able to address 100% of our requirements. For now
we have the capability to handle all of our highest priority needs.” Mr. Kohn said the problems in the FBI
cited by his clients are not unique. “What Bassem told me was it is the same problem the CIA has, the
same problem NSA has,” Mr. Kohn said. “All of these agencies did not adequately prepare before and
have not staffed up after. The Senate committee’s observations are 100 percent on point even today.
The failure of the intelligence community to require foreign language skills as a prerequisite for
promotion has undermined national security and created a disincentive for recruitment.” Mr. Hoekstra,
asked to explain the lack of progress, said, “I just think this is one where they had other priorities they
think they should have been working on. It’s just a lack of focus, lack of priorities and a lack of
management.” The Senate committee is looking for results. It wants agencies to develop a
comprehensive strategy by year’s end, and it added budget money to fix what it called “this perpetual
problem.”
AT: Special Forces
special ops are a failure outside of translating abilities—they are responsible for the
proliferation of terrorism throughout the Middle East—this turns the case
Turse 15—Nick Turse, fellow at the Nation Institute, award-winning investigative journalist,
contributing writer for the Intercept, 2015 (“American Special Operations Forces Have a Very Funny
Definition of Success,” the Nation, 10-26-2015, Available Online at
https://www.thenation.com/article/american-special-operations-forces-have-a-very-funny-definition-
of-success/, Accessed 07-25-2018)//hk
I started by asking Sean Naylor, a man who knows America’s most elite troops as few do and the author
of Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command, about the claims made by
Army Special Forces Command. He responded with a hearty laugh. “I’m going to give whoever wrote
that the benefit of the doubt that they were referring to successes that Army Special Forces were at
least perceived to have achieved in those countries rather than the overall US military effort,” he says.
As he points out, the first post-9/11 months may represent the zenith of success for those troops. The
initial operations in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001–carried out largely by US Special Forces, the CIA,
and the Afghan Northern Alliance, backed by US airpower—were “probably the high point” in the
history of unconventional warfare by Green Berets, according to Naylor. As for the years that followed?
“There were all sorts of mistakes, one could argue, that were made after that.” He is, however, quick to
point out that “the vast majority of the decisions [about operations and the war, in general] were not
being made by Army Special Forces soldiers.”¶ For Linda Robinson, author of One Hundred Victories:
Special Ops and the Future of American Warfare, the high number of deployments is likely a mistake in
itself. “Being in 70 countries…may not be the best use of SOF,” she told me. Robinson, a senior
international policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, advocates for a “more thoughtful and focused
approach to the employment of SOF,” citing enduring missions in Colombia and the Philippines as the
most successful special ops training efforts in recent years. “It might be better to say ‘Let’s not sprinkle
around the SOF guys like fairy dust.’ Let’s instead focus on where we think we can have a success.… If
you want more successes, maybe you need to start reining in how many places you’re trying to cover.”¶
Most of the special ops deployments in those 147 countries are the type Robinson expresses skepticism
about—short-term training missions by “white” operators like Green Berets (as opposed to the “black
ops” man-hunting missions by the elite of the elite that captivate Hollywood and video gamers).
Between 2012 and 2014, for example, Special Operations forces carried out 500 Joint Combined
Exchange Training (JCET) missions in as many as 67 countries, practicing everything from combat
casualty care and marksmanship to small unit tactics and desert warfare alongside local forces. And
JCETs only scratch the surface when it comes to special ops missions to train proxies and allies. Special
Operations forces, in fact, conduct a variety of training efforts globally.¶ A recent $500 million program,
run by Green Berets, to train a Syrian force of more than 15,000 over several years, for instance, crashed
and burned in a very public way, yielding just four or five fighters in the field before being abandoned.
This particular failure followed much larger, far more expensive attempts to train the Afghan and Iraqi
security forces in which Special Operations troops played a smaller yet still critical role. The results of
these efforts recently prompted TomDispatch regular and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich to
write that Washington should now assume “when it comes to organizing, training, equipping, and
motivating foreign armies, that the United States is essentially clueless.”¶ THE ELITE WARRIORS OF THE
WARRIOR ELITE¶ In addition to training, another core role of Special Operations forces is direct action–
counterterror missions like low-profile drone assassinations and kill/capture raids by muscled-up, high-
octane operators. The exploits of the men–and they are mostly men (and mostly Caucasian ones at
that)–behind these operations are chronicled in Naylor’s epic history of Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC), the secret counterterrorism organization that includes the military’s most elite and
shadowy units like the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force. A compendium of more than a
decade of derring-do from Afghanistan to Iraq, Somalia to Syria, Relentless Strike paints a portrait of a
highly-trained, well-funded, hard-charging counterterror force with global reach. Naylor calls it the
“perfect hammer,” but notes the obvious risk that “successive administrations would continue to view
too many national security problems as nails.”¶ When I ask Naylor about what JSOC has ultimately
achieved for the country in the Obama years, I get the impression that he doesn’t find my question
particularly easy to answer. He points to hostage rescues, like the high profile effort to save “Captain
Phillips” of the Maersk Alabama after the cargo ship was hijacked by Somali pirates, and asserts that
such missions might “inhibit others from seizing Americans.” One wonders, of course, if similar high-
profile failed missions since then, including the SEAL raid that ended in the deaths of hostages Luke
Somers, an American photojournalist, and Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher, as well as the
unsuccessful attempt to rescue the late aid worker Kayla Mueller, might then have just the opposite
effect.¶ “Afghanistan, you’ve got another fairly devilish strategic problem there,” Naylor says, and offers
up a question of his own: “You have to ask what would have happened if Al Qaeda in Iraq had not been
knocked back on its heels by Joint Special Operations Command between 2005 and 2010?” Naylor calls
attention to JSOC’s special abilities to menace terror groups, keeping them unsteady through relentless
intelligence gathering, raiding, and man-hunting. “It leaves them less time to take the offensive, to plan
missions, and to plot operations against the United States and its allies,” he explains. “Now that doesn’t
mean that the use of JSOC is a substitute for a strategy… It’s a tool in a policymaker’s toolkit.”¶ Indeed. If
what JSOC can do is bump off and capture individuals and pressure such groups but not decisively roll up
militant networks, despite years of anti-terror whack-a-mole efforts, it sounds like a recipe for spending
endless lives and endless funds on endless war. “It’s not my place as a reporter to opine as to whether
the present situations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen were ‘worth’ the cost in blood and treasure
borne by U.S. Special Operations forces,” Naylor tells me in a follow-up email. “Given the effects that
JSOC achieved in Iraq (Uday and Qusay Hussein killed, Saddam Hussein captured, [Al Qaeda in Iraq
leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi killed, Al Qaeda in Iraq eviscerated), it’s hard to say that JSOC did not have
an impact on that nation’s recent history.”¶ Impacts, of course, are one thing, successes another. Special
Operations Command, in fact, hedges its bets by claiming that it can only be as successful as the global
commands under which its troops operate in each area of the world, including European Command,
Pacific Command, Africa Command, Southern Command, Northern Command, and Central Command or
CENTCOM, the geographic combatant command that oversees operations in the Greater Middle East.
“We support the Geographic Combatant Commanders (GCCs)–if they are successful, we are successful;
if they fail, we fail,” says SOCOM’s website.¶ With this in mind, it’s helpful to return to Naylor’s question:
What if Al Qaeda in Iraq, which flowered in the years after the US invasion, had never been targeted by
JSOC as part of a man-hunting operation going after its foreign fighters, financiers, and military leaders?
Given that the even more brutal Islamic State (IS) grew out of that targeted terror group, that IS was
fueled in many ways, say experts, both by US actions and inaction, that its leader’s rise was bolstered by
US operations, that “U.S. training helped mold” another of its chiefs, and that a US prison served as its
“boot camp,” and given that the Islamic State now holds a significant swath of Iraq, was JSOC’s
campaign against its predecessor a net positive or a negative? Were special ops efforts in Iraq (and
therefore in CENTCOM’s area of operations)–JSOC’s post-9/11 showcase counterterror campaign–a
success or a failure?¶ Naylor notes that JSOC’s failure to completely destroy Al Qaeda in Iraq allowed IS
to grow and eventually sweep “across northern Iraq in 2014, seizing town after town from which JSOC
and other U.S. forces had evicted al-Qaeda in Iraq at great cost several years earlier.” This, in turn, led to
the rushing of special ops advisers back into the country to aid the fight against the Islamic State, as well
as to that program to train anti-Islamic State Syrian fighters that foundered and then imploded. By this
spring, JSOC operators were not only back in Iraq and also on the ground in Syria, but they were soon
conducting drone campaigns in both of those tottering nations.¶ This special ops merry-go-round in Iraq
is just the latest in a long series of fiascos, large and small, to bedevil America’s elite troops. Over the
years, in that country, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, special operators have regularly been involved in
all manner of mishaps, embroiled in various scandals, and implicated in numerous atrocities. Recently,
for instance, members of the Special Operations forces have come under scrutiny for an air strike on a
Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan that killed at least 22 patients and staff, for an alliance
with “unsavory partners” in the Central African Republic, for the ineffective and abusive Afghan police
they trained and supervised, and for a shady deal to provide SEALs with untraceable silencers that
turned out to be junk, according to prosecutors.¶ WINNERS AND LOSERS¶ JSOC was born of failure, a
phoenix rising from the ashes of Operation Eagle Claw, the humiliating attempt to rescue 53 American
hostages from the US Embassy in Iran in 1980 that ended, instead, in the deaths of eight US personnel.
Today, the elite force trades on an aura of success in the shadows. Its missions are the stuff of modern
myths.¶ In his advance praise for Naylor’s book, one cable news analyst called JSOC’s operators “the
finest warriors who ever went into combat.” Even accepting this–with apologies to the Mongols, the
Varangian Guard, Persia’s Immortals, and the Ten Thousand of Xenophon’s Anabasis–questions remain:
Have these “warriors” actually been successful beyond budget battles and the box office? Is exceptional
tactical prowess enough? Are battlefield triumphs and the ability to batter terror networks through
relentless raiding the same as victory? Such questions bring to mind an exchange that Army colonel
Harry Summers, who served in Vietnam, had with a North Vietnamese counterpart in 1975. “You know,
you never defeated us on the battlefield,” Summers told him. After pausing to ponder the comment,
Colonel Tu replied, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”¶ So what of those Green Berets who
deployed to 135 countries in the last decade? And what of the Special Operations forces sent to 147
countries in 2015? And what about those Geographic Combatant Commanders across the globe who
have hosted all those special operators?¶ I put it to Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich, author of Breach
of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country. “As far back as Vietnam,” he tells me,
“the United States military has tended to confuse inputs with outcomes. Effort, as measured by
operations conducted, bomb tonnage dropped, or bodies counted, is taken as evidence of progress
made. Today, tallying up the number of countries in which Special Operations forces are present repeats
this error. There is no doubt that US Special Operations forces are hard at it in lots of different places. It
does not follow that they are thereby actually accomplishing anything meaningful.”
Alt cause – the aff doesn’t reauthorize MAVNI – which is what their internal link
evidence actually says is key to solve
1AC CILJO 18, Cornell International Law Journal Online, “The Exclusion of Immigrants in the Military
and How it Hurts the United States”, http://cornellilj.org/the-exclusion-of-immigrants-in-the-military-
and-how-it-hurts-the-united-states/, -ss
In 2016, the Pentagon announced the closing of the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interests
(MAVNI) program.[1] The program’s closure suspended pending applications and stalled recruits who
had started the process.[2] Created in 2008, the MAVNI program provided expedited citizenship for
those who possessed valuable specialties or highly sought- after language skills.[3] Originally, the
purpose of the program was to attract highly skilled foreign residents to join the military. Yet, starting in
2012, the Obama Administration used the MAVNI program to provide a pathway to citizenship for
undocumented immigrants living in the United States since childhood (Dreamers) if they joined the
military while enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.[4] Sending DACA
recipients to the MAVNI program harmed both programs because only a select few DACA recipients (an
estimated 900 DACA recipients currently serving in the military) possessed highly sought-after
specialties or language skills meeting the stringent requirements.[5] As a result, the Department of
Defense changed how the MAVNI program operated and required additional security screenings, which
caused a substantial backlog of applications and longer processing times.[6] Under § 329 of the
Nationality and Immigration Act, “Any person who, while an alien or a noncitizen national of the United
States, has served honorably as a member of the Selected Reserve of the Ready Reserve or in an active-
duty status in the military may be naturalized as provided in this section.”[7] Since 2009, more than
10,000 immigrants (mostly individuals on student or employment-based visas) have enlisted in the Army
through the MAVNI program.[8] MAVNI applicants must have lived legally in the United States at least
two years to be eligible.[9] Program participants are sworn in as citizens upon completing basic training,
without having to first obtain a green card or permanent residency, making the program the fastest path
towards citizenship available.[10] In return, participants must serve eight years in the military, and they
can lose their citizenship if they fail to serve honorably.[11] Federal regulations under 8 USC § 1227
states that any alien who has committed an aggravated felony is deportable.[12] Moreover, the Army
must discharge any recruit who has not shipped to basic training within two years of joining the
program.[13] From its inception, the program faced heavy criticism. Supporters argued that the program
attracted high-caliber foreign recruits when it was difficult to recruit well-educated and highly-skilled
native-born Americans to join the military.[14] On the other hand, critics expressed concern that
terrorists could infiltrate the program despite the fact there has never been a MAVNI recruit charged
with terrorism.[15] Nevertheless, according to some officials, “anti-immigration sentiment has swirled in
the Pentagon for years,” insofar that the immigrant recruiting process is saturated with additional
security checks for visa holders that are vetted by both Department of State and Homeland Security.[16]
One of the program’s main problems was the confusion among states and difficulty for recruiters
navigating through regulations and background checks, which often lead to immigrant recruits having
their contracts cancelled.[17] This article examines the composition of the United States military in two
respects. The first part revolves around how the cancellation of the MAVNI program will affect DACA
recipients. The second examination centers on the difficulty of recruiting highly-skilled recruits and
increasing cost of military personnel from problems embedded in the immigration system. Without a
stable supply of skilled recruits, the United States military would face a severe shortage of interpreters,
medical personnel, and educated officers among its ranks. In this regard, motivated foreign recruits
provided much-needed skills to the military, which could face several operational obstacles and higher
expenditures as a direct result of closing the MAVNI program.
1NC - Iraq
Squo Solves – Iraq
The status quo solves Iraq SIVs
Zucchino 17, David, writer for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his
reporting from South Africa, he’s a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of
Lebanon, Africa, inner-city Philadelphia, and Iraq, 2-7-17, “Visa Ban Amended to Allow
Iraqi Interpreters Into U.S.,” New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/world/middleeast/trump-visa-ban-iraq-interpreters.html, -ss
BAGHDAD — The Trump administration amended its visa ban on Thursday to allow emigration by the
families of Iraqi interpreters who served the United States government and military forces deployed in
their country. The change, recommended by the Pentagon, eased some of the anger generated in Iraq by
President Trump’s executive order imposing the ban, which has stoked anxiety and confusion around much
of the world since it was issued last week. The order temporarily blocked all Syrian refugees from entering the United States and suspended
visas for applicants from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq. It applied to holders of so-called Special Immigrant Visas
issued to interpreters who worked for the United States during its 2003-11 occupation, often at great personal
risk, and to their families. In a statement about the change sent to The New York Times, a United States Embassy official in Baghdad said, “The
U.S. government has determined that it is in the national interest to allow Iraqi Special Immigrant Visa
(S.I.V.) holders to continue to travel to the United States.” Iraqis who have received the visas, the statement said, may use
them, and the “U.S. Embassy in Baghdad will continue to process and issue S.I.V.s to applicants who are otherwise qualified.” For the family of a
37-year-old Iraqi who once worked as an interpreter for American forces, the news was a joyous surprise after nearly a week of upended travel
plans. An embassy official called to inform family members that they were again permitted to fly to the United States.
“I’m shocked all
over again,” said the former interpreter, who asked to be identified only by his first name and an initial,
Munther A., to protect relatives in Iraq.
CP – Withdrawal Supplement
Solvency
Withdrawal solves—there is no such thing as “winning” the war militarily
Davis 7/24 (Daniel, senior fellow at Defense Priorities, former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who
retired in 2015 after 21 years, including four combat deployments, “Time to Talk to the Taliban”, The
American Conservative, 7/24/18, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/its-past-time-to-
withdraw-from-afghanistan/)//DL
after 17 years no one has any idea how to

While there is broad agreement that American leaders were justified in launching military operations in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, it’s painfully evident that
end the fighting on military terms the biggest impediment to ending the war has been the definition
. Possibly
of the word “win.” “reversing the perceived momentum” of the Taliban,

General Stanley McChrystal said in 2009 that winning in Afghanistan meant
“seek[ing] rapid growth of Afghan national security forces,” and “tackl[ing] the issue of predatory
corruption by Afghan officials some” . Nine full years and zero successes later, however, Lieutenant General Austin S. Miller, latest in line to command U.S. troops in Afghanistan, defined as America’s “core goal” at his confirmation hearing
can’t be militarily accomplished

that “terrorists can never again use Afghanistan as a safe haven to threaten the United States. The reason McChrystal failed to end the war—and Miller will likewise fail—is that these objectives .
Predicating an end to the war on such is to guarantee perpetual failure. A major course correction is
therefore in order Keeping U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan does not, in any way, prevent
. 15,000
terror attacks against the United States from originating there The real —and for this lack of success we will pay at least $45 billion this year alone.
solution is therefore to withdraw our troops rather than throw more of them into a as quickly as can be safely accomplished
fruitless conflict I personally observed in . my second combat deployment in Afghanistan that even 2011 during
with 140,000 boots on the ground, there were still vast swaths of the country that were
U.S. and NATO
ungoverned and off-limits to allied troops at no point since October 2001 has American military . Meaning,
power prevented Afghanistan from having ungoverned spaces . What has kept us safe, however—and will continue to keep us safe—has been our robust, globally focused
Many claim that if the U.S. military

intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that work in concert with the CIA, FBI, and local law enforcement to defend our borders from external attack. pundits
withdraws from Afghanistan then chaos will reign there But that’s how we found —and that is almost certainly true.
Afghanistan, that’s how it is today, and that’s how it will be long into the —wholly irrespective of when or under what conditions the U.S. leaves—
future The question U.S. policymakers need to ask is which is more important
until Afghans themselves come to an accommodation. to American
the maintenance of a perpetually costly war that fails to prevent any future attacks, or ending
interests:
America’s participation in that war? Continuing to fight has drained the U.S. of vital for a country that can’t be won cements a policy that
resources, spilled the blood of American servicemembers to no effect, and dissipated the Armed Forces’
ability to defend against potentially existential threats later on—while in the meantime not diminishing
the threat of international terrorism To strengthen our national security, we must end the enduring .
policy of failure by prudently and effectively ending our military mission . While the fundamentals of a withdrawal plan are relatively straightforward, they
One of the arguments against leaving was

would still be met by considerable opposition. to “show voiced by McChrystal nine years ago when he pleaded with the American public
resolve” Yet the facts can’t be denied any longer: for all eight years of the
because “uncertainty disheartens our allies [and] emboldens our foe.”
Obama administration and the first 500 days of Trump’s tenure, we maintained that “resolve” and were
rewarded with an unequivocal deterioration of the war the Taliban have exploded . Since McChrystal’s admonition to maintain the status quo,
in strength to 77,000, more territory is now in the hands of the insurgents than at any point since
reportedly
2001, the Afghan government remains one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet, and civilian
casualties in the first half of 2018 are the highest ever recorded The only way this permanent failure .
ends is if President Trump push back against the Washington establishment That
shows the courage he has sometimes demonstrated to .
means ignoring the status quo that holds our security hostage, ending the war Without that , and redeploying our troops.
resolve, we can count on continued failure in Afghanistan. With it, American security will be
strengthened and readiness improved .
Withdrawal Advocate / Alt causes
The war is unwinnable – withdrawal solves a waste of military resources – peace talks
have already started.
Davis 07/24 Daniel L. Davis is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and a former lieutenant colonel in
the U.S. Army who retired in 2015 after 21 years, including four combat deployments. Follow him on
Twitter @DanielLDavis1, 2018, “Time to Talk to the Taliban,” The American Conservative, 07/24,
http://theamericanconservative.com/articles/its-past-time-to-withdraw-from-afghanistan/ Accessed
07/26/2018 //jsaltman
Reports have surfaced recently that the White House is instructing its senior diplomats to begin seeking
“direct talks with the Taliban.” It’s a measure that would have been unthinkable at the start of the
Afghanistan war yet today it’s long overdue. Despite the criticism it’s elicited, such talks offer the best
chance of ending America’s longest and most futile war. While there is broad agreement that American
leaders were justified in launching military operations in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, it’s
painfully evident after 17 years that no one has any idea how to end the fighting on military terms.
Possibly the biggest impediment to ending the war has been the definition of the word “win.” General
Stanley McChrystal said in 2009 that winning in Afghanistan meant “reversing the perceived
momentum” of the Taliban, “seek[ing] rapid growth of Afghan national security forces,” and “tackl[ing]
the issue of predatory corruption by some” Afghan officials. Nine full years and zero successes later,
however, Lieutenant General Austin S. Miller, latest in line to command U.S. troops in Afghanistan,
defined as America’s “core goal” at his confirmation hearing that “terrorists can never again use
Afghanistan as a safe haven to threaten the United States.” In Afghanistan, Hoping the 17th General is
the Charm Can We Admit Now That Afghanistan Reconstruction Failed? The reason McChrystal failed to
end the war—and Miller will likewise fail—is that these objectives can’t be militarily accomplished.
Predicating an end to the war on such is to guarantee perpetual failure. A major course correction is
therefore in order. Keeping 15,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan does not, in any way,
prevent terror attacks against the United States from originating there—and for this lack of success we
will pay at least $45 billion this year alone. The real solution is therefore to withdraw our troops as
quickly as can be safely accomplished rather than throw more of them into a fruitless conflict. I
personally observed in 2011 during my second combat deployment in Afghanistan that even with
140,000 U.S. and NATO boots on the ground, there were still vast swaths of the country that were
ungoverned and off-limits to allied troops. Meaning, at no point since October 2001 has American
military power prevented Afghanistan from having ungoverned spaces. What has kept us safe,
however—and will continue to keep us safe—has been our robust, globally focused intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that work in concert with the CIA, FBI, and local law
enforcement to defend our borders from external attack. Many pundits claim that if the U.S. military
withdraws from Afghanistan then chaos will reign there—and that is almost certainly true. But that’s
how we found Afghanistan, that’s how it is today, and—wholly irrespective of when or under what
conditions the U.S. leaves—that’s how it will be long into the future until Afghans themselves come to
an accommodation. The question U.S. policymakers need to ask is which is more important to American
interests: the maintenance of a perpetually costly war that fails to prevent any future attacks, or ending
America’s participation in that war? Continuing to fight for a country that can’t be won cements a policy
that has drained the U.S. of vital resources, spilled the blood of American servicemembers to no effect,
and dissipated the Armed Forces’ ability to defend against potentially existential threats later on—while
in the meantime not diminishing the threat of international terrorism. To strengthen our national
security, we must end the enduring policy of failure by prudently and effectively ending our military
mission. While the fundamentals of a withdrawal plan are relatively straightforward, they would still be
met by considerable opposition. One of the arguments against leaving was voiced by McChrystal nine
years ago when he pleaded with the American public to “show resolve” because “uncertainty
disheartens our allies [and] emboldens our foe.” Yet the facts can’t be denied any longer: for all eight
years of the Obama administration and the first 500 days of Trump’s tenure, we maintained that
“resolve” and were rewarded with an unequivocal deterioration of the war. Since McChrystal’s
admonition to maintain the status quo, the Taliban have exploded in strength to reportedly 77,000,
more territory is now in the hands of the insurgents than at any point since 2001, the Afghan
government remains one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet, and civilian casualties in the first
half of 2018 are the highest ever recorded. The only way this permanent failure ends is if President
Trump shows the courage he has sometimes demonstrated to push back against the Washington
establishment. That means ignoring the status quo that holds our security hostage, ending the war, and
redeploying our troops. Without that resolve, we can count on continued failure in Afghanistan. With it,
American security will be strengthened and readiness improved.
Withdrawal is the only way to solve – massive alt causes overwhelm the aff.
Gault 17 Matthew Gault is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Reuters and The New
York Times. He's a contributing editor at War Is Boring and the host of Reuters War College Podcast,
2017, “To End The War In Afghanistan, The US Needs To Make Some Difficult Decisions,” Task And
Purpose, 01/15, https://taskandpurpose.com/pull-afghanistan-back-brink/ Accessed 07/25/2018
//jsaltman
The United States doesn’t have to lose its longest war … but winning won’t be easy. Nearly 2,400
American service member have died during the war in Afghanistan. Along with so many of its sons and
daughters, taxpayers sacrificed almost a $1 trillion to hold the country since 2001. Not all that cash went
to war, of course. The United States spent around $115 billion of it to reconstruct a country the Taliban
had ravaged. Now, with sequestration cutting into the military budget and a new president coming into
office, Afghanistan’s fate hangs in the balance. The Taliban is resurgent, and though they fell short of
capturing a provincial capital in 2016, they still made inroads in a country Americans and Afghans have
died to keep safe. According to a recent report from John Sopko, Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction, “only 63.4% of the country’s districts were under Afghan government
control or influence a reduction from the 72% as of November 27, 2015.” Congress formed SIGAR and
appointed Sopko in 2008. It’s the biggest governmental body providing oversight of the reconstruction
effort in Afghanistan and what it discovers often isn’t pretty. The most recent report, published in
January 2017, is an assessment of the high-risk areas threatening Afghanistan today. U.S. Army aviators
fly a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, assigned to 1st Combat Aviation Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, during
a mission from Tactical Base Gamberi to Camp Morehead in eastern Afghanistan Oct. 23, 2016.
Washington and Kabul are losing Afghanistan. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Systemic corruption, a
waning security force and a unhealthy relationship with the counternarcotics is destroying Afghanistan
and its military. If America wants to stay in Afghanistan and beat the Taliban, it can. But that’s a big if.
Another option is to negotiate peace with the Taliban, something Kabul has attempted since the war
began. But there are contentious issues neither side will relent on, such as the Taliban’s insistence on
changing Afghanistan’s constitution to reflect sharia law and what form any kind of power sharing
between Kabul and the Taliban would take. There’s another way, one that would be the Taliban’s
preference — the complete withdrawal of coalition forces from Afghanistan. In an article on the
Taliban’s website, its leaders asked U.S. President Donald Trump to do just that. What we can’t do is
continue to lie to ourselves. Turning the tide will be take years, not to mention more money and more
American troops. That’s just the way it is. If we aren’t willing to do that, then we need to leave the
country and face the consequences of failure. That’ll mean saying goodbye to billions of U.S. taxpayer
dollars, strategic fallout from losing an American military presence close to Pakistan’s border region, and
the Pentagon accepting a defeat on a level not seen since Vietnam. The current strategy amounts to a
slow unwinding, a sustained collapse that does a disservice to the American taxpayer and the soldiers of
many nations who fought and died to defeat the Taliban. Root out corruption The biggest problem
eating away at the the war in Afghanistan is corruption. Kabul officials take bribes, local contractors
overestimate the cost of projects to bilk the U.S. taxpayer, and Afghan army commanders overreport
troop numbers to bulk up their budget. Corruption permeates Afghanistan. It’s part of the culture.
According to Transparency International — a nonprofit that tracks corruption — only North Korea and
Somalia are more corrupt than Kabul. “Ninety percent of Afghans say that corruption is a problem in
their daily lives,” Sopko wrote in his latest report. U.S. taxpayers have poured billions in aid into
Afghanistan only to see it scooped up by corrupt government officials, businessmen and criminals. The
problem is so endemic that most U.S. officials familiar with the country feel the threat outweighs even
the Taliban. “The ultimate point of failure for our efforts … wasn’t an insurgency. It was the weight of
endemic corruption,” former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker told SIGAR. Qazi
Muheebullah, city court chief, speaks to defense attorneys and the crowd during a public trial in which
Habib ullah Jangay, Khas Kunar Chief of Police, was charged with misuse of his position, and Shams
urhman Momand, a logistics officer, was charged with corruption. “Corruption alienates key elements of
the population, discredits the government and security forces, undermines international support,
subverts state functions and rule of law, robs the state of revenue, and creates barriers to economic
growth.” To combat the problem, America must track every single dollar spent in the country. It seems
simple, but it hasn’t happened yet. It must also help build a culture of honesty and transparency by
strictly enforcing business ethics, prosecuting corruption cases criminally and leading by example. Too
many times, American contractors came into Afghanistan and overcharged the Pentagon and State
Department for simple construction projects so it could pocket the extra cash. The Afghans watched this
and learned what they could get away with. Without oversight, strict criminal laws backed by tough
prosecution and a change of culture, corruption will defeat America faster than the Taliban ever could.
Take the fight to the Taliban Afghanistan must have a strong and self sustaining military force to keep
the Taliban from retaking the country. Washington and Kabul both know this, and as a result, American
taxpayers have spent almost $70 billion to create and support Afghanistan’s military. But the cash isn’t
enough, especially with corruption remaining a systemic problem. The Afghan National Army’s casualty
rate makes it almost impossible to sustain the service. Soldiers’ pay often fails to make it into their
pockets, since commanders skim cash off the top before handing it over to their troops. The logistical
supply lines are a nightmare thanks to both a lack of infrastructure and pilfering as supplies move down
the road. Because of these problems the ANA is mostly a defensive force, focusing on holding ground as
the Taliban continues to make gains. The problem is so bad that Kabul uses Afghan special operations
forces to hold population centers and fill in for the overstretched army. “One Resolute Support advisor
expressed concern that the ANA’s over-reliance on ‘commandos’ risks burning out those elite forces,”
SIGAR wrote. Soldiers from the 1st Brigade, 205th Afghan National Army Corps conducted helicopter air
insertion training in Southern Kandahar province, Afghanistan, March 31, 2012. Since 2015, Washington
has been more hands off with the Afghan security forces, and the situation has deteriorated rapidly. The
sad fact is the Afghan army simply isn’t ready to defend its own country. If it wants to defeat the Taliban
in Afghanistan, America will have to commit more ground forces to the fight to give the Afghans time to
fill out their force and change the culture of corruption. RELATED: 15 YEARS LATER, WE’RE STILL
FIGHTING IN AFGHANISTAN AND NO ONE CARES » Those are the facts on the ground. According to
Pentagon reports, “from January 1, 2016, through August 19, 2016, a total of 5,523 ANDSF service
members were killed and an additional 9,665 members were wounded.” America pulled its forces and
attempted to let Kabul stand on it’s own. It didn’t work out. To stop the bleeding, America has to re-
commit ground troops to the fight, secure key population centers without the help of Afghan
commandos, freeing them to be an offensive rather than defensive force, and then take the fight to the
Taliban. Joint operations between American and Afghan forces is the only way to do this in a way that
allows Kabul to rebuild its shattered forces. This will take years. Make peace with the poppy This is going
to be the hardest one to swallow, but it’s also the most important. “The cultivation and trafficking of
illicit drugs put the entire U.S. and international investment in the reconstruction of Afghanistan at risk,”
Sopko’s report said. He’s right. The Taliban once suppressed the poppy trade, but now it makes millions
from trafficking every year. The United States has spent almost $8 billion trying to eliminate opium in
Afghanistan. It destroyed fields, paid farmers exorbitant amounts of cash to grow anything other than
poppies and enforced strict drug laws. It didn’t work. “Eradication efforts have had minimal impact on
production and sometimes fostered resentment among farmers, who perceived it as a corrupt practice
for local officials to extract bribes in order for their crop to be spared,” Sopko explained. Afghan
National Security forces oversee poppy eradication in Northern Marjah. Now, the Taliban makes tons of
money off of the opium trade. The religious fanatics figured out what Washington hasn’t, or what it
willfully ignores — people will always want drugs. As a result, a cash crop such as the poppy will always
thrive whether supported by a regulated free market or an unregulated black market. For America to
win in Afghanistan, it has to make peace with the poppy. That runs counter to decades of U.S. drug
policy, but regulating, taxing, and supporting Afghan poppy farmers may be the single biggest change
the Pentagon could make in Afghanistan that would have a lasting effect on all the other problems. A
well-regulated opium trade will instantly win over local farmers, enrich the coffers of Kabul, and allow
the government to quickly become self sustaining, fight corruption by bringing a black market into the
daylight and destroy one of the Taliban’s main income streams. There will, of course, be social problems
associated with a thriving drug trade. But the truth is that those problems already exist and a realistic
approach to the poppy is better than the fantasy of eradication. In Afghanistan, peace with the poppy is
a hard and bitter pill. But if the Pentagon doesn’t swallow it, America may well lose its longest war.
Trump and Defense Secretary James Mattis have hard choices to make. After almost two decades of
perpetual war in Afghanistan, thousands of American lives and billions of taxpayer dollars, Washington
and Kabul are at the brink. Only decisive and radical action will stop the Taliban from winning. It’s time
to take that action or cut our losses and get out.
ANA Solves
It solves the Aff better, greater influence from the Afghan National Army solves local
legitimacy and cultural competence better
CHARLES R. 1AC LISTER 11, Resident Fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, “Cultural
awareness and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan”, http://www.e-ir.info/2011/03/11/cultural-
awareness-and-counterinsurgency-in-afghanistan/
A more effective counterinsurgency strategy would involve giving the Afghan National Army (ANA) a
more front-line role in fighting the Taliban, but more importantly, in providing local-level security.
Given their inherent cultural awareness and linguistic fluency, “after years of watching from the back
seat,”[84] the ANA could beneficially act as local intermediaries, help boost local-level
counterinsurgent legitimacy and encourage HUMINT collection from those who have best access to
‘the hidden enemy.’[85] Rather than “falling in love with the guy who speaks English,”[86] the leveraging
of ANA ties to the Afghan community could potentially open access to those more influential
residents[87] who may have previously been hesitant to approach foreign soldiers.[88] ISAF could
capitalize on such extra stimuli and work towards acquiring a more developed local-level cultural
understanding by deploying its troops within strategic villages and towns – or tache d’huile (oil spots), to
use Lyautey’s expression.[89] Renting and operating out of a qalat[90] (fortified family compound)
would guarantee genuine population engagement and expose avenues for acquiring sincere mutual
cultural understanding between ISAF and local Afghan residents. The counterinsurgents could therefore
begin building relationships based on legitimacy, through communication and trust,[91] and from which
an impression of an acceptable solution to locals would be prompted. Rather than “throwing
money”[92] into building western-style motorways, it would soon become clear that local markets, and
agricultural assistance are of far greater value. An idea of “good enough governance”[93] would lead to
an acceptance that self-styled Afghan ‘warlords,’ though distasteful to Western eyes, should be seen as
potential major players and power-brokers in state building.[94] ISAF is predominantly composed of
soldiers from the U.S., with further sizeable contributions from Britain, Italy, Germany and France,[95]
all of which are highly developed, internationalist states. It is surprising therefore, that on a matter of
such importance, their counterinsurgency endeavours in Afghanistan reveal such low levels of cultural
awareness. While the Iraqi insurgency helped initiate a doctrinal re-evaluation of counterinsurgency
strategy (epitomized by Field Manual (FM) 3-24), and helped stimulate a considerable analytical focus
on the subject, actual tactical-level behaviour and operations have, by and large, failed to sufficiently
adapt themselves in order to make a concrete difference. In Afghanistan “three decades of war,
population displacement and social upheaval”[96] have left the people both tired of, and used to
conflict. The Taliban exploit their familiarity with the environment to conduct a Maoist strategy of
transiently infiltrating and exerting influence in strategic localities, whilst also remaining predominantly
hidden. ISAF forces meanwhile, too often locate themselves away from population centres, conduct
themselves in a culturally offensive fashion and are too risk averse to attempt sincere or permanent
local-level engagement. As a result, the Taliban corroborates the famous maxim that “control of local
systems and structures inherently shapes collaboration”[97] by exploiting the fact that they can spread
their influence through coercion and control more easily than ISAF can. ISA
Afghan forces solve without the US military
Daniel L. 1ac Byman 17, senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, where his
research focuses on counterterrorism and Middle East security. He previously served as the research
director of the center. He is also senior associate dean for undergraduate affairs at Georgetown
University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and a professor in its Security Studies Program. Previously,
Byman served as a staff member with the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United
States (“The 9/11 Commission”) and the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees. Prior to that, Byman was a policy analyst and the director for research in the Center for
Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation and worked for the U.S. government. His most recent
book is "Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know"
(Oxford University Press, 2015). He is the author of several other books on counterterrorism, state
sponsorship of terrorism, and conflict and terrorism in the Middle East, “The case for continued U.S.
involvement in Afghanistan”, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/09/05/the-case-
for-continued-u-s-involvement-in-afghanistan/
The U.S. war in Afghanistan, which enters its 16th year as the longest war in American history, has no end in sight, and Americans increasingly question its value. As a presidential candidate,
Donald J. Trump questioned the continued U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, tweeting “Let’s get out!” because of the “waste of blood and treasure.” As president, however, Trump is following
the path of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama: In August, he approved the deployment of several thousand more troops into Afghanistan, where 8,500 are already stationed. The
United States is likely to stay involved in Afghanistan for the remainder of the Trump presidency and perhaps far longer. As a pre-9/11 advocate of confronting the Taliban, I am loath to see it
return to power and worry about the humanitarian and national security costs of a U.S. failure in Afghanistan. Yet, many Americans feel a sense of futility when they consider Afghanistan, best
captured by the painful headlines of two satirical magazines: Duffleblog’s “‘We’re Making Real Progress,’ Say Last 17 Commanders in Afghanistan” and The Onion’s “Soldier Excited to Take
Over Father’s Old Afghanistan Patrol Route.” In the hopes of clarifying my own thinking along with that of any readers (and yes, I’m talking to you @brookingsbunny), in a two-part series to
follow, I lay out my cases for and against intervention. Fear of terrorism constitutes the primary reason to remain in Afghanistan. Because the Taliban hosted al-Qaida in the years before the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, many assume that the Taliban would host al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations again should it gain power in all or part the country. President Trump, in his Aug. 21
speech announcing the deployment of more troops, warned, “A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum for terrorists, including ISIS and Al Qaida, would instantly fill just as happened before
September 11.” Although the Afghan government controls only part of the country, its presence impedes the Taliban’s ability to host the large-scale training apparatus that allowed al-Qaida
and other groups to flourish before 9/11. Government forces can raid Taliban-controlled areas and disrupt camps, and the United States can fly drones or otherwise strike any facilities with
relative ease. The Taliban may have learned its lesson regarding support for international terrorism, but the United States cannot count on that. In good news, the Afghan Taliban have not
supported a mass-casualty terrorist attack against the West in the post-9/11 era. The militants have not done so even in the face of the ferocious warfare waged against them, suggesting their
theater of operations is local and regional, not international. In addition, the Taliban hesitated to embrace al-Qaida’s global terrorism agenda even before 9/11, though it stumbled into a tight
embrace with the group. However, the Defense Department counts as many as 20 active terrorist groups in Afghanistan. Moreover, the rise of the Haqqani network within the Taliban—
Sirajuddin Haqqani has become the Taliban’s No. 2—is troubling given the network’s ties to international terrorist groups. In addition, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) has
emerged in recent years and has executed brutal terrorist attacks. ISKP rivals the Taliban, and it might conduct attacks if it had more freedom to operate in Afghanistan even if the Taliban
refrained from supporting terrorism. Setting aside the issue of Taliban or ISKP control, the United States also uses Afghanistan as a base for drone attacks in Pakistan. Drones are the tip of the
U.S. spear against al-Qaida remnants remaining in the region. A number of U.S. enemies operate from tribal parts of Pakistan that are within drone and commando range from Afghanistan.
Thus, a continued fight against al-Qaida remnants in Pakistan depends in part on access to Afghanistan. In addition, much of the drone program depends on human assets for reporting—it
cannot be done entirely “over the horizon,” with no allies on the ground. Finally, a U.S. departure would embolden Pakistan’s generals, convincing them (correctly) that covertly supporting
militants against their enemies is a winning strategy and one that they should continue to employ against India. An open U.S. defeat would also be a morale boost for our enemies. This is the
land where the jihadists beat one superpower, the Soviet Union, and giving them a second victory would be a psychological jolt. This would help their recruiting, fundraising and morale in
general. Similarly, U.S. friends would be dispirited, seeing the United States as abandoning the region despite many U.S. and allied sacrifices. Beyond counterterrorism interests, there is a
humanitarian case for remaining in Afghanistan. The Taliban oppose women’s rights, religious tolerance, education for girls and general liberal democratic values. Preventing such a group from
gaining power helps Afghans. Although the United States cannot and should not intervene everywhere to promote human rights, Afghanistan represents a possible exception given the long-
standing U.S. involvement coupled with the security reasons and serious humanitarian concerns. Nor is the picture in Afghanistan all dark. The U.S. military reports that the Taliban lose
The Brookings
approximately 10,000 fighters each year in casualties—a huge number. Unfortunately, they can replace lost cadre, but the cost to the group remains high.
Afghanistan index, though largely negative in its implications, also suggests a few bright spots: The size of the Afghan security
forces has steadily grown along with their ability to operate effectively both with and without U.S.
advisers Some of the U.S. military advising and mentoring at the tactical level has borne fruit, resulting
in more capable Afghan forces Enrollment in elementary and secondary education has increased steadily
since the fall of the Taliban Life expectancy in Afghanistan rose from 42 years in 2004 to more than 60
years in 2010
War on Terror = Unwinnable
the war on terror is unwinnable—laundry list

Vanda 1AC Felbab-Brown 17, “Afghanistan’s terrorism resurgence: Al-Qaida, ISIS, and beyond”,
https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/afghanistans-terrorism-resurgence-al-qaida-isis-and-beyond/
However, Afghanistan remains in a highly precarious condition. After more than a decade of U.S. and
international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and build up the country’s governance structures, the U.N.
special envoy in Afghanistan Nicholas Haysom stated in March 2016 when briefing the U.N. Security
Council that if Afghanistan merely survived 2016 the United Nations mission in the country would
consider it a success.[1] Afghanistan did survive 2016 without much of the country falling into the hands
of the Taliban, or the government collapsing with a protracted political crisis ensuing, and without a full-
blown civil war breaking out. But 2016 also accomplished little in reversing the multiple deleterious
trends that motivated the special envoy’s comments. Security continued to worsen palpably. During the
two and a half years since the United States and NATO turned the fighting over to the Afghan National
Security Forces (ANSF), the Taliban has mounted and sustained its toughest military campaign yet, and
the war has become bloodier than ever. Despite the Taliban’s internal difficulties, its military energy
shows no signs of fizzling out. It has been scoring important tactical and even strategic victories.
Insecurity has increased significantly throughout the country, civilian deaths have shot up, and the
Afghan security forces are taking large, and potentially unsustainable, casualties as other ANSF
deficiencies, including corruption that affects both unit performance and sustainment capacity, persist.
Significant portions of Afghanistan’s territory, including the provincial capital of Kunduz and multiple
districts of Helmand, have fallen (at least temporarily) to the Taliban over the past two years. Moreover,
the Islamic State (IS) established itself in Afghanistan in 2015, although it faces multiple and strong
countervailing forces. Although borrowing its name from the Islamic State in the Middle East and
proclaiming allegiance to it, the Islamic State in Afghanistan is not a Middle East export to the country.
Rather, it consists of several splinter groups and elements expelled from the Taliban, including some too
brutal and too sectarian even for the mainstream Taliban. Eastern Nangarhar in particular has emerged
as the strongest base of IS presence in Afghanistan. In other parts of the country, such as the north,
foreign elements, including Uzbek and Pakistani militants, including factions of Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan, relabeled themselves IS. An IS growth in Afghanistan faces substantial
obstacles: The group’s brutality, greater than even the brutality Afghans have been subjected to for
decades, generates resentment. The Taliban has been better able to calibrate brutality and hide or
excuse the violence it perpetrates against civilians. At times, the Taliban has even temporarily reduced
violence and overly-restrictive edits to generate acceptance by local populations. By contrast, like IS in
the Middle East, IS in Afghanistan has chosen to rule by sheer brutality. The Taliban has also sponsored
opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and the jobs and income it provides for ordinary Afghans, thus
generating political capital. IS in Afghanistan, on the other hand, has prohibited opium poppy cultivation
both on grounds of ideological purity the strategic goal of ensuring that the only employment available
to local men is as IS foot soldiers. IS in Afghanistan has also drawn the attention of international actors,
and the Taliban has been able to capitalize on being seen as a lesser threat by outside powers. For
Russia and Iran, the Islamic State is an even greater threat than the Taliban. Both countries have
provided support to the Taliban in order to fight IS but also as part of their anti-American efforts. Far
more ominous, however, than the emergence of the Afghan version of IS for the stability of Afghanistan
and the long-term success of counterterrorism efforts in the country is how fractious and polarized
politics in Afghanistan remain. The National Unity Government (created in the wake of the highly
contested presidential elections of 2014) has not yet really found its feet. The weakness of the NUG, its
political dependencies and entanglements, and its other priorities, have also limited and undermined its
willingness and ability to robustly tackle the predatory criminality, illicit economies, and organized crime
that have become so intermeshed with Afghanistan’s political system and international
counterinsurgency operations. The country’s illicit economies such as illegal mining and logging and drug
trafficking have financed and stimulated some aspects of the post-2001 violent conflict. But it is
particularly the predatory criminality — involving usurpation of land, taxes, and customs, generalized
extortion, thuggish monopolistic domination of international contracts and local economic markets, and
usurpation of international aid – that has even more severely undermined the stabilization and
reconstruction efforts. Combined with the capricious and rapacious rule by Afghan powerbrokers, the
predatory criminality allows the Taliban, despite its brutality, to to present itself as a more predictable
and less corrupt ruler and gives the insurgency critical traction and resilience.
We can’t win it—commitment to intervention fuels a never-ending cycle of failures

Astore 17—William Astore, retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at the Air Force Academy and
the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology,
2017 (“The Longest War in American History Has No End in Sight,” the Nation, 02-28-2017, Available
Online at https://www.thenation.com/article/the-longest-war-in-american-history-has-no-end-in-sight/,
Accessed 07-25-2018)//hk
America’s war in Afghanistan is now in its 16th year, the longest foreign war in our history. The phrase
“no end in sight” barely covers the situation. Prospects of victory—if victory is defined as eliminating
that country as a haven for Islamist terrorists while creating a representative government in Kabul—are
arguably more tenuous today than at any point since the US military invaded in 2001 and routed the
Taliban. Such “progress” has, over the years, invariably proven “fragile” and “reversible,” to use the
weasel words of General David Petraeus who oversaw the Afghan “surge” of 2010–11 under President
Obama. To cite just one recent data point: The Taliban now controls 15 percent more territory than it
did in 2015.¶ That statistic came up in recent Senate testimony by the US commanding general in
Afghanistan, John “Mick” Nicholson Jr., who is (to give no-end-in-sight further context) the 12th US
commander since the war began. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he called for
several thousand more US troops to break what he optimistically described as a “stalemate.” Those
troops would, he added, serve mainly as advisers and trainers to Afghan forces, facilitating what he
labeled “hold-fight-disrupt” operations.¶ As to how long they would be needed, the general was vague
indeed. He spoke of the necessity of sustaining “an enduring counter-terrorism (CT) platform” in
Afghanistan to bottle up terrorist forces, so they wouldn’t, as he put it, hit us in the “homeland.” Indeed,
the US military considers what it has begun to speak of as a “generational” war in that country
“successful” because no major attacks on the United States have had their roots in Afghanistan since
September 11, 2001. And that certainly qualifies as one of the stranger definitions of success in a
perpetual war that lacks a sound strategy.¶ OF STALEMATES AND PETRI DISHES¶ You know America is
losing a war when its officials resort to bad metaphors to describe its progress and prospects. A classic
case was the infamous “light at the end of the tunnel” metaphor from the Vietnam War years. It implied
that, although prospects might appear dark–that “tunnel” of war—progress was indeed being made
and, in the distance, victory (that “light”) could be glimpsed. Contrast this with World War II, when
progress was measured not by empty words (or misleading metrics like body counts or truck counts) but
by land masses invaded and cities and islands wrested from the enemy. Normandy and Berlin, Iwo Jima
and Okinawa are place names that still resonate with Allied heroism and sacrifice. That kind of progress
could be seen on a map and was felt in the gut; metaphors were superfluous.¶ Afghanistan, US military
theorists claim, is a different kind of war, a fourth-generation war fought in a “gray zone”; a mish-mash,
that is, of low-intensity and asymmetric conflicts, involving non-state actors, worsened by the meddling
of foreign powers like Pakistan, Iran, and Russia—all mentioned in General Nicholson’s testimony. (It
goes without saying that the United States doesn’t see its military presence there as foreign.) A skeptic
might be excused for concluding that, to the US military, fourth-generation warfare really means a
conflict that will last four generations.¶ Long and losing wars seem to encourage face-saving analogies
and butt-covering metaphors. For General Nicholson, Afghanistan is actually a “petri dish” that, as in a
laboratory of terror, has cultivated no fewer than 20 “DNA strands” of terrorist bad guys joined by three
violent extremist organizations—VEOs in military-speak. To prevent a “convergence” of all these strands
and outfits and so, assumedly, the creation of a super terror bug of some sort, Nicholson suggested,
America and its 39-member coalition in Afghanistan must stand tall and send in yet more troops.¶ As it
turns out, our 12th commanding general there isn’t the first to resort to biology and a “petri dish” to
explain a war that just won’t end. In 2010, during the Afghan surge, General Stanley McChrystal referred
to the community of Nawa in southern Afghanistan as his “number one petri dish.” As The Washington
Post reported at the time, McChrystal “had hoped the antibodies generated there [during its
pacification] could be harnessed and replicated [elsewhere in Afghanistan]. But that hasn’t yet
happened.” Nor has it happened in the intervening seven years. McChrystal’s petri dish experiment
failed, yet his metaphor lives on, even if now used in a somewhat different way, with the entire country
(including parts of Pakistan) serving as that “dish” and terrorists, not American troops and friendly
Afghans, multiplying in it.¶ It may not be the most appetizing metaphor, but you can at least understand
why American leaders might prefer it to the classic one applied to foreign attempts to pacify Afghanistan
back in the ancient days of European colonial experiments: “graveyard of empires.”¶ To summarize
Nicholson mixed-metaphorically: Afghanistan is a “petri dish” in which terrorist “strands” are
“converging” to create a “stalemate” that is weakening America’s “enduring CT platform,” which could
lead to terrorist attacks on the “homeland.” Now, let’s take that one apart, piece by piece. Is the Afghan
War truly a stalemate, as in a game of chess? That hardly seems to fit a situation in which the end game
is—as the Pentagon with its generational thinking and Nicholson with his request for more troops
suggest—hardly in sight. In fact, at a time when the Afghan government may control less than 60% of its
territory and its security forces are taking staggering, possibly unsustainable casualties, other players,
not the US-led coalition, seem to have the momentum.¶ What about that “enduring CT platform”—the
presence, that is, of those US and NATO troops (together with private military contractors), all showing
“resolute support” for the Afghan people so as to keep us safe at home? What if, in fact, their presence
is perpetuating the very war they say they are seeking to end? Can Afghanistan of the present moment
truly be described as an experiment in terrorist biology, and if so are US-led “kinetic” efforts to kill those
strands of terror working instead to create an even nastier virus?¶ Above all, are such metaphors just a
way of avoiding the absurdity of suggesting that a few thousand (or even a surge-worthy 30,000) more
US troops could possibly turn a never-ending, losing war into a victorious one almost 16 years later?¶
GRIM HONESTY AMONG THE GROUND-POUNDERS¶ For grim honesty, skip those metaphor-wielding
commanding generals so deeply invested in a war that they can neither admit to losing nor contemplate
leaving. Look instead to the ground-pounders, the plain-speaking corporals and captains who have met
that war face to face, up close and personal. Consider, for instance, a 2010 HBO documentary, The
Battle for Marjah. Seven years ago, in a much larger military effort than the one presently being
contemplated, US troops joined with Afghan forces to secure the town of Marjah in Helmand Province in
the opium-growing heart of the country.¶ The documentary followed a US Marine unit, which fought
valiantly to clear that town of the Taliban in accordance with the counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine
then experiencing a revival under Petraeus and McChrystal. The goal was to rebuild its institutions and
infrastructure so US troops could ultimately leave. As usual, the Marines kicked ass: they cleared the
town. But the price of holding it proved dear, while efforts to build a local Afghan government to replace
them failed. Today, as much as 80% of Helmand Province is under Taliban control.¶ The documentary’s
harshest lessons come almost as visual asides. While Taliban insurgents fought with spirit, Afghan
government forces, then as now, fought reluctantly. US troops had to force them to enter and clear
buildings. In one case, a Marine takes a rifle away from an Afghan soldier because the latter keeps
pointing the muzzle at “friendly” forces. We witness Afghan troops holding a half-hearted ceremony to
salute their government’s flag after Marjah is “liberated.” Meanwhile, the faces of ordinary Afghans
alternate between beleaguered stoicism and thinly veiled hostility. Few appear to welcome their foreign
liberators, whether US or Afghan. (The Afghan government units, hailing from the north, were ethnically
different and spoke another language.) An Afghan shown working with the Marines was assassinated
soon after the US withdrawal.¶ A tired Marine corporal put it all in perspective: for him, the Afghan War
was a “mind-fuck.” At least he rotated out sooner or later. The Afghan people have had no such luck. To
mix metaphors and wars, they were stuck in the big muddy of their “petri dish.”¶ Let’s turn to another
ground-pounding Marine of more recent vintage, Captain Joshua Waddell. A decorated combat veteran
of the war, he penned an article for this month’s Marine Corps Gazette in which he lambastes the US
military for its “self-delusion.” He writes:¶ “It is time that we, as professional military officers, accept the
fact that we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Objective analysis of the US military’s effectiveness in
these wars can only conclude that we were unable to translate tactical victory into operational and
strategic success.”¶ Supporting Waddell’s “lost war” conclusion is General Nicholson’s own testimony,
which cited the same old problems in the Afghan military: too many “ghost” (fake) soldiers—others,
often commanders, pocket their salaries—indicating widespread and endemic corruption; unmotivated
leadership, made worse by crippling shortages of skilled junior officers and noncommissioned officers;
and too many unmanned Afghan checkpoints. (Those “ghost” soldiers, so good at funneling money to
their creators, turn out to be bad indeed at securing checkpoints.)¶ SEEING ONLY WHAT WE WANT TO
SEE¶ Given such a grim assessment, what difference, you might wonder, would just a few thousand
more American troops make, when it comes to tipping the Afghan “stalemate” in Washington’s favor? In
fact, General Nicholson’s humble request is undoubtedly only an opening wedge in the Trumpian door
through which future, far higher troop requests are then likely to enter.¶ Asked by Senator Lindsey
Graham whether he could do the job in Afghanistan with 50,000 troops, which would quadruple
coalition forces there, Nicholson answered with a “yes”; when asked about 30,000 US and other NATO
troops, he was less sure. With that 50,000 number now out there in Washington, does anyone doubt
that Nicholson or his successor(s) will sooner or later press the president to launch the next Afghan
surge? How else to counter all those terrorist strands in that petri dish? (This, of course, represents déjà
vu all over again, given the Obama surge that added 30,000 troops to 70,000 already in Afghanistan and
yet failed to yield sustainable results.)¶ That a few thousand troops could somehow reverse the present
situation and ensure progress toward victory is obviously a fantasy of the first order, one that barely
papers over the reality of these last years: that Washington has been losing the war in Afghanistan and
will continue to do so, no matter how it fiddles with troop levels.¶ Whether Soviet or American, whether
touting communism or democracy, outside troops to Afghan eyes are certainly just that: outsiders,
foreigners. They represent an invasive presence. For many Afghans, the “terrorist strands” in the petri
dish are not only the Taliban or other Islamist sects; they are us. We are among those who must be
avoided or placated in the struggle to stay alive—along with government forces, seen by some Afghans
as collaborators to the occupiers (that’s us again). In short, we and our putative Afghan allies are in that
same petri dish, thrashing about and causing harm, driving the very convergence of terrorist forces we
say we are seeking to avoid.¶ All the metaphors and images do, however, suggest one thing—that
Afghanistan isn’t real to American leaders, much as Vietnam wasn’t to an earlier generation of them. It’s
not grasped as a sophisticated culture with a long and rich history. Those in charge see it and its people
only through the reductive and distorting lens of their never-ending war and then reduce what little
they see to terms that play well to politicians and the public back home. Stalemate? We can break it.
Platform? We can firm it up and launch attacks from it. Petri dish? We can contain it, then control it, and
finally eradicate it with our lethal medicines. What they refuse to do, however, is widen that lens,
deepen their vision, and see the Afghan people as a richly complex society that Washington will never
(and should never try to) dominate and reshape into our image of a country.¶ The question now is what
President Donald (we’re going to win!) Trump will do. If past is prologue, he will end up approving
Nicholson’s request, in part because his leading generals, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, are so psychically and
professionally linked to the Afghan War. (Mattis oversaw that war while serving as head of US Central
Command, McMaster held a command post in Kabul, and Kelly’s son was killed there while on patrol.)¶
Yet if Trump gives Nicholson the troops he wants—and then more of the same—he will merely be
echoing the failed policies of his predecessors, while prolonging a war that will prove endless as long as
foreign forces continue to meddle in Afghan affairs. His will then be a fate foretold in a war in which
Washington’s greatest foe has always been self-deception.
the war on terror inevitably fails—Trump committed to intervention while

simultaneously making a strategic pivot to combatting revisionism
Keller 18—Jared Keller, writing at the Pacific Standard, 2018 (“AFTER 17 YEARS OF FIGHTING TERROR,
THE U.S. MAKES A DISASTROUS PIVOT,” Pacific Standard, 06-25-2018, Available Online at
https://psmag.com/news/after-17-years-of-fighting-terror-the-u-s-makes-a-disastrous-pivot, Accessed
07-25-2018)//hk
It's been 17 years since the United States launched the War on Terror. In that time, the state of
international terrorism has only grown worse.¶ A new International Committee of the Red Cross study
revealed that the number of "non-international" conflicts (those not between two nation-states) more
than doubled between 2001 and 2016; as ICRC analyst Brian McQuinn told the New York Times, more
armed non-state actors have wreaked havoc on their home nations "in the last seven years than in the
previous 70 years." While the United States effectively claimed a victory over the Islamic State in Iraq
and Syria in February, it then immediately ramped up airstrikes as the group re-emerged in the latter.
Even now, the U.S. is desperate to deny the group a new foothold in Afghanistan.¶ The chaos unleashed
on the global system by the existential threat of terrorism in the last two decades can't be ignored: The
number of refugees around the world jumped to around 22.5 million, a metric the Institute for
Economics and Peace claims is indicative of a world less peaceful than it's been in more than a decade.¶
Now once again battling the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. knows that it failed to solve the problem
that plunged it into the War on Terror in the first place. This washout is perfectly captured in a single
sentence from the latest "lessons learned" report to Congress issued by the special inspector general for
Afghanistan reconstruction: "Between 2001 and 2017, U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and
contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed." The underlying message is simple: The military doesn't
know when the region will be stable, and so it will continue its indefinite stay.¶ But instead of surveying
this reality and speculating whether non-intervention might sometimes be the right move, the Trump
administration appears on the verge of a strategic pivot exactly in the opposite direction. The White
House's National Security Strategy, released to the public in December of 2017, proclaimed that the U.S.
has almost totally crushed ISIS in its primary strongholds in Iraq and Syria, and must turn its focus on a
new (but old) threat on the horizon: the return of the "great power competition" that defined earlier
geopolitical eras, this time against Russia and China. The Department of Defense's subsequent 2018
National Defense Strategy echoed the priorities outlined in the security strategy: a focus on China,
Russia, North Korea, and Iran rather than ISIS's caliphate.¶ Despite the ongoing ascension of non-state
armed groups, the U.S. military seems to be pivoting back to that great power competition, waged
mostly against Russia and China. To wit, the Pentagon has funneled short-range air defenses into
Eastern Europe under urgent capability requirements last seen at the end of the Cold War, ostensibly for
use against Russian aircraft and munitions. Meanwhile, despite the rise of terror groups in Libya,
Uganda, Yemen, and Somalia, the Pentagon reportedly plans on shifting the U.S. special operations
forces (SOF) increasingly on the front line of the War on Terror away from combat situations under the
purview of U.S. Africa Command. And while the Army specifically has, in some ways, doubled down on
counterterrorism training in countries like Niger in the aftermath of the October of 2017 ambush, the
SOF personnel who often operate with lax oversight don't even have the resources to extract them in a
manner to avoid repeating such tragedies.¶ To be clear, Russia and China are certainly strategic
challenges to the U.S. government, and previous administrations prematurely pivoted away from Iraq
and Afghanistan before fully addressing their various problems. But where the cycle of drawdowns and
surges that defined the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies appeared rooted in the U.S.
military's overextended nature as world police, Trump's appears to reflect a fundamental
misunderstanding of the modern geopolitical landscape. The president is suggesting a complete and
fundamental reorientation of the U.S. military away from its two-decade mission of counterterrorism
and back toward the sort of superpower engagements that defined the Cold War. Such a transition
won't just fail to effectively respond to both threats, but will once again give terrorism room to flourish,
just as the premature drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan did.¶ The administration's premature great
power pivot isn't really about President Donald Trump himself, or about the military alone; it reflects the
inability of modern nation-states to deal with the rise of non-state actors who defy the conventional
principles of borders and diplomacy. Terrorism, which can't be effectively deprived of geographical
sanctuaries, is only one example of how non-state actors have challenged existing institutions in recent
decades. The populist moments at the heart of Trumpism and the Brexit movement, decentralized and
powered by social media fervor, have taken a sledgehammer to transnational agreements from the Paris
climate accords to the European Union; Russia meddles in elections behind the safety of the computer
screen; the largest singular influences in the entire 2016 U.S. presidential election may have been
Facebook and WikiLeaks. War is no longer fought on Westphalian terms, where rulers control their
borders and religion; the global game has effectively changed.¶ The Trump administration, however,
can't see the writing on the wall for the old way of politics in the ICRC report. The pivot back to the great
power rivalries that defined the golden age of American hegemony may reflect the U.S.'s ongoing
diplomatic dance with Russia and China, but it doesn't reflect the reality about non-state actors.
Peace talks solve
Peace talks solve the war – both sides are open to dialogue.
Mackenzie 18 James, Staff writer at Reuters, 2018, “Afghan Taliban renew call for dialogue with U.S.
to end war,” Reuters, 02/26, https://reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-taliban/afghan-taliban-renew-
call-for-dialogue-with-u-s-to-end-war-idUSKCN1GA27X Accessed 07/25/2018 //jsaltman
The Taliban urged the United States on Monday to begin talks to end almost 17 years of war in
Afghanistan, adding to a series of signals that suggest a greater willingness to explore options for
dialogue. In its statement, two days before the start of a meeting of regional leaders in Kabul to discuss
ways of ending the war, the movement said it wanted a peaceful resolution. “The Political Office of the
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan calls on American officials to talk directly to the Political Office of Islamic
Emirate regarding a peaceful solution to the Afghan quandary,” it said. “It would help in finding a
solution if America accepts the legitimate demands of the Afghan people and [puts] forward its own
concerns and requests for discussion to the Islamic Emirate through a peaceful channel,” it said. The
statement referred to reported comments by Alice Wells, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the
U.S. State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, that the “door is open” for talks with
the Taliban. Less than two weeks ago, the Taliban issued a statement saying they preferred to “solve the
Afghan issue through peaceful dialogue”. The United States last year stepped up its military assistance
to Afghanistan, notably through a sharp increase in air strikes, with the aim of breaking a stalemate with
the insurgents and forcing them to the negotiating table. While the U.S. military says the strategy has hit
the Taliban hard, they still control or contest much of the country. They also claimed responsibility for
two major attacks in Kabul last month that killed or wounded hundreds of civilians and shook public
confidence in the Western-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani. U.S. officials say the only
option for an end to the war is a negotiated settlement between the Taliban and the Afghan
government. In an interview this week with Voice of America, Wells said the next meeting in the so-
called “Kabul process”, beginning on Wednesday, would aim to make clear that there was the potential
for dialogue. “I’m confident that the conference is going to push forward regional efforts to enforce
what has been our most important message to the Taliban - that the door is open, there is a path to
peace and stability,” she said. But while all sides say they want a peaceful solution and there have been
behind-the-scenes contacts, the only major peace talks broke down almost immediately after they
started in 2015. The Taliban, fighting to restore their version of strict Islamic law since they were driven
from power in Kabul by a U.S.-led campaign in 2001, have in the past insisted that international forces
must leave Afghanistan as a precondition for talks.
Peace agreements are key to ending the war and are effective – recent ceasefire
proves.
Maza 18 Cristina Maza is an award-winning journalist who has reported from countries such as
Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, India, Lithuania, Serbia, and Turkey. She previously worked as a reporter for the
Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia, and as a reporting fellow covering energy and cybersecurity for the
Christian Science Monitor in Washington D.C. She writes frequently about international affairs, politics,
global development, religion, defense, and cybersecurity, 2018, “WILL WAR IN AFGHANISTAN END?
GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCES TALIBAN CEASEFIRE IN DESPERATE MOVE TO END VIOLENCE,” Newsweek,
06/07, https://newsweek.com/will-war-afghanistan-end-government-announces-taliban-ceasefire-
desperate-move-964560 Accessed 07/25/2018 //jsaltman
After weeks of speculation about whether the Afghan government was holding secret talks with the
Taliban, President Ashraf Ghani announced an unconditional ceasefire with the group. The ceasefire will
last until June 20 to mark the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Ghani said Thursday. The
decision to call an unconditional ceasefire, the first of its kind since Ghani took office, was made in
response to a fatwa against suicide bombings issued by a group of Islamic clerics. Afghanistan has
experienced a wave of violence in recent months, including an increase in the number of attacks in its
capital, Kabul, as the country fights both the Taliban and the Islamic State. The government deems
ending violence with the Taliban necessary to end the spate of attacks. Still, some experts said it’s likely
the ceasefire will be ineffective. “We should not overstate the significance of this ceasefire. It's
essentially a truce that the Taliban likely won't abide by and that will, at any rate, expire in two weeks,”
Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Wilson Center, told Newsweek. “Kabul wants the Taliban
to view the ceasefire as a demonstration of good faith and an indication that the Afghan government is
ready to talk peace with the Taliban. The problem is that so long as the Taliban thinks it's winning the
war, it's not going to stop fighting, no matter what Kabul may offer. And let's be clear: The Taliban very
much thinks it's winning the war.” Some analysts indicated the Afghan government has decided it
cannot beat the Taliban militarily. Instead, the government hopes to forge a political agreement with the
group so that it can focus its attention on defeating the Islamic State within its borders. Reports have
suggested that Ghani first offered to meet with Taliban leaders in February but never received an
answer. Several months later, however, U.S. military officials said talks were taking place behind the
scenes. “The Afghan government's offer of an unconditional ceasefire, coming after efforts over
previous months to find a peace deal with the Taliban, is evidence of the government's recognition of
the Taliban as a long-term political player in Afghanistan. It is also recognition of the futility of pursuing
an outright military victory against the militants and the government's willingness to try new approaches
to try to end the violence,” Harrison Akins, a Middle East analyst at the Howard Baker Center, told
Newsweek.
CP – Parole
2NC – Solvency - Translators
Parole solves – it’s been used before for translators and their families.
Emmons 14 Mark, writer for Mercury News, 2014, “Former Afghan translator living in Bay Area finally
reunited with family,” Mercury News, 12/03, https://mercurynews.com/2014/12/03/former-afghan-
translator-living-in-bay-area-finally-reunited-with-family/ Accessed 07/25/2018 //jsaltman
For nearly a year, Mohammad Usafi has been living safely in the Bay Area. The Taliban could no longer
harm him. But he still feared that they would go after his family — his father already had been
murdered — because he had helped the U.S. Marines as an interpreter in his native Afghanistan. Not
anymore. When Usafi’s mother and seven younger siblings emerged from customs at San Francisco
International Airport Wednesday, a year’s worth of worry disappeared. A smiling Usafi first embraced
his mother in a long hug and then, one by one, he warmly welcomed each of his five brothers and two
sisters to their new country. The poignant moment was the culmination of the family’s harrowing exit
from their homeland that forced them to hide from people looking for them right up until their plane
left the ground in Afghanistan. “The last week has been so scary,” said Usafi, 25. “I haven’t slept because
we’ve been so scared. The U.S. Consulate told them, ‘You have to leave. It’s not safe for you here
anymore.’ “But now, I’m just so happy.” And relieved. Usafi immigrated to the U.S. last January thanks
to the dogged efforts of his comrade-in-arms Adrian Kinsella, an active-duty Marine captain who now
attends the UC Berkeley School of Law. Since then, they’ve led an intensive lobbying effort that
stretched from the Bay Area to Washington, D.C., to help Usafi’s family follow him out of harm’s way.
The family, which had been hiding in Pakistan, received the good news last month that their long-shot
application to enter the United States under what’s called the “humanitarian parole” program had been
approved. But that also put them in even more jeopardy. After learning that unknown people were
looking for them, the family slipped across the border back into Afghanistan earlier than planned. They
drove 11 hours in three vehicles, then stayed secretly in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for two days, anxiously
waiting for their flight. The day after they left Pakistan, Usafi said, people from “the government” came
to where they had been staying, asking about the family’s whereabouts. “This is when they were in the
most danger,” he added. On Monday night, the family flew out of Afghanistan, starting a day-and-a-half
trip that took them to Dubai and then Shanghai and finally SFO — where they were welcomed by a
group of people who had spent months helping them reach America. “This is maybe straight out of
‘Argo,’ ” Kinsella said of the Ben Affleck film. “But all of this is just making up for what Mohammad did
for us over there. They all deserve this. I’m looking forward to them all becoming American citizens.”
Usafi’s mother and his siblings, who range in age from 5 to 21, looked a little overwhelmed by the
attention. “Thank you so much to all the people who helped and supported us,” said Gulsharina, the
mother, whose words were translated by Usafi. “It means so much to us.” Readers of this newspaper
were introduced to Kinsella and Usafi last summer, and how their close friendship was forged in the
crucible of the Afghanistan war zone. Kinsella then was a second lieutenant leading a platoon during his
deployment. Usafi, who was so respected that Marines affectionately nicknamed him “Yoda” after the
wise “Star Wars” character, was his interpreter. Usafi paid dearly for his service. His father was killed in
2009 after Usafi’s work as a translator was discovered by the Taliban. Later, his youngest brother,
Musameel, then 3, was kidnapped and Usafi had to pay a ransom of $35,000 — his life savings — to
secure his release. A special visa program was created for translators like Usafi who faced reprisals as
American forces were drawing down from Iraq and Afghanistan. But even with the help of Kinsella, who
attends law school with assistance from the Pat Tillman Foundation, it took Usafi 3½ years to navigate
the frustrating, bureaucratic system. Once here, Usafi quickly landed a high-tech job after a chance
meeting with a company CEO at a Super Bowl party. But he couldn’t fully settle into his new life with his
family still at risk. The only chance of them joining him was through a humanitarian parole, which
Kinsella described as a “Hail Mary” because so few are issued by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services.
CP – Afghanistan Gov
Solvency Advocate?
Afghan government negotiations solve – any alternative expands Taliban influence.
Shafqat 07/23 Shazar Shafqat is a counterterrorism and security analyst for the Middle East Eye,
Middle East Monitor and others. His research focuses on South Asian security, Middle East politics and
security issues, counterterrorism strategies, and military-related affairs. His commentary has been
published by World Policy Journal, Asia Times and RealClearDefense, among others, 2018, “Direct talks
between US and Taliban would undermine democracy in Afghanistan and signal defeat,” The Hill, 07/23,
http://thehill.com/opinion/international/398294-direct-talks-between-US-and-taliban-would-
undermine-democracy-in-Afghanistan-and-signal-defeat Accessed 07/26/2018 //jsaltman
So, the United States appears to have taken the bait. The U.S. administration is now contemplating
direct talks with the Taliban, something the insurgents have been seeking for some time. There’s no
denying the fact the stalemate in Afghanistan can only meaningfully be overcome through peace talks.
But, here’s the catch: Who initiates the talks with whom could actually change the dynamics of the
perpetual war. The Taliban only needs to avoid losing in order to remain intact, whereas the U.S. forces
need to win every time, all the time. That’s why -- despite having scored several tactical level victories in
Afghanistan -- a strategic level victory has always eluded the United States. That’s why the idea to have
direct talks with the Taliban is only going to make the situation murkier. Political authority With
parliamentary elections in Afghanistan scheduled for October 20, it is time to strengthen the democratic
process there. A smooth transition of the political process is a dire necessity. However, the latest move
by the U.S. administration to engage the Taliban in direct talks, seemingly, gives an impression that the
government in Kabul doesn’t have sufficient political power and authority. The government controls,
and has influence over, only 229 out of 407 districts in Afghanistan; however, that accounts for 65
percent of the population. The Taliban controls about 12 percent of the population and is contesting
areas in which the remaining 23 percent reside. The fact of the matter is that the Kabul government is a
democratically elected government, and it should be the sole seat of power and authority. By engaging
the Taliban in direct talks, the U.S. administration is doing no good for the continuation of electoral
process in Afghanistan. If there’s a perception that the elected government isn’t capable of pulling it off,
then the political process could get undermined. Remember, it’s the confidence of the people in the
electoral system that counts, and by engaging the Taliban in talks directly with the U.S. administration
instead of the Kabul government, the message will be heard loud and clear by voters in Afghanistan. And
it won’t sound sweet for anyone wishing for a smooth democratic transition. Tactical maneuvering With
parliamentary elections just around the corner, the Taliban would dearly like to have a fair chunk of the
government, and for that, political concessions are what they appear to be going for. The more the U.S.
administration and the Kabul government concede, the more the Taliban are likely to push forward.
With direct talks with the U.S. administration, it’s likely the Taliban will demand a larger role in the next
government. The United States would be best leaving such political wrangling to the local players, with
the outcome to be decided by voters on October 20. Afghanistan desperately needs peace, but the U.S.
administration shouldn’t concede political space to the Taliban, because it cannot do so without both
rewarding the use of terror strikes and undermining the democratic process. What’s more, The U.S.
asking the Taliban to peace talks without first curbing their offensive abilities could appear like accepting
defeat after 17 years – is that a message the U.S. really wants to broadcast? The idea of peace talks is
great. However, the Afghanistan government needs to negotiate directly with the Taliban, and not until
their striking abilities are brought to a halt.
Refugee Econ Link
SIV’s receive additional refugee benefits
Radford and Krogstad 17 (Jynnah, research assistant focusing on global migration at Pew Research
Center, Jens Manuel, writer/editor focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics at Pew
Research Center, “Afghans who worked for U.S. government make up growing share of special
immigrant visa recipients”, Pew Research Center, 12/11/17, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2017/12/11/afghans-who-worked-for-u-s-government-make-up-growing-share-of-special-
immigrant-visa-recipients/)//DL
**supplement this w/ the econ turn in the refugees neg
Recipients of these special immigrant visas can receive refugee resettlement benefits from the U.S.
government, which include financial assistance 85% of those who have entered the U.S. under
30 to 120 days of . About
the special immigrant visa programs have received refugee assistance (from Oct. 1, 2007, to Sept 30, 2017) and resettled in states across the country. Top
resettlement states during this time include California (17,416), Texas (10,598), and Virginia (7,249).
SIV’s disproportionately get more benefits than other refugees

Afghan and Iraqi special immigrants are treated like refugees for purposes of federal public assistance,
including receipt of resettlement assistance Over time, SIV holders have accounted for an increasing .16
percent of the total number of individuals receiving resettlement assistance in the United States SIV .
holders accounted for about 1 percent in 2008 13 of the total number of individuals who received resettlement assistance upon arrival fiscal year (the first year they were eligible for this assistance),
percent in 2016 and 26 percent in

fiscal year 2017 , about fiscal year , with a reduction that year in total refugee arrivals (see fig. 1).
T-Substantial
SIV’s are only 1% of all visas
Radford and Krogstad 17 (Jynnah, research assistant focusing on global migration at Pew Research
Center, Jens Manuel, writer/editor focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics at Pew
Research Center, “Afghans who worked for U.S. government make up growing share of special
immigrant visa recipients”, Pew Research Center, 12/11/17, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2017/12/11/afghans-who-worked-for-u-s-government-make-up-growing-share-of-special-
immigrant-visa-recipients/)//DL
The U.S. has admitted 70,000 Iraqi and Afghan citizens over the past decade through special
more than
immigrant visa programs available to those who worked for the U.S. government during conflicts in their home countries, and Afghans account for a big majority of them, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Department of State
data. Recipients of these special visas served as interpreters or translators or performed other key jobs in Afghanistan or Iraq for the U.S. government and in doing so put themselves and their families in danger. More than two-thirds of special immigrant visas have gone to Afghans
Totals include visas issued to the principal applicants who

(48,601) since fiscal 2007 – the first year visas were awarded under the programs – while Iraqis have received 21,961 such visas.
worked for the U.S. government, as well as their spouses and unmarried children These special younger than 21. (
visas make up a small slice – about 1% – of the overall number of U.S. immigrant visas awarded
AFF
AT: Withdrawal – Incentivize Attacks
Withdrawal doesn’t solve and is a green light for Taliban attacks

Kugelman 6/24 (Michael, deputy director of the Asia Program and senior associate for South Asia at
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, “Will the US withdraw from Afghanistan?”, Arab
News, 6/24/18, http://www.arabnews.com/node/1327151)//DL
In recent days, Afghanistan has experienced some hopeful moments. A three-day Taliban ceasefire to
coincide with the Eid holiday resulted in an unprecedented respite from a war that has ravaged the
nation for nearly 17 years . Afghans around the country staged rallies calling for a more permanent peace, and Kabul asked the Taliban to extend its ceasefire. Unfortunately, the insurgents chose to return to the battlefield and have now
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and

resumed their attacks on Afghan forces. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have , even more significantly, ,
issued statements indicating that foreign forces can be a topic of negotiation in any talks with the
Taliban does this mean that Washington is now
. This is a huge development. For years, the Taliban has insisted that it will not lay down its arms until US troops stop fighting and leave the country. So
open to discussing a troop pullout with the Taliban in order to bring America’s longest-ever foreign war to a close? The answer is that a pullout is a very real and understandable possibility — not now, but further down the road.
a withdrawal, regardless of when it may happen, would pose major risks for regional stability and
However,
US interests the US government has not been comfortable staying in Afghanistan

. In reality, for nearly a decade, . In 2009, President Barack Obama
made the extraordinary decision to announce an eventual phased troop withdrawal from Afghanistan at the very moment he called for a surge. By the end of 2014, the US had ended its combat role in Afghanistan, and most of the 100,000 soldiers in country at the height of the surge had
long departed. Then came Donald Trump. When he announced his Afghanistan strategy last August, he admitted that he was initially uncomfortable with the idea of maintaining a military presence, which he ultimately decided not only to keep in place but also to modestly expand. In
fact, the “conditions-based” approach that guides the Trump administration strategy — one that will let the situation on the ground, not artificial timelines, determine the fate of the US military presenc e — gives the White House an opportunity to withdraw. Let’s assume the
If the White House determines that increased battlefield pressure

administration, sometime down the line, undertakes an appraisal of conditions on the ground.
isn’t turning the tide of the war and that the Taliban still isn’t inclined to talks, then the US could decide
to withdraw This is not to say, however,
. Trump has never been comfortable about staying, and he surely knows that his core political base also doesn’t support extended and expensive military commitments abroad.
that a withdrawal is forthcoming anytime soon, and certainly not in response to a Taliban demand . If a pullout
happens, the US government will do it on its own terms and at a time of its choosing. There are compelling arguments both in support of and against a withdrawal. On the one hand, a 17-year military presence hasn’t prevented the Taliban from expanding its reach and areas of outright
control; it now holds more territory than at any time since 2001. It also hasn’t prevented the arrival and consolidation of Daesh fighters. The US military effort in Afghanistan has cost America the lives of nearly 2,500 soldiers, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars — including,
a withdrawal is fraught with risk The Taliban insists it would stop fighting after
according to one estimate, a whopping $4 million per hour. And yet also .
the departure of foreign forces. However, it would actually have a stronger incentive to take up rather
than lay down arms in the event of a US withdrawal. The departure of US troops would gift the Taliban
an immense battlefield advantage and put it in a strong position to achieve its long-standing goal of
overthrowing the Afghan government And, even if it doesn’t achieve that goal, the Taliban would still be .
able to deliver devastating blows to Afghan security forces, take over much more territory, and further
fritter away at the already-tenuous writ of the Afghan state The consequences could include rampant .
destabilization, an expansion of lawless spaces, and civil war Resilient Al-Qaeda forces, resurgent .
Daesh fighters and other international terror groups could exploit these ugly conditions based in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region
and establish new sanctuaries a US military withdrawal from Afghanistan could produce the very
. In effect,
problems that the initial American intervention was meant to eliminate — and, in some cases, did — . Indeed, US forces, in relatively short order after their arrival in
2001, destroyed the Al-Qaeda sanctuaries used to help plot the 9/11 attacks.
AT: Withdrawal – ANA Fails
The ANA can’t run things by themselves
Sedra 14, Mark, an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at
the University of Waterloo and Balsillie School of International Affairs. He is also the
President and co-founder of the Security Governance Group, an international affairs
consultancy firm, and the Executive Director and co-founder of the Centre for Security
Governance, a non-profit think tank focused on international peace and security issues,
“An Uncertain Future for Afghanistan’s Security Sector,” Stability Journal,
https://www.stabilityjournal.org/articles/10.5334/sta.ei/print/, -ss
The Afghan National Army (ANA) has long been viewed as one of the success stories of Afghanistan’s
state-building process, especially when juxtaposed against the record of its counterpart, the Afghan
National Police (ANP). Numbering just over 186,000 troops in February 2014, the ANA has achieved
some operational success and according to most public opinion polls5 is viewed positively by the Afghan
population. The ANA has not suffered from the endemic corruption and factionalism that has afflicted
the police. Following the transition of security responsibility to the Afghan government, the ANA has
undertaken a number of successful operations. For instance, in December 2013 the ANA spearheaded
one of the largest operations undertaken by the ANSF to date, covering four provinces (Kandahar,
Daykundi, Uruzgan, and Zabul). The operation killed more than 50 insurgents and resulted in the
clearing of key districts, and the capturing of scores of weapons caches, IEDs, and suicide vests
(Beyersdofer 2014). There is little doubt that the tactical and strategic capacity of the ANA has improved
significantly over the past five years. However, weighty problems persist, the most notable of which is
the ANA’s attrition rate, which stood at a startling 33 per cent at the beginning of 2014 (Pugliese 2014).
Almost 60,000 ANA troops are leaving the service each year, a major threat to the viability of the army.
On top of this, as much as 50 per cent of the ANA are estimated to be using drugs (Pugliese 2014) and
less than half the force can be categorized as literate (despite the investment of over US$200 million in
literacy programming since 2009) (Ratnam 2014). These are not new problems, having persisted since
the early days of the ANA development process despite strenuous efforts to address them. ANA troops
are also killing more civilians than ever before – 956 in 2013, up 59 per cent from the previous year – an
outgrowth of their expanded security role, but a potentially worrying development that could, as time
passes, undercut the burgeoning public trust in the force (Ehsan 2014). There is a major imbalance in the
ANA between frontline combat forces and supporting structures, like logistics, transportation and
medical services. A January 2014 Pentagon report identified ‘critical high-end capability gaps’ in the ANA
that would encumber its ability to operate without NATO support (U.S. DoD 2014). The overarching
focus of coalition countries on building the combat capacities of the ANA to get them into the
insurgency fight, set back efforts to build a self-sufficient force. Even in early 2014, the ANA was heavily
dependent on NATO for basic functions like airlift and medical support (Shanker 2013). While the U.S.
has provided an impressive array of military resources to the ANA—including 160 different aircraft,
100,000 military vehicles, and 500,000 weapons (Karkar 2014)—significant gaps remain. As the ICG
stated in a May 2014 report, ‘with or without backup from international forces, the Afghan government
will need more helicopters, armored vehicles, and logistical support’ from donors for some time to come
(ICG 2014: ii). The Afghan air force, while developing, is still inadequate to provide the air support
required for the ANA to operate effectively across Afghanistan’s vast and rugged territory (Agence
France-Presse 2014a). Two aspects of the ANA vividly illustrate the fundamental problems that the force
faces: weapons management and medical services. A July 2014 report by SIGAR painted an alarming
picture of ANA mismanagement of military resources donated by the United States and other NATO
partners. Of the 474,823 weapons, primarily small arms,6 that the U.S. Department of Defense had
provided to the ANA since 2004, 43 per cent (203,888 weapons) could not be accounted for (SIGAR
2014). The report concluded that there was a ‘real potential for these weapons to fall into the hands of
insurgents, which will pose additional risks to U.S. personnel, the ANSF, and Afghan civilians’ (SIGAR
2014: 12). In fact, there have been numerous reports dating back to the early days of the SSR process
that donated weapons were being sold to the Taliban and other anti-government armed groups (Bhatia
and Sedra 2007). A spring 2014 Pentagon report found that the Afghan security forces were unable to
provide adequate medical care for their wounded (Howell 2014). The ANA has struggled with shortages
of medical personnel, equipment and transportation resources. In June 2013, the ANA had only 632
doctors for its 186,000 personnel, 72 short of its stated goal and well below actual needs in a wartime
environment (Hall 2013). Wounded Afghans could previously rely on NATO to fill in the gaps in the ANA
medical system, but as the NATO drawdown continues this luxury will no longer be afforded to them.
The difficulty encountered in building ANA medical capacity is typified by the story of Dawood National
Military Hospital in Kabul, which has received millions of dollars in U.S. aid, but has been ‘plagued by
graphic accounts of abuse,’ referred to in U.S. Congressional hearings in 2012 as ‘Auschwitz-like’
(Chakraborty 2014). Making matters worse, the U.S. two-star army general responsible for the
redevelopment of the facility has been accused of obstructing an investigation into patient abuse and
fraud at the hospital (Chakraborty 2014).
**Counterplan things
US Key Warrants
STEM Adv
Immigration to the US is uniquely key to the nation’s STEM industry
Hemenway, 16 (Nicole Hemenway-Policy and Advocacy – Skills and Workforce
Development Intern, “Retaining More International Students Would Help U.S.
Innovate,” July 12, 2016, https://immigrationforum.org/article/retaining-international-students-
help-u-s-innovate/, dylchik)
The United States is a global leader in innovation. The ability to generate new ideas, products, and
services is essential to maintaining and increasing the nation’s economic competitiveness. Immigrants,
international students and immigration reform can contribute to growing a vibrant science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce in the United States. Occupations in STEM are diverse
and have a variety of educational and training requirements. These occupations include computer
workers, engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, life scientists and physical scientists, and their
educational requirements range from industry-recognized certificates to Ph.D.s. STEM jobs tend to offer
better pay than non-STEM jobs. An analysis by Burning Glass found that in 2013, entry-level STEM jobs,
including those in health care, that require a bachelor’s degree or higher paid $14,000, or 26 percent,
more than non-STEM jobs on average, and entry-level STEM jobs requiring less than a bachelor’s degree
paid more than $10,000, or 28 percent, more. The demand for STEM workers is expected to increase.
Between 2012 and 2022, the number of STEM jobs is projected to grow by 13 percent to more than 9
million, compared with 11 percent growth for non-STEM jobs. Today, the private sector in the United
States is experiencing a shortage of certain STEM workers, such as software developers, petroleum
engineers, and production positions in advanced manufacturing, according to a 2015 analysisby the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. Further, according to a 2014 Brookings Institution report, STEM job vacancies
are open more than twice as long as non-STEM jobs; Brookings’ analysis of at least 500 job openings
showed that vacancies requiring computer skills were open for an average of 40 to 71 days. It is
imperative that we prepare the workforce to meet the current and future STEM needs of employers.
Across the United States, businesses, education and workforce leaders, and community-based
organizations are partnering to implement regional STEM workforce development strategies. For
example, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Montgomery County, Maryland, recently received grants from
the U.S. Department of Labor to improve the skills of immigrants, including people who are limited
English proficient, and other target populations for occupations in high-growth sectors such as
information technology and advanced manufacturing. Short- and long-term workforce training programs
are among the important ways to help employers meet their STEM needs. On the education front, the
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology estimated in 2012 that the United States will
need to increase the number of students who receive undergraduate STEM degrees by 34 percent
annually in order to meet the projected job growth through 2022. The United States has made a
concerted effort to coordinate federal and state STEM programs and activities in the K-12 educational
system to boost student interest in such careers and to promote STEM study at the post-secondary
level. However, only 48 percent of students from the United States are seeking a bachelor’s or higher
degree in STEM fields, far below the needed number of graduates, compared with two-thirds of
international students. Through Optional Practical Training (OPT), international students gain real world
experience, which also helps employers fill their workforce needs temporarily. The students’ F-1 visa
status is extended for 12 to 36 months while the student works a minimum of 20 hours per week in
employment related to the student’s field of study. While its primary purpose is to provide training for
students, OPT has been an important STEM workforce development solution for employers. For
example, recent analysis by Global Detroit shows that between spring 2012 and fall 2014, nearly 68
percent of OPT international students in Michigan were STEM majors. As we work toward bolstering the
United States’ STEM workforce and increasing the number of students who pursue such careers and
education, international students could be another valuable asset for businesses that need to fill these
jobs. However, because of outdated immigration policies, businesses are not able to tap into the STEM
expertise and talents of many international students. Without a long-term path to working in the
United States, these students ultimately return to their home countries and contribute to the growth
of their own domestic economies — often in competition with the United States. Immigration reform
must address the STEM and other workforce needs of businesses in order to help maintain the nation’s
status as a global leader in innovation.
Immigration k2 US STEM industry

Belsie, 16 (Laurent Belsie-writer for the National Bureau of Economic Research,
“Immigrants Play a Key Role in STEM Fields,” November 2016,
http://www.nber.org/digest/nov16/w22623.html, dylchik)
Immigrants hold a disproportionate share of jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)
occupations in the United States, meaning that they are important for maintaining the nation's
preeminence in advanced industries, according to a new study by Gordon H. Hanson and Matthew J.
Slaughter. Their results are reported in High-Skilled Immigration and the Rise of STEM Occupations in
U.S. Employment (NBER Working Paper No. 22623). In 2013, foreign-born workers accounted for 19.2
percent of STEM workers with a bachelor's degree, 40.7 percent of those with a master's degree, and
more than half—54.5 percent—of those with a Ph.D. Most of the foreign-born workers with advanced
degrees obtained those degrees in the U.S. After completing their schooling, they chose to remain in the
country rather than return to their home countries. They are particularly prevalent in software
programming and other computer-related jobs. The authors compare the wages of native-born and
immigrant men, a standard practice in the literature on this topic. Immigrants earn less than native-born
workers across most occupations, even after controlling for worker attributes such as age, education,
and gender. But in STEM fields this pattern is weaker and may even reverse. In 1990, native-born STEM
workers earned more than immigrants both for those with advanced degrees and for those whose final
degree was a bachelor's. In 2012, immigrant STEM workers earned more than their native counterparts.
The researchers also investigate how the wage gap between immigrant and native-born STEM workers
varies with the number of years since immigration. For the period 2010-12, immigrant STEM workers
who had been in the U.S. for less than five years earned on average 5.7 percent less than their native-
born counterparts. However, immigrant STEM workers who had been in the U.S. for at least six years
earned more than their native-born counterparts. The researchers point out that these wage patterns
cast doubt on con-cerns that visa programs like the H-1B program, which allows firms to bring skilled
workers to the United States, have undercut the earnings of domestic workers, at least in the STEM
fields. Immigration of STEM workers may be an important input to U.S. productivity growth. The
researchers write that "In modern growth theory, the share of workers specialized in R&D plays a role in
setting the pace of long-run growth. Because high-skilled immigrants are drawn to STEM fields, they are
likely to be inputs into U.S. innovation." The researchers point out that an immigrant working in a STEM
field is more likely to obtain a patent than a native-born worker in a similar field, and is even more likely
to get a patent that is commercialized.
Refugees Adv
The US has an ethical obligation to accept refugees from nations whose stability it
toppled
Smith, 7/18, (Khury Peterson-Smith- author for Foreign Policy in Focus, “Given What the
U.S. Has Done to the World, It Should Be Letting All Refugees In,” July 18, 2018,
https://fpif.org/given-what-the-u-s-has-done-to-the-world-it-should-be-letting-all-refugees-in/,
dylchik)
People across the United States and around the world have been rightly outraged by U.S. federal
agencies’ detention of migrants and separation of their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Shortly after,
the Supreme Court’s ruled to uphold the Trump administration’s racist travel ban on several Muslim-
majority countries, reviving another fierce reaction to the administration’s policy toward immigrants,
travelers and asylum seekers. In middle school, children in the United States learn that the three
branches of the federal government are arranged with a system of “checks and balances,” so that no
one branch oversteps its power and violates the rights of individuals. But now, the whole world can see
that the only thing “checked” by the White House and the Supreme Court is the human right to
freedom of movement. The cases are united by more than one administration’s xenophobia. Much of
Latin America and the Muslim world share a legacy of U.S. interventions driving the very migration now
being cruelly restricted. Latinx migrants at the southern border have been in the national spotlight. But
too rarely has the question been asked: What situation would compel so many people to leave their
homes and take the perilous journey north in the first place? An honest answer requires an examination
of U.S. policy in Latin America, particularly Central America. While the Trump administration talks
incessantly about its favorite villain, the gang MS-13, it says nothing about the origins of the gang. MS-
13 was actually incubated on the streets and in the prisons of Southern California, where so many
Salvadoran migrants were incarcerated in the 1990s. Washington’s deportation of former prisoners —
among other Salvadorans — back to El Salvador was the context for the development of the MS-13.
The Salvadoran community that developed in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s itself emerged as
Salvadorans fled a nightmarish civil war. The United States was deeply involved in that conflict, arming
and supporting the Salvadoran government and right-wing paramilitary forces throughout Central
America. These death squads committed acts of unspeakable violence that still reverberate
throughout the region today. Similar patterns have played out in Guatemala and Honduras, which are
also countries of origin for refugees where the United States has a legacy of backing right-wing leaders
past and present. On the other side of the world is Yemen, one of the seven countries whose people are
targeted by the travel ban — and the site of a catastrophic U.S.-backed war. We may not hear the cries
of Yemeni children the way we heard those of children detained at the border. But many of them are
also separated from their families here in the United States because of the travel ban. As with Central
America, the United States is committing crimes in Yemen that force millions into desperate
circumstances. According to the United Nations, the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today exists
in Yemen — a striking distinction, given that there’s no shortage of other disasters around the globe.
There is a civil war in Yemen, in which combatants on both sides have taken actions that have had
severe consequences for civilians. But the overwhelming responsibility for the destruction lies with a
coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which has bombed Yemen mercilessly in
support of the Saudi-friendly Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, whom the Gulf States seek to install as the
president. Their campaign has targeted civilian infrastructure, weddings, funerals and even medical
facilities. As a result, tens of thousands have been killed and millions have been displaced. Millions face
starvation as well as sickness and death from entirely preventable diseases like cholera. According to
UNICEF, 11 million children, or “nearly every child in Yemen,” is in need of humanitarian assistance. A
dropped bomb or exploded missile leaves so much in its wake. But there is a particular and peculiar
remnant of the blasts that have wounded Yemen. Yemenis find, again and again, labels on bomb
fragments that indicate they are made and sold by the United States. Indeed, last summer, Trump
negotiated with Saudi Arabia to sell the kingdom $110 billion in weapons. The United States also
approved $2 billion in arms sales to the U.A.E. last year. The United States is also supplying
intelligence to the Saudi/Emirati coalition, as well as mid-air refueling for coalition aircraft. The United
States, therefore, is doing everything but dropping the bombs itself. But even that distinction dissolves
when one remembers that the United States did bomb Yemen repeatedly using drone strikes and cruise
missile attacks throughout the Obama administration. The United States has bombed Yemenis. It is
supplying the weapons for other countries to bomb Yemenis now. And, as it’s doing toward Central
Americans in the most callous way, it is denying Yemenis the right to enter the United States. The
beginning of accountability for those actions is letting these — and all — refugees in. But that cannot
be the end. Let this time of anguish and outrage be one of a deep reckoning — with what the United
States does at its borders, within them, and beyond them.
The US is key to refugee leadership – the US must lead in resettlement for it to be

successful
Martin and Ferris 17 Susan F Martin is professor emeritus at Georgetown University, Elizabeth Ferris
is research professor at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University,
“US leadership and the international refugee regime,” Michigan eLibrary
Assessing US Leadership
In general, the United States leads in assistance and protection of refugees and displaced persons. As
discussed, it remains the largest donor to the array of international organizations with responsibilities in
this area. Generally, there has been bipartisan support for these contributions to humanitarian
programs. Although in recent years, all funding has seen significant cuts, as pressure to reduce
government spending has increased, the US budget for refugees has remained largely intact. There has
been no effort to remove funding for the refugee resettlement program, despite the controversy over
Syrian refugee admissions. These levels of funding, not only for UNHCR but also IOM, UNRWA, ICRC, and
other humanitarian agencies, effectively gives the United States veto power when setting the priorities
of these organizations.
Us funding provides both multilateral and bilateral assistance, giving some discretion to the
international organizations to determine how to best meet the needs of refugees and displaced persons.
At the same time, it has earmarked funds to encourage these agencies to address what the United
States perceives as unmet needs. The Safe from the Start initiative is a case in point, as has been long-
time US advocacy for the protection of refugee women and girls.
The United States has pushed initiatives to expand protection for other populations, most recently
migrants in countries in crisis. Only a handful of member states have taken on initiatives of this sort--the
leadership of Norway and Switzerland on the Nansen Initiative Global Protection Agenda for those who
cross borders in the context of natural disasters and the effects of climate change comes to mind. In the
case of Nansen (as well as the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and others), the US
government took a keen interest but chose not to lead. By contrast, in each of these situations, US non-
governmental organizations and experts played important roles in providing intellectual guidance to the
initiatives.
The convening power of the US government has played an enormous role historically and continues to
be a principal reflection of its leadership within the field. This power does not appear to have
diminished, as witnessed by the response to President Obama's decision to host a summit on refugees
at the 2016 General Assembly. Over fifty governments, many represented by heads of state or
government attended the Leaders' Summit--a significant achievement, when considering that
governments could attend only if they had made significant new commitments.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to be cautious about US leadership. While it is unlikely that the United
States will soon lose its status as principal donor and one of the principal strategists on tackling
displacement issues, its ability to generate new resettlement offers is less clear, as is its ability to
increase its own resettlement levels. Whenever resettlement in the United States has been a political
football, rather than a testament to humanitarian, foreign policy, and domestic constituency interests, it
has suffered. Continuing political leadership from the supporters of a robust resettlement effort will be
essential if the program is to grow, as the need for resettlement grows and respond efficiently and
effectively to new demands.
The numbers who are resettled today are significantly lower than those of the early 1980s and well
below the need for global resettlement. The multiple security checks imposed on applicants for
resettlement leave applicants neither approved nor denied but instead awaiting clearance. The asylum
system still has significant gaps, particularly in provisions such as interdiction, detention, arbitrary
deadlines, and security checks that make them inaccessible for too many asylum seekers with credible
claims for protection.
What does all of this mean for US leadership in the refugee regime? By most measures, the United
States is still the dominant power, whether measured by influence, money, or admission levels. Unlike in
many other policy spheres, the United States has often preferred to operate through multilateral
approaches in encouraging protection and assistance for refugees and displaced persons. The US
government has supported other governments that wish to lead in important international initiatives to
enhance protection. Having other prominent states lead in the refugee regime is fully consistent with US
strategy. That having been said, however, there is little likelihood that major changes in policies or shifts
in refugee priorities would succeed without US agreement to these practices.
US restrictions on refugees weaken the international community

- Also applicable for translators
Welch 17 Keith Welch is a Research Assistant at the Haas Institute assisting in research on global
migration and refugee resettlement in the United States. He recently graduated with a Master in Public
Policy degree from the University of California, Goldman School of Public Policy, “A Pivotal Moment for
the US Refugee Resettlement Program,” June 2017,
http://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/haasinstitute_usrefugeeresettlment_june2017_pu
blish.pdf
Refugees & Security
Attempts to restrict refugee resettlement are based on the premise that refugees from the Middle East
pose a significant security threat to the United States. Reality contradicts this belief. Of the 784,000
refugees that the United States has resettled since September 11, 2001, three have been arrested for
planning terrorist activities.90
A study by MI5’s behavioral science unit provides further evidence that refugees do not pose a security
threat. The study found little to no connection between religiosity and extremism. Instead they found
that many terrorists are religious novices and that a strong religious identity actually protects against
radicalization.91 Additionally, it is highly unlikely that the refugees who are fleeing war and persecution
are supporters of terrorism.
One key reason for the US resettlement program’s strong record on security is the rigorous screening
process that every refugee undergoes before entering the United States. The process takes 18-24
months for each refugee from start to finish, during which the FBI, Department of Homeland Security,
State Department, and national intelligence agencies check refugees’ data against security databases.
Less than one percent of applicants make it past the initial screening.92 Some groups of refugees, such
as Syrians, undergo even more intensive security scrutiny.93 Overall, this screening process has proven
to be highly effective in preventing security risks.
Importantly, increasing refugee resettlement to the United States would not only relieve the strain on
refugees and the countries they reside in, but would also advance US national security interests. A group
of former national security leaders and government officials recently wrote in a letter to Congress that
“resettlement initiatives help advance US national security interests by supporting the stability of our
allies and partners that are struggling to host large numbers of refugees.”94 One key way in which the
program advances US security interests is by providing refuge to Iraqi citizens who served as interpreters
for the US military. Without the possibility of escaping the threats that interpreters are certain to face if
they stay in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that they would offer their support to the military.
The need for increased refugee resettlement has not shown signs of dissipating. The US has historically
taken the lead in providing resettlement to highly vulnerable refugees. Without that leadership, it is
unlikely that the international community will be able to meet the unprecedented challenge caused by
the current crisis. Moreover, restricting resettlement would likely make Americans less safe.
US global leadership on refugees is key to international compacts

Martin and Aleinikoff 18 Susan Martin is professor emerita at Georgetown University and T.
Alexander Aleinikoff is director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School.
“Without US leadership, what is the future for refugees and migrants?,” May 13th 2018,
http://www.kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/news/without-us-leadership-what-future-refugees-and-migrants
Not since the 1930s has United States leadership on global refugee issues been as absent as today. A
recent report indicates the US has resettled only 11 Syrian refugees in 2017. At current rates, the US is
unlikely to admit more than 24,000 refugees in total this year, the lowest level since passage of the
Refugee Act of 1980 – even lower than in 2002, when resettlement was temporarily halted after
September 11. In the meantime, the Trump administration has taken steps to make it more difficult for
asylum seekers to enter the US, to prevent Central Americans and others fleeing violence to reach safety
in this country. These steps happen in the context of broader policy goals to build a wall on the US-
Mexico border, reduce significantly family migration, and prevent the entry of Muslims in a wide range
of admissions categories.
A failure of US leadership affects much more than domestic refugee and migration policy or, even, the
refugees and migrants who are seeking entry into the US. This country has long been the most
important actor in ensuring protection for refugees worldwide, through its financial support,
resettlement of refugees and diplomatic efforts to encourage other states to protect and assist
refugees. When US leadership has been robust, millions of lives have been saved. When it has waned, as
it did during the 1930s, millions more have lost their lives to persecution and conflict. As a nation of
immigrants, the US has also been a beacon to people throughout the world who want to partake in the
American dream and bring with them their hopes, aspirations and skills.
Today, US leadership is needed more than ever, as governments grapple with defining the contents of
two international agreements – one on refugees and the other on migration. The Global Compact on
Refugees and another on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration are meant to be non-legally binding but
articulate common understandings and commitments. Talks are ongoing, with hopes the agreements
will be adopted by the United Nations before the year’s end. The US is present at the consultations on
the refugee compact, but the Trump administration refused to even enter negotiations on the migration
compact. This is counter-productive. The US should return to the migration negotiating table and work
to ensure that both compacts reach their full potential.
Theory
2ac
Its infinitely regressive – unlimits political actors
a) There are 68,029 Intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations

UIA 15 (Union of International Associations, “Number of international organizations by type”,
https://uia.org/sites/uia.org/files/misc_pdfs/stats/Number_of_international_organizations_by_type_20
14.pdf)
AT: State Visas CP
2ac Links to Ptx
It links to the net benefit – requires transparent federal government support
1NC Fuller and Rust 13 (deputy director and research scholar at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban
Management and the NYU Stern Urbanization Project AND ** Law and Public Policy Scholar at Temple
University’s Beasley School of Law (Brandon and Sean, “The Insanely Clear-Cut Case for Region-Based
Immigration Visas,” CityLab, 05/03/13, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/05/insanely-clear-cut-
case-region-based-immigration-visas/5475/)//RC
America’s cities are the engines of its growth. Though the immigration bill before Congress would help cities by increasing the flow of legal migrants, cities would be even better
served by a bill that makes immigration decisions local. State governments are in a far better position to understand the immigration needs of the towns and cities within their borders.
The federal government should allow them to sponsor region-based visas. Region-based visas would be three-year, renewable
non-resident visas. Like the H-1B visas for specialty employment, region-based visas would be dual-intent—the visa holders would be allowed to apply
for permanent residency, and eventually citizenship, during their stay. With security clearance from the
federal government, foreign workers would be eligible to apply for state-based sponsorship. States would work
with their towns and cities to determine how many immigrants to sponsor or whether to sponsor any immigrants at all. States would assign the visa-holders to specific regions or cities,
allowing them to place applicants in the areas where their skill sets are needed most.
SD – Top Level
States fail – many hate immigration and will pass discriminatory policies, and they
don’t have the capacity, ability, or authority to offer LPR or fix the broken federal
system
Cohen 12 (Adam Cohen, JD, American journalist, lawyer, and former assistant editorial page editor at
the New York Times, lecturer at Yale Law School, worked in the administration of New York City Mayor
de Blasio, “Why States Shouldn’t Control Immigration”, 5/7/2012,
http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/07/why-states-shouldnt-control-immigration/)//RC
If the Supreme Court upholds Arizona’s law getting tough on undocumented immigrants, as many observers expect, it would not just be approving one state’s
crackdown. It would be giving a green light to other states to pass similar laws — and it is likely that at least some would. That would be unfortunate:
what Americans need is not state-by-state policies but a comprehensive federal solution to the
immigration problem. The court heard arguments last month in a challenge to the Arizona law. The goal of SB 1070 is “attrition by enforcement” —
prodding illegal immigrants to leave the country by aiming a series of harsh criminal laws at them. Arizona made it a crime to be in the
state without proper immigration papers. And it required police to check the immigration status of
anyone they arrest if they have “reasonable suspicion” the person is not there legally. There is a bitter debate over SB 1070.
Supporters argue it is necessary because the federal government is not serious about enforcing immigration laws. They say Arizona has been flooded with illegal
immigrants who have hiked the crime rate, overwhelmed the social-services system and driven down wages. Critics respond that the law is
mean-spirited and that it will hurt innocent people, including children. They also say it will be used to harass Hispanics,
including American citizens. The legal challenge to the Arizona law has focused not on these broad objections but a
more technical legal one: Does the law conflict with federal immigration law? The Obama Administration, which brought
the challenge, argues that immigration is a federal matter and that the laws Congress has passed trump any state
laws in the area, based on a legal principle known as pre-emption. Lower courts have blocked parts of
the law, but it could be a different story in the Supreme Court. Based on what the Justices said at argument, it seems they are prepared to uphold the whole
law. If they do, it could open the floodgates. Five states — Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana and Utah —
have already passed laws like Arizona’s, which are on hold. Those laws could take effect, and
other states might enact laws of their own. William Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action
Committee, told the Associated Press that he believes his group and its allies could pass Arizona-style laws in “most states.” That may be an
overstatement, but it is likely that at least some new states would jump in. Advocates for illegal immigrants are, naturally, worried — they fear
harsh new laws and crackdowns in state after state. But even people who take a harder line on
immigration should not be particularly pleased if this is how things go. There is a good reason that we look to
the federal government — and not the states — to take the lead on immigration law. Only
Congress can address the issue in all its complexity, taking on the many concerns on all sides. The
Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which never passed, showed what Congress could do. That bill would have
created a clear path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the U.S. It
also had real get-tough provisions, including increased enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border and a
national database for employers to check the immigration status of job applicants. States cannot do
anything this ambitious. They may be able to hound individual immigrants into leaving the country or
drive the ones who remain to live their lives in the shadows. But states cannot give people a path to
citizenship or create a national database. They cannot fix a national system that almost everyone agrees
is badly broken. The main reason that Arizona, Alabama and other states have begun acting aggressively
on immigration is that Washington has failed for years to address the problem. Even if the Supreme
Court says that states have the legal right to enact immigration laws like Arizona’s, that does not mean
that it makes any sense for the nation’s immigration policy to be established at the state level.
Whatever the outcome of the challenge to Arizona’s law, it should be a wake-up call to Congress that the American people are tired of waiting for
immigration reform.
Perm
Only the perm solves – effective immigration policy requires precedent setting by the
federal government and enforcement by the federal government and the states
Rodriguez 14 (Cristina Rodriguez, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, nonresident
fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington D.C., writes on immigration law
and policy, constitutional law and theory, and administrative, “Law and Borders” 2014,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5817&context=fss_pap
ers)//RC
the real problem with Arizona-style laws is
In the immigration setting, scholars such as Kevin R. Johnson, Mike Wishnie, and Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan have argued that not that they interfere with federal
that they violate the civil rights of citizens and non-citizens alike State and local enforcement
enforcem ent, but .
measures increase the risk of racial profiling and enable the surveillance and harassment of
immigrants, Latinos, and their communities—a concern Justice Kennedy highlighted in Arizona. In
a recent contribution to the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy, Lucas Guttentag
argues that civil rights concerns cut across the federalism debate in a way that should lead to pre-
emption of state and local enforcement laws like Arizona’s, but also to authorization of laws that
promote the integration of immigrants, such as California’s non-enforcement law. The
comprehensive federal scheme governing the treatment of aliens against which state and local
laws must be judged, he argues, includes civil rights laws dating back to the nineteenth century that
require equal treatment of aliens and citizens. It should go without saying that state and local immigration laws that violate civil rights statutes and constitutional principles are invalid. But the very content
of these rights is part of what is being contested on federalism’s ideological playing field. Does immigration enforcement constitute discrimination? Is the fact that enforcement might create race-based externalities enough to characterize local enforcement laws as irredeemably
discriminatory, even if the civil rights laws do not contemplate freedom from enforcement as a protected right? Or must proof of these civil rights costs be adduced? Was Arizona’s S.B. 1070 motivated by racial animus? Does local resistance to enforcement promote the federal
interest in equal treatment of non-citizens as the government understands it? And what exactly are the rights of unauthorized immigrants—a question that’s far from being settled in constitutional doctrine? Each of these questions could generate a healthy legal debate, not to
the fluid nature of the concept of civil rights in the immigration setting, coupled with the
mention a complicated political one. But
difficulty of proving discriminatory intent, points to the importance of taking the battle over immigrants’
place in the polity to each level of government on the merits. Beyond the Enforcement Debate The political turmoil and litigation surrounding Arizona’s law have helped
fuel the impression that immigration federalism amounts to a debate over enforcement policy. To some degree, every pro- or anti-immigrant position taken at the state or local level could have an enforcement consequence, either by discouraging immigrants from remaining
in a jurisdiction, or by drawing them 62 SUMMER 2014 LAW AND BORDERS there in search of favorable treatment. But a full understanding of the national conversation over immigration requires that we consider the broader range of immigration-related work being done at the state and
local level, much of which is targeted at addressing the needs of immigrant populations and integrating new arrivals into sometimes-ambivalent environments. From extending state health and higher-education benefits to unauthorized immigrants; to providing robust support for
language instruction, financial services, and other integration programs; to enacting local laws to punish and prevent exploitation, state and local governments use their bureaucracies to anchor immigrants’ place in the community, often in ways the federal government does not or
cannot. States and localities sympathetic to immigrant populations have adopted policies with both expressive and pragmatic benefits for unauthorized immigrants. Twenty states, some traditionally Dem- ocratic, others traditionally Republican, have declared certain unauthorized high-
school students eligible for in- state tuition. A handful of states permit unauthorized immigrants to apply for drivers’ licenses. Most permit recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—a form of relief from removal the Obama Administration has made available to
certain unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children—to do the same. Among the first initiatives Bill de Blasio announced after his inauguration as mayor of New York City was the creation of a city identification card for unauthorized immigrants meant to facilitate
daily life, a practice already adopted in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., as well as smaller locales such as New Haven, Connecticut, and Princeton, New Jersey. And with California in the lead, other state bars are now considering whether unauthorized
immigrants otherwise qualified for admission can become members. As with the non-enforcement policies discussed above, Congress may well be able to pre-empt many of these measures with its broad immigration power, which includes the power to determine the terms and
conditions of immigrants’ presence in the United States and prevent states from facilitating the ongoing presence of unauthorized immigrants. Staving off such efforts should involve a healthy defense not only of immigrants’ rights, but also of states’ and localities’
prerogatives to chart their own course, especially when it comes to their own institutions. Apart from these high-profile initiatives, states and localities, along with the private sector, perform much of the day-to-day work of immigrant integration. DEMOCRACYJOURNAL.ORG 63
We have a national interest in working out difficult moral and public policy matters, like immigration, through state and local institutions. States such as Illinois and Maryland have created offices or task forces for new immigrants. These offices provide umbrellas and infrastructure for the
work that many other states and localities also perform on an ad hoc basis, including improving non-citizens’ access to health and welfare services through translation and language training, as well as cultural awareness training for bureaucrats, language education for
adults, and elimination of barriers to immigrants’ acquisition of state professional and employment licenses. These sorts of policies are even more immune to pre-emption concerns than those that seek to shield or extend rights to unauthorized immigrants. In the immigration
reform debates of the last decade, some policy entrepreneurs have called for the United States to adopt an integration policy as well as an immigration policy, in part out of a progressive desire to complement and offset the federal government’s enforcement orientation with a more
civic- minded approach to immigration. But states and localities are ultimately better positioned than the federal government to perform this work because of the institutions under their control, and because of the relevance of local conditions and the particularities of different
immigrant populations to facilitating integration. To prevent integration policy from becoming an ideologically driven project, the federal government should play the role of funder and coordinator, rather than the driver of national policy, leaving our national integration strategy to the
rather than think of cooperative immigration federalism as being

institutions of federalism already deeply embedded in the enterprise. In addition,
exclusively about enforcement, we might enlist state and local expertise to assist in the implementation
of any future legalization program . We might also take seriously the idea recently floated by Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan— a Republican—to recruit immigrants to Detroit to help revitalize it. This idea recalls a short-
intergovernmental
lived campaign by Tom Vilsack when he was governor of Iowa to create immigrant enterprise zones by seeking exemptions from federal quotas to attract immigrants to the state to reverse its population decline. These
admissions strategies would require congressional authorization, as well as guarantees that the
immigrants recruited had mobility rights . But regardless of whether these are good ideas, they reflect the possibilities that come into play when we recast states and localities as competent in immigration policy and
reframe cooperation as an approach aimed at harnessing the benefits of immigration, not just policing its costs. The Shifting Terrain of Immigration Federalism It is hard to predict the direction immigration federalism will take in the aftermath of Arizona v. United States. The Supreme
Court has significantly limited but 64 SUMMER 2014 LAW AND BORDERS not eliminated Arizona-style federalism, and a great deal of legal and political space remains for integrative federalism. The extent of autonomous state and local activity will be a function of partisan dynamics in
each state. But institutional interests will also drive state and local innovation and adaptation, as administrators, law enforcement, and executives work to foster good relations with and enhance the prospects of immigrant communities, even in the face of public ambivalence. Finally,
the particular positions states and localities take will depend on how much they learn and adapt, and how much demographic change alters the politics of the immigration issue. In the 1970s, Texas enacted a law denying unauthorized children access to public schools, prompting the
Supreme Court’s landmark 1982 decision striking it down and articulating the equality interests of children of unauthorized immigrants in Plyler v. Doe. Today, however, Texas extends in-state tuition benefits to unauthorized students and has not followed Arizona’s trajectory, despite
How the federal government will manage immigration federalism also remains to be seen
being a profoundly Republican state. .
If Congress manages to
Perhaps the growing localized resistance to Secure Com- munities, the FBI-DHS data-sharing program, will prompt the Administration to refashion its enforcement policies, just as S.B. 1070 led to a strong federal reaction.
enact immigration reform, what is left of the momentum behind Arizona-style ordinances could
dissipate further, if reform provides a path to legalization . That said, as a trade-off for legalization, Con- gress might authorize Arizona-style enforcement measures ostensibly to prevent
Congress is indispensable
future illegal immigration, and the political opposition to legalization that will likely survive any congressional reform co uld manifest itself in state and local laws and practices designed to obstruct legalization. Though
to lasting immigration reform Progressive advocates,
, other constitutional players, including states and localities, have been setting the terms of our immigration policy of late.
pragmatic policy wonks, and citizens who believe in democratic pluralism have strategic, if not
principled, interests in understanding and even embracing the dynamics of immigration federalism in all
of its forms. The United States consists of myriad overlapping political communities that simultaneously
map onto and transcend jurisdictional boundaries. Federalism offers a means through which we might
come to a compromise among those communities over competing conceptions of immigration policy
and the national good.
Federal action key – it provides necessary support to make state enforcement and
implementation as effective as possible
Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 16 (Pratheepan Gulasekaram, Professor of Law at
Santa Clara University, constitutional law and immigration law, and S. Karthick
Ramakrishnan, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of
California Riverside, civic participation, immigration policy, and the politics of race,
ethnicity, and immigration in the United States, “The President and Immigration
Federalism”, Florida Law Review, Volume 68 Issue 1, October 2016,
https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1273&context=flr)//RC
*footnotes are removed
Reexamination of the antecedent examples discussed above helps uncover a pattern of state-level effects and responses
to executive-led immigration action. Although the specific instances yielded a variety of ways in which executive branch decision-making
interacted with state- level policies, the interactions comprise three basic categories: (1) the Executive’s power to curtail or counteract
state-level policy making; (2) executive action designed to co-opt state policies and possibly
obviate them; and (3) executive action that catalyzes state-level policy making, either intentionally or
unintentionally. In addition, there is a potential fourth theme—that of state and local reactions intended to counteract or express displeasure with
presidential action. This reciprocal state and local feedback is often baked into the three primary themes, as a reaction to either ongoing or impending federal
executive action. Part II applies these categories to contemporary presidential action, providing a systemic conceptual framework within which to understand
current forms of executive influence on immigration federalism dynamics. The
initial impetus for the Burlingame Treaty
demonstrates the type of action that the Executive takes to curtail state and local policies. Recall that at
the time the Treaty was signed, several cities within California, as well as the state itself, were creating
explicitly anti-Chinese policies. The Treaty attempted to override those policies by announcing a general
nondiscriminatory policy toward the Chinese in the United States, as negotiated between officials in
both countries.171 As detailed below with contemporary examples, this type of executive action that cuts against the grain of a subfederal movement might
not fully staunch the state and local trend. In the case of the Burlingame Treaty, state and local governments in California attempted to continue their anti-Chinese
campaign in new forms despite the Treaty. As such, this form of executive action can create virulent backlash from states. Examples
of the Executive
attempting to co-opt state agencies or placate state-level policy preferences appear in the transition to
federal immigration control after Chy Lung and again with the Bracero Program.172 Despite ousting state control over
immigration matters, the first federal immigration laws in 1882 kept state structures intact, relying on state commissions to continue their screening duties, but now
with oversight by executive branch officials.173 Later, when
the federal government created its own administrative
structures, those federal agencies recruited state immigration officials to staff them, thus allowing state
input into federal immigration enforcement.174 Similarly, one year before the Bracero Program began, facing impending labor shortages,
growers and officials from large farm states petitioned the immigration service to directly import Mexican workers.175 Farmers in border states had begun
recruiting undocumented Mexican workers to help address their labor needs.176 The initial Bracero agreement attempted to obviate unilateral actions by local
interests within states with large agricultural sectors.177 Relatedly, executive decisions to temper immigration enforcement efforts so as to ensure non-
apprehension of unauthorized workers helped quell pressure from federal Both
the Bracero Program and the Caribbean and
Central American migrant surges of the 1970s and 1980s illustrate the third category of executive
action—that which catalyzes state and local policies. With the Bracero Program, the State
Department expressly included nondiscrimination provisions in its bilateral agreements and was keen
not to undermine its fledgling Good Neighbor Policy with Mexico.179 The Executive’s seeming
acquiescence to Mexico’s blacklisting helped prod Texas to reconsider its enforcement history
and then to create policies and agencies to bring the state in line with the Administration’s vision
for its relationship with Mexico.180 As another example, the significant numbers of both foreign and domestic
migrant workers who became a persistent reality during the mid-twentieth century also galvanized state
and local action. The various state committees on migratory labor attempted to focus on areas of
concentrated migrant populations, providing social services and integration services for that
population.181 Similarly, states and localities also responded to the influx of Caribbean migrants, many of
whom executive action paroled into the country, and the significant numbers of Central American
migrants who unlawfully entered.182 The sanctuary movement saw local jurisdictions and local organizations in certain migrant-friendly parts of
the country offering a safe haven to these populations.183
Absent Congressional and executive guidance and enforcement, state immigration

policy fails
Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 16 (Pratheepan Gulasekaram, Professor of Law at
Santa Clara University, constitutional law and immigration law, and S. Karthick
Ramakrishnan, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of
California Riverside, civic participation, immigration policy, and the politics of race,
ethnicity, and immigration in the United States, “The President and Immigration
Federalism”, Florida Law Review, Volume 68 Issue 1, October 2016,
https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1273&context=flr)//RC
*footnotes are removed
majority, however, seemed to rely upon the importance of executive decision-making as constitutive of
The
federal policy. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, framed the discussion of the specific provisions of Arizona law by noting that discretionary executive decisions are
“principal” features of the enforcement system.325 On this policy for preemption purposes, Justice Scalia argued: Of course there is no reason why the Federal Executive’s need to
allocate its scarce enforcement resources should disable Arizona from devoting its resources to illegal immigration in Arizona that in its view the Federal Executive has given
short shrift. . . . But there has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona . . . predicted: A Federal Government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written,
Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal

and leaves the States’ borders unprotected . . . . So the issue is a stark one.
Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws? 325. As Justice Kennedy noted: A principal feature of the removal
system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials. Federal officials, as an initial matter, must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all. . . . The dynamic nature of
relations with view,the problem with state enforcement statutes is not that they interfere with federal statutes
as written; instead, they tend to subvert or disrupt the President’s enforcement priorities based on the
Administration’s discretionary use of enforcement resources and normative decisions regarding
the appropriateness of immigration prosecution against any particular individual or group of
individuals.326 The significance of Arizona is not its reification of the primacy of the federal government in immigration enforcement but rather the distinctive consolidation of
immigration authority in the President as distinct from Congress.327 This reliance on nonbinding agency priorities and executive
prerogatives also highlights the inadequacy of the current doctrinal framework for analyzing
immigration federalism conflicts.328 In traditional preemption analysis, the Court has long maintained that the intent of
Congress is the touchstone of any preemption decision, and traditionally only Congress has the authority
to preempt state laws.329 As Professor Catherine Kim argues, the Arizona Court purported to apply ordinary preemption analysis, although it was clearly relying on the
this friction
Executive’s interpretation and reading of the legislative backdrop—an interpretation arguably at odds with congressional intent.330 She maintains that
between restrictionist state and local legislation, on the one hand, and presidential decisions to calibrate
or focus enforcement, on the other, is uniquely poignant in the immigration preemption arena.331 Professor Cox
sharpened the point by noting that outside of immigration law, enforcement redundancy between federal and state
legislators and officials is a constitutional and well-accepted course of interaction.332 Yet, this redundancy was the critical
legal defect in the various state immigration enforcement laws. Both scholars note that in the immigration field, significant legislative delegation
of enforcement authority to the Executive Branch and ever-present foreign affairs concerns have
muddied the doctrinal background.333 Arizona, by squeezing these presidential immigration federalism
concerns into the traditional preemption framework without explaining the unique features of executive
action vis-à -vis state-level policies in immigration law, has introduced potential incoherence into the
doctrine. 334 A second, subtler evolution in preemption analysis arises from executive actions that co-opt state and local agencies. As state and local
involvement become increasingly mediated by federal authorities, the Executive consolidates federal
power, even as states and localities appear to be taking on a greater role. With programs such as S-Comm, PEP, and 287(g),
federal executive-mediated and managed involvement remains the only way for states and localities to
participate in immigration enforcement. This form of interaction between the federal and subfederal
governments in immigration is not based on the independent authority of states but on
interconnectedness dictated by the federal government. As Professor Abbe Gluck describes, in certain regulatory areas, Congress
either builds in a concurrent state administration or includes implementation in the federal statutory
scheme, a scheme she describes as “intrastatutory federalism.”335 She notes that this form of federalism occurs within federal laws
in areas such as health care, environmental law, and telecommunications regulation.336 In immigration law, the INA provides leeway for states to participate in limited forms of
immigration enforcement and delegates to the Executive Branch the authority and discretion to enter into agreements with state agencies for expanding local immigration enforcement
through 287(g) agreements.337 Outside the scope of the INA, DHS’s S-Comm program conscripted states and localities into aiding federal authorities to identify potentially deportable
persons.338 PEP, S-Comm’s replacement, functions similarly.339 In these arrangements, states and localities may enforce federal immigration laws and provide information to the
This type of federalism arrangement

federal immigration authorities, but they must do so primarily within the boundaries calibrated by executive branch officials.
is paradoxical because it consolidates and nationalizes immigration enforcement power, even as it

ostensibly vindicates federalism values and appears to apparently respect the independent status of
states.340 In short, programs such as 287(g) and S-Comm give the Executive a stronger claim to field preemption in any lawsuits challenging ultra vires state and local enforcement activity.
On that score, the DOJ’s brief for the United States in Arizona mentioned S- Comm as part of the federal government’s comprehensive immigration framework that already
states and localities, desirous of a greater role in immigration

incorporated state and local participation.341 In these instances,
enforcement, have paradoxically further embedded executive primacy and lent more credence to the
claim that subfederal immigration participation can solely be engaged on the federal government’s
terms.342 Thus, the same tools that the Executive uses to permit state and local involvement in immigration
enforcement become part of the legal basis for shutting down any independent exercises of subfederal
authority that the federal government does not oversee. To be sure, these interdependent arrangements also provide opportunities for states
to practice “uncooperative federalism.”343 States and localities have resisted these forms of co-optation into the Administration’s enforcement scheme; Section III.B explores
these possibilities more fully. But, it is important to note that the overwhelming majority of jurisdictions in the United States have not entered into 287(g) agreements, and the number
of such arrangements is dwindling.344 States and localities’ resistance to S-Comm ultimately led to its demise and rebirth in an apparently less robust form.345 But as a general
matter, the Executive in recent years has used these programs to simultaneously conscript states and localities into remedying informational and capacity deficits for the federal government
the incidence of the federal executive presence in

while limiting their participation to only that approved by the Executive Branch. Looking forward,
immigration suits—as litigating party, originator of agency policy, and co-opter of state and local
agencies—is more likely. The nearly unprecedented decision for the DOJ to sue Arizona and other restrictionist states, and the success of those interventions,
would seem to incentivize the Executive Branch to continue to deploy this form of executive intervention and
wield its litigatory power against state-level trends that it opposes in the future. When those suits arrive in federal courts, the
analysis this Article presents can help guide them in their attempt to grasp the unique features of executive action in immigration federalism and supplement the theoretical defenses
constructed by Professors Cox and Kim.346 Whatever its precise contours, judicial clarification of the distinct—even oppositional—role of the President in immigration federalism matters
appears necessary, especially given the likelihood that federal immigration action in the near future is likely to spring from the President and not from Congress.347
2ac Congress Key
Only Congress solves – state policies are discriminatory and reproduce racial violence
Joaquin 13 (Linton Joaquin, general counsel of the National Immigration Law Center,
former professor of law at the University of Southern California and Southwestern
University, former executive director and director of litigation for the Central American
Refugee Center, and former staff attorney for the United Farm Workers of America,
“Congress, not the states, should handle immigration reform”, 5/23/18,
http://progressive.org/dispatches/congress-states-handle-immigration-reform/)//RC
Congress should enact common-sense immigration reform to put an end to the frustration that has led to a patchwork
of poorly conceived anti-immigrant laws at the state level. While a panel of U.S. senators debates how to repair the immigration
system, a federal appellate court panel seated 109 miles south in Richmond, Va., will be considering whether to allow parts of South Carolina's anti-immigrant law,
modeled after Arizona's notorious SB1070, to take effect. Almost a year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court found that several key provisions of Arizona's law were
unconstitutional, affirming that the
federal government has supreme authority over immigration law and
enforcement. Congress should exercise that authority now. Its failure to deal with the problems created
by our out-of-date immigration laws led to a patchwork of harsh and discriminatory state laws sharing a
common thread: to make life so miserable for immigrants that they "self-deport," a term coined by the
architect of several of these state laws and made famous by Mitt Romney. Some of the provisions in these laws have included
keeping undocumented immigrants from exercising their First Amendment rights, or from getting rides
to work or being able to rent a house. Enforcement of the laws would certainly have subjected people of color
to racial profiling. Our organization, the National Immigration Law Center, with assistance from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, has challenged these laws in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and
Utah. This month, South Carolina is arguing to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond that key parts of its law were wrongly blocked by the lower court, even
though the lower court's decision was based firmly on the Supreme Court's analysis in the Arizona case. At issue in the South
Carolina case are sections of
the law that would make it a crime for a person to be unlawfully present in the state or for someone to give
a ride or rent an apartment to an undocumented immigrant. The lower court found that these provisions of the South Carolina
law are likely unconstitutional because they regulate in an area that properly belongs to the federal government and they conflict with federal law. For the same
reasons, the 4th Circuit should uphold the preliminary injunction and continue to block enforcement of South Carolina's law. But the case also should send a
broader message to Washington. Congress needs to create an immigration system that responsibly meets our national needs. Congress should read again what
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, concluded last year in Arizona v. U.S.: " The
national government has significant power
to regulate immigration. With power comes responsibility, and the sound exercise of national power
over immigration depends on the nation's meeting its responsibility to base its laws on a political will
informed by searching, thoughtful, rational civic discourse." We need broad and humane immigration
reform that provides a clear road to citizenship for our immigrant population and promotes their full
integration into our social and economic system, with all the rights and responsibilities that full
integration entails.
AT: R&D CP
R&D Ineffective
Empirics prove a net negative effect of government R&D funding – leads to crowding
out – private industries sufficiently fund
Kealey 13 Doctorate from Oxford University, writer of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research
(Terence Kealey, 8-5-2013, The Case against Public Science, https://www.cato-
unbound.org/2013/08/05/terence-kealey/case-against-public-science, Date Accessed: 7-25-2018)//LB
the current dogma: scientific research is fundamentally a public good because new ideas, unlike
So here is
private goods, cannot be monopolized for long, but in practice we can treat research as a merit good
(which is good that requires only some of its funding from government) because conventions such as patents or industrial secrecy, to say
nothing of institutions such as universities and research societies, have evolved to bolster a certain—if inadequate—degree of private funding.
But the difficulty with this new story of science as a merit good is that there is no empirical evidence that
research needs any funding from government at all. The fundamental problem that bedevils the study of the economics of
science is that every contemporary actor in the story is parti pris: every contemporary actor who enters the field starts by
pre-assuming that governments should fund science. Such actors are either industrialists looking for
corporate welfare, or scholars looking to protect their universities’ income, or scientists (who, frankly,
will look for money from any and every source—they are shameless) or economists who assume that knowledge is
“non-rivalrous” and only “partially excludable” (which are posh ways of saying that copying is cheap and easy.) But no contemporary
has ever shown empirically that governments need fund science—the assertion has been made only on
theoretical grounds. Remarkably, the one economist who did look at the question empirically found that the evidence showed that
governments need not fund science, but his claim has been for a long time ignored, because he was notoriously a libertarian—and
libertarians have no traction amongst the scholars, politicians, and corporate welfarists who dominate
the field. In 1776, moreover, that economist supported a revolution, so he is not only outdated but he was, presumably, subversive of the
social order. Nonetheless, if only out of antiquarian interest, let’s look at what this empiricist reported. The evidence showed, he wrote, that
there were three significant sources of new industrial technology. The most important was the factory
itself: “A great part of the machines made use of in manufactures … were originally the inventions of
common workmen.” The second source of new industrial technology were the factories that made the
machines that other factories used: “Many improvements have been made by the ingenuity of the
makers of the machines.” The least important source of industrial innovation was academia: “some
improvements in machinery have been made by those called philosophers [aka academics.]” But our
economist noted that that flow of knowledge from academia into industry was dwarfed by the size of the opposite flow of knowledge: “The
improvements which, in modern times, have been made in several different parts of philosophy, have
not, the greater part of them, been made in universities [ie, they were made in industry.]” Our empiricist
concluded, therefore, that governments need not fund science: the market and civil society would provide.
Arguments for the subsidy of so-called public goods, moreover, were dismissed by our libertarian economist with: “I have never known much
good done by those who have affected to trade for the public good.” In particular, arguments by industrialists for subsidies were dismissed
with: “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversions, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against
the public.” And our revolutionary underminer of the social order dismissed the idea that wise investment decisions could be entrusted to
politicians, even to that nice Mr Obama, because he distrusted: “that insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician.” Our
long-dead economist recognized the existence of public goods, which he described as those “of such a nature, that the profit could never repay
the expense to any individual or small number of individuals”, but he could not see that scientific research fell into that category. The
economist in question was, of course, Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations from which these quotes were drawn was published in 1776. And
he is indeed long-dead. Yet the contemporary empirical evidence supports his contention that governments need not support scientific
the lack of historical evidence that government investment in research
research. Consider, for example,
contributes to economic growth. The world’s leading nation during the 19th century was the UK, which
pioneered the Industrial Revolution. In that era the UK produced scientific as well as technological
giants, ranging from Faraday to Kelvin to Darwin—yet it was an era of laissez faire, during which the
British government’s systematic support for science was trivial. The world’s leading nation during the
20th century was the United States, and it too was laissez faire, particularly in science. As late as 1940, fifty
years after its GDP per capita had overtaken the UK’s, the U.S. total annual budget for research and development
(R&D) was $346 million, of which no less than $265 million was privately funded (including $31 million for
university or foundation science). Of the federal and states governments’ R&D budgets, moreover, over $29 million was for agriculture (to
address—remember—the United States’ chronic problem of agricultural over productivity) and $26 million was for defence (which is of trivial
economic benefit.) America, therefore, produced its industrial leadership, as well as its Edisons, Wrights, Bells, and Teslas, under research
Meanwhile the governments in France and Germany poured money into R&D, and though they
laissez faire.
produced good science, during the 19th century their economies failed even to converge on the UK’s, let alone
overtake it as did the US’s. For the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, the empirical evidence is clear: the
industrial nations whose governments invested least in science did best economically—and they didn’t
do so badly in science either. What happened thereafter? War. It was the First World War that persuaded the UK government to
fund science, and it was the Second World War that persuaded the U.S. government to follow suit. But it was the Cold War that sustained those
governments’ commitment to funding science, and today those governments’ budgets for academic science dwarf those from the private
sector; and the effect of this largesse on those nations’ long-term rates of economic growth has been … zero. The long-term rates of economic
growth since 1830 for the UK or the United States show no deflections coinciding with the inauguration of significant government money for
research (indeed, the rates show few if any deflections in the long-term: the long-term rate of economic growth in the lead industrialized
nations has been steady at approximately 2 per cent per year for nearly two centuries now, with short-term booms and busts cancelling each
other out in the long term.) The contemporary economic evidence, moreover, confirms that the government
funding of R&D has no economic benefit. Thus in 2003 the OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development—
the industrialized nations’ economic research agency) published its Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries, which reviewed
all the major measurable factors that might explain the different rates of growth of the 21 leading world
economies between 1971 and 1998. And it found that whereas privately funded R&D stimulated
economic growth, publicly funded R&D had no impact. The authors of the report were disconcerted by their own findings.
“The negative results for public R&D are surprising,” they wrote. They speculated that publicly funded R&D might crowd out
privately funded R&D which, if true, suggests that publicly funded R&D might actually damage economic
growth. Certainly both I and Walter Park of the American University had already reported that the OECD data showed that government
funding for R&D does indeed crowd out private funding, to the detriment of economic growth. In Park’s
words, “the direct effect of public research is weakly negative, as might be the case if public research
spending has crowding-out effects which adversely affect private output growth.”
R&D Contributes nothing to innovation

Solomon 18 An innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship expert and a former professor of
technology and industry forecasting at the University of Texas at Dallas (Yoram Solomon, 7-19-2018,
Why R&D Spending Has Almost Nothing to Do with Innovation, https://www.inc.com/yoram-
solomon/dont-be-alarmed-by-us-4th-place-in-rampd-investment.html, Date Accessed: 7-26-2018)//LB
Why R&D Spending Has Almost Nothing to Do with Innovation It doesn't have the correlations you might
think it does. A newly released infographic by Visual Capitalist shows that while the US leads in the amount of dollars spent on research
and development ($463 billion), it only came in fourth place with the percentage of GDP spent on R&D (2.79 percent),
just over half of the GDP percentage invested by South Korea. Beyond Korea, the US is trailing Japan and Germany. Note that the inforgraphic
only includes select G20 countries. Once non-G20 countries are added to the mix, another country jumps to first place--Israel. With 4.3 percent
of its GDP invested in R&D, it surpasses South Korea. Other non-G20 countries that occupy the top 10 spots include Finland, Sweden, Austria,
Denmark, Taiwan, and Switzerland, pushing the US down to the 11th place. Another perspective on R&D investment is R&D expenditure per
capita. In that list, Singapore is at the top (with $1,832 per capita), followed by Switzerland, South Korea, Sweden, and Denmark, with the US
occupying the 6th place with $1,443. Israel drops to the 10th place with $1,362. Why you shouldn't be alarmed in a previous article, I
analyzed Apple's investment in R&D as a possible indicator of how innovative the company might be. In the first year that the Boston Consulting
Group (BCG) ranked Apple as the most innovative company in the world, 2005, Apple's revenue increased 68.3 percent
and its profit increase 383 percent compared to the previous year, while the company's investment in R&D only increased 9.2 percent. That
68.3 percent revenue growth is phenomenal, considering that Apple had already generated $8.3 billion the year before. However, in 2016,
Apple's revenue declined 7.7 percent from $234 billion to $216 billion. Its profit declined even faster, by 14.4 percent. At the same time, Apple's
R&D investment actually increased from $8 billion (3 percent of sales) in 2015 to $10 billion (5 percent of sales) in 2016. Apple's
investment in R&D increased 25 percent year over year, while revenue declined. In fact, Apple's R&D
investment grew by more than 30 percent in each of the previous 7 years. The conclusion is simple: investment in R&D is not
the same as innovation. The percentage of revenue (or GDP) that a company (or country) invests in R&D
is not a clear indication of how innovative that company (or country) is. You don't have to worry about South Korea
or Israel outspending the US (as a percentage of GDP) in R&D. The focus should be on how innovative the US is. ‘
Federal R&D returns are near zero - crowds out private funding
-Sveikauskas 07 Analyst for the Division of Productivity Research and Program Development Bureau
of Labor Statistics Publishing for the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the
Office of Productivity and Technology. (Leo Sveikauskas, 2007, R&D and Productivity Growth: A Review
of the Literature, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/ore/pdf/ec070070.pdf, Date
Accessed: 7-26-2018)//LB
This paper reviews the literature on R&D to provide guidelines for recent efforts to include R&D in the national income accounts. The main
conclusions are: 1. Measures of R&D as an asset held by a particular owner must be complemented by estimates of the spillover effect of R&D
in order to obtain a reliable measure of the overall effect of R&D on productivity growth. 2. If
research financed by the
government and research financed by business are both counted as investment, some double counting
occurs and growth accounting analysis overstates the role of research relative to other factors. 3. The
overall rate of return to R&D is very large, perhaps 25 percent as a private return and a total of 65 percent for social returns. However, these
returns apply only to privately financed R&D in industry. Returns to many forms of publicly financed
R&D are near zero. 4. Firm R&D should be allocated to the different industries in which a firm produces, rather than all credited to the
firm’s main industry. An allocation procedure is proposed. 5. Much further work needs to be carried out to understand how R&D conducted in
the richest countries is transmitted to developing countries. Detailed microeconomic data on firms or establishments in developing nations will
be necessary to understand the channels of technology transfer more fully.
R&D High how
R&D at all time high – private industries ensure support
-Henry 16 Director of FYI, Previous government relations manager for the University Corporation for
Atmospheric Research (Mike Henry, 11-8-2016, US R&D Spending at All-Time High, Federal Share
Reaches Record Low, https://www.aip.org/fyi/2016/us-rd-spending-all-time-high-federal-share-reaches-
record-low, Date Accessed: 7-26-2018)//LB
The National Science Foundation estimates that U.S. R&D funding reached an all-time high of $499 billion
in 2015. Of that total, the federally sponsored share fell to a record-low 23 percent while the business sector’s share rose
to a record-high 69 percent. According to new estimates from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering,
total spending on R&D reached $499 billion last year, buoyed by record levels of business spending. If confirmed, this will represent the
largest amount the U.S. or any nation has ever spent on R&D in a single year. It is one of a number of indicators
that the U.S. remains the international leader in science and technology even as China poses a challenge to U.S. dominance in the field. Of
total U.S. R&D in 2015, businesses funded $355 billion, or 69 percent, continuing a long-term trend of private
enterprise financing an increasingly large majority of R&D nationwide. The federal government, the second-largest funder of U.S. R&D,
sponsored an estimated $113 billion, or 23 percent of the total. us-rd-by-source-of-funding-1953-2015.png U.S. R&D By Source of Funding
1953 to 2015 Business-funded R&D has grown over the decades and now comprises about two-thirds of U.S. R&D spending, while federally
funded R&D has gradually declined to its lowest point as share of the economy since records began in 1953. (Image Credit - NSF, National
Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, National Patterns of R&D Resources (annual series)) Federal funding for R&D has
declined for four years in a row, reaching its lowest level since 2007 in 2015. The federal share of total U.S. R&D is also now the
lowest it has been dating back to 1953, when NSF first began recording data on the subject. However, the final fiscal year 2016 spending
agreement provided robust funding increases to multiple science agencies, meaning that the federal contribution might increase in 2016.
Federal government remains top supporter of basic research NSF breaks down total R&D into the categories of basic research, applied research,
and experimental development, according to definitions used by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The overall
distribution between these three types of R&D within total U.S. R&D has stayed remarkably stable since 1970: basic research between 13 and
18 percent, applied research between 19 and 23 percent, and experimental development between 61 and 65 percent. According to the NSF
data, the federal government remains the nation’s foremost sponsor of basic research, funding 45 percent of the national total while
businesses funded 27 percent. Much of the federal funding for basic research goes to universities and other institutions of higher education.
Overall, higher education conducts about half of U.S basic research, while businesses conduct just over one-quarter.
Private enterprise,
however, leads in the funding and conduct of both applied research and experimental development.
Business accounted for 52 percent of applied research funding and for 82 percent of development funding in 2014. Since the 1990s, institutions
of higher education, state and local governments, and non-profit organizations have also funded significant amounts of basic and applied
research. Surge in business R&D brings nation closer to 3% goal for U.S. R&D In 2009, in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences,
President Obama proposed that the U.S. spend at least 3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on R&D, promising “the largest
commitment to scientific research and innovation in American history.” That same year, the R&D portion of U.S. GDP
reached 2.81 percent, boosted by new, one-time investments provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also
known as the economic stimulus law. This was the highest share achieved since the beginning of NSF’s time-series
data, and it remains the closest the nation has come to reaching Obama’s ambitious goal. R&D as a share of U.S. economic output was at 2.78
percent in 2015, aided by steadily increasing investments in private-enterprise R&D. This is a continuation of a decades-long trend in which
business-sponsored R&D soared from 0.6 percent of GDP in 1953 to almost 2.0 percent in 2014. By contrast, federally sponsored
R&D has declined as a share of GDP from its peak of 1.8 percent, which it reached in 1965 during the Apollo Program.
Since then, federal R&D as a share of GDP has declined steadily, with only two multi-year upticks, one in
the 1980s under the Reagan Administration and again in the 2000s under the Bush Administration. By
2014, the federal government was investing about 0.6 percent of GDP in R&D.
R&D Politicized
Links to Net benefit – R&D funding increases are heavily politicized – vast majority of
republicans hate the proposal
Funk 17 Director of science and society research at Pew Research Center Cary Funk, May 2017,
Democrats far more supportive than Republicans of federal spending for scientific research,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/01/democrats-far-more-supportive-than-republicans-
of-federal-spending-for-scientific-research/, Date Accessed: 7-26-2018)//LB
Democrats far more supportive than Republicans of federal spending for scientific research There is a
wide and growing partisan gap in the U.S. over how much government should spend for scientific
research. Six-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents back increased federal spending
for scientific research, up from 46% four years ago. But just a third of Republicans and Republican leaners support
increased spending for scientific research today, up modestly from 25% in 2013. Among the public overall, 48% of Americans
say they would increase spending for scientific research, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in April, up 11 percentage
points since 2013. Just 12% of Americans say scientific research funding should be decreased, and roughly four-in-ten (38%) think it should stay
the same. The partisan gap in views of spending for scientific research has grown steadily over time. In
2001, there was no significant divide between parties over federal spending for scientific research. Since then, Republican support
trended steadily downward before a modest uptick in recent years, while Democratic support remained relatively steady before
rising significantly in the current survey. The partisan gap in support for more spending was 16 percentage points in
2011 and now stands at 27 points. President Donald Trump’s proposed budget in March raised the
possibility of deep funding cuts for a number of federal agencies with science research missions, including
the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and NASA. According to analysis by the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the president’s proposed budget would lead to some of the deepest cuts for science and
engineering research in more than 40 years. Concerns over the funding outlook for scientific research were among issues raised by people
participating in the March for Science held April 22. Scientific research is one of many program areas, including veterans benefits,
infrastructure, environmental protection and poverty assistance, in which a significantly greater share of the public now backs increased
Partisan divides over budget issues are not limited to scientific
government spending than did so in 2013.
research. Republicans are less likely than Democrats to back increased spending on 11 of the 14 program
areas in the survey. There are two areas where Republicans are more likely than Democrats to support
federal spending increases: military defense and anti-terrorism spending.
Links to Net benefit – R&D funding increases are heavily politicized

Valdivia and Clark 15, Valdivia: a fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings
Institution. Clark: Associate Professor at the Levin College of Urban Affairs, (Walter D. Valdivia and
Benjamin Y. Clark, 2015, The politics of federal R&D: A punctuated equilibrium analysis,
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/r_dpolitics.pdf, Date Accessed: 7-26-
2018)//LB
The fiscal budget has become a casualty of political polarization and even functions that had enjoyed bipartisan support,
like research and development (R&D), are becoming objects of controversy. As a result, federal R&D is likely
to grow pegged to inflation or worse, decline. With the size of the pie fixed or shrinking, requests for R&D funding
increases will trigger an interagency zero-sum game that will play out as pointless comparisons of
agencies’ merit, or worse, as a contest to attract the favor of Congress or the White House. This
insidious politics will be made even more so by the growing tendency of equating public accountability
with the measurement of performance. Political polarization, tight budgets, and pressure for
quantifiable results threaten to undermine the sustainability of public R&D. The situation begs the question: What can
federal agencies do to deal with the changing politics of federal R&D? We turn to history for guidance. We apply punctuated equilibrium theory to examine the last
four decades of federal R&D, both at the aggregate and the agency level. The series studied are characterized by a general stable upward trend that is primarily due
to the decentralization of the system; each agency requests an R&D level based on its own funding history. We also observed budget leaps or punctuations but they
do not appear to have lasting effects: budgets return, in time, to their trend. These historical lessons suggest that agencies are better off securing stable growth in
their budgets in the long run rather than pushing for budget leaps. As the politics of R&D are stirred up, agencies are sure to find that proposing
punctuations is becoming more costly and risky.
R&D is heavily politicized - Non-Defense funding upsets republican base

Nillasithanukroh 15 Staff Writer For the Chicago Policy Review (Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, 11-9-
2015, Do Democrats Always Spend More on Science Funding?,
http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/11/09/do-democrats-always-spend-more-on-science-funding/,
Date Accessed: 7-26-2018)//LB
From abortion rights to gun control, bitter political fights between Democrats and Republicans are common. A
recent study by Pew Research Center indicates that the US political landscape is at its most polarized point in the last two decades. This
polarization makes elected officials less willing to make compromises and more likely to stand firm on extreme positions .
One result of
this division is a generation of stereotypes about each party’s stance on certain issues. When it comes to
funding for general research and development (R&D) purposes, or for scientific organizations like NASA, there is a common
perception that Democrats are more supportive of science funding than their Republican counterparts.
This stereotype has developed in part due to numerous Republicans’ public expressions of disbelief or hostility in regard
to scientific issues. For example, several of the 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls do not believe that global warming is taking place,
while others doubt that it is a result of human action. Events in Congress have also helped perpetuate this belief. The most drastic
example of this may have been when House Republicans pushed for a one-third budget cut for science
and technology programs in 1995. This proposed cut led to a dispute with the Democrat-controlled
White House, resulting in the temporary shutdown of several science agencies. In reality, Republicans actually
spend more on some issue areas within research and development than their Democratic counterparts. Sidita Kushi explains in a new study
that there is important nuance missing from this stereotype. In reality, Republicans actually spend more on some issue areas within research
and development than their Democratic counterparts. To uncover the effect of presidential and congressional parties on the level of federal
R&D funding, the author looks at past levels of federal R&D spending from 1976 to 2013, broken down by political makeup of the presidential
administration, the Senate, and the House. Aside from examining the total amount of R&D funding by the government in constant 2005 US
dollars, the author also disaggregates science spending into its functions (e.g. health, space, defense) and agencies (e.g. Department of
Agriculture, Department of Defense, NASA). Contrary to popular stereotypes, Kushi finds that there is a weak negative correlation between a
Democratic president and the total amount of research and development spending. When a new Democratic president comes into office, there
is an average decrease of $6 billion in funding. However, the correlation between the House majority party and funding is the opposite.
When Democrats hold the majority in the House, there is an average increase of $6 billion in R&D
funding. In the Senate, the author finds no correlation between party affiliation and level of R&D spending. When the author disaggregates
science and technology spending into issue areas, she finds that there is an average increase in spending on space, energy, and environmental
research when a Democratic president comes to office. A
Democratic president is more supportive of science research
outside the defense realm, while a Republican president spends more on defense. However, defense spending
also falls under the umbrella of R&D spending. Defense spending alone represents more than 50 percent of the total R&D spending each year.
As it is almost universally true that Democrats spend less than Republicans on defense, the author notes that this is the likely cause of higher
the parties conform to the stereotype in this regard. A
overall R&D spending by Republican presidents. Thus,
Democratic president is more supportive of science research outside the defense realm, while a
Republican president spends more on defense. Kushi does not find a clear consensus on which party spends more after
breaking down the funding among various federal agencies. For example, data show that a Democratic president spends less on the
Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services, relative to a Republican president. But, at the same time, a
Democratic president tends to spend more on the Department of Commerce and the US Environmental Protection Agency. This study suggests
that Democrats do not always spend more on R&D, contrary to what is often expected by the public and the media. While it may superficially
seem that Republicans are less supportive of investing in R&D compared to Democrats, a closer scrutiny of the data suggests otherwise—
particularly when it comes to military and defense development. Although party affiliation may tell us which party is spending more on certain
areas of science policy, there is no consistent party pattern in total research and development funding.
AT: Commissions CP
Links to NB
Commissions are politicized – empirics
Wagner 18 – Staff writer @ Washington post (John, “Trump abolishes controversial commission
studying alleged voter fraud”, Washington Post, 1/4/18,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-abolishes-controversial-commission-studying-voter-
fraud/2018/01/03/665b1878-f0e2-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html?utm_term=.5595d74b0639)
President Trump announced Wednesday that he is disbanding a controversial panel studying alleged
voter fraud that became mired in multiple federal lawsuits and faced resistance from states that
accused it of overreach. The decision is a major setback for Trump, who created the commission last year in response to his claim, for which he
provided no proof, that he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 because of millions of illegally cast ballots. The commission met
only twice amid the series of lawsuits seeking to curb its authority and claims by Democrats that it was stacked to recommend
voting restrictions favorable to the president's party. In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said there is "substantial evidence of
voter fraud" and blamed the ending of the commission on the refusal of many states to provide voter data sought by the panel and the cost of ongoing lawsuits.
The bipartisan panel, known as the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, had been
nominally chaired by Vice President Pence and led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who has aggressively sought to
prosecute alleged voter fraud in his state. Pence in recent months had sought to distance himself from its work. In the
statement, Sanders said Trump had signed an executive order asking the Department of Homeland Security "to review its initial findings and determine next courses
of action." Critics of the commission hailed Trump's announcement, calling it long overdue. "The
commission never had anything to do
with election integrity," Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. "It was
instead a front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims, and was ridiculed from
one end of the country to the other. This shows that ill-founded proposals that just appeal to a narrow
group of people won't work, and we hope they'll learn this lesson elsewhere." Former Missouri secretary of state Jason
Kander (D) also wished the panel "good riddance." "President Trump created his sham voting commission to substantiate a lie he told about voter fraud in the 2016
election," said Kander, president of the advocacy group Let America Vote. "When he couldn't come up with any fake evidence, and under relentless pressure, he
had no choice but to disband his un-American commission." Trump, however, appeared to stand by the claims of voter fraud without offering any further evidence.
In tweets Thursday, he said the commission "fought hard" to investigation allegations of voter abuses "because they know that many people are voting illegally.
System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D." "As Americans, you need identification, sometimes in a very strong and accurate form, for almost everything you do . . .
except when it comes to the most important thing, VOTING for the people that run your country," Trump wrote in a separate tweet. "Push hard for Voter
Identification!" The
11-member commission proved a magnet for controversy from the outset and was sued
by one of its members, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D), who alleged in November that he
has been kept in the dark about its operations, rendering his participation "essentially meaningless."
Republicans on the commission accused Dunlap of paranoia, but a federal judge last month ruled partly
in his favor. In an interview Wednesday night, Dunlap said it may be premature to celebrate the demise of the commission, given Trump's announcement
that Homeland Security would pick up the work. The department, he said, could angle to change regulations affecting voter identification and other matters
affecting voting without as much public scrutiny. "I think people who are saying 'the witch is dead' should be very alarmed by this move," he said. "I think that's very
dangerous." The
commission had been targeted in at least eight other lawsuits seeking to curb its operations
or make its deliberations more transparent. Several of those stemmed from an early sweeping request
to states for voter data that some, including those led by Republicans, deemed too intrusive. The panel sought
all publicly available information about voter rolls in the states, such as names of registrants, addresses, dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers and other
data.
AT: Process CP Competition
AT: substantial = certain/immediate
Substantial means considerable in quantity
Merriam Webster nd (“definition: substantial” https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/substantial)
possessed of means : well-to-do. considerable in quantity : significantly great. earned a substantial wage
Defer to ordinary definitions

Arkush 2 – Professor of Legislation at Richmond School of Law (David, “Preserving "Catalyst" Attorneys'
Fees Under the Freedom of Information Act in the Wake of Buckhannon Board and Care Home v. West
Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources”, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review,
Winter, 37 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 131)
Plaintiffs should argue that the term "substantially prevail" is not a term of art because if considered a
term of art, resort to Black's 7th produces a definition of "prevail" that could be interpreted adversely to
plaintiffs. 99 It is commonly accepted that words that are not legal terms of art should be accorded their
ordinary, not their legal, meaning, 100 and ordinary-usage dictionaries provide FOIA fee claimants with
helpful arguments. The Supreme Court has already found favorable, temporally relevant definitions of
the word "substantially" in ordinary dictionaries: "Substantially" suggests "considerable" or "specified to a
large degree." See Webster's Third New International Dictionary 2280 (1976) (defining "substantially" as
"in a substantial manner" and "substantial" as "considerable in amount, value, or worth" and "being that
specified to a large degree or in the main"); see also 17 Oxford English Dictionary 66-67 (2d ed. 1989)
("substantial": "relating to or proceeding from the essence of a thing; essential"; "of ample or
considerable amount, quantity or dimensions"). 101
AT: should = certain
Should” isn’t binding
Dvorsky 15 – Senior staff reporter at Gizmodo (George, “A Single Typo Nearly Killed the Paris Climate
Accord”, 12/14/15, Gizmodo, a-single-typo-nearly-killed-the-paris-climate-accord-1747908970)
Hours before the historic Paris climate accord was to be ratified in a final vote, someone noticed that a
word had been changed in the final draft of the text—a single word that threatened to derail the entire
deal. As reported in the Washington Post, someone changed the word “should” to “shall.” Now, it seems
like a little thing, but given that the words were in reference to sweeping new legal and financial
obligations, it mattered. A lot. When it comes to legally binding terminology, there’s a big difference
between “should” and “shall.” Whereas “should” is a kind of wishy-washy call to action, the word “shall”
implies an obligation, and this is why Secretary of State John Kerry could not abide the unexpected
change. The New York Times reports: Throughout the process, the longer and less binding “should” was
a deliberate part of the international agreement, put there to establish that the richest countries,
including the United States, felt obligated to pony up money to help poor countries adapt to climate
change and make the transition to sustainable energy systems. “Shall” meant something altogether
different, American officials said. When “shall” was spotted in the document on Saturday, Secretary of
State John Kerry called his French counterpart and made it clear that unless a switch was made, France
could not count on American support for the agreement. “I said: ‘We cannot do this and we will not do
this. And either it changes, or President Obama and the United States will not be able to support this
agreement,’ ” Mr. Kerry told reporters after delegates had accepted the deal by consensus Saturday
night, amid cheering and the celebratory stamping of feet. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and
within hours the wording within the 31-page text was reverted back to the original “should.” A
subsequent vote affirmed the Paris Accord, and all was saved.
“Should” doesn’t require certainty

Black’s Law dictionary 79 (Black’s Law Dictionary, Fifth Edition, p. 1237)
Should. The past tense of shall; ordinarily implying duty or obligation; although usually no more than an
obligation of propriety or expediency, or a moral obligation, thereby distinguishing it from “ought.” It is
not normally synonymous with “may,” and although often interchangeable with the word “would,” it
does not ordinarily express certainty as “will” sometimes does.
AT: should = immediate
Should doesn’t mean immediate
Dictionary.com 10 – (“Definition: Should”, dictionary.com,
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/should)
should /ʃʊd/ Show Spelled[shood] Show IPA –auxiliary verb 1. pt. of shall. 2. (used to express condition):
Were he to arrive, I should be pleased. 3. must; ought (used to indicate duty, propriety, or expediency):
You should not do that. 4. would (used to make a statement less direct or blunt): I should think you
would apologize. Use should in a Sentence See images of should Search should on the Web Origin: ME
sholde, OE sc ( e ) olde; see shall –Can be confused: could, should, would (see usage note at this entry
). –Synonyms 3. See must1 . –Usage note Rules similar to those for choosing between shall and will
have long been advanced for should and would, but again the rules have had little effect on usage. In
most constructions, would is the auxiliary chosen regardless of the person of the subject: If our allies
would support the move, we would abandon any claim to sovereignty. You would be surprised at the
complexity of the directions. Because the main function of should in modern American English is to
express duty, necessity, etc. ( You should get your flu shot before winter comes ), its use for other
purposes, as to form a subjunctive, can produce ambiguity, at least initially: I should get my flu shot if I
were you. Furthermore, should seems an affectation to many Americans when used in certain
constructions quite common in British English: Had I been informed, I should (American would ) have
called immediately. I should (American would ) really prefer a different arrangement. As with shall and
will, most educated native speakers of American English do not follow the textbook rule in making a
choice between should and would. See also shall. Shall –auxiliary verb, present singular 1st person
shall, 2nd shall or ( Archaic ) shalt, 3rd shall, present plural shall; past singular 1st person should, 2nd
should or ( Archaic ) shouldst or should·est, 3rd should, past plural should; imperative, infinitive, and
participles lacking. 1. plan to, intend to, or expect to: I shall go later.
AT: resolved = certain
“Resolved” doesn’t require certainty
Webster 9 – (Merriam Webster 2009, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resolved)
# Main Entry: 1re·solve # Pronunciation: \ri-ˈzälv, -ˈzȯlv also -ˈzäv or -ˈzȯv\ # Function: verb # Inflected
Form(s): re·solved; re·solv·ing 1 : to become separated into component parts; also : to become reduced
by dissolving or analysis 2 : to form a resolution : determine 3 : consult, deliberate
AT: resolved = immediate
Resolved isn’t immediate
PTE 9 –( Online Plain Text English Dictionary 2009,
http://www.onelook.com/?other=web1913&w=Resolve)
Resolve: “To form a purpose; to make a decision; especially, to determine after reflection; as, to resolve
on a better course of life.”
AT: usfg = entire
“The USFG” isn’t all three branches
UIC 7 (University of Chicago Manual of Style, “Capitalization, Titles”,
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/CapitalizationTitles/CapitalizationTitles30.html)
Q. When I refer to the government of the United States in text, should it be U.S. Federal Government or
U.S. federal government? A. The government of the United States is not a single official entity. Nor is it
when it is referred to as the federal government or the U.S. government or the U.S. federal government.
It’s just a government, which, like those in all countries, has some official bodies that act and operate in
the name of government: the Congress, the Senate, the Department of State, etc.
Immigration Courts CP
Neg
1NC
**It’s long but provides detailed explanation of solvency for each plank and is worth reading.
The counterplan is a prerequisite to aff solvency—only resolving backlogs through an

efficient, independent immigration court guarantees fair decisions
Marks 16 (The Honorable Dana Leigh Marks—graduate of University of California Berkeley and
Hastings College of the Law, and she has served as an Immigration Judge in San Francisco since January
of 1987. Judge Marks is currently in her 14th year as President of the National Association of
Immigration Judges, the recognized collective bargaining unit for the approximately 250 member corps
of immigration judges nationwide. Judge Marks taught Immigration Law for over a decade and has
lectured extensively on various immigration law topics to judges and attorneys at local and national
continuing legal education seminars throughout her career. International Affairs Forum, Winter 2016,
Volume 1, Issue 1. “A World on the Move: Migration and Statelessness.” http://www.ia-
forum.org/Files/QNEMHW.pdf//sabín)
The delicate balance that has allowed this complicated system to function in the past has begun to
unravel due to the crushing caseloads currently facing the courts. EOIR is facing record high dockets: at
the end of Fiscal Year (FY) 2015, the immigration courts had over 456,000 pending cases being
adjudicated by an immigration judge corps of approximately 250 judges, more than double the number
of cases pending in 2010.5 If evenly divided among all judges, each immigration judge would have a
pending docket of more than 1,800 cases, but more than 15 judges perform exclusively or primarily
management functions.6 This huge caseload has been one of the contributing causes to an increase in
the average time during which cases remain pending, which has now reached 635 days.7 Further
complicating the docketing dilemma, the cases of recent arrivals and detainees are being prioritized so
that non-priority cases are being set for hearings in November 2019, even though many have already
been pending for years.8 These delays are extremely troubling to many, creating lengthy separation
from family abroad and painful limbo for already-stressed refugees who can neither travel nor sponsor
their spouses or children who may be stranded in harm’s way. Ironically, these delays benefit only those
individuals whose claims are least likely to prevail when their case is finally decided, thereby
undermining the integrity of the removal system as they may be able to remain in the United States for
years simply awaiting their court date. For almost a decade, the scarcity of human resources in the
immigration courts has been roundly criticized by a wide range of experts and former government
officials. Sources ranging from organizations such as the American Bar Association (ABA) and the
Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), to the editors of such well respected
newspapers as the Houston Chronicle, The Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, Bloomberg Views, The
New York Times, and The LA Times have decried the lack of resources and funding provided to the
immigration courts.10 These diverse officials and experts have long called for increased staffing for the
immigration courts. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced in August of 2006 that the
Department of Justice (DOJ) would seek budget increases starting in FY 2008 to hire more immigration
judges and judicial law clerks.10 The ABA’s Commission on Immigration in 2010 concluded EOIR was
underfunded, resulting in too few judges and insufficient support staff to handle the caseload.11 ACUS
confirmed in 2012 that the case backlog and limited resources of the immigration courts presented
significant challenges.12 In 2014, two expert roundtables convened by Georgetown University’s Institute
for the Study of International Migration called for increased resources for immigration judges and the
court system to reduce the growing backlog.13 In a 2015 article, The Bipartisan Policy Center stated its
belief that by adding more judges to reduce the backlog, “the enforcement system [would] function
more efficiently and help migrants receive a fairer hearing.”14 While the immigration enforcement
budgets have been skyrocketing, increasing to more than $18.5 billion in FY 2015, the immigration
courts have been left so far behind as to resemble a distant speck on the horizon. Human Rights First
recommends that the overdue right-sizing of the immigration courts would require adding 280
immigration judge teams, and cost about $223,357,500, which would still amount to only 3.4 percent of
an $18.5 billion immigration enforcement budget.15 There is no doubt that a dramatic increase in the
number of immigration judges is an essential part of the solution.16 However, as each day passes it
becomes equally obvious that this step alone is just a band-aid, not a cure. An equally important step to
resolve the crisis in our immigration courts, one that is essential to provide a lasting solution that will
have continued efficacy in the future, is to establish an independent immigration court under Article I of
the Constitution. Here is a brief overview of why this is an imperative next step towards a durable
solution to the problems that have long plagued our courts. The immigration courts are still suffering
from the historical legacy of their position as a part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
In an effort to increase independence, EOIR was created as a separate agency within the DOJ in 1983,
but it remained dramatically overshadowed by the INS. It was then that we nicknamed ourselves legal
“Cinderellas,” feeling like the immigration courts were the mistreated and less loved stepchild, relegated
to leftovers and rags.17 Hoping to prevent this from occurring again, the National Association of
Immigration Judges fought to keep the immigration courts separate when the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) was created and given primary authority for immigration law enforcement, and due to
these efforts the immigration courts remained in the DOJ.18 Unfortunately, time has shown that the
immigration courts are still relegated to an afterthought despite our essential role in the removal
process, and that our placement in the DOJ, a law enforcement agency, remains highly problematic. By
law, immigration judges are required to “exercise ... independent judgment and discretion” when
deciding cases and also to take actions consistent with the law and regulations in their decision-
making.19 The DOJ, with its strong identity and admirable work, is nevertheless an agency whose
mission does not always align comfortably with neutral adjudication, nor does it provide the
immigration courts with the independence we require.20 The stark reality is that the immigration
courts have been chronically resource-starved for years. We have reached a stage where we must
acknowledge that our dockets too often prove true the adage that justice delayed is justice
denied. To be efficient, to operate economically and to guarantee fairness, our courts need to be
independent from both law enforcement and the respondents who come before us. To withstand the
political firestorms which undoubtedly will continue to occur in the future, we need the protection of
judicial independence upon which all other courts rely and the transparency necessary to provide us
the funds we need. In order to understand the depth of the tensions caused by our current placement
in a law enforcement agency, a few examples are helpful. Each demonstrates how the current structure
of the immigration courts contributes to the diminution of the court’s ability to fairly, impartially and
expeditiously adjudicate the thousands of cases pending before us.21 For example, although the law
considers immigration judges to be administrative judges, the DOJ relegates our stature to that of
agency attorneys representing the United States government.22 This interpretation places judges in
untenable conflict: we are asked to serve two masters, each with different priorities. A judge is required
to be an independent and fair arbiter, yet how can this be done if at that same time he or she is “an
attorney representing” an agency of the same government as one of the parties appearing before us?
This conflict has become apparent in many ways.23 One example is the fact that immigration judges lack
contempt authority, despite the fact that Congress passed legislation in 1996 providing judges with that
tool.24 We continue to await implementing regulations to this day.25 Another is the fact that
communication about pending cases between supervisory immigration judges and supervising attorneys
with DHS who prosecute the cases in our courts is commonplace; because we have the same client, the
United States government, such discussions are not technically prohibited as ex parte. Yet another
example is the recent change in docketing practices brought about by the surge of unaccompanied
minors at our southern border. There is no other court that would turn the docket “on its head” at the
request of one party or for politicized priorities, yet the immigration courts “flipped” the docket by
moving the cases of new arrivals to the front of the line, despite the objection of immigration judges
who are in the best position to control their dockets on a case-by-case basis, which allows them to make
decisions based on the individual factors bearing on each case. Some consider the most troubling aspect
of relegating immigration judges to mere agency attorneys to be the lack of transparency regarding
discipline. The current system places immigration judges in the unenviable position of being treated as
attorney employees subject to multiple, often conflicting codes of conduct, while at the same time
depriving the public of an open discipline process which is the judicial model nationwide. At present,
immigration judges can be disciplined or downgraded in a performance review for insubordination to a
supervisor and thereby punished for their good faith interpretation of the law. Because these steps are
characterized as personnel actions taken against government attorneys, the public does not have the
right to know whether or not any action has been taken against an individual judge, let alone what
sanction, if any, has been imposed.26 In contrast, the judicial discipline systems advocated by the
National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) (based on ABA and other national court models)
protect judges from discipline for their legal interpretations. At the same time, they provide greater
transparency for the public by allowing access to information about investigations and any sanctions.27
The confusion created by the current problematic structure is rampant. The public and even members of
the press all too frequently refer to the “INS courts” and are unaware that the immigration courts are
now part of a completely separate agency than the prosecutors in our courts. This public perception of
the immigration court affects immigration judges’ ability to do their jobs. The public’s skepticism
regarding immigration judges’ independence and impartiality makes it extremely difficult, if not
impossible at times, to establish the trust and cooperation necessary to obtain all the relevant evidence
that is essential for making determinations that are fair. Where there is a concern that due process is
being denied, class action lawsuits are filed.28 There is economy in timeliness. When cases move
through a court system without undue processing delays, the outcomes are more accurate and costs of
repetitive reconsiderations disappear. Anecdotal evidence strongly supports the conclusion that public
distrust leads to increased numbers of appeals of immigration judge decisions, resulting in unnecessary
pressure on the under-resourced federal circuit courts of appeal. It is cheaper to resolve these cases in
the trial level immigration courts instead of clogging our appellate courts. The best solution to the
myriad problems caused by the current structural flaw is the creation of an immigration court under
Article I or, as an alternative, the establishment of an immigration court in an independent agency
outside the DOJ. NAIJ recommends an Article I tribunal consisting of a trial level immigration court and
an appellate level immigration review court.29 An aggrieved party should have resort to the regional
federal circuit courts of appeal following the conclusion of these proceedings. This model is based on the
U.S. Tax Court. Implementation of this proposal would satisfy the need for independence in an area of
adjudicative review while retaining the efficiency of a specialized tribunal. It would create a forum with
the needed checks and balances to ensure due process. The DOJ would be free to focus all its efforts
on its primary mission, the prosecution of terrorists and other law enforcement activities, an
increasingly compelling focus. Both due process and judicial economy would be fostered by a structure
where the immigration courts’ status as a neutral arbiter is enhanced. The immigration courts’
credibility would be strengthened by a separate identity, one clearly outside the imposing shadow of the
DHS or the law enforcement priorities of the DOJ. Such structural reform would benefit Congress and
the American people by providing an independent source of statistical information to assist them in
determining whether the mandate of immigration adjudication is being carried out in a fair, impartial,
and efficient manner, and it would also allow an independent funding request to Congress to assure
the courts’ budget is not shortchanged.
AT: Links to Politics
It’s bipartisan
Marks 16 (The Honorable Dana Leigh Marks—graduate of University of California Berkeley and
Hastings College of the Law, and she has served as an Immigration Judge in San Francisco since January
of 1987. Judge Marks is currently in her 14th year as President of the National Association of
Immigration Judges, the recognized collective bargaining unit for the approximately 250 member corps
of immigration judges nationwide. Judge Marks taught Immigration Law for over a decade and has
lectured extensively on various immigration law topics to judges and attorneys at local and national
continuing legal education seminars throughout her career. International Affairs Forum, Winter 2016,
Volume 1, Issue 1. “A World on the Move: Migration and Statelessness.” http://www.ia-
forum.org/Files/QNEMHW.pdf//sabín)
The idea is far from novel; it has been seriously considered for over 30 years.30 The merits of this
solution have been endorsed recently by comprehensive studies commissioned by the American Bar
Association (ABA) and the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice.31 Prestigious organizations such as the
National Association of Women Judges and the American Judicature Society have endorsed the concept
as well. Acknowledgement is long overdue that incremental modifications to the immigration court system cannot resolve the pernicious problems that plague
it, and that additional resources alone are insufficient. History has clearly shown that surges in the immigration court caseload are cyclical and bound to reoccur, yet
time after time the courts have found themselves unprepared. Enduring change must be implemented to meet this predictable
challenge. From the thorough study of a bipartisan commission over 30 years ago to the recent
exhaustive study of all stakeholders by the ABA, the solution has been agreed upon and is clear: we
must establish an Article I court or a separate agency. Prompt action is needed now. It is only through this structural reform that the
independence of the immigration courts will be guaranteed, providing optimal fairness and efficiency for all parties. Through meaningful structural
reform, our immigration courts will be equipped to meet and overcome the challenges which we now
face and be prepared for those which will surely continue to arise in the future. The time for reform is here – urge
Congress to act.
CP Solves Politicization
The DOJ controls immigration judge hiring, it makes politicization inevitable
Ramey 18 (Sara Ramey—Opinion Contributor. 5-22-2018, "DOJ shouldn't be in charge of immigration
courts," The Hill, http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/388876-doj-shouldnt-be-in-charge-of-
immigration-courts//sabín)
It appears that the administration is looking for specific outcomes in cases with little regard to the
merits of the claim. The attorney general has certified an unprecedented number cases to himself for
review with the idea that he might change the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals. This
extraordinary power of one political-appointee to overturn the decision of trained immigration judges is
fundamentally at odds with judicial independence. Unfortunately, it appears that not only the review
and firing of judges has become political, but their hiring too. Information has surfaced that the
Department of Justice is asking candidates questions about their political party affiliation, their
position on same-sex relationships, and their opinion on abortion; preparing internal memos on those
whose immigration views that do not align with the administration’s policies; slowing down review of
applications where there are ideological differences; and withdrawing employment offers or delaying
start dates by up to a one and a half years. Making judicial decisions subject to the political whims of the
times, and not dependent on the accurate execution of the law, is a serious risk to the checks-and-
balances system underlying our democracy. The need for independent immigration courts has never
been clearer.
Solves efficiency and politicization

Bass 18 (Hilarie Bass—President of the American Bar Association for the Subcommittee on Border
Security and Immigration. April 18, 2018. " Strengthening and Reforming America’s Immigration Court
System." GAO.
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/uncategorized/GAO/HilarieBassStatement-4-18-
18.authcheckdam.pdf//sabín)
An Article I court also should attract highly-qualified judicial candidates and help to further
professionalize the immigration judiciary. History has shown the potential for the politicization of the
hiring process and an inherent bias toward the hiring of current or former government employees.
Removing the hiring function from the Department of Justice also may increase the diversity of the
candidate pool. Providing for a set term of sufficient length, along with protections against removal
without cause, will similarly protect decisional independence and make Article I judgeships more
attractive. By attracting and selecting the highest quality lawyers as judges, an Article I court is more
likely to produce well-reasoned decisions. Such decisions, as well as the handling of the proceedings in
a professional manner, should improve the perception of the fairness and accuracy of the result.
Perceived fairness, in turn, should lead to greater acceptance of the decision without the need to
appeal to a higher tribunal. When appeals are taken, more articulate decisions should enable the
reviewing body at each level to be more efficient in its review and decision-making and should result in
fewer remands requesting additional explanations or fact-finding. These improvements in efficiency
should reduce the total time and cost required to fully adjudicate a removal case and thus help the
system keep pace with expanding caseloads. They also should produce savings elsewhere in the system,
such as the cost of detaining those who remain in custody during the proceedings.
Aff Answers
2ac Top Level
Counterplan fails to solve backlogs and links to the net benefit—massive immigration
restructuring would be a political firestorm that drains resources
Arthur 18 (Andrew R. Arthur—served for eight years as an Immigration Judge at the York Immigration
Court. Resident Fellow in Law and Policy for the Center for Immigration Studies. On April 18, 2018, 4-18-
2018, "Strengthening and Reforming America's Immigration Court System.” Congressional
Hearing//sabín)
It is unclear how much more autonomy I would have had over my courtroom and docket if I had been
an immigration judge in an independent court than I did as an immigration judge in EOIR. I had full
control over my courtroom, and of the parties who appeared in it. My bailiff (a York County Prison
employee) was solely responsible to me when court was in session. I also had sufficient leeway to move
cases around in order to accommodate my docket, consistent with due process. As for filing bar
complaints, this was a rarity for me. There was only ever one attorney whose conduct I never deemed
rising to the level of a bar complaint, and that matter was handled by disciplinary counsel in a
satisfactory manner. Any judge should generally be able to control the conduct of the parties in his or
her courtroom in almost any situation without recourse to such measures. An inability to do so,
respectfully, reflects more on the judge then on EOIR As for "workforce professionalism or credibility",
GAO stated: Four of the ten experts and stakeholders we contacted stated reasons why a court system
independent of the executive branch might also improve the professionalism or credibility of the
immigration court system's workforce. For example, one of the experts and stakeholders explained that
placing judges in an independent immigration court system could elevate their stature in the eyes of
stakeholders, and by extension, enhance the perceived credibility of their decisions. Additionally, one of
the experts and stakeholders explained that if the judge career path was improved under a restructuring
such that immigration judges were able to advance to more prestigious judgeships, this could assist in
attracting candidates to the immigration bench. Regarding the hybrid scenario, one of the experts and
stakeholders noted that this proposal may attract a more diverse and balanced pool of candidates for
immigration judge positions.168 Again, this is extremely soft variable, and one that would nowhere near
justify the cost and difficulty of transitioning immigration courts out of EOIR. Respectfully, the
"professionalism or credibility of the immigration court system's work force" is more a factor of that
workforce rather than a factor of where they are positioned within the United States government. As
for elevating the stature of immigration judges, I never viewed the job as being beneath me, and I do
not believe that any attorney who ever appeared in my court thought any less of me as a judge than
that attorney did of any other judge. The fact was, I was the decision-maker with whom those lawyers
had to deal, and they acted accordingly. Nor did I ever feel constrained in moving along in my career. I
certainly could have applied for any other judgeship (state or federal) that had an opening for an
attorney with my skills and experience. As a practical matter, however, my skills and experience were
better utilized on the immigration court than they would have been in some other tribunal. Finally, I was
never aware of any difficulty that EOIR had with attracting a diverse pool of qualified candidates to the
bench. The fact is, the job comes with many benefits (a title, a relatively high rate of pay, a pension,
access to the federal Thrift Savings Plan and health benefits, generous vacation benefits, federal
holidays, and the stature and dignity of being a judge). Certainly, an immigration judge could advance to
the position of board member at the BIA, or assistant chief immigration judge, and more than a few did.
Many of my colleagues had, however, served for years as immigration judges, and intended to retire in
that status. Organizational capacity or accountability is an issue with which EOIR struggles. I believe,
however, that this is largely due to the fact that many attorneys general in various administrations
neglected that office for a significant period of time. It is apparent from Attorney General Sessions'
statements and actions that he intends to correct these issues, and he should be given the opportunity
to do so. This is especially true given the expense and difficulty of transitioning the immigration courts
to a different organization, or making them independent. I concur with the "experts and stakeholders"
whom GAO contacted and who asserted "that a court system independent of the executive branch may
not address the immigration courts management challenges, such as the case backlog."169 The fact is,
regardless of where they are placed, immigration courts will have a large caseload, with which the
courts will have to contend. Again, Attorney General Sessions has attempted, and is attempting, to
obtain sufficient resources to enable the courts to handle that caseload. Moreover, absent a change to
section 292 of the INA,170 aliens will either have to hire their own lawyers, obtain pro bono counsel, or
represent themselves. This would be true regardless of where the court is located, and would be an
issue with which the court would have to contend, regardless of whether it remains in EOIR or not.
Perhaps the strongest non-constitutional reason for not moving the immigration courts out of EOIR
(aside from the cost and difficulty of doing so) is the need for more judges. As GAO stated: Two of the
ten experts and stakeholders we interviewed noted that requiring the presidential nomination and
senate confirmation of immigration judges under an independent court system could further complicate
and delay the hiring of new judges by making the appointment of additional judges more dependent on
external parties.171 The biggest issue facing the immigration courts is resources, and in particular (but
not solely, as noted above) immigration judges. Simply put, there are too few judges to handle the
immigration court caseload at the present time. Any proposal to restructure the
immigration courts that would slow down the hiring of immigration judges
by making the hiring of those judges dependent on any external party
would do a disservice to the alien respondents, the government, and justice
itself. If Congress is interested in acting on the crippling backlogs facing the immigration courts, it
would be best to direct its efforts toward providing those courts with more money and resources.
AT: Increase Judges
Increasing judges is insufficient, the aff is necessary for effective streamlining
Hayoun 17 (Massoud Hayoun— contributing writer to Pacific Standard. 10-5-2017, "Is Trump Solving
the Immigration Court Backlog or Is He Funding It?," Pacific Standard, https://psmag.com/social-
justice/is-trump-solving-the-immigration-court-backlog-or-is-he-funding-it//sabín)
"The backlog is directly attributable to the Trump administration's broad enforcement priorities, which
do not distinguish between immigrants with longstanding ties in the U.S. and strong legal defenses to
being deported," says Richard A. Boswell, a law professor at the University of California–Hastings College
of the Law. President Donald Trump's fiery words and actions on immigrants fund the backlog, Boswell
explains. "Under a system of laws, a person facing deportation cannot be picked up and immediately
removed from the U.S. They are entitled to a hearing and that hearing is presided over by an
immigration judge." And more judges won't be enough to meet the need, Boswell warns. "Even if they
did bring in more immigration judges, they are overloading the system. When and if this
administration faces the realities of our immigration problem, they will see that we need
comprehensive immigration reform that provides for legalization of many of those who are already
here, and which also streamlines the process for those with good reason to be allowed into our
country." Immigration officials underlined for the Post that, in an effort to slash the backlog, the
administration had reversed the practice of prosecutorial discretion, whereby judges can set aside low-
urgency cases in order to prioritize others. The administration of former President Barack Obama—
which deported an unprecedented number of undocumented migrants—introduced the practice to
address the growing backlog.
SD – Backlog
They don’t solve funding—it makes backlogs inevitable
Lovett 16 (Kourtney Lovett—Eastern Michigan University Honors College. "Immigration Courts:
Processes, Problems and Prescriptions for Improvement" (2016). Senior Honors Theses. 488.
http://commons.emich.edu/honors/488//sabín)
Underfunded Immigration Courts While the number of cases pending in immigration courts has
ballooned in recent years, the money they have to operate has remained fairly stagnant in comparison
to the DHS's immigration enforcement sectors ("Empty Benches", 2015, p. 1). For example, as displayed
in Figure 3, both Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
combined experienced a 105% monetary increase between FY 2003 and FY 2015, which specifically went
from $9.1 billion to approximately $1 8.7 billion ("Empty Benches", 2015, p. 1 ). On the other hand,
immigration court monies increased "more modestly74 percent from FY 2003 to FY 2015, from $199
million to $347.2 million" ("Empty Benches'\ 2015, p. 1). [Figure 3 here] Overall, the increase in funding
within immigration enforcement sectors and the relative lack of money within immigration courts has
significantly contributed to the increased backlog of cases. Indeed, the number of immigration court
backlogs has spiked by 163% between FY 2003 and April 2015 ("Empty Benches", 2015, p. 1). ''The
resulting backlog has led to average hearing delays of over a year and a half ... " ("Empty Benches",
2015, p. 1). Essentially, the number of cases being filed surpasses the actual number of cases that can
sufficiently be heard by Us. "For instance in FY 2014, courts received 23 percent more matters than they
completed (306,045 versus 248,078)" ("Empty Benches, 2015, p.3).
Circumvention – General
Immigration courts are subject to Trump’s political pressure—there’s no checks
Kim 18 (Kim, Catherine Y—University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill - School of Law. “The
President's Immigration Courts” (April 28, 2018). Emory Law Journal, Forthcoming; UNC Legal Studies
Research Paper. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3144100//sabín)
The statutory provisions governing administrative adjudication in the immigration context do not share
these characteristics. Unlike the APA, the INA vests the power to conduct removal proceedings in
“immigration judges” personally, rather than delegating such power generically to agency leadership to
be sub-delegated. Moreover, the INA contains no analog to the APA provision awarding an agency’s
political leadership authority to review and reverse the initial decisions of hearing officers. Indeed, it
does not contemplate any form of review except to federal courts in certain types of cases.130
Nonetheless, the INA’s implementing regulations not only create the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)
to review the decisions of immigration judges,131 but also allow further appeal to the Attorney General
himself, who may refer cases to himself for potential reversal.132 The Attorney General has exercised
this refer-and-review power repeatedly to reverse BIA decisions perceived to depart from the
President’s political agenda.133 Indeed, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently co-authored
a law review article championing the exercise of this authority “as a powerful tool through which the
executive branch can asserts its prerogatives in the immigration field.” 134 3. Limits to conventions as a
barrier to political control The permeability of legal barriers to political influence suggests that the only
real protection against presidential interference in agency adjudications may rest on soft
“conventions.”136 But it is not at all clear that these soft norms will be sufficient to counterbalance
the President’s incentives to control agency adjudications. Attorney General Gonzales’s recent article
demonstrates that the convention of independence does not prevent agency leadership from
celebrating, much less exercising, its power to reverse the decisions of lower-level adjudicators. Political
scientists have documented a similar willingness to exercise such review authority in other agencies. 137
Perhaps more disturbing, political actors appear to exert pressure on agency adjudicators directly,
without even having to exercise formal review power, 138 although a series of empirical analyses across
different agencies found no evidence that case outcomes were responsive to changes in political
leadership.139 Finally, even if conventions were effective in restraining prior administrations, the
current President is perhaps singular in his willingness to defy such soft norms. If conventional norms
were the primary reason why prior Presidents refrained from exercising control over agency
adjudications, we should not be surprised if such restraint dissipates in the current administration.
Circumvention – Judges
The DOJ controls immigration judge hiring, it makes politicization inevitable
Ramey 18 (Sara Ramey—Opinion Contributor. 5-22-2018, "DOJ shouldn't be in charge of immigration
courts," The Hill, http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/388876-doj-shouldnt-be-in-charge-of-
immigration-courts//sabín)
It appears that the administration is looking for specific outcomes in cases with little regard to the
merits of the claim. The attorney general has certified an unprecedented number cases to himself for
review with the idea that he might change the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals. This
extraordinary power of one political-appointee to overturn the decision of trained immigration judges is
fundamentally at odds with judicial independence. Unfortunately, it appears that not only the review and firing of
judges has become political, but their hiring too. Information has surfaced that the Department of Justice is asking
candidates questions about their political party affiliation, their position on same-sex relationships,
and their opinion on abortion; preparing internal memos on those whose immigration views that do not
align with the administration’s policies; slowing down review of applications where there are
ideological differences; and withdrawing employment offers or delaying start dates by up to a one and
a half years. Making judicial decisions subject to the political whims of the times, and not dependent on
the accurate execution of the law, is a serious risk to the checks-and-balances system underlying our
democracy. The need for independent immigration courts has never been clearer.
Circumvention – Asylum
Sessions makes asylum impossible—durable fiat doesn’t solve because it’s a question
of his interpretation of the plan
Kim 18 (Kim, Catherine Y—University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill - School of Law. “The
President's Immigration Courts” (April 28, 2018). Emory Law Journal, Forthcoming; UNC Legal Studies
Research Paper. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3144100//sabín)
C. Emerging Tools to Influence Immigration Adjudication The central importance of immigration courts
to national immigration policy has led the current administration to institute wide-ranging reforms to
expand control over removal proceedings. These include altering the procedures and standards for
considering asylum claims, threatening to eliminate immigration judges’ authority to grant discretionary
relief in the form of “administrative closure,” discouraging courts from releasing detained aliens, and
implementing a series of managerial reforms including an ambitious hiring initiative, the introduction of
performance metrics, and additional supervisory measures to ensure that the decisions of immigration
judges conform to the President’s immigration policy agenda. 1. Asylum claims The Attorney General
has been explicit in his skepticism toward asylum claimants. In remarks to the EOIR, Sessions asserted,
“We []have dirty immigration lawyers who are encouraging their otherwise unlawfully present clients to
make false claims of asylum.” According to him, “Saying a few simple words [establishing a credible fear
of persecution] is now transforming a straightforward arrest and immediate return into a probable
release and a hearing.” He exhibited particular cynicism for the high rates at which aliens succeed in
establishing a credible fear of persecution, stating that “any adjudicatory system with a grant rate of
nearly 90 percent is inherently flawed.”178 To that end, in early March, he exercised his power to “refer
and review” two decisions issued by the Board of Immigration Appeals relating to asylum claims. On
March 5, 2017, the Attorney General in Matter of E-F-H-L vacated a BIA decision holding that asylum
claimants are entitled to an evidentiary hearing to establish their claims. At the trial level, the
immigration judge concluded that respondent’s written application for relief failed to establish a prima
facie claim for asylum and thus denied an evidentiary hearing. On review, the Board of Immigration
Appeals in 2014 vacated and remanded as legally erroneous, emphasizing regulations making clear that
asylum applications shall be determined “after an evidentiary hearing.”179 In a precedent-setting
published opinion, the BIA concluded, “in the ordinary course of removal proceedings, an applicant for
asylum … is entitled to a hearing on the merits of the applications, including an opportunity to provide
oral testimony and other evidence, without first having to establish prima facie eligibility for the
requested relief.”180 Subsequently, the respondent in the case withdrew his application for asylum to
pursue legal permanent resident status on the basis of a family relationship. 181 Rather than let the
BIA’s opinion stand, however, the Attorney General four years later, on March 5, 2017, with no apparent
notice to respondent or other interested parties, exercised his self-referral power to vacate the BIA’s
decision on the ground that the withdrawal of the application rendered the decision “moot.” In doing
so, he summarily eliminated the precedential decision entitling asylum seekers to an evidentiary
hearing before immigration judges. Two days later on March 7, 2018, the Attorney General exercised his
refer and review authority to stay an unpublished BIA decision dating from 2016, in which the Board
reversed the denial of asylum to an individual claiming asylum on the basis of the Salvadorean
government’s failure to protect her from domestic abuse.182 This time, the Attorney General did
provide notice to the respondent and interested parties, inviting briefing on the following question
“Whether, and under what circumstances, being a victim of private criminal activity constitutes a
cognizable ‘particular social group’ for purposes of an application for asylum or withholding of removal.”
Parties were given until April 20, 2018 to brief the issue; to date, the Attorney General has not issued a
final opinion on the matter.
They don’t solve judge disparities

Rappaport 17 (Nolan Rappaport—immigration experience includes seven years as an immigration
counsel on the House Judiciary Committee and twenty years writing decisions for the Board of
Immigration Appeals. 1-13-2017, "Our immigration court crisis will be Trump's lasting headache,"
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/314238-our-immigration-court-crisis-will-be-trumps-
lasting-headache//sabín)
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the median level of asylum
decision disparity has risen to more than 56 percentage points. The grant rate varies from 15 percent
to 71 percent, depending on the judge. The six judges in Newark, N.J., for instance, had denial rates that
varied between a low of 15.7 percent and a high of 98.6 percent. Their grant rates accordingly varied
from only 1.4 to 84 percent. When TRAC examined this issue ten years ago, the typical denial rate for
asylum applications was 65 percent, but eight judges denied nine out of 10 applications and two granted
nine out of 10.
**Circumvention Things
Neg
1NC – Circumvention
LPR is dead under Trump – the USCIS will deny substantially more visa applications on
arbitrary footing.
Kang, 7/19/18 – [Jennifer, Contributor @ Splinter, “Trump Administration Escalates Attacks on Legal
Immigration With Stringent New Visa Rules”, (https://splinternews.com/trump-administration-
escalates-attacks-on-legal-immigra-1827724891)]//MM
The Trump administration has made it easier for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to immediately deny visa
applications if there is missing or inaccurate information. Under the previous guidance, issued in 2013,
applicants were given 30 days to fix any issues. The new policy eliminates that grace period. They also won’t
be notified in advance that their request might be denied, but will instead be given a final statutory denial.
The change will take effect September 11, 2018. The unforgiving new policy, dictated by a memo issued June 13 by USCIS, applies
to applications and renewals of both temporary and permanent resident status visas. If their request is
denied, immigrants could suddenly face deportation. They will essentially be treated like criminals, who are also
placed on fast-track deportation upon conviction. “Under the law, the burden of proof is on an applicant, petitioner, or requestor to establish
eligibility - not the other way around,” said USCIS spokesperson Michael Bars in an email to CBS News. The memo emphasizes that the new
policy will discourage “frivolous or substantially incomplete” applications. Although the memo claims the policy is
“not intended to penalize filers for innocent mistakes,” there’s no doubt this is a new attack on legal immigrants. “It’s
just a smokescreen. If every ‘t’ is not crossed, and every ‘i’ is not dotted, they can deny the claim,”
California-based immigration attorney David Acalin said, according to CBS News.
Trump’s policy definitively overwhelms all their certainty key warrants.

O’ Brien, 18 – [Staff-writer @ CNN, “Visa policy change will make it easier for Trump administration to
deny applications”, (https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/16/politics/visa-policy-changes/index.html)]//MM
New York (CNN)Visa policy change will make it easier Trump administration to deny applications It
will soon be easier for the Trump
administration to deny visas. In a move that further curbs immigration, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is
giving anyone who reviews visa applications or petitions the discretion to deny requests, without first
seeking additional evidence that might be needed to complete an application, or issuing a notice stating the intent to
deny a request. The change takes effect September 11. The memo, quietly issued on Friday, means the government can deny visas if
applications do not include all the necessary information when submitted. It also lets the government deny visas without
specifying what additional information would have been necessary to complete the application. "Under the
law, the burden of proof is on an applicant, petitioner, or requestor to establish eligibility -- not the other way around," said USCIS
spokesperson Michael Bars, who emphasized the policy is part of a move to cut down on abuse and "frivolous" applications. It rescinds 2013
guidance that outlined the process for requesting more information or issuing notice about the intent to deny a visa request. The process of
requesting more information effectively granted applicants more time to complete applications if something was missing. It also created a
constructive dialogue between immigration lawyers and USCIS on applications for visas. The
memo came about one week after
USCIS announced it would start initiating removal proceedings -- which can lead to deportation -- against
visa applicants who lack immigration status when their visa applications are denied. Hassan Ahmad, an
immigration rights advocate and founder of HMA Law Firm, noted the two memos issued in near tandem is significant. "Read together, this
means one thing: You better get it right the first time," he wrote in a series of tweets on Sunday. "As an
immigration and citizenship lawyer, this effectively means the system just got a lot more unforgiving. Even a
simple, straightforward application, one that might be considered 'routine' -- can no longer be so considered."
Previously, USCIS was typically required to submit a "request for evidence" on incomplete visa petitions, unless there was no possibility new
information could lead to a complete application. According to the memo, the new policy is "intended to discourage frivolous or substantially
incomplete filings used as 'placeholder' filings and encourage applicants, petitioners, and requestors to be diligent in collecting and submitting
required evidence." It adds the new guidance is "not intended to penalize filers for innocent mistakes or misunderstandings of evidentiary
requirements." The
memo applies to most visas, including the popular yet controversial H-1B visas that tech
companies rely upon to used to add skilled employees to their workforces. The new policy does not apply to
processing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) requests. Related: Amazon, Microsoft among top companies hiring foreign workers
The change has immigration advocacy groups and immigration lawyers on high alert. They worry that the change will lead to more
denials without insights into why, creating more uncertainty for immigrants. "If you're applying for a visa and leave
out any required evidence, you could be rejected with no opportunity to fix your application, forcing you to re-
apply and pay another round of fees," said tech firm Boundless Immigation cofounder Doug Rand, who also served as the former
White House assistant director for entrepreneurship under President Obama. Experts were scrambling Monday to determine how the new
guidance will impact foreigners. "We are still digging through all the details, but this gives us great concern," said Todd Schulte, president of
FWD.us, an immigration reform group launched by Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders. "It is
the newest in a
series of moves by the administration to substantially restrict legal immigration by making it more difficult,
expensive and bureaucratic for the applicants while allowing the government to easily deny claims for
people who should be coming here -- or who are here and stuck in a broken visa system -- and strengthening our country,"
Schulte told CNN. Immigration attorney William Stock of Klasko Immigration Law Partners told CNN the memo returns USCIS to a
"culture of 'no,'" a characterization he says is reminiscent of the agency before the 2013 guidance.
Whether immigrants are admitted is up to the sole discretion of the USCIS – durable
fiat doesn’t solve because it isn’t a question of backlogs or eligibility requirements –
they will find arbitrary loopholes to deny applicants.
Tran et. al, 18 – [Andrew Ba Tran & Abigail Hauslohner, Staff-writers & The Washington Post, “Legal
immigration also declining under Trump administration”,
(https://www.pressherald.com/2018/07/02/legal-immigration-also-declining-under-trump-
administration/)]//MM
***specific for Translators, Refugees, & Family-Based Visas
But the Trump administration has managed to effect significant changes in immigration without Congress, in part by
relying on administrative guidance handed down to consular officials to change the way immigrant visas are
considered and processed, administration officials and outside experts said. The result is a shift in the legal immigration process in line with
the vision of Miller, the adviser who officials say sits at the helm of immigration policy decisions. “Miller sees consular officers as the
tip of the spear in his effort to control who is getting into the country,” said one high-ranking national security official
who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak to the media. “He sees it as a generational thing, like
he has to retrain them.” Under the previous administration, case officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) processed
immigrant visa applications with “a culture of getting to ‘yes,’ ” said another high-ranking administration official familiar with immigration
policy deliberations. Now those officers, along with consular officers at the State Department, feel
empowered to exercise
their own discretion, take more time scrutinizing each applicant and more strictly enforce existing laws on
inadmissibility, the official said. The longer vetting process results in fewer approved applications per month. “If
you’re empowering people to spend more time vetting an application, and you’re not having a culture of getting
to ‘yes’ but having a culture of make the right decision, it’s axiomatic that you will not be able to process
applications for immigration benefits at the same speed,” the official said. Advertisement In a March report, analysts at
the Migration Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, noted that these bureaucratic changes have “gone largely unnoticed.”
“Without need for congressional approval, the administration has initiated several small but well-calibrated actions through regulations,
administrative guidelines, and immigration application processing changes,” the report stated. Amendments
to the State
Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual in January expanded the burden of proof for visa applicants to show that
they will not become “a public charge,” which is grounds for denial. Immigration
analysts who have reviewed leaked policy
drafts expect the administration to publish new rules soon to expand further the terms of inadmissibility.
“It’s intended to have an effect on the numbers,” said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service and now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “It’s intended to put more rigor into the visa issuance process. But almost by
definition, that’s going to likely result in more denials.” — The largest decline in approvals is occurring in
the family-based visas that allow U.S. citizens and legal residents to sponsor the immigration of relatives
to the United States – what Trump has labeled “chain migration.” Special immigrant visas that are predominantly reserved
for the Iraqis and Afghans who served the U.S. government in war zones also have been reduced significantly.
Advertisement Margaret Wong, an Ohio-based immigration attorney with offices across the country, said her practice has experienced an
increase in family-based immigrant visa applications since Trump took office. More people are applying out of fear that the administration will
soon eliminate those types of visas, she said. But immigration attorneys are having less success getting the
applications approved. Applicants are “facing arbitrary questions that are really difficult for them to
answer, and then they’re getting denials for things that attorneys have never seen before,” said Kristie De
Peña, director of immigration and senior counsel at the Niskanen Center, an immigrant advocacy group. “We’re hearing that pretty
much across the board from all the attorneys that practice with us.” There have been similar trends in other immigrant categories.
Refugee arrivals are on track to fall by 75 percent from 2016 levels, according to federal data. With just three
months before the end of the fiscal year,the United States is only a third of the way to its refugee cap for Africa and Latin America and less than
half of the way to its cap for Asia. But it has surpassed the smaller cap set for European refugees, said analysts at the Niskanen Center. Trump
has consistently emphasized his intention to transform the U.S. immigration system into one based on
“merit” rather than family ties, preferring those with desired skills and financial resources who also speak
English. In his State of the Union address, Trump said he planned to accomplish this in part by eliminating a vast subset of family-based visas,
along with the diversity visa lottery, which provides about 50,000 immigrant visas to underrepresented nationalities each year.
1NC – Denaturalization
Trump’s denaturalization agenda overwhelms certainty.
deGooyer, 18 – [Stephanie, a 2018-19 fellow in the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and an
assistant professor of English at Willamette University “Why Trump’s Denaturalization Task Force
Matters”, (https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-denaturalization-task-force-matters/)]//MM
In June, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that a newly established office would investigate
naturalized Americans suspected of lying on their citizenship applications. USCIS director L. Francis Cissna said the
probes would target “a few thousand” people, with the aim of revoking citizenship from those who did, in fact, lie. This news stoked
fears that President Trump’s already-restrictive immigration rules were taking an authoritarian turn. This week, an
early target emerged: According to the Miami Herald, the Department of Justice is suing to strip citizenship from a
grandmother in Miami because she did not disclose her minor role in a financial crime in her naturalization application. She
immigrated legally, suffers from a rare kidney disease, and even cooperated with the FBI when they investigated
the crime. Still, after living and working for decades in the United States, she is facing deportation. There is no denying that the Trump
administration’s policies are often racist, cruel, and politically motivated. But investigating fraud isn’t the same
thing as expelling entire groups, like when the Nazis denaturalized German Jews en masse in the early 1930s. Nor can this initiative be solely
attributed to Trump: An earlier version of the program known as Operation Janus began during the Obama administration, and identified many
of the cases the current program will examine. ADVERTISING Still, there is something decidedly unsettling about the
timing of the new announcement. Why did the government choose, in the middle of a nationwide outcry over family separations at the border, to declare its interest in a trivial amount of
naturalization fraud? To understand what might be going on, we need to put aside the Nazi references and turn to America’s own history. Denaturalization—the legal procedure for revoking and nullifying citizenship—was for
decades a relatively common practice in the United States. Unlike totalitarian versions of this policy, which were politically and ethnically defined, denaturalization in America hinged on legal interpretations of fraud: From the use
of naturalization as a tool to rig election turnout in the late 19th century, to the current interest in the use of fake names and other falsehoods on citizenship applications. Denaturalization first became a legal possibility in the
United States with the passage of the 1906 Nationalization Act. Section 15 of this piece of legislation gave US attorneys the authority to initiate proceedings “for the purpose of setting aside and canceling the certificate of
citizenship on the ground of fraud or on the ground that such certificate of citizenship was illegally procured.” The original purpose of the denaturalization clause was to clean up a naturalization process that had been wildly
inconsistent across state and federal courts. Once introduced, though, it quickly opened the gates for the interpretation of fraud to support exclusionary and often racist investigations. The 1907 Expatriation Act used the
denaturalization clause to rid the populace of certain unwanted individuals who were targeted for their ethnic background, their gender, and their political views. Between 1907 and 1931, the clause was used to strip citizenship
from American women who married foreigners. It was also used by the government to target individuals on the basis of their political opinions, which is what happened, most notably, to the anarchist Emma Goldman: Her US
citizenship was deemed invalid because her ex-husband, who sponsored her, had not met the full residence requirement before naturalizing himself. Further, the government even used the clause to allow the denaturalization of
“un-American” races, specifically Asians. Current Issue View our current issue Subscribe today and Save up to $129. This history, which historian Patrick Weil eloquently narrates in his 2012 book, The Sovereign Citizen, shows us
that denaturalization fraud was for decades at the center of racist and xenophobic immigration policy in the United States. However, in the early 1940s, the Supreme Court began to issue decisions to protect naturalized citizens,
culminating in a landmark 1967 decision, Afroyim v. Rusk, that ruled that all American citizens, whether native-born or naturalized, could not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily. This decision does not mean that today
naturalized citizens can never lose their citizenship. A naturalized citizen of the United States can be denaturalized on the grounds that they falsify or conceal relevant facts, refuse to testify before Congress, are proven a member
of subversive organization (such as the Nazi Party or Al Qaeda), or because of a dishonorable discharge. As recently as last year, an Indian immigrant named Baljinder Singh was stripped of his US citizenship because he used a false
name to apply for naturalization while he was wanted for deportation. And though litigation is pending, the Associated Press just reported the discharge of approximately 40 immigrants from the army—dismissals that could affect
It remains to be seen to what extent the government will be able to substantially

their attempts to become citizens down the line.
expand what counts as naturalization fraud, and how the courts will handle the issue. Last June, in Maslenjak v. The United States, the Supreme Court heard the case of an ethnic
Serbian woman who fled Bosnia for the United States during the Balkan wars in 1998. The government argued that Maslenjak could be denaturalized because she lied on her citizenship application about her husband’s involvement
in the Bosnian army; Maslenjak countered that she had indeed lied, but that the lie was immaterial and had no bearing on the decision related to her naturalization. In a 9-0 decision, the Court supported her argument, sending the
case back down for resolution in a lower federal court. “Under the Government’s reading,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan, “a lie told in the naturalization process—even out of embarrassment, fear, or a desire for privacy—would
always provide a basis for rescinding citizenship. The Government could thus take away on one day what it was required to give the day before.” Support Progressive Journalism If you like this article, please give today to help fund
Americans are right to instinctively worry about the government’s task force on
The Nation’s work. In our unsettled times,
denaturalization fraud. For now, though, the law is on the side of the immigrants, so the government is unlikely to win
denaturalization cases in the courts; even a more conservative Supreme Court, after the replacement of Justice Kennedy, is unlikely to change
this calculus. What we should worry about immediately is what sort of message the government is sending.
Even if USCIS’s new office closes up shop after handling a few thousand cases of clear-cut lying, cheating, and fraud, the
threat of denaturalization now hangs over the heads of America’s immigrant population, and its effects
will be far-reaching and long-standing. This is precisely why the government made its announcement in
the middle of a public outcry over immigration policy: to ratchet up fear as an indirect means of border control. Fear,
unlike a border wall or the travel ban, is inexpensive, and does not have to be passed through Congress
or the courts. Fear also threads through people fast, and spreads quickly, especially online. After the immigration agency’s announcement,
many naturalized citizens were left questioning the validity of an immigration status they assumed would always be safe. Many others, afraid of
being targeted or tripped up in a lie, may now never pursue naturalization at all, even if they are eligible. This is why comparisons to the Third
Reich fall short. Not only do they belie America’s own history with denaturalization, they also let fear control the behavior of naturalized
Americans—and future citizens, too. Americans, regardless of where they were born, should remember that their citizenship cannot be revoked
on a dime. The real lie is that they were ever made to feel otherwise.
Block – Detention
No solvency – Trump has made the system too complex for immigrant families to
appear in court – makes deportation and unlawful residence inevitable.
Lind, 7/11/18 – [Dara, Staff-writer @ Vox, “A new study blows up Trump’s “catch-and-release” myth”,
(https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/11/17525006/catch-release-families-border-
trump)]//MM
After several months of experimenting with punitive policies toward families coming to the US without papers —
including separating thousands of children from their parents to detain and prosecute parents — the Trump administration is reluctantly
returning to a practice it pejoratively calls “catch and release”: releasing families from immigration detention and
allowing them to live in the US while they wait for their asylum claims to be adjudicated. President Donald
Trump and other top administration officials have spent months railing against the release of immigrant families as a recipe for widespread
lawlessness. They claim that once a family is released from immigration, they’ll simply abscond into the US, skipping their appointed court
dates, to live as unauthorized immigrants. The administration makes it seem like this is a deliberate strategy — a known end-run around
existing immigration law that takes advantages of extra protections afforded to children, families, and asylum-seekers. But a
new study,
compiled by a pair of legal advocacy groups, shows that isn’t the case, and that the administration doesn’t
have to choose between separating immigrant families (or detaining them indefinitely) and making sure they show
up to court. The administration has identified a real problem, but misunderstands, or misrepresents, the cause. The
study confirms that families who cross into the US without papers often miss their court dates, but offers suggestive qualitative
evidence — collected from families who were contacted by attorneys and notified that they’d missed their court dates — that many
families aren’t deliberately absconding at all. They’re trying to stay in the system. It’s just that the system
makes it too hard for them, then punishes them with an order of deportation when they fail. The
people whom the Trump administration is painting as lawless “absconders” are often just lost, confused,
and overwhelmed families in a strange land, working as hard as they can to be allowed to stay here but
faced with legal and bureaucratic obstacles that make missing a court date an understandable
outcome. If the Trump administration is genuinely concerned about making sure asylum seekers stay in the legal process as long as they ’re in the US, this is great news. It shows that they didn’t really need to use punitive tactics like separation and indefinite detention to accomplish that goal. And it shows that, now that they’ve started releasing families together again, they can devote their energy to smoothing the bureaucratic obstacles that are the real heart of the problem. On the other hand, if the Trump administration
continues to paint “catch and release” as a recipe for widespread lawlessness instead of trying to help families go through the system the right way, it will indicate that they are more interested in punishment than they are with ensuring the legal process gets followed. Families not showing up to court dates is a real problem Most people who are caught entering the US without papers can be deported quickly without a court hearing. But, to the apparent chagrin of President Trump, there are special protections for some groups, including asylum-seekers, to give them a
chance to prove they’re eligible for legal status in the US. Since the road to legal status runs through the incredibly backlogged immigration court system, that can take years, leaving the government with the question of what to do with migrants while their court cases are pending. The way Trump tells it, any migrant who gets released from immigration detention before her court case is resolved will immediately escape into the US and evade detection by the authorities. “We release them. They go someplace into our country. They’re supposed to come back within two or
three years for a court case, but nobody ever comes back,” Trump told a West Virginia crowd in April. That’s somewhat overstated, but it doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real. In fiscal year 2016, the last year for which full statistics are available, slightly more than a quarter of all cases decided in immigration courts ended with an order of deportation issued because the defendant hadn’t shown up to court (known as an in absentia order). There aren’t separate in absentia stat istics just for asylum-seekers caught entering the US. But statistics suggest that relatively few of
the people who say they’re seeking asylum when they’re caught by a Border Patrol agent end up seeing the process of applying for asylum through to the end. Less than 40 percent of people who pass the initial screening interview for asylum submit a written asylum application, which is a necessary step in the process even though they’ve passed the interview and gotten assigned a court hearing. (To the Trump administration, this is proof that the other 60 percent of people were just lying about being persecuted as an excuse to sneak into the US.) The worst group for
absenteeism appears to be families. Two legal advocacy groups, CLINIC (the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc.) and ASAP (the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project of the Urban Justice Center), used the Freedom of Information Act to get data about all cases involving “adults with children” in the immigration court system from July 18, 2014, to November 2016 — the aftermath of the spring-summer 2014 wave of Central American children and families entering the US. That data showed that more than 70 percent of families’ cases decided during that time ended with in
just because the Trump administration is correct that

absentia deportation orders. For comparison, during fiscal years 2015 and 2016 — i.e,. between October 2014 and September 2016 — the in absentia rate across all cases was only 26 percent. Not showing up to court is the biggest reason families are losing their asylum cases But
people not showing up to court is a problem doesn’t mean it’s correct about why it’s happening. And the
data collected by CLINIC and ASAP suggests that families aren’t skipping out because they know their asylum cases are doomed. Oo the
contrary, they end up dooming their asylum cases by missing their court dates. Among all immigrants, in
absentia cases made up
only about a third of deportation orders. Among families, according to the new data, in absentia cases
accounted for 83 percent of all removal orders. Meanwhile, families were much more likely to win cases in
which they did show up to court than other immigrants. During the period covered in the new report, 83 percent of
families’ cases ended with removal orders. But if you take out the removal orders issued in absentia — and look only at cases where families did
show up to court — only 40 percent of cases ended with a family ordered deported. That’s a much bigger swing than immigration cases overall
saw: In fiscal years 2015 and 2016, 70 percent of all cases ended in removal orders, but taking out the in absentia orders drops the removal rate
to 59 percent. The CLINIC/ASAP report says that during this time, asylum
screening interviews in family detention centers
had a higher approval rate than screening interviews among other border-crossers who claimed a fear of
persecution (88 percent versus 77 percent). And the hearings most commonly skipped aren’t the final hearings at which an immigrant’s
fate is set; they’re the initial hearings, known as “master calendar” hearings, in which the date for a full hearing is set months or years in the
future. (The CLINIC report doesn’t offer data to prove that these are the most commonly missed hearings, but that characterization is
consistent with other analyses.) Most suggestively, families that
had been in detention at some point, even if they had since
been released, were more
likely to show up to court than families who’d never been detained. They were
also more likely to have legal representation, which CLINIC attributes to the fact that families in detention are often connected
to pro bono attorneys and other resources that they can retain even after they get out. The conclusion drawn by the advocacy groups is that
people with attorneys were more likely to figure out how to make their court dates, and those without lawyers were at risk of
getting swallowed up by the system. Many families are trying to keep up with their cases, but are
thwarted by bad information or unclear directions In 2015, CLINIC and ASAP started reaching out to families released from
detention to remind them of their court dates. “ASAP and CLINIC consistently encountered families who had missed their hearings for several
reasons, mostly outside of the families’ control,” the report says. Some families missed their court dates because of confusion, often
exacerbated by the effects of trauma from their home countries or other mental illness. Or because they worried that Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) would arrest them if they showed up to court. That didn’t happen much under the Obama administration, when
this report was conducted, but ICE has since done this to witnesses in criminal cases (and even victims seeking restraining orders) in some cases
under Trump. But in a lot of cases, a parent thought she was doing everything right and it just wasn’t enough. If
someone moves while
their case is pending, the report says, they are “expected to update their address with up to five
different entities—the immigration court, USCIS, ICE OCC, ICE ERO, and ISAP—using three different
mediums—Form EOIR-33, Form AR-11, and oral or written notice.” That’s a lot of paperwork for someone without an
attorney, especially someone whose English skills or general literacy may not be great. And immigrants may not even know they
have to go through all that.
Block – Domestic Violence
The USCIS denies applications for asylees with domestic violence claims.
Bowden, 7/12/18 – [John, Staff-writer @ The Hill, “Trump implementing new policy to turn away
more asylum seekers at border”, (http://thehill.com/latino/396645-trump-implementing-new-policy-to-
turn-away-many-more-asylum-seekers-at-border-report)]//MM
New guidance directs USCIS asylum adjudication officers to weigh a migrant's illegal entry into the U.S.
against legitimate claims of asylum and instructs officers to turn away asylum seekers citing gangs or
domestic violence as a reason for entry at the border. The move comes after Attorney General Jeff Sessions used his authority to
overturn a decision last month from an immigration court, ruling that claims of gang violence or domestic abuse no longer qualify potential
asylum seekers for entry. "Claims based on ... the members' vulnerability to harm of domestic violence or gang
violence committed by non-government actors will not establish the basis for asylum, refugee status, or a credible or
reasonable fear of persecution," according to the new guidance, which was first reported by CNN. Authorities are also
reportedly encouraged to use "an applicant's illegal entry, including any intentional evasion of US authorities, and including
any conviction for illegal entry where the alien does not demonstrate good cause for the illegal entry, to weigh against a favorable
exercise of discretion" during asylum applications. The new decision reportedly places the burden of describing in correct legal
terminology the reasoning behind an asylum claim on asylum seekers, and means that many more migrant families will be
denied entry at the U.S.'s southern border with Mexico without ever seeing a judge. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
accused previous administrations of overreach in granting asylum, stating that victims of domestic violence or gangs were not meant to be
protected in an emailed statement. "Our laws do not offer protection against instances of violence based on personal, private
conflict that
is not on account of a protected ground, but over the years grounds for qualifying for asylum have greatly expanded far beyond
what Congress originally intended," USCIS spokesman Michael Bars said. "Many petitioners understand this, know how to exploit our system,
and are able to enter the U.S., avoid removal, and remain in the country. They’re then referred to an immigration judge and released on a
promise to appear for a court date weeks, months, or years down the line regardless of whether they plan to show up. This exacerbates delays
and undermines those with legitimate claims," he added. Immigration
advocates, however, painted the plan as an
attempt by Sessions to undercut legitimate claims of asylum by migrants. "When you put it all together, this is his
grand scheme to just close any possibility for people seeking protection -- legally — to claim that protection
that they can under the law," Ur Jaddou, a representative for immigration advocacy group America's Voice, told CNN. "He's looking
at every possible way to end it. And he's done it one after the other."
Block – EB-5
No admission – the USCIS hates the EB-5 program – and uncertainty deters investors,
EB-5 expires in September, and they can’t overcome the travel ban.
Hayoun, 7/25/18 – [Massoud, Staff-writer @ Pacific Standard. “Amid Immigration Uproar, Trump
Keeps Mum on the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program”, (https://psmag.com/economics/amid-
immigration-uproar-trump-keeps-mum-on-the-eb-5-immigrant-investor-program)]//MM
The controversial EB-5 "immigrant investor" program, which sells American citizenship to wealthy internationals, is set to
expire in September unless Congress votes to extend it. With a president exceedingly vocal on all manners of immigration,
the White House's silence over the United States' EB-5 program is unusual—and could bode poorly for its
future. In March, Congress temporarily extended the program, amid attempts to regulate what many
say are rampant instances of EB-5 project stakeholders defrauding potential immigrant investors out of
their money. Launched by Congress in 1990, the EB-5 program grants Green Cards to foreigners who invest upward of $500,000 in a
sustainable, job-generating business project located in an economically struggling zone of the U.S. The investments are at-risk, meaning if the
project doesn't generate the jobs mandated by the program or the development project goes under, the investor (the vast majority of whom
are Chinese nationals) loses both money and a shot at U.S. citizenship. The Securities and Exchange Commission has warned against rampant
fraud in the EB-5 system, oftentimes perpetrated by people purporting to coordinate projects that were never truly intended to succeed or
even break ground. ADVERTISEMENT The
EB-5 program came under increased scrutiny early this year amid reports
that the SEC had been investigating Kushner Companies over its use of EB-5 capital. Kushner Companies is owned
by the family of President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. Though Trump and Kushner have repeatedly claimed to
have divested from their business interests, in May of 2017, Kushner's sister, Nicole Meyer, mentioned her brother and Trump in a presentation
at an event in Shanghai meant to attract Chinese EB-5 investments for a Kushner Companies project (called One Journal Square) in New Jersey.
The name-dropping was said by analysts at the time to have run afoul of White House ethics codes. Pacific Standard was unable to reach White
House press staff at an email address provided by the administration for comment on whether Kushner's relationship to the EB-5 program has
affected the president's decision to remain silent on this particular facet of U.S. immigration policy. The Kushner debacle may have only further
sullied views of the program. "The scandals around the Kushner EB-5 Project gave ammunition to the anti-EB5 camp. The program is presently
seen by many on the Hill as a method for greedy NYC developers to obtain cheap capital," immigration lawyer Mona Shah tells Pacific Standard
via email. Trump may still weigh in on EB-5 ahead of September. Meanwhile, U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services is
calling on Congress to amend or rescind the program altogether. Jared Kushner. (Photo: Brendan
Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images) "Congress created the EB-5 program to benefit U.S. workers, the economy, and our communities by providing
an incentive for foreign capital investment in the U.S., and ultimately create jobs," USCIS spokesman Michael Bars writes in an email to Pacific
Standard. "However, while it was originally well-intended, the
EB-5 program has too often been prone to instances of
fraud and abuse, with foreign investors exploiting our system, undermining our laws and ultimately
buying their way to citizenship without fulfilling their required contributions to the American economy
as required by law." Congressional attempts at reform have so far proved unsuccessful. "In March, Congress considered making
significant changes to the EB-5 program, such as increasing the minimum investment amount to $800,000 and making it harder to put EB-5
projects in major metropolitan areas," explains Stephen Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at Cornell Law School. That consideration
came to an impasse and EB-5 was extended to September together with a short-term government spending bill. Given that this is an election
year, there isn't much hope for reform anytime soon. "Because of the mid-term elections this fall, I suspect that Congress will again kick the EB-
5 can down the road and extend the program for another year without making any changes," Yale-Loehr says. While the program has been
abused frequently enough to merit an SEC warning, Shah, the immigration lawyer, says that EB-5 has the potential to inject fresh flows of
outside capital from investors into areas grappling with joblessness. People working with EB-5 anticipated Trump "would be beneficial for EB-
5," Shah says. "Rather it has been quite the opposite." Beyond the Kushner investigation, the travel ban barring people from five Muslim-
majority nations, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, has proved an obstacle for those working in the program, Shah says. "The real
uphill battle has been with the Muslim ban," she says. "We had a steady stream of high net worth, good
quality immigrants from countries like Iran and Syria—we are fighting with the consulates to even get
them here." EB-5 investors typically seek to park capital or secure their futures in more stable climates in the U.S. In China's case, many
investors sought to ease fears over an ongoing anti-graft campaign in Beijing that appeared to upend the wealth of much of the nation's ruling
class. But international
views of the U.S. as a bastion of calm and rule of law have drastically changed since
Trump's inauguration. "Potential investors see the U.S. as an unfriendly place," Shah says.
Block – Family Migration
**also look at the Tran et. al evidence under Circumvention – Generic
No solvency – Trump wants to replace family migration with a merit-based system.

Barros, 17 – [Aline, an immigration reporter for VOA’s News Center in Washington, D.C. “Trump
Administration Wants to End Family Sponsorship Visas”, (https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-
administration-family-sponsorship-visas/4161073.html)]//MM
**edited for problematic language
After a Bangladeshi national detonated an improvised explosive device Monday morning near a Port Authority bus terminal in New York, calls
for an immigration overhaul grew louder — led by President Donald Trump. "The lottery system and chain
migration family migration — we are going to end them fast. Congress must get involved immediately, and they are involved
immediately, and I can tell you we have tremendous support, they will be ended," Trump said Tuesday. Chain migration Family migration refers
to people sponsoring family members to come to the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said accused
bomber Akayed
Ullah, 27, entered the U.S. in 2011 after presenting a passport with an F-43 family immigrant visa — a type of visa that
leads to legal permanent residence and is usually given to the children of siblings of U.S. citizens. Akayed Ullah U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions joined the immigration reform chorus at a Baltimore press conference, saying there have been two terrorist attacks in New York in recent
months carried out by men who were in the U.S. "as a result of failed immigration policies." "An individual won the lottery i n Bangladesh. He came here. He then, through the chain migration family migration process, brought his sister and she brought her son," Sessions said. Timing
criticized Advocates say Tuesday's remarks were an attempt to undermine immigrant families and communities. Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a coalition of five civil rights organizations, issued a statement calling it "shameful" to use "moments of tragedy to scapegoat all immigrants
and push for unrelated policies that would drastically harm immigrant communities while doing nothing for improving national security." They said the majority of Asian immigrants entered the U.S. through the family-based immigration system. "Many Asian immigrants that come on
employment-based [so-called "merit-based"] visas are invested in their jobs and communities because they are able to use the family-based system to reunite with their family members," they wrote. Sessions, who spoke at the news conference with the new DHS s ecretary Kirstjen
Nielsen, called on Congress to strengthen immigration laws. He said the current administration is taking steps to enforce the ones on the books more strictly. FILE - President Donald Trump listens in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Aug. 2, 2017, during an event to
unveil legislation that would place new limits on legal immigration. "The president is exactly right to call attention to these issues and to how they affect our security. … We should give priority to those who are likely to thrive here — such as those who speak English already or are highly
skilled — not someone chosen at random or who happens to be somebody's relative," he said. The numbers According to the U.S. State Department, in 2017 about 212,155 immigrants received a visa based on family relationships. The U.S. immigration system is based on spo nsorship. A
U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident (green card holder) can sponsor relatives from his or her home country to move to the United States. Spouses and minor children qualify as immediate relatives and do not need to wait for a visa num ber. For those individuals, there's no quota, and
the U.S. citizen can simply file a petition. But for brothers, sisters and adult children, the process can be long and difficult. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute reports that in 2015, more than 1 million permanent residents were admitted to the United States. Of that number, 44
proposal, merit-based immigration, would reward

percent were immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, and 20 percent entered through a family-sponsored preference . Trump's
points based on high-paying job offers, past achievements, English-language ability and education. All
of that would be taken into account when green card applications are considered. The higher the score,
the more likely an immigrant would be admitted to the United States.
Block – H-1B
The USCIS denies H-1B applications.
Anderson, 18 – [Stuart, Contributor @ Forbes. “USCIS Lays Out Far-Reaching Anti-Immigration
Agenda”, (https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/04/26/uscis-lays-out-far-reaching-anti-
immigration-agenda/#400688b71721)]//MM
In practice, an H-1B visa is typically the only way a high-skilled foreign national or an international student from a U.S. university can work in the
United States. That means new H-1B restrictions prevent foreign-born individuals from making their careers in
America. (See this article for more background on H-1B visas.) Cissna's letter to Grassley proudly notes USCIS has already implemented a
policy (not deferring to prior agency determinations) that has caused many people working years in the U.S. to lose their jobs and be forced to
leave the country after applications to extend their H-1B status were denied. Here's the “trick”: Trump
officials themselves wrote
the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order issued on April 18, 2017 – and since then have
cited it regularly as a way to justify their actions to restrict immigration. The Cissna letter cites the executive order
to justify prohibiting tens of thousands of women, the spouses of H-1B visa holders, from working in the United States. MORE FROM FORBES
Workday BrandVoice The Adobe Digital Academy: An Apprenticeship for Today's World KPMG BrandVoice Six Things Companies Can Do To Help
Women Rise To The Top However, real-world facts, including low unemployment rates in technical fields and around the country, conflict with
administration views that foreign-born individuals are preventing U.S. workers from finding jobs. “The U.S. labor market is the tightest it has
been in nearly two decades,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “If every unemployed person in the Midwest was placed into an open job, there
would still be more than 180,000 unfilled positions, according to the most recent Labor Department data.” The April 4, 2018 USCIS letter to
Grassley lists new restrictions the agency plans to impose: Making It More Difficult For A High-Skilled Individual To Qualify For An H-1B Visa:
USCIS “will propose to revise the definition of specialty occupation, consistent with INA§ 214(i), to increase focus on
obtaining the best and the brightest foreign nationals via the H-1B program, and to revise the definition of
employment and employer-employee relationship to better protect U.S. workers and wages,” according to the
letter. “In addition, DHS will propose additional requirements designed to ensure employers pay appropriate wages to H-1B visa holders.”
Preventing H-1B Spouses – Primarily Women From India – From Working In The United States: “With regard to
regulations, our plans include proposing regulatory changes to remove H-4 dependent spouses from the class
of aliens eligible for employment authorization, thereby reversing the 2015 final rule that granted such eligibility,” the letter
notes. “We announced this intention earlier this year in the semiannual regulatory agenda of the Department of Homeland Security. Such
action would comport with the E.O. [executive order] requirement to ‘propose new rules and issue new guidance, to supersede or revise
previous rules and guidance if appropriate, to protect the interests of United States workers in the administration of our immigration system.’”
Closing Off A Viable Option For A Foreign-Born Entrepreneur: “We are also drafting a proposed rule to remove the
International Entrepreneur Rule (IER), as announced in the regulatory agenda,” notes the USCIS letter. “Due to the court order
which invalidated the IER delay rule, the International Entrepreneur Final Rule is currently in effect. We have not approved any parole requests
under the International Entrepreneur Final Rule at this time.” The
USCIS letter covers only part of the Trump
administration’s anti-immigration agenda, omitting, for example, a future regulation that would restrict or
even eliminate the ability of international students to work on Optional Practical Training. The
administration has already reduced refugee admissions to historically low levels, sought to make it more
difficult to apply for asylum and instituted a travel ban on individuals from selected countries. Legislatively,
the administration opposed relief for Dreamers (young people brought to America as children) unless Congress agreed to the largest reduction
in legal immigrants since the 1920s. And Trump officials are poised to enact a questionable rule on “public charge” as a way to keep more legal
immigrants out of the country. The
regulations to change the definition of an H-1B specialty occupation,
prevent the spouses of H-1B visa holders from working and other measures will lead to litigation as
attorneys and affected individuals attempt to prevent their enactment. In the past, courts have granted a great
deal of deference to regulatory agencies, which means the outcome of any litigation is uncertain.
Trump’s intended policies cause delays in the H1-B process and prevents spouses of
high skilled immigrant’s from working.
Chishti et al 18 (Muzaffar Chishti, Sarah Pierce, and Jessica Bolter, 3-22-2018, "Even as Congress Remains on Sidelines, the Trump
Administration Slows Legal Immigration," migrationpolicy.org, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/even-congress-remains-sidelines-
trump-administration-slows-legal-immigration//NR)
While the President has repeatedly advocated for an immigration system that favors high-skilled immigration, his administration’s
policies have thus far worked to limit or slow the admission of some high-skilled immigrants. For example,
the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has mandated in-person interviews for all employment-
based permanent residency applicants, a practice previously confined to cases that raised specific
concerns. In a statement with stakeholders, the USCIS Ombudsman office indicated that diverting resources to
this process will inevitably slow processing of family-based immigration and naturalization petitions in
the short term. On April 18, 2017, Trump signed the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, which directed the Departments
of State, Justice, Labor, and Homeland Security to issue new rules and guidance to protect the interests of U.S. workers and prevent fraud and
abuse in the immigration system. It also tasked the agencies with suggesting reforms to ensure that H-1B visas are awarded only to the most-
skilled or highest-paid beneficiaries. Since then, the
government has taken several steps to meet that objective by
focusing more attention on employers who sponsor workers on H-1B and L-1B visas. This heightened scrutiny is
to ensure a proper employer-employee relationship exists, especially when the H-1B employee is placed at a third-party site. The
administration also rescinded a policy that allowed for minimal review in cases where previous nonimmigrant visa recipients were extending or
renewing a visa. While the government has yet to release data on H-1B adjudications since the start of the Trump administration, reports have
indicated rising levels of denials and challenges, or “requests for evidence” (RFEs). Between January 1 and August 31, 2017, the
number of
RFEs in H-1B cases increased by 45 percent, while total H-1B petitions rose by less than 3 percent in the
same period. As a result of the greater scrutiny and rescission of the deference policy, individuals on their
third or fourth H-1B renewals are now being denied, leaving them to face the choice of either
immediately leaving the country or overstaying their authorized status. The administration also indicated that it
intends to propose regulatory changes in the H-1B program, including: Modifying the selection process for applications subject to the H-1B visa
cap to choose the most skilled and/or highest-paid individuals. Redefining “specialty occupation” to restrict the number of people who qualify.
Redefining “employment” and “employer-employee relationship,” again to limit the number of people who qualify. Adding additional
requirements to ensure employers pay appropriate wages to H-1B visa holders. Establishing an electronic registration program for employers
filing for H-1B visas that are subject to the “H-1B cap.” The
administration has also indicated it intends in June to end
an Obama-era policy allowing spouses of some H-1B visa holders to apply for work authorization. Under the
policy, from May 2015 through June 2017 more than 71,000 spouses (H-4 visa holders) were granted work
authorization. Of these, 94 percent were female and 93 percent were Indian nationals. If the policy is
rescinded, many H-4 visa holders—who may spend decades in the United States while waiting for
their spouses’ backlogged employment-based green cards—will not be able to lawfully work.
Block – H-4
Incredible processing times for H-4 visas and the USCIS denies applicants –
overwhelms certainty.
Hellman, 7/03/18 – [Staff-writer @ The Seattle Weekly, “The Deferred Dreams of Working Women
on H-4 Visas”, (http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/the-deferred-dreams-of-working-women-on-h-4-
visas/)//MM
For starters, Nancy arrived in Washington from Hyderabad, India, in March 2011, a month after getting an arranged marriage to her husband,
who worked in the U.S. on the H-1B program—a three-year visa for highly skilled workers in specialty jobs. Adjusting
to life in
America was difficult for Nancy as an H-4 visa holder whose immigration status depended on her husband’s
employment. What’s more, the program’s regulations prohibited her from working at the time. Upon boarding
the plane to America, she left behind her successful careers as a staff nurse at a cardiology hospital and a clinical instructor in psychology and
psychiatry—work that she believed fulfilled her life’s purpose. Lokesh Marenayakanapalya, a software engineer at F5 Networks, is one of the
roughly 30,000 high-skilled Indian green-card applicants throughout Washington. Photo by Melissa Hellmann Birds in a Cage: The Indian Green
Card BacklogFeb 21, 2018 “I thought I can work as a nurse,” Nancy says as she places her arms on her dining-room table, a soccer ball resting at
her feet, “but when I came to here, my hopes, my dreams, everything came down when I found out I can’t really work.” Wisps of dark hair
frame Nancy’s face, a red bindi placed between her eyebrows. As she talks, her son sits on a leather couch behind her, watching TV and eating a
bowl of popcorn. Nancy
remained hopeful that she could return to the workforce one day, despite crushing
evidence to the contrary. Yet she powered on, opting to begin the laborious process of becoming a registered nurse once again, this
time via the U.S. system. It entailed a several-year process of applying for verification, then taking national nursing and English-language
proficiency exams, all while she volunteered at Bellevue’s Overlake Hospital Medical Center and reared her first child. “Since childhood
onwards, my passion was to help others. Even my mom said, ‘You have to help others,’ ” Nancy says as she nods toward her visiting mother,
who is cleaning in the kitchen. The four “really frustrating” years that Nancy was stuck in the house without a job came to an end in 2015, when
the Obama administration introduced a rule that allowed H-4 visa holders to work as long as their spouses on H-1B visas had applied to be a
lawful permanent resident. Since her husband had applied for his green card a year earlier, she immediately began working at a skilled nursing
facility in Redmond. “I really felt confident about myself. I felt like, OK, I’m right back to my feet again,” Nancy says, clasping her hands. But the
freedom she’s experienced over the past few years could all come crashing down, because the
Trump administration announced
last year that it would repeal the Obama-era rule. Since 2015, over 84,000 women on H-4 visas like Nancy
have been granted the right to work, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data. The
Department of Homeland Security cited President Trump’s April 2017 Buy American, Hire American Executive Order, which called for a review
of the H-1B program, as the motive for rescinding the rule. The rule was set to reverse in February 2018, but the revocation date was later
deferred to June. Yetas the June deadline came and went, USCIS still hadn’t completed the rule-making
process. (USCIS officials didn’t respond to Seattle Weekly’s request for an updated timeline on plans to rescind the rule.) “The agency is
considering a number of policy and regulatory changes to carry out the President’s Buy American, Hire
American Executive Order, including a thorough review of employment-based visa programs,” USCIS
spokesperson Michael Bars wrote in a statement emailed to Seattle Weekly. “USCIS is focused on safeguarding the integrity of our immigration
system and ensuring its faithful execution so that the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers are protected. USCIS is committed to
reforming employment-based immigration programs so they benefit the American people to the greatest extent possible.” Amid
the
multilayered immigration debate permeating the country—which includes the Trump administration’s Muslim ban and
“zero-tolerance” family separation policy—many H-4 visa holders at risk of losing their employment authorizations
say that their stories are being forgotten. And this is an issue that disproportionately impacts women.
According to a recent Migration Policy Institute study, 94 percent of the H-4 visa holders with work permits in early 2017 were women (93
percent of whom originated in India, 4 percent from China). Advocacy groups created by the recipients of H-4 work permits contend that the
visa holders deserve to work when they follow their spouses to the U.S., because they are mainly highly educated contributors to the U.S.
economy. Compounding the issue, the
per-country limit for immigrants to receive green cards is capped at 7
percent, which creates a bottleneck for Indian and Chinese workers, who are among the most-numerous
employment-based applicants. In a February interview, Lokesh Marenayakanapalya of GC Reforms—a national group of Indians advocating for employment-based immigration reform—told Seattle Weekly that over 30,000 people on
H-1B visas in Washington state are waiting for their employment-based green cards, and that many of them won’t receive permanent residency for over 90 years, according to current green-card approval trends. Opponents of the employment-authorization rule blame H-1B workers and
their employed H-4 spouses for taking jobs from American citizens. Shortly after the rule that granted employment to some H-4 spouses went into effect, a group of IT workers called Save Jobs USA said that they lost work to H-1B employees. They filed a lawsuit against the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) in April 2015 under the “allegation that its members will face even more competition from foreign workers as a result of the Rule,” the lawsuit stated. John Miano, attorney for Save Jobs USA, considered the Obama administration’s employment authorization of
some H-4 visa holders unlawful because it bypassed Congressional approval, “which is why the Trump administration is trying to gracefully pull it down, rather than have the plug pulled by the courts,” he told Seattle Weekly. “The whole concept of the president unilaterally deciding to
allow foreign labor into the United States should be repugnant to American citizens, and we should be screaming over that. That’s something that a dictator does, that’s not something a president does.” If H-4 visa holders want to work, they should apply for their own H-1B visas, Miano
argued. “If the H-1B workers are supposed to be filling jobs that Americans can’t fill, what are the H-4 workers doing?” he questioned. However, the H-4 visa holders interviewed for this story said that it’s not that easy to receive an employee-sponsored work permit. H-1B visas are
awarded every year through a random selection process that is capped at 65,000 workers, along with an additional 20,000 for people with advanced degrees. This year, USCIS received over 190,000 applications, and filled the quota in less than a week after the filing period opened in April.
Miano posited that the quota would not be met so quickly if Congress restricted the qualifications for the H-1B program to only the highest-skilled workers. He claims the mere existence of the H-4 work authorization program is unfair to American workers. “Americans all over the country
are losing their jobs and being replaced by H-1B workers … the media doesn’t give a wet fart about it. H-4 workers, the spouses of the replacements, are threatened to lose their jobs, and the American media is all over it. Why is that?” Although the H-4 work authorization program has
not existed long enough to examine its effects, Tahmina Watson, a Seattle-based immigration lawyer and founder of Watson Immigration Law, said that “rhetoric that immigrants are taking jobs away is just rhetoric to create fear and anxiety in the broader community.” In fact, a 2017
study from the Center for Global Development stated that American workers “were better off by about $431 million (or $1,345 per additional migrant) in 2010 because of the H-1B program.” Nancy rejects the notion that she’s taking a job from an American. Whenever she’s run into her
manager in the breakroom over the past month, she says, her employer has been sympathetic to her predicament, insisting that Nancy’s work is needed in the facility. In fact, the national nursing shortage is so pronounced that more registered-nurse jobs will be available than any other
job in the U.S. by 2022, according to the American Nurses Association. “We are paying taxes, we are serving the people. And what kind of harm did we do?” Nancy wonders. Her income is imperative to her family, she says, and the work helps boost her confidence. Revoking the H-4 work
authorization would deprive the country of the talents of highly educated immigrant workers, advocates argue. A recent survey created by SaveH4EAD (Employment Authorization Document), a national group of H-4 work permit holders, found that 55 percent of the 2,411 respondents
throughout the U.S. have a post-graduate or professional degree and 38 percent have at least a bachelor’s degree. Additionally, 60 percent of them pay at least $5,000 in taxes. Sam (who also asked for her name to be changed to protect her identity) is one of the highly educated women
on an H-4 visa in Washington who fears that her skills will go to waste if she’s unable to continue working. Although she had nearly completed her dentistry degree in Nagpur, India, when she married her husband, Mr. Kukreja (who asked that his first name not be given), in 2011, Sam
knew that she would have to enroll in a U.S. dentistry program to practice in Washington after reuniting with him the next year. Mr. Kukreja had moved to the U.S. to work as a software developer at a major retail company in Seattle under the H-1B program in 2010. Despite knowing she
would be unemployed before she arrived, Sam still found it “pretty depressing” to be stuck at home while her husband was at w ork when she moved to Issaquah in 2012. The disappointment of being unable to use her eight years of dentistry education compounded with the isolation of
living in a community where she didn’t know anyone. After all, she’d lived with about 20 members of her extended family under one roof in India for her entire life. The culture shock was stark. “When I moved here, I was just sitting at home alone,” Sam recalls. The couple decided that
they would have their first child in the U.S. and stay in the Seattle-area for a couple of years before moving back to India, so Sam could finally start practicing dentistry. “I want my wife to be happy,” Mr. Kukreja says as he sits across from Sam in a Bellevue Starbucks on a recent Monday
evening. “We have 100-plus years of green-card waiting. I don’t think that a spouse can wait for 100 years. It’s more than a lifetime.” But after two years of volunteering as an assistant at Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission’s free dentistry clinic, Sam saw a possibility to remain in the country
and work under the Obama administration’s H-4 employment-authorization rule. Comforted by the job security the new rule offered, Sam took a leap of faith and borrowed a $250,000 pers onal loan from India to enroll at the University of Washington School of Dentistry in 2015. Mr.
Kukreja had already applied for a green card in 2013, so Sam figured that she could easily secure an H-4 work permit by the time she graduated in June 2017. Additionally, the H-4 employment authorization offered the flexibility that she desired in her career. “With the H-4 EAD, I have the
freedom to choose my employer. But with the H-1B, we are restricted to one employer and you don’t get to experience more,” Sam said. She’s now working part-time as an associate dentist at a clinic in Redmond and another in Bothell. Sam has considered opening a private practice, but
the uncertainty of the H-4 permit’s future has stalled her plans. To be safe, she recently applied for an H-1B visa that
now puts the future of her career at the mercy of a lottery. But even if she did land an H-1B visa, she wouldn’t be able to achieve her dream of
creating her own clinic, and she would be tethered to the employer who sponsored her visa. Sam is unsure what she’ll do if her current work
permit is rescinded and she’s unable to secure an H-1B visa, but she insists she needs to continue working to pay off her school loan and
support her growing family. “I
don’t want to stay here if I cannot work,” Sam says resolutely. “I’ve spent so much
money, and my time, and experience, and learning.”
Block – HSI
No solvency – Trump’s USCIS will deny high-skilled immigrant’s entry on an ad-hoc
basis, specifically Chinese A.I. workers – and, there are alt causes to uncertainty.
Anderson, 7/25/18 – [Stuart, Contributor @ Forbes, “New Evidence USCIS Policies Increased Denials
Of H-1B Visas”, (https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/25/new-evidence-uscis-
policies-increased-denials-of-h-1b-visas/#5aec9b315a9f)]//MM
At the same time the Trump administration has launched a trade war premised, in part, on worry that China will
pass the U.S. in the technologies of the future, Trump officials are guaranteeing America will not have the
talent to produce such technologies by blocking the entry of foreign-born scientists and engineers. New
data show that in 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) denied many more H-1B petitions and issued
numerous costly Requests for Evidence to stop highly educated foreign nationals from working in America.
“Soon after Donald Trump issued the ‘Buy American and Hire American’ presidential executive order on April 18, 2017, U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services started to increase both the Requests for Evidence (RFEs) and denials for H-1B petitions for high-skilled foreign-born
professionals,” according to a new report from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). Data obtained by NFAP from U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services show the impact of the administration’s efforts, particularly in the 4th quarter of Fiscal
Year 2017 (which started July 1, 2017). Table 1: Denial Rate for H-1B Petitions 3rd Quarter of FY 2017 15.9% 4th
Quarter of FY 2017 22.4% Source: USCIS, National Foundation for American Policy. An analysis of the USCIS data in the report finds: “The
proportion of H-1B petitions denied for foreign-born professionals increased by 41% increase from the 3rd to the
4th quarter of FY 2017, rising from a denial rate of 15.9% in the 3rd quarter to 22.4% in the 4th quarter. “The number of Requests for
Evidence in the 4th quarter of FY 2017 almost equaled the total number issued by USCIS adjudicators for the first three quarters of FY 2017
combined (63,184 vs. 63,599). Failure
to comply with an adjudicator’s Request for Evidence will result in the
denial of an application. “As a percentage of completed cases, the Request for Evidence rate was approximately 69% in the 4th
quarter compared to 23% in the 3rd quarter of FY 2017. “Demonstrating the trend in adjudications is continuing, in the 1st quarter of FY 2018
the denial rate was 30.5% for L-1B petitions (for employees with ‘specialized knowledge’) and 29.2% in the 2nd quarter of FY 2018, both
representing an increase from a denial rate of 24% for L-1B petitions in FY 2016.” Table 2: Number of Requests for Evidence for H-1B Petitions
Quarters 1, 2 and 3 of FY 2017 Combined 63,599 Quarter 4 of FY 2017 63,184 Source: USCIS, National Foundation for American Policy. It is
logical that the
big increases in denials and Requests for Evidence did not happen immediately after Donald Trump
took office. “It took some time to get people in to many of the key positions,” said immigration attorney Greg Siskind in an
interview. “Once we saw who was being appointed, a who’s who of stars in the anti-immigration world, no one was really
surprised with what we’re seeing.” MORE FROM FORBES Forbes Insights 6 Ways The Internet Of Things Is Improving The Quality Of
Urban Life KPMG BrandVoice Customers Demand Agile Orgs (They Just Don't Tell You!) KPMG BrandVoice It's 2018: Do You Know Where Your
Digital Bank Is? Making
adjudications more difficult is only one facet of a broad-based administration plan to
prevent high-skilled foreign nationals from working in the United States. This recent article explains the harsh
consequences of the new USCIS policy memo on Notices to Appear, which could result in a foreign-born scientist or engineer being placed in
deportation proceedings if their H-1B or other application is denied and the long processing time leaves the individual no longer still in status.
Another new policy would allow adjudicators to deny applications without providing a Request for
Evidence or giving employers a chance to correct information on applications. U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services also plans to prevent the spouses of many H-1B visa holders from working and to
restrict or end the ability of international students to work on Optional Practical Training (OPT) after they complete
their studies, even if they have degrees in science, technology engineering and math (STEM) fields. This would make it difficult
or impossible for many international students to obtain H-1B status after graduating from U.S. universities, which is a longstanding goal of key
Trump immigration policymakers. And this
brings us back to the Trump administration’s plans to impose tariffs on
possibly all Chinese imports – an ill-conceived policy that will raise prices for American consumers and close off
many export markets for U.S. producers. The administration claims a key motivation is to allow the United States to prevail in the
development of the next decade’s emerging technologies and overcome “China’s stated intention of seizing economic leadership in advanced
technology.” “One target of U.S. ire is the Made-in-China 2025 program, which oversees billions of dollars in subsidies to develop champions in
artificial intelligence, robotics, low-emissions vehicles and quantum computing,” writes David Lynch in the Washington Post. If the goal is
for the U.S. to “beat” China in technologies such as artificial intelligence and low-emission and autonomous
vehicles, then the worst possible thing to do is what the Trump administration is doing – making it as difficult
as possible for high-skilled foreign nationals, particularly international students in STEM fields, to work in the United
States. Economists Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih and Chad Sparber researched H-1B visas and found, “When we aggregate at the national level,
inflows of foreign STEM workers explain between 30% and 50% of the aggregate productivity growth that took place in the United States
between 1990 and 2010.” Moreover, the entry of H-1B visa holders actually increases the wages of Americans: “A 1 percentage point increase
in the foreign STEM share of a city’s total employment increased the wage growth of native college-educated labor by about 7–8 percentage
points and the wage growth of non-college-educated natives by 3–4 percentage points.” Even though approximately 80% of full-time graduate
students in computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are international students and provide enormous benefits to the
country, the
Trump administration would like nothing better than to prevent these talented individuals
from working in America. It would be difficult to craft a more misguided policy.
Employment-based backlogs are inevitable because of processing delays.

Nickelsburg, 18 – [GeekWire’s Civic Innovation Editor, covering technology-driven solutions to urban
challenges and the intersection of tech and politics. Before joining GeekWire, she worked for The Week,
Forbes, and NBC. Monica holds a BA in journalism and history from New York University. “Families
brought to U.S. for tech jobs face ‘infuriating and degrading’ delays from USCIS”,
(https://www.geekwire.com/2018/families-brought-u-s-tech-jobs-face-infuriating-degrading-delays-
uscis/)]//MM
Jansi Kumar immigrated from India to the United States in 2016 because of a promise. She would be allowed
to work. Her husband was already living in America on an H-1B visa — the type companies like Microsoft use to hire international talent.
Spouses of H-1B visa holders typically receive H-4 visas but historically those did not allow them to earn an income in the country. That changed
in 2015 when an executive order from President Barack Obama gave H-4 visa holders whose spouses are in line
for green cards the ability to apply for employment authorization documents (EAD). That policy change convinced
Kumar. She joined her husband in Seattle and started working as a technical recruiter. “The only reason I came to the U.S. was
because I knew the EAD was there and I would be able to work,” she said. “If it was not there I would have asked my
spouse to come back to India or relocate to Canada or any other location.” Now, employment authorization for H-4 visa
holders is on the chopping block. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security said it plans to rescind the Obama-era policy
allowing H-4s to work, though DHS has delayed the rule-changing process several times. If her work authorization is revoked,
Kumar and her husband plan to leave the U.S. I see myself as a very independent person. I don’t know what I would do if I
couldn’t work. “I don’t think I could see myself not working,” she said. “All the women in my family have been independent people. I see myself
as a very independent person. I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t work.” Kumar’s story is not unique. Thousands
of people like
her immigrated to the U.S. with spouses on skilled work visas under the expectation that they too would
be authorized to continue their careers. But a series of policy changes tied to President Donald Trump’s “Buy
American, Hire American” executive order has many families who came to the U.S. to work in the tech industry
questioning whether they want to remain here. Many of them cite increased delays in the amount of
time it takes to process employment authorization documents. In the past, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was
required to process those applications within 90 days. But the Buy American, Hire American order rescinded the 90-day rule, which means
applicants are now waiting six months or more to receive their documents. The changes are part of the
administration’s effort to streamline and reform work visa programs and ensure that American workers are the top
priority. Some of the delays can also be attributed to an increased volume of applications. Kumar doesn’t want to leave the U.S. and she’s
doing everything she can to convince the government to keep H-4 work authorization intact. She co-founded an advocacy group on Facebook
called SaveH4EAD which has grown to 6,000 members. Kumar said she and other members of the group spend at least an hour and a half each
day speaking with their representatives and advocating on the issue. Kirsten Eklund, an immigration attorney with MacDonald Hoague &
Bayless, said the process to rescind the H-4 work authorization rule could start as early as this month. “You’re talking about 27,000-plus people
no longer having that benefit going forward,” she said. President Donald Trump speaks at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (DOD Photo /
Dominique A. Pineiro) USCIS
is “considering a number of policy and regulatory changes to carry out the
President’s Buy American, Hire American Executive Order, including a thorough review of employment-
based visa programs,” according to Sharon Rummery, a public affairs officer for the agency. “USCIS is committed to reforming employment-based immigration programs so they benefit the American
people to the greatest extent possible,” she said. Kumar is waiting to see whether the Trump administration follows through on its promise to end H-4 work authorization. But others have already made that difficult decision to
leave. The last straw Helen was working as an employment attorney and living in the United Kingdom with her family when her husband received a job offer to join a large Seattle-area tech company. The new employer would
sponsor her husband for an L1 visa, which allows highly skilled international talent to work in the U.S. Since spouses of L1 visa holders are also allowed to work in the country with the proper documentation, they decided to take
the plunge and continue both of their careers in America. That was back in 2015, when the 90-day rule was still in effect. Helen, who asked GeekWire not to use her last name because of her husband’s employment status, received
an offer for a temporary position with the same big tech company where her husband worked in 2017. But her employment authorization documents (EAD) expired just two weeks after she started the new gig. That meant she had
to put the job on hold for four months until it could be renewed. Her application to expedite the process was denied. She was finally able to start the job in January. A few months later, the company offered her a permanent
position. She was eager to take it but she was staring down the barrel of another long wait for employment documents. Her husband’s visa was coming up for renewal, which meant she had to start the application process all over
again. It’s infuriating and degrading and the thought of going through this process [again] is frankly not one we can be bothered to do. “It’s infuriating and degrading and the thought of going through this process [again] is frankly
not one we can be bothered to do,” Helen said. Faced with another false start to her career and aging parents back home who needed care, Helen and her family decided to move to Ireland. She still hadn’t received her
employment authorization documents by the time she left the country on June 20. “It makes me feel like they just don’t want us as workers in America but I think it’s just ridiculously bad
business,” Helen said. Later she added, “Why on earth if they’re giving us the right to work, aren’t they actually enabling us to work and pay tax? We’re here. Most of the people have families. We’re using schools and
roads and other things that general taxes pay for.” Holding out hope Some are willing to endure delays and frustration because of the promise that the American economy offers. Take Sarah, who asked to have her name changed
because of her employment authorization status. Like Helen, she and her husband moved to the U.S. in 2015 after he received a job offer under a skilled work visa. Her plan was to start a consulting company. “It was a huge part of
our adventure in life to relocate here, me to start my business, have more time as a family, enjoy all that Seattle has to offer as well as the career opportunities,” she said. Sarah did start her business when they arrived and then
took some time off in 2016 when she became pregnant. By the time she was ready to return, the immigration landscape had changed. She applied for her documents in June 2017 and didn’t receive them until May of this year,
It felt like I wasn’t wanted here. I wasn’t allowed to work here even though I
though she admits part of the delay was due to a form error.
was really willing and had made a lot of sacrifices to be here and to work and be of service. “It felt really
personal,” she said. “It felt like I wasn’t wanted here. I wasn’t allowed to work here even though I was really willing and had made a lot of
sacrifices to be here and to work and be of service. When the visa came through, I realized it hadn’t been about that. It’s not personal. It was
the system. It was political.” Politics and bureaucracy It’s
difficult to gauge how much of this glue in the system can be
attributed to a political agenda versus simple bureaucracy. Doug Rand — co-founder of immigration startup Boundless and
an Obama White House alumnus — says it’s likely a little of both. “There’s an innocent explanation for these wait times, which have
been going up for years now as volume has increased,” he said. “At the same time, it’s no secret that the current
administration wants many kinds of immigration applications to receive much greater scrutiny, which
can create further delays.” That scrutiny is a pillar of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
The federal government is concerned with work-visa programs that aren’t tightly regulated because its
ultimate goal is to preserve jobs for American workers. “The rationale from the administration’s perspective is that these
are unrestricted employment authorizations that potentially — if you’re talking about Buy American, Hire American — these EADs have no
other types of restrictions on them,” said Eklund, the immigration attorney. “There’s no cap, there’s no lottery. There’s no restrictions on where
you’re employed.” Whatever the root causes, there’s a clear effect on people like Helen. Just before she left the U.S., she received a request for
additional information on her EAD application. She believes the information was erroneously requested because it was
related to a missing answer on a question required for a different category of work authorization than
the one she applied for. Helen said the application had been reviewed by immigration attorneys. An employment lawyer herself, she
also personally verified the form was correct. “To me, it felt like a delay tactic, but perhaps I’m wrong,” Helen said. “Let’s just say my
interactions with the Irish authorities so far have been incomparably smoother and quicker than with the U.S.”
Block – Indian Visas
Trump’s USCIS rejects Indian visas.
Bhattacharya, 18 – [Ananya, Reporter @ Quartz: India, “The US is rejecting more and more Indian H-
1B applicants”, (https://qz.com/1335857/indias-h-1b-visa-applicants-are-getting-rejected-at-higher-
rate/)]//MM
The Donald Trump administration’s crackdown on work visas is hitting Indians disproportionately hard. Between
July and September 2017, the US denied H-1B visas to 23.6% of Indian applicants, up from 16.6% in the three
preceding months, according to the latest data (pdf) released by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), a non-profit,
non-partisan organisation dedicated to public policy research. This increased scrutiny is a result of president Trump’s “Buy
American and Hire American” executive order signed in April 2017. “It took some time to get people into many of the key
positions,” immigration attorney Greg Siskind told the NFAP. “Once we saw who was being appointed, a who’s who of stars in the anti-
immigration world, no one was really surprised with what we’re seeing.” Besides the uptick in outright denials, there has also been a
sharp increase in the number of requests for evidence (RFE). These are notices the US authorities issue to visa applicants
seeking more information on their applications. Between July and September 2017, the Trump administration issued 63,184 RFEs, compared to
63,599 RFEs issued during the nine months prior. Several lawyers previously told Quartz that their clients were struggling with the high number
of RFEs, which not only delay the visa process but also increase costs for companies. Here, too, Indians took a severe beating. Between July and
September 2017, up to 72% of Indians applying for H-1B visas received RFEs, compared to 61% for all other
countries. Between October and December 2016, during which period president Barack Obama was in office, only 18.2% of Indian
applicants were asked to submit supplementary material. And it’s not just the H-1B applicants who are in trouble. Other
US work visas Almost half (48%) of the petitions for the L-1B—a visa category meant for existing employees
with specialised skills—filed for Indian nationals were denied between July and September 2017. As NFAP
explained: “…due to the time and expense, employers and attorneys only send in applications for
individuals they believe have a good chance of gaining approval, which means it makes little sense to
attribute an increase in the denial rate to a sudden influx of unqualified applicants, rather new
restrictive policies.” Even the L-1A visa, used by firms to transfer managers and executives to the US, saw the number of denials for
Indians climb up to 16.4% by September 2017, up from 9.5% in December 2016. This trend may further pick up pace in the future. In a July 13
memo (pdf), the US Citizenship and Immigration Services equipped its officers with the right to outright deny an application without furnishing
RFEs first.
Block – Refugees
Multiple factors block refugee entry permanently – durable fiat doesn’t solve – Trump
and USCIS will use bureaucratic lawyering to keep admissions incredibly low.
Hoffman, 18 – [Meredith Hoffman is a freelance journalist who who has covered immigration for AP,
Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and VICE, “Trump Has Slowed Refugee Admissions to a Crawl”,
(https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/26/refugee-resettlement-confusion-executive-
orders-217038)]//MM
**edited for ableist language
If refugee arrivals continue at the same pace as they have been for the past five months, the
United States is on track to resettle just
half the number President Trump declared was the ceiling this fiscal year: 45,000, already a historically low
number. Just 6,704 refugees were resettled in the first quarter of 2018, which started in October, according to the
State Department’s Refugee Processing Center, compared with 25,671 in 2017 and 13,791 in 2016. And in the few weeks after the
so-called Muslim ban on refugees from 11 countries was lifted, from Jan. 21 to Feb. 15, the United States had received only 53 such individuals,
who typically make up about half of all refugee arrivals, according to resettlement workers. In a year in which the president simply
banned whole groups of refugees from entering the United States, it’s far from unexpected that arrivals
would be below those of previous administrations. But Trump’s high-profile executive orders halting refugee admissions last
year are just part of the resettlement program’s disruptions. More than a year after the original ban, resettlement workers paint a
picture of chaos and confusion, and a field that has been upended by dramatic, sometimes seemingly arbitrary,
changes. “If the refugee resettlement program were an assembly line in a factory, it works efficiently because every station knows what to
do and how to do the handoff,” said Barbara Strack, who was chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services
(USCIS) in the Department of Homeland Security until retiring three weeks ago. “What the administration has done this year is
break that assembly line in multiple places at the same time.” Family reunification cases, or follow-to-join cases like the
Janes, are a striking example of how administrative obstacles have **hindered** one part of the refugee
resettlement process. These cases have been among the most stymied, even after the court ordered they resume. Fewer than 25
such individuals arrived in the first five weeks after the program’s resumption in late December, a
resettlement source said. By comparison, about 200 such individuals typically arrived each month under the Obama Administration. The
backlog of pending follow-to-join cases has exploded in recent months, said Angie Plummer, executive director of the refugee
resettlement organization Community Refugee & Immigration Services in Columbus, Ohio, who has worked on follow-to-join cases for the past
25 years. “It seems like they’re getting bottle-necked and now nothing is moving forward,” said Plummer, who has 58
pending follow-to-join cases, including Jane’s, in her local office alone. “Typically, this is a pretty straightforward process.”
Plummer says many of her clients are stuck in the middle of their application process, and for others, USCIS gives her no explanation
than that the case is in “administrative processing.” “These cases should have begun to travel, and what
we’ve seen is just a trickle,” said Danielle Grigsby, associate director of Refugee Council USA, a coalition of over two dozen
resettlement agencies. A State Department spokeswoman attributed the follow-to-join delays to “changes to screening and vetting of follow-
to-join refugees.” She said 150 follow-to-join individuals had received travel documents since the December court order, but could not confirm
how many had been booked for travel. Strack attributed the delays to updated security checks, which DHS, the State Department and the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence had found were necessary in the 120-day interagency review after the President’s March
executive order halting refugee resettlement. “Overall, the
resettlement program will take a while to rebound,” she said.
“It’s just not sufficiently resilient that it can draw down and have so many things change, and then
resume at traditional processing levels quickly.” This is a key point about these executive orders: The
resumption of complex, layered federal processes can often accomplish
the same thing as the original ban, and for a longer amount of time,
“putting gum in the cogs of a system that has functioned quite well
since its inception,” in Grigsby’s words. On an individual level, this confusion can be devastating. In Jane’s case,
Plummer received an email from the U.S. Embassy in Kampala, Uganda, last October saying the paper file had been sent back to USCIS “due to a
large backlog and lack of physical space in our office,” and that the Embassy planned on “requesting the return of these files before the end of
the year.” But just after that email, Trump’s executive order halted all follow-to-join processing. Since then, Plummer has received no updates
about Jane, and USCIS has announced it will no longer process follow-to-join applications in Uganda. Instead, all those cases will be moved to
Nairobi, Kenya, added to the applications already there. “Every
time they redesign the process it takes time to figure out
how things will work. Meanwhile, I have some client standing in the parking lot outside our office every day
asking, ‘Do you have an update about my family?’” said Plummer. “It’s excruciating.” It’s not just the
bureaucratic re-routing that is holding up the process. Another dramatic impetus for the drop in refugee arrivals is
that USCIS is assigning about half of its Refugee Affairs Division officers to the border and to asylum
offices in the U.S. interior instead of abroad, Strack said, which has a dramatic effect on USCIS’ capacity to
do refugee interviews. Under past administrations the reverse has been true: Asylum officers were occasionally sent abroad to help
screen refugees, especially under the Obama administration, which ordered as many asylum officers as necessary to help screen enough
refugees to reach the ceiling, she said. (The Obama administration came just shy of its 85,000 ceiling in fiscal year 2016, with 84,994 refugees.)
With only half the resettlement officers working abroad as usual, the Department of Homeland Security has had
to cut back drastically on trips for employees to screen refugees in those countries, known as circuit rides. DHS
cut its circuit rides to fewer than five locations abroad in the first quarter of this fiscal year, which began in
October, resettlement sources said. That’s less than one-third the usual amount in that same time period in previous administration. The
rides were also shorter, staffed with fewer officers and included none to the Middle East, multiple
resettlement sources confirmed. And while DHS has added more locations to its second quarter, the rides will remain much shorter than their
usual six-to-eight-week duration, and still include no Middle East locations. That’s because the
agency anticipated that updated
security or processing requirements would force them to re-interview anyone from these countries after
the end of Trump’s October executive order, or that certain categories of refugees could be d-
prioritized. This lack of circuit rides has caused countless refugees to watch their medical screenings and
background checks expire, said Erol Kekic, executive director of the Immigration and Refugee Program for the resettlement agency
Church World Service. On their circuit rides, DHS conducts interviews with refugees who have already undergone
about two years of checks. “Every single process in refugee resettlement takes time and has an
expiration date,” said Kekic. “They need to be sending circuit rides out to move people through the system, and refugees who are
interviewed in the third and fourth quarter of this year won’t be booked for travel until next year.” These delays have already cut down the
expected number of yearly refugees to a fraction of previous administrations’ goals, but the
worst might be yet to come. The
Trump administration officially resumed accepting refugees from the 11 formerly banned countries in mid-
January—but with the announcement came enhanced security measures not just for the individuals from those
countries but for all refugees. The new measures include “additional screening for certain nationals of high-risk countries,” administering
the program in a “more risk-based manner,” and “a periodic review and update of the refugee high-risk country list.” As a result, a State
Department spokeswoman said that “processing time may be slower” while they implement additional security “to
identify threats to public safety and national security,” and processing times may also be impacted by “security checks,
medical checks and the operational capacity of DHS.” A USCIS representative did not return repeated requests for comment. Strack says that
the security measures were enhancements to the overall integrity of the process, and she said the agency could not share more details about
the checks because it was classified information. But for
resettlement workers, that lack of detail about process
changes might be the most frustrating part. “We just know they will be additionally screened, but what
does that mean?” said Kekic. “Is that going to take 3 months or 3 days? What is the approval rate?” Kekic’s comments are part of a
broader chorus of complaints about a lack of communication from the federal government at the same time they’re making such dramatic
changes to the resettlement process. “We used to have regular meetings that the State Department would coordinate, and we’d talk about
things happening on the regional level,” Melanie Nezer, senior vice president of public affairs for the resettlement nonprofit HIAS said. “But
those haven’t happened since the inauguration,” she said. With
so little from the administration to persuade them
otherwise, the people I spoke to in the resettlement world all agreed on one thing: The Trump
administration is more than happy to stay far below that 45,000-refugee ceiling. “Past administrations have
looked at the ceiling as a goal,” said Strack, who served in the federal government 26 years and in refugee resettlement the past 12. “That’s not
the case for this administration.” Meanwhile, refugees like Jane are left waiting for updates on their cases, clinging to hope they will recover
their family again. “Before I got attacked I was with the children. It was meant to separate me from them forever, since it was meant to kill me,”
said Jane. “But I knew as long as I still have life we can get back together. So I still pray for that to happen.”
Block – Translators
**also look at the Tran et. al evidence under Circumvention – Generic
No solvency – translators are denied entry based on subjective ‘security concerns’ –

even then, the process takes nearly three years.
Magagnini, 17 – [Stephen, Staff-writer @ The Sacramento Bee, “American family wants to help
Afghan interpreter, but Trump administration says no”,
(https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article187680333.html)]//MM
Every day, Ken and Susie Perano wake up on their cattle ranch wondering whether Muhammad Kamran
and his wife and four daughters are still alive. For the past nine months, the Peranos and their daughter Kristy,
27, have been trying to get the U.S. government to grant entry to Kamran and his family. Kamran says he
fled Afghanistan after working as an interpreter for U.S. forces for 10 years. He now lives in Pakistan, where
he says he and his family stay in hiding to avoid being harmed by the Taliban or its surrogates. The Peranos have
agreed to sponsor the Kamran family for a year, covering all expenses, but so far the U.S. government has denied Kamran’s
applications for refugee status and humanitarian parole, an emergency status which grants entry for one year to some immigrants whose
lives are in danger. The government’s denial letter cites “security reasons” but doesn’t specify what those
are. “This is the most important fight of my life,” said Ken Perano, 62, a retired engineer and military contractor for Sandia Labs, who talks to
Kamran and his family on a secure phone line almost daily. “He’s done more for my country than I have.” Top of Form Be the first to know when
big news breaks Bottom of Form Kamran says he was forced to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban shot up his car
while his brother and nephew were inside. He says he has received death threats by letter and phone, and is terrified that the
Pakistan police or military will turn him over to the Taliban, Perano said. By denying them entry, “we’re giving a family of six
a death sentence,” he said. Ken Perano said he and his wife now consider the Kamrans part of their family and have already
designated two bedrooms for them, one for Kamran and his wife and the other for their daughters, ages 2 to 9. “I’m on board,” said Susie
Perano. “When I talk to his wife, Sharifa, I can feel her fear, I can see it in her eyes. I’m sure it will be challenging for everybody when they get
here, but I’m looking forward to it.” The Peranos said they can eventually move the Kamrans into an empty house on their 140-acre ranch. The
Peranos’ two grown sons, who live nearby, have offered to helped the family adjust to all phases of life in California, including getting their
driver’s licenses and enrolling in Medi-Cal and school. Kamran’s brother, also an interpreter for U.S. forces, was granted refugee status in 2013
and now lives in Georgia along with their sister. If the Kamrans can’t come to Jackson, his sister has asked to take the daughters, Ken Perano
said. The Peranos, who voted for Donald Trump, now wonder if the government’s rejection of Kamran and his
family reflects a policy shift under the new administration, given that it has reduced the flow of refugees into the U.S.,
particularly from Muslim countries. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman Claire Nicholson declined to comment
on the case, and could not provide the number of discretionary denials her department has issued in
humanitarian parole cases over the past year. While they hope and wait, the Perano family has been sending the Kamrans about $1,100
a month. They also have hired an immigration lawyer, Danielle Rosché of Seattle, who called the government’s denial of Kamran and his wife
and children for humanitarian parole “the most egregious case I have seen. “The reason he’s being targeted by the Taliban is because of his
work for U.S. forces, and I find
it particularly revolting that the U.S. government didn’t have any concern about
putting his life in danger and now we’re refusing him refuge,” she said. Sacramento has become home to several
thousand Afghan interpreters and others who were granted Special Immigrant Visas because of their service to U.S.
and coalition forces. Kamran could theoretically come to the United States with such a visa, but he has had difficulty
pulling together an application. When he fled Afghanistan, he left behind crucial contact information for his
superiors in the U.S. military, who would be needed to write letters of recommendation. He has since
obtained such a letter with the help of Kristy Perano, a UC Davis graduate who is now getting her doctorate in environmental engineering at
Cornell University. Kristy Perano said she used Linkedin to track down a former Navy officer who worked with Kamran. “Muhammad and his
fellow interpreters were absolutely critical to our mission’s success – without them we would not have been able to complete our objectives,”
wrote Karsten Daponte, a former Navy officer who worked with Kamran. Perano said she came across Kamran when she saw his plea on the
Facebook page of No One Left Behind, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to helping Afghan interpreters escape to safety. “It’s a
question of when and not if he is found tortured and murdered,” she said. Kamran said he has already been robbed, beaten end extorted by
police several times. Kristy Perano, who has been working more than 10 hours a week trying to help Kamran, said she has started a Change.org
petition that has collected over 13,000 signatures in support of the family. But the SIV path is not an easy one these days.
Rosché said the process takes 2 1/2 years and only a limited number of visas are issued each year. Kamran, 33, said he fled Pakistan
in 2014 after his brother and nephew were attacked while borrowing his car. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees forwarded his
case to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, but the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service denied him “as a matter of discretion for security
reasons,” according to the denial letter. Kamran appealed but was denied on Feb. 6, 2017, for the same reason, Rosché said. “They didn’t deny
Muhammad for providing material support to terrorists, they
denied him for nebulous security reasons. To me it’s very
suspicious.” When she and the Peranos asked the government to let the kids come to the United States, the government said “the
security risk relates to the entire family,” Rosché said. In October, each of Kamran’s family members, including the children,
received a denial notice.
Block – Trafficking
No solvency – the USCIS denies applications for T-Visas – and the system is so
overburdened applicants are deported before their visa can be approved.
Dahlstrom, 7/12/18 – [Julie Dahlstrom is the director of Boston University’s Law’s Immigrants’
Rights & Human Trafficking Program and a Clinical Associate Professor at Boston University School of
Law.” Trump's harsh immigration policies are a gift for human traffickers”,
(http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/396781-trumps-harsh-immigration-policies-are-a-gift-for-
human-traffickers)]//MM
The contradictions were palpable, as the Trafficking in Persons Report directly references the vulnerability of migrants and children to
trafficking without mention of recent U.S. policies that increased family separation and detention. This dissonance is not new, although recent
events have been particularly egregious. Since his inauguration, President
Trump has espoused strikingly different — and
dramatically inconsistent — approaches to immigration and human trafficking. In the context of immigration, he has
labeled entire immigrant communities as “criminals, “rapists,” and “traffickers,” while mobilizing
immigration enforcement efforts to root them out and deport them with no concern for due process. On
the other hand, the Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that ending human trafficking is a major foreign policy priority. Indeed, in
April 2018, Trump set off much debate by saying that "[t]rafficking is probably worse today than at any time in our history” — a fact
unsupported by existing anti-trafficking data. In a further flourish that now appears, at best, profoundly cynical, he told trafficking survivors,
“[y]ou are not alone.” And yet, immigrant survivors in the United States have never felt so alone. Despite the
administration’s occasional rhetoric about protecting survivors of trafficking, the brutal fact is that indiscriminate
targeting of
undocumented immigrants, including trafficking survivors, has sown chaos and fear in immigrant
communities. This makes survivors much less likely to cooperate with law enforcement, and more likely to be targeted
as victims. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, immigrant survivors of trafficking may qualify for
special forms of immigration protection, known as T visas (for trafficking survivors) or U visas (for survivors of certain
crimes, including trafficking). However, the path to immigration status is far from immediate or easy. Of 5,000
available visas, only 672 T visas were issued in fiscal year 2017. It often takes a year or more for the visa
to be granted, and during this time, most survivors have no protection from deportation and no ability to
work lawfully. In fact, on June 28, 2018, USCIS issued a new policy memorandum specifying that any survivor who applies for
T visas — and is denied — will be placed in deportation proceedings. This is a dramatic shift in USCIS
policy, which for many years, has refused to place T visa applicants in deportation proceedings for fear that it
would have a dramatic chilling effect on the filing of applications from immigrant survivors. In addition, to be eligible for
the T visa, survivors generally must cooperate with law enforcement, which has been cruelly complicated by the increasingly menacing immigration enforcement machinery humming in the background. Despite laudable efforts by
some law enforcement officials, cooperation is exceptionally challenging these days, and ICE officials have done little to reassure fearful survivors. In 2017, ICE Acting Chief Thomas Homan was asked in a press conference, “You are
not going to take advantage of the immigrant communities who are survivors, right?” and he merely replied, “Is there a population of illegal aliens that are off the table? I am not saying that.” Indeed, according to President
Trump’s Executive Order in January 2017 that expanded the priorities for deportation, anyone who is undocumented is an enforcement priority — apparently including survivors of trafficking and other crimes. Indeed, in the past
year, ICE has strenuously bolstered cooperation with local and state law enforcement, blurring the lines between criminal and immigration enforcement. Reports of ICE agents showing up at local courthouses — and even arresting
Add to this the impact of the “zero tolerance” policy and

survivors seeking restraining orders — have sparked considerable fear in immigrant communities.
family separation, and these developments do not inspire immigrant survivors or their legal advocates
to see police stations as beacons of hope. Rather, they result in fewer survivors coming forward. Faced with increasing
immigration enforcement and no clear guarantees of protection, many survivors will choose to stay hidden and silent.
Worse still, such policies only prime the pump for more victimization.
Trump policies and rhetoric deter immigrants from applying for LPR status – decks aff
solvency
Cox 17 (Natalie Cox, 2017, “Maintaining Refuge: Anthropological Reflections in Uncertain Times,”
American Anthropological Association) jl
It was during one of these extremely high-volume call days at the AAN when I
first met with Fatima (all names in this essay are
pseudonyms), a West African woman in the process of adjusting her legal status after she divorced her
abusive husband. As the spouse of an H-1B visa recipient, her legal status was directly tied to his. The only way she could remain in the
country with her American-born children was to apply for a U-visa, a special protection granted to victims of domestic violence, human
trafficking, or sexual assault (USCIS 2016). She knew her domestic violence charges against him would never make it to court if she left the
country, and she feared that if she returned home, her husband’s family might try to take custody of their children. However, only 10,000 U-
visas are distributed annually, there is a massive processing backlog, and the visa itself represents a temporary measure: it does not grant legal
permanent residency (USCIS 2016). But, as Fatima said in our meeting, “It is better than having no papers at all, especially now that he [Trump]
is in power.” Fatima is certainly not the first person with pending status to navigate the liminal (but increasingly common) spaces of the casual
labor market and other sources of temporary, quasi-legal compensation. But in the Trump era, the risks associated with obtaining any under-
thetable cash, however marginal, seem ever more amplified (as does my complicity in assisting people in similar predicaments with their
survival strategies). Nevertheless, Fatima and I combed through online ads together, looking for day labor housekeeping jobs, temporary
personal assistant positions, and focus groups or other market research which provided compensation. Some of the ads were obvious scams,
but some seemed like potentially promising ways to earn petty cash. “How about this one?” I asked, pointing to an ad for someone needing
help cleaning and organizing their home office. Fatima considered it, but then asked,“Is it true that ICE [Immigration and Customs
Enforcement] is now posting fake ads on Craigslist in order to catch people with no papers? I fear to give
anyone my information because of that.” I did not know how to reply, but her concerns seemed totally rational to me. After all,
if ICE felt empowered to arrest an undocumented transgender woman at a courthouse in El Paso, Texas,
while she filed a criminal case against her abusive ex-partner (Blitzer 2017), it seemed entirely plausible that
Craigslist could be used by ICE as a tool of entrapment. Then Fatima went on to say, “Honestly, I don’t know why I
bother. Maybe no one will hire me, not even when I get my papers. Because they see this (she pointed to her hijab), and they are afraid. And
there is so much racism too.” A media-savvy young woman, Fatima told me that she knew of the undercurrents
of anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant politics in the United States and, to her, the election of
Donald Trump signified the political legitimization and social dominance of such bigotry. After three years
living in the Bay Area, she was used to people staring at her headscarf, but now she was fearful of being targeted by ICE because of it.
Moreover, she
had no confidence that her papers would protect her from racial, religious, and gender
discrimination. Like many other AAN clients, Fatima felt the Trump Administration meant that even the ostensibly immigrant friendly and
politically-liberal San Francisco Bay Area was no longer a “safe place for a woman like her.”
Internal Link - ICE
Trump administration expands ICE enforcement capability and discretion in detention
Miroff and Sacchetti 18
Nick Miroff, national security correspondent who covers immigration enforcement, drug trafficking and
the Department of Homeland Security, and Maria Sacchetti, Reporter covering immigrant communities
and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, The Washington Post, “Trump takes ‘shackles’ off ICE,
which is slapping them on immigrants who thought they were safe,” 2/11/18,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-takes-shackles-off-ice-which-is-
slapping-them-on-immigrants-who-thought-they-were-safe/2018/02/11/4bd5c164-083a-11e8-b48c-
b07fea957bd5_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f32ebc6bdea5 //KW
Those facing deportation who show up for periodic “check-ins” with ICE to appeal for more time in the
United States can no longer be confident that good behavior will spare them from detention. Once-
routine appointments now can end with the immigrants in handcuffs.
More broadly, the Trump administration has given street-level ICE officers and field directors greater
latitude to determine whom they arrest and under what conditions, breaking with the more selective
enforcement approach of President Barack Obama’s second term.
Trump officials have likened this to taking “the shackles off,” and they say morale at ICE is up because its
officers have regained the authority to detain anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.
Officers are detaining suspects in courthouses more often, and ICE teams no longer shy from taking
additional people into custody when they knock on doors to arrest a targeted person.
“What are we supposed to do?” said Matthew Albence, the top official in the agency’s immigration
enforcement division, who described the administration’s goal as simply restoring the rule of law. If ICE
fails to uphold its duties to enforce immigration laws, he added, “then the system has no integrity.”
In addition to arresting twice as many immigrants who have not been convicted of crimes, ICE also
arrested 105,736 immigrants with criminal convictions, a slight increase. That figure includes people
with serious or violent offenses as well as those with lesser convictions, such as driving without a license
or entering the country illegally.
ICE’s arrest totals in Trump’s first year in office are still much lower than they were during Obama’s early
tenure, which the agency says is partly because it is contending with far more resistance from state and
local governments that oppose Trump’s policies. And the president’s repeated negative
characterizations of some immigrant groups have created an atmosphere in which arrests that were
once standard now erupt as political flash points.
Obama initially earned the moniker “deporter in chief” because his administration expelled hundreds of
thousands of immigrants, including people with no criminal records. But when Republicans blocked his
effort to create a path to citizenship for millions living in the country illegally, Obama curtailed ICE
enforcement, especially for those without serious criminal violations. Those measures incensed
Republicans — and eventually helped to propel Trump into office.
An estimated 11 million people are living in the United States without legal residency, and the new era
of ICE enforcement has shattered the presumption that their social and economic integration into
American life would protect them.
Because immigration records are generally secret, it is difficult to independently verify how federal
agents decide to make arrests. Immigrant advocates and ICE often clash over immigration cases, and
both sides frequently present incomplete versions of an immigrant’s case.
A lack of restrictions and checks on immigration enforcement allow ICE to deport

immigrants at their discretion, while also fueling xenophobia, human rights abuses,
and hate crimes
Chacón 17
Justin Aker Chacón, activist, writer, and professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies, coauthor of No One Is
Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, International Socialist Review
Issue #105: Interviews, interviewed by Ashley Smith and Lance Selfa, published by the Center for
Economic Research and Social Change, “Immigration policy under Trump,” March 2017,
https://isreview.org/issue/105/immigration-policy-under-trump //KW
The most immediate threatening act of the Trump Administration has been a series of rule changes
(“guidance memos”) that are currently being implemented by the DHS under executive authority. The
memos give a broader mandate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to arrest,
detain, and deport undocumented people, as well as authorizing them to act on their own impulses and
target people more generally in the course of conducting their “duties” without restriction or checks.
Under the new rules, if someone can’t prove that they have been living in the United States
continuously for two years, they are eligible for “expedited removal,” that is, without the opportunity
for legal consultation or a court hearing. Previously, this was limited in practice to those apprehended
within 100 miles of the border and who had arrived within the past two weeks. This is designed to allow
the Border Patrol, ICE agents, and the bureaucrats of the DHS themselves to become the handmaidens
of mass deportation.
Trump has also ominously stripped federal privacy protections for undocumented youth who registered
with the federal government in order to qualify for the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This program has shielded over 750,000 people from deportation and
allowed them to apply for work permits. By repealing the privacy provisions, the Trump administration is
indicating that their names and information could be turned over to immigration agents if DACA is
repealed.
It should be noted that the union representing the Border Patrol officially endorsed the candidacy of
Donald Trump, showing the alignment of thinking with the 20,000 member armed border force. In other
words, this order is designed to allow more impunity to the federal border police, a federal agency
already accused of widespread human rights abuses. In effect, the Trump administration is unleashing
and encouraging the immigration police to go on the offensive and unleash a more far-reaching reign of
terror on undocumented immigrants, which will undoubtedly increase and intensify state violence and
abuse.
The Arizona-based human rights organization No More Deaths, for instance, produced a comprehensive
report that documents 30,000 incidents where human rights abuses occurred between fall of 2008 and
spring of 2011. Since 2010, according to the Southern Border Communities Coalition, forty-six people
have been killed on the border. Another study conducted by the Kino Border Initiative (KBI), a bi-
national organization promoting humane immigration policies, found that about “40 percent of Mexican
migrants deported from the United States said Border Patrol agents violated their human rights, and
two-thirds said their families were returned to Mexico separately.” These daily abuses were committed
during a period when the border police had minimal restrictions on their rules of engagement.
ICE agents operating within the interior are no different, although their patterns of arrest have been
more selective and targeted. Even though the claim is to catch and deport “criminals,” the initial results
show a different reality. Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an Arizona-based worker and mother of two, who
was detained and deported after an annually required “check-in” with ICE. She had previously been
arrested for using false documents to work during a workplace raid in 2008 under the regime of
notoriously racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, charged with “identity-theft,” and spent one year in prison.
In the era of Trump, this has the potential to be even more political, as illustrated by the fact that
another early detainee in the interior of the country was DREAM activist Daniela Vargas. A twenty-two-
year-old DACA college student, Vargas was arrested moments after speaking publicly at an immigrant
rights rally in Jackson, Mississippi and transferred to a detention center in Jena, Louisiana.
Enrique Balcazar, Zully Palacios, and Alex Carillo-Sanchez, community and labor organizers with Migrant
Justice, a workers’ rights organization in Vermont, were also arrested in late March. Since they had no
deportation orders, criminal records, or any other factor that would have brought them to the attention
of ICE, this shows that they were surveyed, arrested, and detained by regional agents for no other
reason than for their immigrant rights advocacy.
Not only are the armed enforcers of Trump’s immigration orders animated by their new license to target
immigrants, but the Far Right is also emboldened. For example, racists in the well-funded, right-wing
information production industry are jubilant. The fake think tank Center for Immigration Studies, an
overt anti-immigrant organization that produces bogus research to justify exclusion and receives access
to practically every mainstream media outlet, rejoiced at the new rules. Director of the group, Mark
Krikorian, claimed that “The message is: The immigration law is back in business.” After declining in the
first few years of the Obama administration, when it was believed that immigration would pass through
a Democratic “supermajority” in Congress, the number of anti-immigrant hate groups and membership
is once again on the rise.
The political attack on immigrants has also increased the confidence of racist hate groups and
individuals to commit acts of violence and terrorism. Encouraged by the rhetoric of Trump and the
ratcheting up of state repression, the Far Right has increased its activities. The Southern Poverty Law
Center documented 867 incidents of hate crimes in the first ten days of the Trump administration alone,
and further attacks have targeted a broad spectrum of people including immigrants, African-Americans,
Jewish people, South and Central Asians, and others. For instance, in late February, a racist gunman in
Kansas walked into a bar near Kansas City and opened fire on two Indian men killing Srinivas Kuchibhotla
while yelling, “Get out of my country!” This is the violence of the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim
policies at the center of US politics in its most unfiltered, toxic form.
Internal Link - USCIS
USCIS circumvents the raised cap – Trumpian policies mean more people just end up
getting denied
Hauslohner and Tran 7/2 (Abigail Hauslohner and Andrew Ba Tran, 07-02-2018, "How Trump is changing the face of legal
immigration," Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-trump-is-changing-the-face-of-legal-
immigration/2018/07/02/477c78b2-65da-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.html/NR)
Under the previous administration, case officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) processed
immigrant visa applications with “a culture of getting to ‘yes,’ ” said another high-ranking administration official familiar
with immigration policy deliberations. Now those officers, along with consular officers at the State Department,
feel empowered to exercise their own discretion, take more time scrutinizing each applicant and more
strictly enforce existing laws on inadmissibility, the official said. The longer vetting process results in fewer approved
applications per month. “If you’re empowering people to spend more time vetting an application, and you’re not having a culture of
getting to ‘yes’ but having a culture of make the right decision, it’s axiomatic that you will not be able to process applications for immigration
benefits at the same speed,” the official said. In a March report, analysts at the Migration Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, noted that
these bureaucratic changes have “gone largely unnoticed.” “Without need for congressional approval, the administration
has initiated several small but well-calibrated actions through regulations, administrative guidelines, and immigration application processing
changes,” the report stated. Amendments to the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual in January
expanded the burden of proof for visa applicants to show that they will not become “a public charge,”
which is grounds for denial. Immigration analysts who have reviewed leaked policy drafts expect the administration to publish new
rules soon to expand further the terms of inadmissibility. “It’s intended to have an effect on the numbers,” said Doris
Meissner, a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
“It’sintended to put more rigor into the visa issuance process. But almost by definition, that’s going to
likely result in more denials.”
Raising the cap doesn’t do anything – USCIS will just investigate “bad” naturalization
cases and revoke citizenship
Helm 7/5 (Angela Helm, Ms. Bronner Helm is Contributing Editor at The Root, 7-5-2018, "Trump Creates ‘Denaturalization’ Task Force to
Pursue Deportation Against Thousands of U.S. Citizens," Root, https://www.theroot.com/trump-creates-denaturalization-task-force-to-pursue-
d-1827372139)
In June, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly announced a new task force that
will investigate “bad” naturalization cases, wherein the agency will hire dozens of lawyers and
immigration officers “to find U.S. citizens they say should not have been naturalized, to revoke their
citizenship, and then eventually deport them,” according to The Takeaway, from WNYC and Public Radio International. CNN
reports that that the new office in Southern California will review cases and then refer them to the Justice Department,
which will then pursue denaturalization proceedings against U.S. citizens accused of fraud. In an interview
with the Associated Press, USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna said the number of cases could reach into the thousands—this in a nation of about
325 million. “We
finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start
denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking
at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.” CNN reports: Since the Obama administration, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement has also been working to put more than 300,000 fingerprint records into a system that can be checked against citizenship
applications. According to USCIS, the
effort to followup on those records has resulted in 2,500 cases that have
been flagged for in-depth review, and 95 of those have been referred to the Justice Department to date.
A former chief counsel for USCIS, Ur Jaddou, now a director at the pro-immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, said it was “troubling” that
the Trump administration was looking at what has been an ongoing issue. “Under
this administration, this denaturalization
effort, doesn’t feel like a good government ensuring integrity,” Jaddou said. “That was already
happening before this administration. ...So, it begs the question, why the sudden new and, especially
public, focus?” I think we all know—harassment, fear and playing to the piggiest of people.
Internal Link - Sessions
Sessions circumvents the plan – he understands and controls the complex legal system
surrounding legal immigration
Lind 18
Dara Lind, senior reporter covering immigration at Vox, “Trump made an immigration crackdown a
priority. Jeff Sessions made it a reality.,” 5/23/18, https://www.vox.com/2018/5/23/17229464/jeff-
sessions-immigration-trump-illegal //KW
If President Trump and all his appointees left office tomorrow, the mark Attorney General Jeff Sessions
has left on policy would be the most enduring.
While other Cabinet officials have gotten sucked into White House drama or caught in their own venal
scandals, Sessions has generally kept his attention on doing his job — even at the cost of his relationship
with the president. He’s pulled every available lever to redirect the considerable resources of the
Department of Justice (DOJ) to fight the crimes he considers most serious: violent crimes, drug crime,
and, most notably, violations of immigration law.
The DOJ’s role in the immigration system isn’t widely understood, but it’s crucial. Illegal entry and
reentry aren’t just the most commonly prosecuted federal crimes — they make up a majority of all
federal convictions. The litigation the DOJ chooses to file can help tilt the balance between state,
federal, and local governments as the three try to negotiate who gets to help — or has to help —
enforce immigration law. Perhaps most importantly, the part of the deportation process that has so far
posed the biggest obstacle to mass deportation — the immigration court system — is under Sessions’s
control.
Sessions, at heart, is a prosecutor. He understands the complicated and sensitive legal system he
currently wields power over as well as anyone — but he understands it as a weapon with which to
protect America against people who would do it harm. And while his peers in the Republican Party tried
to strike a balance between “good” legal immigrants and “bad” illegal ones, he has always taken a
skeptical attitude toward immigrants and immigration, period, believing that the burden of proof ought
to be on an immigrant to prove that she deserves to come to or stay in the US, and preferring, always, to
keep worthy people out rather than let anyone unworthy in.
Sessions ensures immigrants don’t get in – laundry list

Lind 18
Dara Lind, senior reporter covering immigration at Vox, “Trump made an immigration crackdown a
priority. Jeff Sessions made it a reality.,” 5/23/18, https://www.vox.com/2018/5/23/17229464/jeff-
sessions-immigration-trump-illegal //KW
Sessions is requiring judges to decide immigrants’ fate in a matter of hours

In early April, the DOJ sent a memo to all immigration judges telling them that “efficiency” would now
factor into their performance reviews. The DOJ set standards that it called “benchmarks”: Judges would
need to complete at least 700 cases a year to earn a “satisfactory” rating, while completion of fewer
than 560 cases would lead to a judge being deemed “unsatisfactory.”
Immigration judges and lawyers assailed the “benchmarks” as quotas. But a DOJ source shrugged about
the new directive to the Washington Post, saying that 700 cases was only “three cases a day.” The
National Association of Immigration Judges, the judges union, estimates that when you account for the
days court isn’t in session and other factors, it’s more like four cases a day.
“Anecdotally,” says judges union head Ashley Tabaddor, “we’re not aware that this is a number that is
even close to being reasonable.”
The “benchmarks” get into the details of court proceedings too. In cases where the judge has to review
the judgment of an asylum officer about whether an asylum seeker can claim a “credible” fear” or
“reasonable fear” of persecution or torture, the DOJ says the judge should be able (85 percent of the
time) to make a decision that same day.
Immigration lawyers worry that they simply can’t put together a compelling case in that time. “Often
[you need] documents from overseas that take time to get, documents from hospitals in other
countries, to document your persecution claim,” says Karen Lucas of the American Immigration Lawyers’
Association.
Immigration court cases are famously complex — if a judge considers all the possible outcomes. But if
she’s just rubber-stamping deportations, they go much faster. And immigration judges and lawyers alike
are deeply concerned that at the pace of three or more rulings a day, there is no way for immigration
court to become anything other than a deportation assembly line.
Sessions is working to reduce options for judges and immigrant defendants
At the same time that the DOJ is telling judges that cases need to go faster, though, it’s making moves to
eliminate some things that allow cases to go faster but make it more likely that immigrants win.
In April, for example, the DOJ announced abruptly that it was suspending a program that offered group
“legal orientation” workshops to immigrants in detention centers — explaining to them how court
hearings worked (necessary because there’s no right to a lawyer in immigration court) and what options
they might have to prevent a deportation order.
The DOJ claimed it was “pausing” the legal orientation program to evaluate its effectiveness. But the
lead contractor, the Vera Institute for Justice, says they received an email from DOJ telling them “there
is not intent that the program will be renewed.”
The Vera Institute was blindsided — not least because the legal orientation program had been evaluated
in 2012, and found to make the system more efficient. Because immigrants weren’t fighting hopeless
cases, court cases took an average of 12 fewer days to resolve and the government saved an average of
six nights in detention costs — for a total savings of $17.8 million a year over and above the cost of
administering the orientation.
“This seems totally contrary to the Department of Justice’s interests,” Oren Root of Vera told Vox in
April. “Their biggest problem, from their point of view, is getting cases concluded. And here is a tool that
is proven by their own study to be effective in doing that.”
The DOJ reversed its decision to suspend legal orientations under pressure from members of Congress.
But the evaluation of its effectiveness is ongoing, and there’s no guarantee Sessions’s DOJ will decide
the program is a good idea.
There’s a similar pattern in the cases that Sessions has referred to himself for review from the Board of
Immigration Appeals, a tactic he’s used aggressively in the past several months. In May, Sessions ruled
that judges couldn’t move cases off their docket by closing them without a deportation order — and
opened the door to the reopening of 350,000 cases that had already been closed this way.
Future rulings in cases Sessions has referred to himself could reduce judges’ options to side with
immigrants even further: One could reduce judges’ ability to grant asylum to victims of violence from
non-state actors (like domestic abusers or gangs), while another could limit judges’ abilities to delay a
hearing to let the immigrant apply for legal status elsewhere.
All these changes, and threatened changes, to immigration courts would create a ratchet. Judges would
have to get through more cases due to the “performance measures,” without being able to move cases
off their docket by closing them — their primary tool of docket control over the past few years. They’d
have to make rulings in asylum cases more quickly, without giving immigrants time to present evidence,
and without being able to grant asylum on the basis of domestic violence. They’d have to find time for
hopeless cases that immigrants might not have tried to fight if they had gone through “legal orientation”
— taking time away from cases immigrants could actually win if given the chance.
Internal Link – Racism/Xenophobia
Even if Trump doesn’t roll back the plan, his xenophobic rhetoric is sufficient to deter
immigration to the US
Judis 18
John Judis, editor at large at Talking Points Memo and the author of The Populist Explosion: How the
Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, The American Prospect, “The Two Sides
of Immigration Policy,” 2/1/18, http://prospect.org/article/two-sides-immigration-policy //KW
In fact, Trump has not come close to deporting the 12 million. According to reports last September, he
has deported fewer undocumented immigrants than the Obama administration did in a comparable
period. But his rhetoric, and his rejection of DACA, have sown fear among immigrants. A friend reports
that in parts of Texas, where there is little public transportation, undocumented immigrants who cannot
obtain driver’s licenses are trapped in their homes, fearful that if they are apprehended while driving,
they will be deported. Trump’s policies are cruel and inhumane; and they help reinforce the existence of
a fearful, docile underclass that can be exploited by political demagogues and avaricious business
managers and owners.
Democrats and liberals have rightly rejected Trump’s words and deeds. And they have reasserted the
need to find an eventual path to citizenship for the 12 million. But in responding to Trump’s xenophobia,
many have gone to the opposite extreme and denied, in effect, that a problem really exists. They have
consistently downplayed or denied that there is any urgent need to stanch the flow of unauthorized
immigration. The party’s 2016 platform plank on immigration gave short shrift to the problem of illegal
immigration, merely calling for law enforcement that is “humane and consistent with our values.”
Internal Link - Discretion
Trump can still restrict immigration – courts and congress can’t check him
Bier 7/10 – David J. Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global
Liberty and Prosperity. He is an expert on visa reform, border security, and interior enforcement, and his
work has been cited in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico,
and many other print and online publications. ("Why the Legal Immigration System Is Broken: A Short
List of Problems," Cato Institute, https://www.cato.org/blog/why-legal-immigration-system-broken-
short-list-problems) jbb
23. The
president can ban any immigrants that he doesn’t like. In 1952, Congress passed a statute that
authorizes the president to suspend “the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” if he finds them to be
“detrimental.” This power is untethered by any constraints, and as the travel ban case proves, the
Supreme Court is willing to allow the president to ban immigrants based on the thinnest of pretexts.
Sweeping power of this kind is incompatible with the rule of law and cedes lawmaking power to the president in a way that would shock our founders. Congress
should require courts to use strict scrutiny when evaluating these types of actions by the president.
a2 Law Checks – DACA/Border Separation
DACA and border separations prove the administration can ignore the law
Gleckman 6/20 – author of the book "Caring for Our Parents" and resident fellow at The Urban
Institute, affiliated with the Tax Policy Center and the Program on Retirement Policy, senior
correspondent in the Washington bureau of Business Week. (Howard, "President Trump's Situational
Enforcement Of Tax And Immigration Laws," Forbes, 2018
https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2018/06/20/president-trumps-situational-
enforcement-of-tax-and-immigration-laws/#2e110c472999) jbb
This week, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsentold reporters that border separation was mandated by federal
law. It was, she said, the “product of loopholes in our federal immigration laws” and that Congress “alone can fix it.”
And she said of those trying convince the White House to stop the practice: “Congress is asking those of
us who enforce the law to turn our backs on the law.” Whether the law actually requires the government to separate children from
parents is the subject of significant doubt. But the Administration’s absolute claim that it must enforce laws, even if it
disagrees with them, turns out to be somewhat…situational. Ignoring the Johnson Amendment Twice in the last three weeks, in formal
remarks, Vice President Mike Pence said the Administration would ignore another statute: The Johnson Amendment that bars 501(C)(3) non-profits, including
houses of worship, from participating in political campaigns for, or against, a candidate. Pence could have not been more explicit. Speaking to the Family Research
Council on May 25, he said the Johnson Amendment “will no longer be enforced under this administration.” He repeated the vow in a speech to the annual meeting
of the Southern Baptist Convention last week. MORE FROM FORBES Pence is merely echoing President Trump, who has made no secret of his commitment to
repealing the law. Candidate Trump included it in his campaign platform and has repeated the vow frequently since his election. A year ago he signed an executive
order that he said repealed the law. Of course, the president can’t repeal a legislative statute by fiat. Congress has been clear For decades, Congress has been clear
about its views on electioneering by 501(c)(3)s. The Johnson Amendment has been on the books for nearly 65 years. Congress slightly toughened the law in 1987.
And although it has had multiple opportunities to repeal or scale it back over the past 18 months, Congress has explicitly declined do so. The House has tried
unsuccessfully to use spending bill riders to limit the ability of the IRS to enforce the Johnson Amendment. Last year, conservative lawmakers tried, but failed, to use
the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to repeal the law. And that is why the Administration’s commitment to ignoring this law is so concerning. It seems clear that a majority in
Congress does not want to change the legal restrictions on politicking by churches and other 501(c)(3)s. Yet the Administration vows to ignore the law. In fairness,
the IRS has rarely enforced violations of the Johnson Amendment by houses of worship. And its published guidance gives faith communities wide latitude to engage
in in limited political, or quasi-political, activities. The practical effects of Pence’s promise to ignore the statute will be modest. But the message it sends—that the
White House can tell the IRS which tax laws to enforce and which it must ignore—are deeply troubling. Political decisions It should be noted that Trump
is
not the first president to refuse to enforce laws with which he disagreed. In 2012, President Obama ordered
the government to grant work and residency permits to immigrants who were brought to the US as
young children, even though the Administration had no statutory authority to do so. In effect, Obama used
his presidential power to implement provisions of the DREAM Act that Congress had not enacted. And the
IRS and other government enforcement agencies make choices all the time about how they’ll allocate scarce
resources. They may choose to ignore a violation of the law because it is minor, or because they are
focused on other priorities. But there is a significant difference between administrative judgments by career officials and policy decisions by a
president or his senior staff to ignore some statutes while enforcing others for strictly political reasons.
a2 Law Checks - Sessions
Sessions uses the power principle to exploit loopholes
Manning 17 – Stephen W. Manning is the legal director of the Innovation Law Lab. Michelle Mendez is
managing attorney of the Catholic Legal Immigration Networks’ Defending Vulnerable Populations
Project. Mr. Manning and Ms. Mendez collaborated in the design of the volunteer lawyer projects
mentioned in Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ speech. ("Trump, Sessions attack immigration lawyers in
latest affront to rule of law," TheHill, 10/18, http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/355958-trump-
sessionss-latest-affront-to-rule-of-law-attack-immigration-lawyers) jbb
President Trump and the attorney general are already aiming to eliminate immigration court review. At a
time when they push to slash federal spending generally, they’ve quickly found the funding to incarcerate immigrants, to the financial gain of private prison
companies. They've converted anti-immigrant rhetoric into policy, stigmatizing immigrants on a vast scale. And now they are challenging the lawyers that serve this
community. Just last week, in a speech before the Executive Office of Immigration Review, Sessions
launched an attack against
immigration defense counsel, effectively criticizing the rule of law in deportation proceedings. The Trump
administration can now activate its constitutionally abhorrent and morally repugnant experiment of mass expulsion of immigrants and further enrich private prison
companies in the process. There are two basic rule of law principles. First, our
legal system should operate fairly, even when it is
under stress. Second, our legal system requires that all the law should be fairly applied, not just the law
chosen by the powerful or the few. For example, when then-candidate Trump defended his tax write-off for millions of dollars as a feature of
the tax code, he was articulating a rule of law principle. However, when his administration derides the asylum process as a
loophole, he is using a rule by power principle — what monarchs and autocrats do. Sessions’ attack on lawyers is
another example of the rule by power principle. Sessions is ready to dispense with the laws he dislikes — the law of
asylum and the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — in order to achieve an end that he desires —
detaining and deporting immigrants.
a2 Law Checks – Zero Tolerance
Trump circumvents the law – zero tolerance proves
Gilman 7/17 – Denise Gilman is a professor at the University of Texas-Austin School of Law and directs
its Immigration Clinic. ("Donald Trump is ignoring the immigration laws that protect children and
families," Detroit Free Press, 2018, https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/2018/07/17/ignoring-
immigration-law/793476002/) jbb
Ignoring the laws they don't like However, Trump's team is picking and choosing which laws to follow. The
administration adopted a "zero tolerance" policy for prosecuting border-crossers under misdemeanor criminal laws,
in order to separate children from their parents, even though such prosecutions are discretionary. The administration has
also sought to use immigration detention authority to jail parents and children across the board and for prolonged
periods, either separately or together. Yet the administration is not enforcing other laws that that impose obligations to protect
children, families and asylum seekers. Those laws include Immigration and Nationality Act provisions that require
processing of all asylum requests, regardless of how the applicant arrived in the U.S. They also include
decades-old immigration rules, which prohibit locking up children for any significant length of time. These
provisions require immigration officials to release children as quickly as possible to an available care-giving parent, like those parents arriving with their children at
the southern border. There
is also the constitutional law rule that immigration detention may not be used as a
deterrent, but only as an administrative arrangement to ensure that individuals appear for their hearings and do not present a danger to the community.
The law also includes the bedrock constitutional principleof family unity, which prevents the government from taking
children or intervening in the parent/child relationship. Reading all of these legal provisions together, it becomes clear what enforcing the law actually means. The
government may hold asylum-seeking families arriving in the U.S. in custody for a short period to allow for basic processing but then must release families together.
Families must be allowed to live with relatives or in community-based shelters while they undergo proceedings on their asylum claims.
a2 Courts Check
Travel ban ruling emboldens trump – courts won’t check him
Nakamura 6/26 – David Nakamura started at The Washington Post as a summer intern in 1992. After
four years as a sports reporter, he moved to the local news staff and wrote about education in Virginia
and Maryland and city government in the District. In 2004, he was part of a team that uncovered high
levels of lead contamination in D.C. tap water, a series that won the 2005 Selden Ring Award for
investigative reporting. He has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Japan. (“Travel-ban ruling could
embolden Trump in remaking the U.S. immigration system,” Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/travel-ban-ruling-could-embolden-trump-in-remaking-the-
us-immigration-system/2018/06/26/168ca994-7957-11e8-80be-
6d32e182a3bc_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8df44b3ce95f) jbb
President Trump’s victory Tuesday in the Supreme Court’s ratification of his travel ban marked a
milestone in his attempt to paint broad swaths of immigrants as dangerous — a rhetorical strategy that
has underpinned the administration’s sweeping efforts to unilaterally curtail immigration. Since taking office 18
months ago, Trump has amplified, and attempted to codify into policy, his campaign-trail warnings of the threats posed by
foreigners who attempt to enter the United States, including those who come through legal channels.
Shunting aside a Congress mired in a decades-long stalemate over immigration, the president has wielded his executive authority to
pursue a hard-line agenda. The Trump administration has ramped up arrests of illegal immigrants,
slashed refu-gee programs, criminalized unauthorized border crossings, attempted to terminate a
deferred-action program for immigrants who came as children and — until Trump reversed himself last week — implemented
a policy that separated families at the border between the United States and Mexico. Critics expressed fears that the court’s ruling
would embolden Trump to further test the limits of his statutory authority to enforce border-control
laws without explicit approval from lawmakers. Aides have promised new measures ahead of the midterm elections in November, and
Trump ruminated this week about the power to turn away unauthorized immigrants without offering them due-process rights. “Who’s going to be next?” asked
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), whose state brought the case against the travel ban. “Is the president going to issue an executive order against Mexicans? Is he going
to issue an executive order against people from Honduras? Guatemala? What’s next?” The ban, which originally applied to six majority-Muslim nations, represented
the audacity of Trump’s ambition in the early days of his administration — but also, over the past year, the potential legal limits of his authority. The administration
suffered several humiliating legal setbacks in lower courts to immigrant rights groups that had cast Trump’s order as a xenophobic attack on Muslims that violated
the Constitution. 1:45 Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump's travel ban The high court’s 5-to-4 decision, sharply split between conservative and liberal justices,
handed Trump a “tremendous victory,” as he called it during impromptu remarks at the White House. Aides described an air of vindication and even elation in the
West Wing just days after Trump acceded to an about-face over his family separation policy in the face of an international uproar. “This ruling is also a moment of
profound vindication following months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border
and our country,” Trump said in a statement. “As long as I am President, I will defend the sovereignty, safety, and security of the American People.” But Trump’s
critics agreed with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who in her dissent compared the ruling to the high court’s 1944 endorsement of the U.S. government’s imprisonment
of Japanese Americans and Japanese citizens in internment camps during World War II. The court’s opinion on the travel ban, though, included a repudiation of the
earlier decision, which it called “gravely wrong the day it was decided.” The travel-ban ruling is “a shameful mark on American history,” said Mariko Hirose, litigation
director at the International Refugee Assistance Project, which successfully blocked an earlier version of the ban last year. 3:22 Trump’s long history of scapegoating
immigrants “If they are allowed to have this ban, what will they try next?” asked Mohamad Mashta, a Syrian immigrant who was a plaintiff in that case. Over the
past decade, as a politically polarized Congress failed in several attempts to pass major immigration bills,
successive administrations have
sought to unilaterally amend the laws through executive power. First under President Barack Obama, and now Trump, the
immigration fight increasingly shifted from Capitol Hill to the judicial branch. Obama sought to cast the majority of
immigrants, even those in the country illegally, as law-abiding and productive members of society whose presence helped spur economic growth and added to the
implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protected
nation’s cultural vibrancy. He
nearly 800,000 younger immigrants known as “dreamers” from deportation.
No checks on immigration from the Court – Jennings v. Rodriguez proves

Peña 18
Daniel Peña, author of Bang: A Novel, NBC News, “The Supreme Court's latest immigration ruling
formalizes terror against Latinos,” 2/28/18, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/supreme-court-s-
latest-immigration-ruling-formalizes-terror-against-latinos-ncna851966 //KW
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Jennings v. Rodriguez on Tuesday is a bizarre and dark new
development in the American experiment. Not only because it’s a breakdown of the court’s ability to
properly interpret the constitution (as they formally institutionalize a de facto second class of citizens),
but because it’s a dereliction of the court’s duty as a part of a system of checks and balances designed to
protect the constitutional rights of people in this country, regardless of country of origin, from a
tyrannical government that would subvert our founding document for political or racist ends.
This ruling only formalizes what many of us in the Latinx community have known for generations: that
the perpetuation of systems and laws that instill fear in immigrants (detained or not) is a form of state-
sponsored terror. Now the court is complicit and part of that terror. And as pathways to legal status for
immigrants come under attack by the current administration, this kind of terror is increasingly designed
to incarcerate people for no other reason than for their inability to access pathways toward legal status
— which is how this ruling will likely be used by this current administration.
The court ruled in Jennings v. Rodriguez that all immigrants, even those with protected legal status or
asylum seekers, do not have a right to periodic bond hearing after detention, which makes it possible for
them to be detained indefinitely. The defendant, Alejandro Rodriguez, who was brought to the United
States from Mexico as an infant and became a permanent legal resident, was detained for three years
for joy riding and possession of a controlled substance; the ACLU was fighting for his right to a hearing.
It comes a day after another Supreme Court decision not to rule on the Obama-era Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals program, which in effect leaves that program safe for at least another year. But while
the ruling on DACA might give the impression of an impartial system of courts, the latter development
undermines that illusion by giving this discriminatory Trump administration its seal of approval in the
name of the law.
All three branches are now in sync with their consensus to terrorize detained immigrants,
documented and undocumented alike. And the explicit message of this ruling against Rodriguez is that,
no matter your legal status, the constitution does not work for you if you’re an immigrant. You can be
extracted from the American fabric for seemingly arbitrary reasons, by virtue of that now-
institutionalized second class status.
Aff
court checks
Trump would still enforce unpopular immigration policies and courts check – DACA
proves
Mccallister 1/10 (Doreen Mccallister – BA in Journalism and Communication from Point Park
University and writes frequently for NPR, 1-10-2018, "Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump's
Decision To End DACA," NPR.org, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2018/01/10/576963434/federal-judge-temporarily-blocks-trumps-decision-to-end-daca) jl
A federal judge in California temporarily blocked the Trump administration's decision to end the Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals program late Tuesday night. Widely known as DACA, the program protects young immigrants from deportation.
In September, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the program would be phased out. President Obama
implemented the program in 2012; it has protected about 800,000 people who were brought to the United States as children by their families,
some of whom overstayed their visas. Under the program, young adults, often referred to as "Dreamers," have been permitted to live and work
legally in the U.S. The ruling from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco granted a request by California and other
states to keep DACA going, at least until lawsuits can play out in court. Responding to the news on Wednesday morning,
President Trump tweeted, "It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA)
always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts." Trump has said that any deal to extend DACA
must include plans for a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. In his ruling, Alsup wrote that lawyers for the immigrants' "have clearly
demonstrated that they are likely to suffer serious, irreparable harm," unless the court steps in with an injunction. "DACA covers a class of
immigrants whose presence, seemingly all agree, pose the least, if any, threat and allows them to sign up for honest labor on the condition of
continued good behavior," Alsup wrote. "This has become an important program for DACA recipients and their families, for the employers who
hire them, for our tax treasuries, and for our economy." Federal
judge gives respite to ‘dreamers’, says DACA can’t end while
lawsuit is pending Court
rules the government must keep protections in place for existing recipients while
legal challenge proceeds. White House decries move as “outrageous.” California Attorney General Becerra said in a statement after
Tuesday's decision: "Dreamers' lives were thrown into chaos when the Trump administration tried to terminate the DACA program without
obeying the law. Tonight's ruling is a huge step in the right direction." However, the Trump administration could appeal
Alsup's ruling. Justice Department spokesman Devin O'Malley issued a statement last night: "Tonight's order doesn't change the Department of
Justice's position on the facts: DACA was implemented unilaterally after Congress declined to extend these benefits to this same group of illegal
aliens. As such, it was an unlawful circumvention of Congress, and was susceptible to the same legal challenges that effectively ended DAPA.
"The Department of Homeland Security therefore acted within its lawful authority in deciding to wind down DACA in an orderly manner.
Promoting and enforcing the rule of law is vital to protecting a nation, its borders, and its citizens. The Justice Department will continue to
vigorously defend this position, and looks forward to vindicating its position in further litigation." The judge's ruling came hours after Trump
met with lawmakers at the White House, to discuss the DACA program and other immigration issues. NPR's Brian Naylor reported: "Trump told
a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Tuesday that he wants a bill to allow young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally to remain,
saying that such a measure should be "a bipartisan bill of love" and that "we can do it." "As to what sort of immigration legislation he would
approve, Trump said that he was reliant on lawmakers and that even if they produced legislation he wasn't
"in love with," he would still support it. He also said he would take the heat for both Republicans and Democrats if they get
criticism over a compromise immigration measure, adding that his "whole life has been heat" and that to a certain extent he prefers it that
way." The president also addressed the issue of a border wall with Mexico, saying the U.S. needs one "in certain areas obviously that aren't
protected by nature" and where existing fences are in bad shape and need to be fixed or rebuilt. But Trump also added, "There are large areas
where you don't need a wall."
Court intervention checks Trump policies

Tchekmedyian and Davis 6/27 (Alene Tchekmedyian, Kristina Davis, 6-27-2018, "Judge’s ruling on
families separated at border sets stage for new immigration showdown. Here’s a breakdown," latimes,
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-border-ruling-migrants-children-explainer-20180627-
story.html) jl
A San Diego federal judge has given the Trump administration a tight timeline to reunite children separated
from their parents at the border, setting up another showdown in immigration policy. What did the judge rule? U.S. District Judge Dana
Sabraw issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday that calls for all children affected by the Trump
administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy to be reunited with their parents within 30 days. Under the
order, children younger than 5 must be reunited with their parents within 14 days, while older children must be reunited with their parents within 30 days. Within
10 days, federal authorities must allow parents to call their children if they’re not already in contact with them. “The unfortunate reality is that under the present
system, migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property. Certainly, that cannot satisfy the requirements of due process,”
Sabraw said. What is the case about? The
ACLU made the injunction request as part of its class-action lawsuit filed on
behalf of two women — one who was arrested after crossing the border illegally and one who claimed
asylum at the border — who were separated from their children. Sabraw earlier this month had decided the lawsuit against the
government’s family separation practice could move forward, calling the practice “brutal, offensive” and contrary to “traditional notions of fair play and decency.”
Under U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions’ zero-tolerance policy, which criminally charges all unauthorized immigrants
caught crossing the border, defendants are detained within the criminal system, often allowed to plead guilty and
sentenced to serve little to no prison time. That process usually takes a few weeks to a month, then they are taken into immigration custody for the civil deportation
process to begin. What was the
ACLU’s argument to the court? The American Civil Liberties Union called for reunifications to occur
during the civil process. In declarations, two officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services
describe existing ways children are reunited with parents before deportation and how parents in civil immigration custody can speak with separated children via
video or phone. The declarations do not detail a process for reuniting families prior to deportation and say family residential centers, where children and parents
can be detained together, have limitations. The
ACLU said that is why the court must intervene — and points out that
Trump’s executive order halting the separation of family’s can be rescinded at any time. “The government has no
meaningful plan for swiftly ensuring that such reunifications occur,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt argued in his motion. “Thus, thousands of families remain separated,
and many parents have no idea where their children are or how to find them. With each added day of separation, the terrible trauma inflicted by the government
on both parents and children continues to mount. Many of the children are babies and toddlers who every night are crying themselves to sleep wondering if they
will ever see their parents again.” In its filing, the ACLU included several declarations from attorneys and immigrant advocates who provide specific examples of
clients who are awaiting deportation. The immigrants said they were given an option to be deported with their children, but after hearing of others who have been
deported without their children, they fear the same will happen to them. “Parents who are facing imminent deportation without their separated children are in
particularly grave need of immediate relief,” the ACLU’s brief argues. The process for parents to find where their separated children have been detained also has
been challenging, Gelernt argued. A hotline number regularly puts callers on hold for 30-minute periods, a stretch that is “infeasible for detained parents.” Lately,
callers have been met with a busy signal. What is the government’s position? Government lawyers had argued the judge didn’t need to get involved. The
executive order already addresses the family separation concerns outlined in the ACLU lawsuit and says
federal agencies are working on reunification of the 2,000-plus families who remain apart. “This Court should
give the agencies time to take action, rather than issuing an injunctive order,” the government’s motion urges. “A court imposed process is likely to slow the
reunification process and cause confusion and conflicting obligations, rather than speed the process of reunifying families in a safe and efficient manner.” Lawyers
with the Department of Justice argued that a court injunction would unnecessarily restrict the ability of immigration authorities “to carry out its immigration
enforcement mission and address smuggling concerns,” and said the government must follow standards that protect children from parents who would pose a risk to
the child’s welfare or from smugglers. What is the next step? The order appears to set the stage for a legal clash over a crisis that was created by the White House
and has sown increasing levels of fear and confusion. Earlier Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, testifying on Capitol Hill, said the only way
parents can quickly be reunited with their children is to drop their claims for asylum in the United States and agree to be deported. If parents pursue asylum claims,
administration officials plan to hold them in custody until the hearings are complete — a process that can take months, and in some instances years, because of a
backlog of several hundred thousand cases. While that process takes place and the parents are in custody, their children would not be returned to them, Azar said,
citing current rules that allow children to be held in immigrant detention for no more than 20 days. “If the parent remains in detention, unfortunately, under rules
that are set by Congress and the courts, they can’t be reunified while they’re in detention,” Azar told the Senate Finance Committee. He said the department could
place children with relatives in the United States if they can be located and properly vetted. Azar’s department has custody of 2,047 children separated from their
parents after they were apprehended crossing the border illegally since May. That’s when the Trump administration began enforcing the zero tolerance policy.
Court rulings ensure immigration policies are carried out

Kriel and Carroll 6/27 (Lomi Kriel and Susan Carroll, 6-27-2018, "Court ruling starts clock ticking for
reunification of immigrant children," Houston Chronicle,
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/BORDER-13032089.php) jl
BROWNSVILLE — The Trump administration is staring down a rapidly approaching, court-ordered deadline to reunite parents and children
separated at the border after a federal judge excoriated the government for failing to keep track of them as well
as it does “property.” Department of Homeland Security officials were mum on Wednesday about the sternly worded ruling by federal
District Court Judge Dana Sabraw in California. The order requires the government to put separated parents in touch
with an estimated 2,000 children within 10 days, and reunify children under 5 with their parents within two weeks. All of the families
must be reunited within a month, according to the ruling. The judge also said the government could not deport any parents without children
absent a waiver. Families seeking asylum in the Unites States have been waiting for several days on the bridge between Brownsville and
Matamoros. In this video a Brownsville attorney describes the situation on the bridge and a father from Honduras explains the violence in their
home country that forced them to seek sanctuary in the United States. Sabraw wrote that the government’s so-called zero-tolerance system
did not account for children with “the same efficiency and accuracy as property.” Most Americans oppose key parts of Trump immigration
plans, including wall, limits on citizens bringing family to U.S., poll says “We hope the administration will comply,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead
lawyer for the ACLU in the class-action lawsuit against the government filed on behalf of children separated from their parents at the border.
The two lead plaintiffs were mothers from Congo and Brazil who were detained and separated from their children for months. “These children
are in serious danger of becoming irreparably harmed for the rest of their lives,” Gelernt said. “We can have all of the arguments we want going
forward, but on this one thing, the administration ought to say were are going to do what is right for these children.” Asked
about the
injunction, President Donald Trump offered no complaint, saying, “We believe the families should be
together also so there’s not a lot to fight.” At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar said
the government must vet people before releasing children to them, which can take weeks. HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is taking an
average of 57 days to place children in its care with adult sponsors — far longer than the time now allotted by the judge. A spokesman for the
agency said he did not have an updated number of the children who had been reunited as of Wednesday. HHS referred questions Wednesday
to the Justice Department, which in turn said it was up to Congress to deal with the border situation. “Last
night’s court decision
makes it even more imperative that Congress finally act to give federal law enforcement the ability to
simultaneously enforce the law and keep families together,” the department said in a statement. It added: “Without this
action by Congress, lawlessness at the border will continue.” MORE INFORMATION Conditions in shelters under review The Health and Human
Services inspector general’s office says it’s launching a wide-ranging review of conditions at shelters for migrant
children. The agency said Wednesday it will focus on safety and health-related concerns, as well as the training and qualifications of federal
contractors who are supposed to ensure the well-being of children temporarily in federal custody. Spokeswoman Tesia Williams says the
inspector general’s probe will not focus on specific allegations of mistreatment, because those are being investigated separately. HHS is caring
for about 12,000 migrant children, including some 2,000 who arrived at the southwest border with a parent and were separated because of the
Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. Associated Press Lawmakers in Washington on Wednesday once again failed to pass
immigration reform legislation. DHS officials did not respond to questions about the lawsuit. Geoffrey Hoffman, director of the Immigration
Clinic at the University of Houston Law Center, called the judge’s ruling “very significant.” “This is a humanitarian disaster that needs to be put
right,” Hoffman said. Amid massive
backlash, President Trump issued an executive order this month ending
the policy of separating families. But attorneys for some of the parents whose children were placed in ORR custody reported they
could not locate the children, even after calling a government hotline designed to help. Carlos Garcia, a McAllen lawyer on the board of
directors for the Texas Civil Rights Project, said he interviewed eight separated parents in the Port Isabel Detention Center Tuesday. One
mother he is representing from Honduras has gone weeks without knowing where her 6-year-old daughter is. “She’s been crying a lot and it’s
hard for her to sleep,” he said. She told Garcia that she fled Honduras after gang members killed some of her relatives and threatened her too.
She was prosecuted for crossing the border illegally after Border Patrol agents arrested her earlier this month, placing her daughter somewhere
in a federal foster care shelter. Protests continue as Trump administration moves to reunite separated families Court
ruling starts clock ticking for reunification of immigrant children Immigrant minor distraught over family separation is prescribed
antidepressants in U.S. shelter, lawsuit alleges Garcia said he hoped the Department of Homeland Security would release separated parents so
they could begin finding their children themselves. “The government is slammed with reunification because they were not prepared,” Garcia
said. Garcia’s civil rights organization has filed an international complaint over the practice of separating families. Anthony Romero, the
executive director of the ACLU, said if
the government seeks a stay or appeals to a higher court, it “would make it
clear that the government is just dragging its feet on a humanitarian crisis.” If the government fails to
comply with the order, he added, the ACLU will notify the judge. As confusion over the immediate fate of parents and
children trickled out to migrants waiting on the Brownsville & Matamoros Express International Bridge, several asylum seekers said they were
not deterred. Isabel Flores fled Honduras after the tumultuous presidential elections last November threw her country into a political crisis and
she faced death threats. She had been waiting on the bridge all day, and planned to sleep there as she waited to ask for asylum along with her
children and grandchildren. “No matter what happens, President Trump’s not going to keep my kids,” she said wearily. “My kids are mine,
they’re not his. I have faith.”
Congress is split on Trump’s immigration agenda and federal judges can check abuses
– family separation proves
Barrett et al 18
Devlin Barrett, reporter on national security and law enforcement, Mike DeBonis, reporter on Congress
for the Washington Post, Nick Miroff, national security correspondent who covers immigration
enforcement, drug trafficking and the Department of Homeland Security, and Isaac Stanley-Becker,
reporter, Washington Post, “Congress, courts stymie Trump border crackdown,” 6/27/18,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/27/federal-judge-enjoins-
separation-of-migrant-children-orders-family-reunification/?utm_term=.e4de3f08eca1 //KW
The Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown faltered Wednesday after GOP leaders
watched members of their party help defeat a border bill championed by the president and a federal
judge ordered the government to swiftly reunite migrant families. By a vote of 301 to 121, the House rejected
a wide-ranging GOP immigration bill that would have funded President Trump’s border wall, offered young
undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship and partially addressed the family-separation crisis at the southwest border. The vote came
hours after the president tweeted that the House should pass the bill to “SHOW THAT WE WANT STRONG BORDERS & SECURITY.” After weeks
of negotiations between GOP conservatives and moderates, the vote made clear how split the party remains on the
issue. The measure barely won a majority of Republican lawmakers, and with no Democrats voting for it, the bill went down in a
lopsided defeat. Lawmakers will leave for a 10-day Fourth of July recess, taking no action amid an uproar over the separation policy and
images of migrant children held in chain-link detention pens. At the same time, administration officials scrambled Wednesday to craft a
response to a
federal judge in San Diego who late Tuesday ordered the government to quickly reunite migrant
children with their parents. Judge Dana M. Sabraw granted a preliminary injunction sought by the American Civil Liberties Union,
saying all migrant children separated from their parents must be returned to their families within 30 days, allowing just 14 days for the return
of children under age 5. He also ordered that parents be allowed to speak by phone with their children within 10 days. Secretary
Kirstjen
Nielsen and other top Department of Homeland Security officials have repeatedly insisted that the
country’s immigration impasse requires urgent legislative attention. But the country’s border security and
immigration agencies now find themselves pressed by Trump’s June 20 executive order and the new court order to
reunite the migrant families they have spent the past six weeks pulling apart.
The courts check administrative overreach

Economist 7/11 – (“Courts slap down the Trump administration’s immigration policies,” 2018,
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/07/11/courts-slap-down-the-trump-
administrations-immigration-policies) jbb
THE Trump administration’s position on immigration is simply summarised: it would like to have fewer immigrants,
whether legal or illegal. But that aim, shared by both President Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions, the
attorney-general, has collided with pesky obstacles like laws, courts and public outrage. It has also provoked chaos on
the southern border. A new “zero-tolerance” policy, announced in May, referred adults caught illegally crossing the border to criminal prosecution
and required that accompanying children be separated and held in specialised facilities. That resulted in the spectacle of small, terrified children in cages, shocking
the world. On June 20th the
administration reversed its policy, instead opting to hold families together in
detention. Now two legal losses for the administration make this compromise untenable. The first,
decided by a federal judge in San Diego on June 26th, criticised the administration’s “reactive governance
responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government’s own making,” which violated
migrants’ due-process rights. The judge lambasted the federal government’s failure to track separated children and its failure to plan for their
eventual reunification with their families. Authorities tended to give more care and attention to seized cars and property than to the children of illegal immigrants,
he wrote. The judge forbade the Trump administration from separating more such families and ordered that it reunify separated
children and parents within one month. He gave the government 14 days to reunite 102 children aged under five with their parents. But the deadline of July 10th
came and went with only one-third of those small children back with their parents, thanks to chaotic organisation and a lack of tracking. Some children had been
without their parents for so long that they no longer recognised them. The second decision, issued by a federal judge in Los Angeles on July 9th,
severely hampers the administration’s back-up plan of keeping families together while pursuing criminal
prosecutions against parents. A binding court settlement, known as the Flores decision, limits the time that a child can
spend in such detention to 20 days. Donald Trump ordered the Department of Justice to try to convince the court to change the terms, so that
children could be held indefinitely while their parents’ cases proceeded. For asylum cases, this could mean several months in custody. The judge, Dolly
Gee, didn’t much like this request. She described it as a “cynical attempt” to “shift responsibility to the
judiciary for over 20 years of congressional inaction and ill-considered executive action that have led to
the current stalemate”. She denied it. All this shows the folly of the Trump administration’s attempts to
upend immigration policy. Mr Sessions may continue to use his prosecutorial discretion to file criminal charges against illegal immigrants. But he can
no longer separate families or hold them in detention together for longer than 20 days. Executive fiat has been slapped down by the
courts.
public pressure
Ending of family separation proves Trump’s willingness to enforce softline
immigration policies
NCR 7/12 (NCR STAFF, 7-12-2018, "After days of outrage, Trump orders end to family separation at
border," No Publication, https://search-proquest-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/pqrl/docview/2071304112/9F01292D2BE74EF6PQ/5?accountid=14667) jl
In an about-face following days of defending the separation of immigrant children from their families at
the U.S.-Mexico border and falsely claiming only legislation could end it, President Donald Trump signed an
executive order allowing families to remain together while continuing his administration's "zero
tolerance" policy to prosecute all who enter the country illegally. The order, issued June 20, came amid mounting outrage
across the country as more details and images emerged of the family separation practice in action. The
policy of the administration is "to maintain family unity" for migrants, the order stated, as it is to "rigorously enforce
our immigration laws." "We're keeping families together, and this will solve that problem," Trump said. "At the same time we are keeping a
very powerful border. And it continues to be a zero tolerance."
Trump backs off in the face of public or bipartisan pressure

Bowden 18
John Bowden, reporter at The Hill, “Trump wanted to use executive order to pass total immigration
reform: report,” 6/23/18, http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/393799-trump-wanted-to-use-
executive-order-to-pass-immigration-reform-report //KW
President Trump indicated to aides this week that he wanted

to reform America's immigration system through an
executive order before deciding on Wednesday to sign an order ending his administration's policy of
separating migrant families. The Washington Post reported that Trump, feeling pressure from the public on his "zero
tolerance" policy, wanted to assuage criticism by signing a full immigration bill. One aide described the idea to the Post as a "pretty
insane idea." According to the Post, Trump was discouraged by government lawyers who said he was not able to issue such a broad rewrite of
the immigration system. Trump then reportedly demanded aides produce an expedited executive order to curb public discontent with the
family separation policy, which he then signed later Wednesday. “We’re going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the
families together,” Trump said at a signing ceremony Wednesday at the White House. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being
separated.” As he signed the order, the president added: “You're going to have a lot of happy people.” Trump
had faced intense
bipartisan pressure this week to reverse his administration's policy of separating migrant families who cross
into the U.S. illegally along the southern border. The policy resulted in the separations of more than 2,000 families from April to May —
separations that Trump administration officials had acknowledged could happen. Trump's reversal on the executive order
came just two days after Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen forcefully defended the policy at
a press briefing, arguing that only Congress could pass a solution for the rising number of separated families.
Trump backs off – public outcry and Democratic resistance ensure no rollback
Editorial Board of the Chicago Tribune 18
Editorial Board, the Tribune believes in the traditional principles of limited government; maximum
individual responsibility; and minimum restriction of personal liberty, opportunity and enterprise; free
markets, free will and freedom of expression, Chicago Tribune, “Editorial: Trump helps the kids.
Meanwhile, where is immigration reform?,” 6/20/18,
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-children-immigration-border-
separation-20180620-story.html //KW
President Donald Trump did the right thing Wednesday by reversing course to address an immigration crisis. He issued
an executive
order to end his administration’s inhumane practice of separating children from their parents at the
southern border. Nearly 2,000 children had been sent alone to shelters because of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to prosecute all
adults, including parents, who violate immigration laws. Taking aggressive enforcement action at the border is a policy choice, but doing so at
the cost of victimizing children was cruel. Trump
responded to the public outcry, and to protestations at home from
the first lady. He also recognized what previous presidents learned at some point in their tenures: Immigration is an emotion-
laden issue that defies simple resolution. Sort of like health care. “Nobody knew health care could be so
complicated,” Trump marveled early in his term, even if he was among the last American to discover that fact. On Wednesday, he offered a
similar gee-whiz observation about immigration reform: “If you are really, really, pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with
millions of people. And if you’re strong, you don’t have any heart. That’s a tough dilemma.” In signing the executive order, Trump left himself
open to some colorful criticisms. He
“caved” to pressure. Or he “lied” about his policy reversal because he
previously insisted only Congress could end the separation practice, not an executive order. Or he had been
holding the children “hostage” as part of a hoped-for congressional deal that also would fund the border wall he desperately wants. Forgive our
lack of indignation. We’ve seen presidents do backflips to escape poor decisions, and we want them to rectify their mistakes and search for
compromises. What’s hurt Trump in this instance is his failure to seize the moment. He could have used the last few days to rally members of
the House and Senate in support of a bill that would end the practice of separation plus take on other desperately needed immigration reforms.
Something still could happen, but when momentum on Capitol Hill didn’t accelerate quickly, Trump took action. He did so despite the fact that
his initial claim that Congress must act to stop separations may turn out to be accurate. As of Wednesday night, there
was still an
expectation the House could take up a bill supported by Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. It would resolve both the
treatment of migrant children and another immigration problem, that of the so-called Dreamers — the young
foreigners who grew up in the U.S. after being brought here without permission. Ryan’s bill also would provide money for border security,
including Trump’s wall, and tighten legal immigration. The challenge is finding enough supporters in a bitterly divided legislative body.
Democrats don’t want to fund the wall, or give Trump a victory. Hard-line Republicans equate giving the Dreamers a
path to staying in the U.S. with amnesty. And the president won’t abandon his wall idea. We’ve scoffed at that notion ever since Trump
mentioned it (and promised that Mexico would fund it). Another issue is whether there is still urgency to include an end to child separation in
the bill, or if the executive order is enough.
eb-5
EB-5s are the exception to Trump’s hardline stance – he has personal interest and
won’t rollback the plan
Chen 17
Michelle Chen, contributing writer for The Nation, “Trump’s Special Back Door for Wealthy Immigrants,”
6/15/17, https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-special-backdoor-for-wealthy-immigrants/ //KW
Trump’s “build the wall” immigration agenda isn’t as inflexible as it seems. That hardened border has one exclusive toll
booth: It’s called the EB-5 visa, aka “greenbacks for green cards”—known among global investor circles as the EZ Pass to the
American Dream. Through the EB-5 program, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) offers about 10,000 spots annually for foreign
investors to purchase at the “front of the queue,” if they promise to sink $500,000 to $1 million in a US-based “development” project. The goal
is to give investors priority in the green-card process as a “sweetener” in exchange for investing in commercial ventures that boost
employment. But the controversial program, which has exploded since the financial crisis, has been tarnished by links to shady influence-
peddling in the backrooms of Trump’s real-estate empire. The
EB-5 bonus, which has been renewed under Trump despite
mounting public
criticism, flew into the media spotlight after the family firm of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared
Kushner allegedly dangled a visa bonus when negotiating a luxury-apartment development proposal
with Chinese investors. Yet the deal reflects problems deeper than hints of conflict of interest. The EB-5 symbolizes the corporate
corruption festering throughout Washington’s broken-border policies.
The plan is the reform Trump wants – solves fraud and strengthens the economy
NDTV 18
New Delhi Television Limited, “EB-5 Visa Trump's Latest Target. US Congress Told To Reform It Or Kill It,”
6/23/18, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/eb-5-visa-trumps-latest-target-tells-us-congress-to-
reform-it-or-perish-1871936
WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has urged the US Congress to either reform or eliminate the EB-5
investors visa programme, which provides green cards to foreigners investing at least $1 million in the US that create nearly 10
permanent full-time jobs. The move comes from the Trump administration amidst increasing reports of misuse or fraud from
foreign nationals. Top American lawmakers too have been opposing EB-5 Investors Visa programme as it increases cases of fraud and misuse of
this one-of-its kind investors visa programme. "The
EB-5 regional center programme, which is set to expire on September 30 of this
year, is in dire need of reforms to better protect US investors, businesses and communities against fraud,
abuse, and mismanagement," L Francis Cissna, Director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services told lawmakers during a
Congressional hearing this week.
**Kritikal Link Things
neolib
link—generic
Migration recruitment techniques operate through processes of coerced labor
extraction based on the demands of wealthier countries Portes and Böröcz 89
(Alejandro Portes, Prof. of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and
Development at Princeton University; József Böröcz, Prof. of Sociology at Rutgers;
“Contemporary Immigration: Theoretical Perspectives on Its Determinants and Modes
of Incorporation”, https://www-jstor-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/2546431.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A92eeb9ecc4eb5
ccff21ea11a52815da2)//vl
The most widely held approach to the origins of international migration
— “push-pull" theories — sees labor flows as an
outcome of poverty and backwardness in the sending areas. Representatives of this perspective provide lists of “push
factors” —— economic, social and political hardships in the poorest parts of the world — and “pull factors” — comparative advantages in the
more advanced nation-states — as causal variables determining the size and directionality of immigrant flows. These
lists are
invariably elaborated post factum, that is, after particular movements have already been initiated. The
compilation of such lists is usually guided by two underlying assumptions: first, the expectation that the most
disadvantaged sectors of the poorer societies are most likely to participate in labor migration; and
second, the assumption that such flows arise spontaneously out of the sheer existence of inequalities on
a global scale. On the surface, these assumptions appear self-evident: workers migrate from Mexico to the
United States and from Turkey to West Germany and not vice versa. However, the tendency of the push-pull model to be applied
to those flows which are already taking place conceals its inability to explain why similar movements do not arise out
of other equally “poor” nations or why sources of outmigration tend to concentrate in certain regions
and not in others within the same sending countries. Thus, the proclivity of these theories to the post hoc recitation of
“obvious” causes makes them incapable of predicting the two principal differences in the origin of migration: 1) differences among collectivities
— primarily nation-states — in the size and directionality of migrant flows; 2) differences among individuals within the same country or region
in their propensities to migrate. The first question concerns macrostructural determinants of labor displacements while the second concerns
their micro- structural causes. The difference between these levels of analysis is also absent from most standard push-pull writings. At the
broader level of determination, the
onset of labor flows does not arise out of invidious comparisons of economic
advantage, but out of a history of prior contact between sending and receiving societies. History is replete with
instances in which an absolute wage advantage in economically expanding areas has meant nothing to the population of more isolated regions;
when their labor has been required, it has had to be coerced out of them. In general, the emergence of
regular labor outflows of stable size and known destination requires the prior penetration by institutions
of the stronger nation-state into those of the weaker sending ones. Political and economic conditions in
the latter are then gradually molded to the point where migration to the hegemonic center emerges as
a plausible option for the subordinate population. The process of external penetration and internal
imbalancing of labor-exporting areas has taken very different forms, however, during the history of capitalism.
Conquest and the slave trade involved the partial penetration of outlying areas to the expanding
capitalist world economy and resulted in coerced labor flows from them. This form of displacement
required relatively large, high risk capital investment and active support by the colonizing power so that the labor of slave-
releasing areas should be available to mines and plantations located elsewhere under the same colonial domain (See, Portes and Walton,
1981:Ch. 2). Migrant recruitment
through economic inducements can be seen as the midpoint of an
historical process that ranged from coerced labor extraction, as above, to the spontaneous initiation of
flows on the basis of labor demand in the wealthier countries. The nineteenth to mid-twentieth century labor
recruitment practices of the post-colonial nations of the Americas — from the United States to Argentina — were again costly in terms of
capital input, but required only passive support from the coercive bodies of the receiving states. Deliberate recruitment through
economic inducements has also been a common practice throughout the twentieth century with the
goal of provoking labor displacements from nearby peripheries, for example from the relatively less developed
countries of the Caribbean or the Mediter- ranean basin (Portes and Walton, 1981; Piore, 1979). Self-initiated or spontaneous labor flows are
more recent phenomena. They arise out of a change taking place in peripheral societies’ consumption patterns which reflect more and more
those being diffused from the advanced centers. The fulfillment of such expectations becomes increasingly difficult under the economies of
scarcity of the periphery and growing cross-national ties make it possible for certain groups located there to seek a solution by migrating
abroad. Thus, external
penetration in its successive forms — from physical coercion to economic
inducement to cultural dif- fusion — has been a precondition for the initiation of international labor
flows under capitalism (Portes, 1979).
Immigrants are included and incorporated only insofar as they meet employer
demand for productivity which caters to economic interests of corporations
Money 97 (Jeanette, PhD political science @ UCLA, MBA in finance @ American
Graduate School of International Management, BA in IR @ San Francisco State
University; “No Vacancy: The Political Geography of Immigration Control in Advanced
Industrial Countries”, https://www-jstor-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/2703503.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A505cd9ef95dfce
6d2353d09b5ffb1d70)//vl
Many explanations have been advanced to account for variation in immigration control policies among advanced industrial countries. Most
point to aspects of national identity, to economic factors, or to the interaction between economic and cultural
dimensions of immigration. One group of analysts focuses on conceptions of ethnicity, citizenship, and/or national identity to predict
immigration policy.7 Doris Meissner, for example, juxta- poses European nations in which citizenship is tied to “shared ethnicity
and nationality” to attitudes in the “traditional settler nations,” such as Australia, Canada, and the United States,
“where nation building through immigration led to ideas of membership based on civic participation
and a generally shared commitment to democratic values.”8 From this perspective, “settler” states are those
where national identity and citizenship are based on civic values of participation; immigrants are viewed
as potential citizens, and the state is relatively open to immigration. In contrast, “nonimmigrant” nations are those
where citizenship and national identity are based on ethnicity; where these cultural values hold, immigrants are viewed as aliens or foreigners,
and low levels of immigration are anticipated. Because national identity is fixed, in order to account for the variation over time the analyses
introduce additional exogenous variables.9 From
the “identity” perspective, elites, institutional structures, or
extremist groups, for example, can damp down or kindle pressures to control alien entry.10 Economic
interests of domestic political actors are a second major explanatory scheme. One group of analysts favors employer interests in
explaining levels of openness. According to Marxian analyses, employer interests are dominant because of their
privileged access to the capitalist state;“ for public choice analysts, it is because employers face fewer
collective action problems than do employees or the public at large;12 for labor market analysts,
employer interests are a reasonable proxy for other societal interests because migrant labor is
concentrated in the secondary labor market and therefore complements and enhances the returns to
the native labor force deployed in the primary labor market.” Alternatively, domestic political actors are believed to have
competing economic interests, forcing them to vie in the political arena for different policy outcomes. That is, “different social classes within
the national territory will have conflicting interests which can result in opposing positions on immigration.” 1“ In other words, employers
are one important class of political actors in favor of immigration, but now unions (or other interest
groups) enter the political equation as actors who “might be opposed on the ground that this will harm
workers’ wages and working conditions.” From the “economic” perspective, variation is explained either in
terms of employer demand for labor and hence for migrants or in terms of power balances among societal actors,
some who support immigration, others who oppose it.
Money 97 (Jeanette, PhD political science @ UCLA, MBA in finance @ American
Graduate School of International Management, BA in IR @ San Francisco State
University; “No Vacancy: The Political Geography of Immigration Control in Advanced
Industrial Countries”, https://www-jstor-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/2703503.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A505cd9ef95dfce
6d2353d09b5ffb1d70)//vl
On the demand side, firms
are the primary actors with an interest in immigrant labor and an incentive to lobby
government regarding immigration issues. I argue that local support
for immigration varies over time in response to
employers’ labor market needs. Local support is strongest in periods of low unemployment; however, support will be mitigated by
flexible labor markets and high capital mobility. Other factors being equal, low levels of local unemployment put pressure on local wage levels.
Local labor market conditions, however, may be insufficiently attractive to generate internal migration,
giving rise to geographically segmented labor markets and geographically specific corporate demands
for immigrant labor. Regardless of conditions in the economy as a whole, local labor market conditions may intensify the demand for
immigrant labor. Other factors are not always equal however. Firms with high capital mobility, such as manufacturing
firms with standardized technology, can choose to export capital to sites of cheap foreign labor, whereas
other firms have no alternative but to petition for the importation of labor. Natural resource—based firms,
agricultural producers, and service firms (in-person delivery of services) are spatially fixed and therefore unable to reduce labor costs through
capital exports. Firms in declining sectors of the economy also lack capital mobility. Given equal levels of unemployment, support for
immigration will be strongest among firms with limited capital mobility. Therefore, local demand for immigrant labor will be strongest where
firms with limited capital mobility dominate the local economy. Finns also confront variation in labor market flexibility. Numerous studies
demonstrate that migrant labor provides desired flexibility by participating in the secondary labor market.23 That is, immigrants
permit the expansion of dual labor markets and increase flexibility of production. Firms confronting
inflexible labor markets will prefer higher levels of immigration than firms confronting flexible labor
markets. Given equal levels of unemployment and similar levels of capital mobility, local
link—nurses
The nursing industry is undergirded by neoliberalism – bureaucratic capitalism coerces
and disenfranchises Filipino migrants by breaking down kinship ties and political
mobilization, while the transaction of benefits across borders is an affirmation of
Western corporate control
San Juan ’05 - director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Storrs, Connecticut, USA. He
received his graduate degrees from Harvard University. He was recently a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois
Institute, Harvard University. He served as professor of English, Comparative Literature and Ethnic
Studies in several universities, the last as chair of the Comparative American Cultures Dept, Washington
State University. He was recently Fulbright professor of American Studies at Leuven University, Belgium
and visiting professor of English at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan and the University of the
Philippines. He was a Rockefeller Study Center fellow at Bellagio, Italy and fellow of the Humanities
Center, Wesleyan University. Among his recent books are Working through the Contradictions (Bucknell
University), Toward Filipino Self-Determination (SUNY Press) and Critique and Social
Transformation (The Edwin Mellen Press). (E., The Global South, “Overseas Filipino Workers:The Making
of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora,” Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2009, Indiana University Press, Project
Muse)//PS
At the beginning of this millennium, Filipinos have become the newest diasporic community in the whole world. United
Nations statistics indicate that Filipinos make up the newest migrant assemblage in the world: close to ten million Filipino
migrant workers (out of 90 million citizens), mostly female domestic help and semiskilled labor. They endure poorly paid employment
under substandard conditions, with few or null rights, in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, North America,
and elsewhere. It might be noted here that historically, diasporic groups are defined not only by a homeland but also
by a desire for eventual return and a collective identity centered on myths and memories of the
homeland. The Filipino diaspora, however, is different. Since the homeland has long been conquered and
occupied by Western powers (Spain, United States) and remains colonized despite formal or nominal
independence, the Filipino identification is not with a fully defined nation but with regions, localities,
and communities of languages and traditions. Perceived as untutored, recalcitrant strangers, they are
lumped with familiar aliens: Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, Pacific Islanders, and so on. Newspaper reports have cited the [End Page 116]
Philippines as the next target of the US government’s global “crusade” against terrorism—tutelage by
force. Where is the sovereign nation alluded to in passports, contracts, and other identification papers? How do we conceive of this “Filipino” nation or
nationality, given the insidious impact of US disciplinary forces and now, on top of the persistent neocolonizing pressure, the usurping force of quantifying capital
and its reductive cash-nexus ? According to orthodox immigration theory, “push” and “pull” factors combine to explain the phenomenon of overseas contract
workers. Do we resign ourselves to this easy schematic formulation? Poverty
and injustice, to be sure, have driven most Filipinos to
seek work abroad, sublimating the desire to return by regular remittances to their families. Occasional visits and
other means of communication defer the eventual homecoming. Alienation and isolation, brutal and racist treatment, and other
dehumanized and degrading conditions prevent their permanent settlement in the “receiving” countries,
except where they have been given legal access to obtaining citizenship status. If the return is postponed, are modes of adaptation and temporary domicile in non-
native grounds the feasible alternatives for these expatriates (as they are fondly called by their compatriots in Manila)? The reality of “foreignness,” of “otherness,”
seems ineluctable. Alienation, insulting treatment, and racist violence prevent their permanent resettlement in the “receiving societies,” except where Filipino
communities (as in the US and Canada, for example) have been given opportunities to acquire citizenship rights. Individuals, however, have
to go
through abrasive screening and tests—more stringent now in this repressive quasi-fascist ethos. During
political crises in the Philippines, OFWs mobilize themselves for support of local and nationwide
resistance against imperial domination and local tyranny. Because the putative “Filipino” nation is in the process of formation in
the neocolony and abroad, OFWs have been considered transnationals or transmigrants—a paradoxical turn since the existence of the nation is problematic or
under interrogation, whereby the “trans” prefix becomes chimerical. This diaspora then faces the perennial hurdles of racism, ethnic exclusion, inferiorization via
racial profiling, and physical attacks. Can Filipino migrant labor mount a collective resistance against globalized exploitation? Can the Filipino process of transition
expose also the limits of genetic and/or procedural notions of citizenship? In what way can this hypothetical diaspora serve as a paradigm for analyzing and critically
unsettling the corporate-led internationalization of the division of labor and the consolidation of reified ethnic categories as the global financial crisis unfolds? In
summary, I offer the following propositions for further reflection and elaboration. My paramount thesis on the phenomenon of the Filipino dismemberment is this:
Given that the Philippine habitat has never cohered as a genuinely independent nation—national
autonomy continues to escape the [End Page 117] Filipino people in a neocolonial setup—Filipinos are
dispersed from family or kinship webs in villages, towns, or provincial regions first, and loosely from an
inchoate, even “refeudalized,” nation-state. This dispersal is primarily due to economic coercion and
disenfranchisement under the retrogressive regime of comprador-bureaucratic (not welfare-state) capitalism
articulated with tributary/semi-feudal institutions and practices. Migration is sometimes seen as an event-sequence offering the
space of freedom to seek one’s fortune, experience the pleasure of adventure in libidinal games of resistance, sweetened by illusions of transcendence, so the origin
to which one returns is not properly a nation-state but a village, a quasi-primordial community, kinship network, or even a ritual family/clan. In this context, the
Philippine state-machinery (both sending and receiving states benefit from the brokerage transaction)
is viewed in fact as a corrupt exploiter, not representative of the masses, a comprador agent of
transnational corporations and Western powers. What are the myths enabling a cathexis of the homeland as collective memory and
project? They derive from assorted childhood reminiscences and folklore together with customary practices surrounding municipal and religious celebrations; at
best, there may be signs of a residual affective tie to national heroes like Rizal, Bonifacio, and latter-day celebrities like singers, movie stars, athletes, and so on.
Indigenous food, dances, and music can be acquired as commodities whose presence temporarily heals the trauma of removal; family reunification can resolve the
psychic damage of loss of status or alienation. In short, rootedness in autochthonous habitat does not exert a commanding sway; it is experienced only as a
nostalgic mood. Meanwhile, language,
religion, kinship, the aura of family rituals, and common experiences in
school or workplace function invariably as the organic bonds of community. Such psychodynamic
clusters of affects demarcate the boundaries of the imagination but also release energies that mutate
into actions serving ultimately national-popular emancipatory projects. Alienation in the host country is what unites OFWs,
a shared history of colonial and racial subordination, marginalization, and struggles for cultural survival through heterogeneous forms of resistance and political
rebellion. This is what may replace the nonexistent nation/homeland, absent the political self-determination of the Filipino people. Years of union struggle, united-
front agitation, educational campaigns, and political organizing in interethnic coalitions have blurred if not erased that stigma. Accomplishments in the civil rights
struggles of the 1960s have provided nourishment for ethnic pride. However, compared
to the Japanese or Asian Indians, Filipino
Americans as a whole have not made it; the exceptions prove the rule. Andrew Cunanan (the serial killer who slew the
famous Versace) is the specter that continues to haunt “melting pot” Filipino Americanists who continue to blabber about the “forgotten Filipino” in the hope of
being awarded a share of the obsolescent welfare-state [End Page 118] pie. Dispossession of sovereignty leads to moral and ethical
shipwreck, with the natives drifting rudderless, some fortuitously marooned in islands across the
continents. Via strategies of communal preservation and versatile tactics of defining the locality of the
community through negotiations and shifting compromises, the Filipino diaspora defers its return—
unless and until there is a Filipino nation that they can identify with. This will continue in places where there is no hope of
permanent resettlement as citizens or bona fide residents (as in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and elsewhere). This is the disavowed terror
of globalization. Some Filipinos in their old age may desire eventual return only when they are economically secure. In general, Filipinos will not return
permanently (except perhaps for burial) to the site of misery and oppression—to poverty, exploitation, humiliated status, despair, hunger, and lack of dignity. Of
course, some are forcibly returned: damaged, deported, or dead. But OFWs would rather move their kin and parents to their place of employment, preferably in
countries where family reunification is allowed, as in the United States, Italy, Canada, and so on, or even in places of suffering and humiliation, provided there is
some hope or illusion of future improvement. Utopian longings can mislead but also reconfigure and redirect wayward
travels, sojourns, and adventures. Ongoing support for nationalist struggles at home is sporadic and intermittent during times of retrenchment
and revitalized global apartheid. Do we see any mass protests and collective indignation here in the United States at the Visiting Forces Agreement, or the rapes of
Filipinas by US soldiers? Was there any protest at the recent invasion (before and after 9/11) of the Philippines by several thousand US Marines in joint US-
Philippines military exercises? Especially after September 11, 2001, and the Arroyo sycophancy to the Bush regime, the Philippines—considered by the US
government as the harbor of homegrown “terrorists” like the Abu Sayyaf—may soon be transformed into the next “killing field” after Afghanistan. During the
Marcos dictatorship, the politicized generation of Filipino American youth in the United States was able to mobilize a large segment of the community to support
the national-democratic mass struggles, including the armed combatants of the New People’s Army (led by the Communist Party of the Philippines), against US-
supported authoritarian rule. Filipino nationalism blossomed in the late 1960s and 1970s but suffered attenuation when it was rechanelled to support the populist
elitism of Aquino and Ramos, the lumpen populism of Estrada, and now the thoroughly corrupt Arroyo regime. The
precarious balance of class
forces at this conjuncture is subject to the shifts in political mobilization and calculation, hence the
intervention of Filipino agencies with emancipatory goals and socialist principles is crucial and
strategically necessary. [End Page 119]
The aff’s capitalistic objectification of Filipina nurses is ruthless exploitation that
ignores the inherent racialization of the nursing industry – the plan upholds notions of
American imperialism under the guise of paternalistic benevolence
Ceniza Choy ‘3 - Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her major
research interests focus on the U.S. global presence in Asian countries, Asian migrations to the United
States, and the impact of trans-Pacific migration on American and Asian societies (Catherine,
“Introduction: The Contours of a Filipino American History,” From Empire of Care, DOI:
10.1215/9780822384410 Duke University Press, 2003,
https://wggc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/CatherineChoy_EmpireofCare_Introduction.pdf)//PS
Despite the important role that Filipino nurse migrants play in the United States and other countries, we know
little about the development of this phenomenon as well as the nurse migrants themselves. Although renewed
interest in the migration of highly trained persons to the United States has produced a number of studies that have included Filipino nurse migrants, these studies
often lump them together with flows of other Asian professional migrants.∞≠ These studies provide valuable information about the national origins and highly
skilled nature of contemporary migration patterns to the United States, but the lumping of Filipino nurse migrants with professional migrants from other Asian
sending countries and/or other professional migrants from the Philippines produces some troubling e√ects. First, it tends to foreground the uniqueness of the
United States as a receiving nation of a diverse group of highly skilled migrants. Many of these studies
generally refer to contemporary
U.S. immigration legislation and economic opportunities to explain the phenomenon of Filipino nurse
migration. In particular, they highlight the 1965 U.S. Immigration Act’s new visas allocated to workers with
needed skills and critical U.S. nursing shortages in the post–World War II period. Second, although some studies have emphasized
the unique situations of the Asian countries that send professional migrants, they con tinue to emphasize an economic logic to explain
professional migration, often referred to as ‘‘brain drain.’’ These studies argue that the inability of Asian countries to provide
professional and economic opportunities to their professionals commensurate with their skills and training combined with economic opportunities in the United
States produce these professional migrant flows.∞∞ Third, the statistical nature of these studies renders Filipino nurse
migrants impersonal, faceless objects of study, an objectification that prevents an understanding and
appreciation of these migrants as multidimensional historical agents, and consequently hinders an
identification with them as professionals, women, and immigrants. I characterize these e√ects as troubling because the
emphasis on U.S. immigration legislation and economic opportunities reinscribes the popular notion that these
contemporary Filipino nurse migrations are spontaneous flows made by individual Filipino nurses who
rationally calculate professional earnings in both countries, and then migrate because the nursing salary in the United States is higher. This notion obscures
the very important and complicated roles that both Philippine and U.S. governments, recruitment agencies, and
professional nursing organizations, as well as the Filipino nurse migrants themselves, have played in facilitating this form of migration. Rendered
invisible is the culture of migration, the ways in which narratives about the promise of immigration to
the United States—narratives circulated by the media as well as Filipino nurse migrants already in the
United States—shape Filipino nurses’ desire to migrate abroad. Also rendered invisible are the ways U.S.
hospital recruiters have collaborated across national boundaries with Philippine travel and recruitment agencies in their
aggressive recruitment of Filipino nurses to work in their hospitals, collaborations that illuminate what Jon Goss and Bruce Lindquist have called the
institutionalization of migration.∞≤ The
lack of study about this culture and institutionalization of Filipino nurse
migration to the United States, then, perpetuates a critical void. Little has been written about the
exploitation faced by Filipino nurses from Philippine and American recruiters and their American
hospital employers, the scapegoating of Filipino immigrants in the United States during diffcult political
times, and the absence of professional solidarity between Filipino and American nurses. All of these issues
complicate and critique the popular narratives about the promise of American immigration. The studies that include Filipino nurse migrants also marginalize and
simplify the very complex and dynamic history of the colonial relationship between the United States and the Philippines. When the history of U.S. colonialism in the
Philippines is mentioned, it is often in the context of an Americanized educational system that ambiguously predisposed Filipinos to American culture and customs.
At stake here is the insidious persistence of the interrelated myths of U.S. exceptionalism and
benevolence, which claim that Americans embraced their ‘‘little brown brothers’’ in the Philippines
with what Vicente Rafael has called ‘‘white love.’’∞≥ According to these myths, America’s tutelage of Filipinos bestowed on
Filipinos the enlightened American systems of education, infrastructure, and public health, thus
distinguishing Americans from their brutal European colonial counterparts. Rendered invisible are the
ways U.S. colonialism in the Philippines created an Americanized training hospital system that
eventually prepared Filipino women to work as nurses in the United States as opposed to the
Philippines. Furthermore, despite their reformist intentions, American physicians and nurses in the
Philippines during the U.S. colonial period helped shape, as they were shaped by, a culture of U.S. imperialism
that created racialized hierarchies, with Americans on top and Filipinos below.
The nursing industry in the Philippines is historically grounded in American

imperialism and the imposition of Westernized norms – the plan is a complicit
affirmation of racialized exploitation
Ceniza Choy ‘3 - Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her major
research interests focus on the U.S. global presence in Asian countries, Asian migrations to the United
States, and the impact of trans-Pacific migration on American and Asian societies (Catherine, “Nursing
Matters: Women and U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines,” From Empire of Care, DOI:
10.1215/9780822384410 Duke University Press, 2003,
https://wggc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/CatherineChoy_EmpireofCare_Introduction.pdf)//PS
The training of Filipino nurses, like America’s medical mission against the cholera epidemic, involved the
imposition of control over Filipinos’ social beliefs and practices regarding class and gender. As Dock herself
admitted, the notion of Filipino women working as nurses was an idea that had to be ‘‘entirely overcome’’ both by Filipinos in general and elite Filipinos in
particular. Their strong objections were probably related to the training of Filipino nurses in hospitals, which had become the sites for the training of student nurses
in the late nineteenth-century United States. Elite Filipinos regarded the Spanish colonial hospitals as places where those who were so unfortunate as not to have
homes would spend their last days until death. Furthermore, during the cholera epidemic, rumors spread among Filipinos that Americans poisoned cholera victims
upon their arrival at the hospitals.≥≠ The training of Filipino nurses involved not only spatial control within the
hospital workplace; it also involved corporeal control in terms of clothing. Elite Filipino families, from which Americans originally
recruited potential nursing students, opposed the use of the Americanstyle nursing uniform, as its absence of a long train signified lower-class status. Echoing
imperial narratives that cast all Filipinos in a timeless past and ignored Filipino cultural differences, Dock
referred to an essential ‘‘Filipino costume’’ and characterized the donning of the nursing uniform by
Filipinos as yet ‘‘another struggle’’: ‘‘The Filipino has worn the same style of costume for about three
hundred years. This dress has a long train which carries with it class distinction. It is almost symbolical of the leisure or wealthy upper class: the longer the
train, the higher the class, absence of train, lack of class. To abolish this costume even for the period of ‘duty,’ was therefore, something to accomplish, but it was
done, and the student nurses now look most attractive in their striped, gingham uniforms, with white caps and aprons.’’≥∞ Furthermore, the idea that Filipino
women engaged in nursing was a gendered construction about the labor of nursing, which American nursing leaders in the Philippines actively had to reproduce in
the archipelago. In the United States, while the nature of nursing as labor changed from being a last option for women in the mid–nineteenth century into more
respectable and proper work for women by the early twentieth century, nursing was consistently ‘‘women’s’’ work. Furthermore, sex segregation, in the form of a
separate ‘‘women’s sphere’’ that encompassed professional opportunities, was an integral part of the evolutionary logic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century white American women’s ‘‘civilization’’ work. As Louise Newman points out in her generative work on the racial origins of feminism in the United States,
‘‘Evolutionist theories linked sexual di√erences with racial progress. ‘Civilized’ races were di√erentiated from ‘primitive’ races according to the specific sexual traits
and gender roles that characterized the white middle classes. . . . the more civilized the race, the more the men and women of that race had to di√er from one
another.’’≥≤ Thus, Dock and other American
nurses viewed Filipino women’s nursing training as a foundational point
from which to begin the uplift of the Filipino race. Her history of the establishment of Americanized
nursing in the Philippines reveals that the American effort to impose American nursing customs involved the
deliberate attempt to separate and exclude men from the labor of nursing: ‘‘When Miss McCalmont took charge of the nursing force in the Philippines, a peculiar
state of a√airs existed. All male patients, even the Americans, were cared for by male attendants only. In the men’s wards, the nurses did only desk work, charting,
and giving out medicines. Baths, treatments, and nearly all surgical dressings were done by the attendants, who were generally ex-army corps men, with even less
than the ordinary training. . . . It seemed impossible to get the nurses back into the hospital habits of the United States, and an attempt was made to solve the
problem by a training school for men.’’≥≥ Finally, American
colonial medicine and nursing enabled American medical
personnel to biologically and socially reinvent American bodies and social practices. In the early 1900s, the
American colonial government had established laboratories to study Filipino and American bodies in the
archipelago. These laboratory studies, which included the disease surveys of parasites in Igorots’ stools, for example, ‘‘re’’-discovered
Filipino bodies as a potentially dangerous type, a carrier of germs, parasites, and pathogens. Dock, again
confirming the beliefs of other medical personnel, was probably referring to such laboratory studies when she claimed that ‘‘investigation has shown the impaired
health and weakened condition of the Filipino people (who are not a strong or enduring race) to be largely due to the prevalence not only of tuberculosis, but of the
hook-worm disease, which seems to have no equal in its capacity to enervate and undermine the system.’’≥∂ However, colonial
laboratory studies
also ‘‘re’’-discovered American bodies as a resilient racial type. Focusing on the control of external factors, such as clothing or
contact with the ‘‘natives,’’ these studies concluded that American bodies could survive the tropical climate, once thought to be the source of the ‘‘white man’s
grave.’’≥∑ Dock’s history of nursing and the reproduction of late nineteenthcentury American nursing reforms in the Philippines similarly invented a sanitized image
of the United States. While Dock’s
insistence that Filipino young women ‘‘had to be grounded in the very a-b-c of
hygiene and sanitation’’ revealed the very Western-centric perspective from which notions of hygiene
and sanitation were constructed and taught, her history also concealed the historical changes regarding hygiene and sanitation in the
United States. Dock claimed that the ‘‘a-b-c of hygiene and sanitation’’ was ‘‘rudimentary knowledge which, in our country, is assimilated we know not when or
how—it is almost inborn,’’ suggesting
that such knowledge among Americans was innate, biological, and
immutable. However, before 1873, when the first training schools for nurses were opened in the United States, the hospital was an institution for society’s
marginal people, such as the poor. Dirt, vermin, and rampant cross-infection known as hospitalism were common.≥∏ Until the creation of the modern U.S. hospital
after the Civil War, American patients in the nineteenth century, like Filipinos, tried to avoid hospitalization. It was not until the 1900s, when Lavinia Dock published
her history of nursing, that nurses in American hospitals concentrated their e√orts on incessant cleaning to promote what Dock referred to ahistorically as the ‘‘a-b-
c of hygiene and sanitation.’’
The nursing industry is undergirded by neoliberalism – bureaucratic capitalism coerces

and disenfranchises Filipino migrants by breaking down kinship ties and political
mobilization, while the transaction of benefits across borders is an affirmation of
Western corporate control
Transformation (The Edwin Mellen Press). (E., The Global South, “Overseas Filipino Workers: The Making
Muse)//PS
At the beginning of this millennium, Filipinos have become the newest diasporic community in the whole world. United
Nations statistics indicate that Filipinos make up the newest migrant assemblage in the world: close to ten million Filipino
migrant workers (out of 90 million citizens), mostly female domestic help and semiskilled labor. They endure poorly paid employment
under substandard conditions, with few or null rights, in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, North America,
and elsewhere. It might be noted here that historically, diasporic groups are defined not only by a homeland but also
by a desire for eventual return and a collective identity centered on myths and memories of the
homeland. The Filipino diaspora, however, is different. Since the homeland has long been conquered and
occupied by Western powers (Spain, United States) and remains colonized despite formal or nominal
independence, the Filipino identification is not with a fully defined nation but with regions, localities,
and communities of languages and traditions. Perceived as untutored, recalcitrant strangers, they are
lumped with familiar aliens: Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, Pacific Islanders, and so on. Newspaper reports have cited the [End Page 116]
Philippines as the next target of the US government’s global “crusade” against terrorism—tutelage by
force. Where is the sovereign nation alluded to in passports, contracts, and other identification papers? How do we conceive of this “Filipino” nation or
nationality, given the insidious impact of US disciplinary forces and now, on top of the persistent neocolonizing pressure, the usurping force of quantifying capital
and its reductive cash-nexus ? According to orthodox immigration theory, “push” and “pull” factors combine to explain the phenomenon of overseas contract
workers. Do we resign ourselves to this easy schematic formulation? Poverty
and injustice, to be sure, have driven most Filipinos to
seek work abroad, sublimating the desire to return by regular remittances to their families. Occasional visits and
other means of communication defer the eventual homecoming. Alienation and isolation, brutal and racist treatment, and other
dehumanized and degrading conditions prevent their permanent settlement in the “receiving” countries,
except where they have been given legal access to obtaining citizenship status. If the return is postponed, are modes of adaptation and temporary domicile in non-
native grounds the feasible alternatives for these expatriates (as they are fondly called by their compatriots in Manila)? The reality of “foreignness,” of “otherness,”
seems ineluctable. Alienation, insulting treatment, and racist violence prevent their permanent resettlement in the “receiving societies,” except where Filipino
communities (as in the US and Canada, for example) have been given opportunities to acquire citizenship rights. Individuals, however, have
to go
through abrasive screening and tests—more stringent now in this repressive quasi-fascist ethos. During
political crises in the Philippines, OFWs mobilize themselves for support of local and nationwide
resistance against imperial domination and local tyranny. Because the putative “Filipino” nation is in the process of formation in
the neocolony and abroad, OFWs have been considered transnationals or transmigrants—a paradoxical turn since the existence of the nation is problematic or
under interrogation, whereby the “trans” prefix becomes chimerical. This diaspora then faces the perennial hurdles of racism, ethnic exclusion, inferiorization via
racial profiling, and physical attacks. Can Filipino migrant labor mount a collective resistance against globalized exploitation? Can the Filipino process of transition
expose also the limits of genetic and/or procedural notions of citizenship? In what way can this hypothetical diaspora serve as a paradigm for analyzing and critically
unsettling the corporate-led internationalization of the division of labor and the consolidation of reified ethnic categories as the global financial crisis unfolds? In
summary, I offer the following propositions for further reflection and elaboration. My paramount thesis on the phenomenon of the Filipino dismemberment is this:
Given that the Philippine habitat has never cohered as a genuinely independent nation—national
autonomy continues to escape the [End Page 117] Filipino people in a neocolonial setup—Filipinos are
dispersed from family or kinship webs in villages, towns, or provincial regions first, and loosely from an
inchoate, even “refeudalized,” nation-state. This dispersal is primarily due to economic coercion and
disenfranchisement under the retrogressive regime of comprador-bureaucratic (not welfare-state) capitalism
articulated with tributary/semi-feudal institutions and practices. Migration is sometimes seen as an event-sequence offering the
space of freedom to seek one’s fortune, experience the pleasure of adventure in libidinal games of resistance, sweetened by illusions of transcendence, so the origin
to which one returns is not properly a nation-state but a village, a quasi-primordial community, kinship network, or even a ritual family/clan. In this context, the
Philippine state-machinery (both sending and receiving states benefit from the brokerage transaction)
is viewed in fact as a corrupt exploiter, not representative of the masses, a comprador agent of
transnational corporations and Western powers. What are the myths enabling a cathexis of the homeland as collective memory and
project? They derive from assorted childhood reminiscences and folklore together with customary practices surrounding municipal and religious celebrations; at
best, there may be signs of a residual affective tie to national heroes like Rizal, Bonifacio, and latter-day celebrities like singers, movie stars, athletes, and so on.
Indigenous food, dances, and music can be acquired as commodities whose presence temporarily heals the trauma of removal; family reunification can resolve the
psychic damage of loss of status or alienation. In short, rootedness in autochthonous habitat does not exert a commanding sway; it is experienced only as a
nostalgic mood. Meanwhile, language,
religion, kinship, the aura of family rituals, and common experiences in
school or workplace function invariably as the organic bonds of community. Such psychodynamic
clusters of affects demarcate the boundaries of the imagination but also release energies that mutate
into actions serving ultimately national-popular emancipatory projects. Alienation in the host country is what unites OFWs,
a shared history of colonial and racial subordination, marginalization, and struggles for cultural survival through heterogeneous forms of resistance and political
rebellion. This is what may replace the nonexistent nation/homeland, absent the political self-determination of the Filipino people. Years of union struggle, united-
front agitation, educational campaigns, and political organizing in interethnic coalitions have blurred if not erased that stigma. Accomplishments in the civil rights
struggles of the 1960s have provided nourishment for ethnic pride. However, compared
to the Japanese or Asian Indians, Filipino
Americans as a whole have not made it; the exceptions prove the rule. Andrew Cunanan (the serial killer who slew the
famous Versace) is the specter that continues to haunt “melting pot” Filipino Americanists who continue to blabber about the “forgotten Filipino” in the hope of
being awarded a share of the obsolescent welfare-state [End Page 118] pie. Dispossession of sovereignty leads to moral and ethical
shipwreck, with the natives drifting rudderless, some fortuitously marooned in islands across the
continents. Via strategies of communal preservation and versatile tactics of defining the locality of the
community through negotiations and shifting compromises, the Filipino diaspora defers its return—
unless and until there is a Filipino nation that they can identify with. This will continue in places where there is no hope of
permanent resettlement as citizens or bona fide residents (as in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and elsewhere). This is the disavowed terror
of globalization. Some Filipinos in their old age may desire eventual return only when they are economically secure. In general, Filipinos will not return
permanently (except perhaps for burial) to the site of misery and oppression—to poverty, exploitation, humiliated status, despair, hunger, and lack of dignity. Of
course, some are forcibly returned: damaged, deported, or dead. But OFWs would rather move their kin and parents to their place of employment, preferably in
countries where family reunification is allowed, as in the United States, Italy, Canada, and so on, or even in places of suffering and humiliation, provided there is
some hope or illusion of future improvement. Utopian longings can mislead but also reconfigure and redirect wayward
travels, sojourns, and adventures. Ongoing support for nationalist struggles at home is sporadic and intermittent during times of retrenchment
and revitalized global apartheid. Do we see any mass protests and collective indignation here in the United States at the Visiting Forces Agreement, or the rapes of
Filipinas by US soldiers? Was there any protest at the recent invasion (before and after 9/11) of the Philippines by several thousand US Marines in joint US-
Philippines military exercises? Especially after September 11, 2001, and the Arroyo sycophancy to the Bush regime, the Philippines—considered by the US
government as the harbor of homegrown “terrorists” like the Abu Sayyaf—may soon be transformed into the next “killing field” after Afghanistan. During the
Marcos dictatorship, the politicized generation of Filipino American youth in the United States was able to mobilize a large segment of the community to support
the national-democratic mass struggles, including the armed combatants of the New People’s Army (led by the Communist Party of the Philippines), against US-
supported authoritarian rule. Filipino nationalism blossomed in the late 1960s and 1970s but suffered attenuation when it was rechanelled to support the populist
elitism of Aquino and Ramos, the lumpen populism of Estrada, and now the thoroughly corrupt Arroyo regime. The
precarious balance of class
forces at this conjuncture is subject to the shifts in political mobilization and calculation, hence the
intervention of Filipino agencies with emancipatory goals and socialist principles is crucial and
strategically necessary. [End Page 119]
The aff’s commodification of Filipina nurses is a violent exploitation of women, which

enables the oppression and degradation of the 3rd world through immigration
legislation
Muse)//PS
Victimization of Filipinos by employers from Europe to the Middle East to Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan have been documented in
detail since the seventies when the export of “warm bodies” started. The fates of Flor Contemplacion, Sarah Balabagan, Maricris Sioson,
and others—several hundred OFWs languish today in jails in the Middle East, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc.—have become public scandals and occasions for mass
indignation. Consequently, on April 8, 2009, the UN Committee for the Ratification of the Migrants Convention deleted the Philippines from the list of model states
complying with the UN Convention mandating countries to protect the rights of their migrant citizens. Amid the tide of barbarization attendant on the putative
benefits of global capitalism—celebrated by such pundits as Thomas Friedman and other neoconservative defenders of privatization, deregulation, and cutting of
social services—we have witnessed a paradigm-shift among scholars studying the phenomenon of the Filipino diaspora. Critical intelligence has been hijacked to
serve vulgar apologetics. For example, the employment of Filipina women as domestics or nannies to care for children, old people, the chronically infirm or disabled,
and so on, has been lauded as altruistic care. Generally, this exploitation of enslaved human labor-power eludes criticism
because of its philanthropic facade. With most female domestics coming from impoverished, formerly colonized societies, we perceive that the
traditional structure of global inequality among nation-states has something to do with this trend. This point cannot be over-emphasized: The buying and
selling [End Page 108] of “third world” bodies is a legacy of the unjust and unequal division of international
labor in both productive and reproductive spheres. This “global care chain,” as trendy sociologists would put it, is
household work managed as a thoroughgoing profit-making industry. In Global Woman, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochshild
tried to contextualize the exploitation of third-world women in the new epoch of flexible globalized
capitalism. But their picture missed one stark difference, a telling omission: the status/rank of the
Philippines as a neocolonial dependency without power to enforce its sovereignty right and safeguard
the welfare of OFWs. The stark disparity is sharply delineated by Bridget Anderson in her penetrating critique, Doing the Dirty Work? Opposing scholars
who streamline if not euphemistically glamorize the job of caring, Anderson exposes how domestics from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and other subaltern nations
function as “legal slaves.” Anderson shows how this
came about through the economic conquest of third-world societies
by the profit-driven industrialized North. This has given the middle class of the First World “materialistic
forms of power over them” (149). She deploys Orlando Patterson’s conceptual distinctions between the pre-modern personalistic idiom of power
and the materialistic idiom of power under capitalism and defines the employer/domestic relation as a master/slave relation. The employer exercises both forms of
power: the materialistic because of the massive discrepancy in access to all kinds of material resources between the receiving state and the countries of origin of
migrants and the personalistic because the worker is located in the employer’s home—and often dependent on her not just for her salary but for her food, water,
accommodation and access to the basic amenities of life. The employer uses both of these idioms of power, and both idioms are given to employers and reinforced
by the state. (6) Viewed systemically, the
neoliberal global structure enables the exploitation of poor countries by
the rich ones, and the exploitation of the citizens of poor countries by citizens of the global North
(either male or female) through immigration legislation, even criminalizing migrants who
assert their human rights. Earlier, institutionally imposed norms of race, nationality, and gender served to
naturalize the migrant worker’s subjugation, but in the new field of globalized capital, the lack of citizenship
rights and the status of subordinated or inferiorized nationality/ethnicity both contribute to worsening
the degradation of third-world women. But there is something more pernicious that eludes the orthodox scholastic. What Anderson argues is
that domestic work commodifies not only labor power—in classic political economy, labor power serves as the commodity that produces surplus-value (profit) not
returned to or shared with the workers— but, more significantly, the personhood of the domestic. Indentured or commodified [End Page 109] personhood is the
key to understanding what globalization is really all about. Consequently, what needs to be factored in is not only an analysis of the labor-capital relation, but also
the savage asymmetry of nation-states, of polities that hire these poor women and the polities that collude in this postmodern slave-trade. Economics signifies
nothing without the global sociopolitical fabric in which it is historically woven. Brutalized
migrant labor throughout the world thrives
on the sharpening inequality of nation-states, particularly the intense impoverishment of “third world”
societies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Race, national, and class forces operate together in determining the exchange-value (the price)
of migrant labor. The reproduction of a homogeneous race (in Europe, North America, Japan, etc.) integral to the perpetuation of the unjust social order is
connected with the historical development of nation-states, whether as imagined or as geopolitically defined locus. Historically, membership in the community was
determined by race in its various modalities, a circumscription that is constantly being negotiated. It is in this racialized setting that European women’s positioning
as citizen acquires crucial significance. This is the site where third-world domestics play a major role, as Anderson acutely underscores: “The fact that they are
migrants is important: in order to participate like men women must have workers who will provide the same flexibility as wives, in particular working long hours and
combining caring and domestic chores” (190). This is the nexus where we discern that care as labor is the domestic’s assignment,
whereas the experience of care as emotion is the employer’s privilege. The distinction is fundamental and necessary in
elucidating the axis of social reproduction rooted in socially productive praxis. Such a vital distinction speaks volumes about migrant
domestic labor/care as the key sociopolitical factor that sustains the existing oppressive international
division of labor. This key distinction undermines all claims that globalized capitalism has brought, and is
bringing, freedom, prosperity, and egalitarian democracy to everyone. The political economy of
globalized migrant labor involves the dialectics of production and reproduction. Following an empiricist line of inquiry, Rhacel
Salazar Parrenas examines the racial and class dimensions of OFWs in what she quaintly terms “the international transfer of caretaking” in Rome and Los Angeles
(113). While she calls attention to the gendered system of transnational capitalism, she downplays the racialist component and scarcely deals with subordination by
nationality. This is because Parrenas construes “class” in a deterministic, economistic fashion. Her focus on the “patriarchal nuclear household” displaces any
criticism of the colonial/imperial extraction of surplus value from enslaved/neocolonized reproductive labor. Indeed, the fact of the caretakers’ national
origin is erased, thus evading the issue of national oppression. The slavish condition of indentured reproductive labor scrutinized
by [End Page 110] Anderson is not given proper weight. We need to examine how the dynamics of capital accumulation
hinges on, and subtends, the sustained reproduction of iniquitous social relations and exploitative inter-
state relations. Unlike the conventional immigration specialist, Anderson foregrounds social reproduction at the center of her inquiry, allowing her to
demonstrate how gender, race, and nation are tightly interwoven into the mistress/domestic class relationship. In effect, the Filipina domestic is
what enables European/North American bourgeois society and, by extension, the relatively
prosperous societies of the Middle East and Asia to reproduce themselves and thus sustain capital
accumulation with its horrendous consequences. This also allows the legitimacy of patriarchal control of
the household and the state to evade feminist critique.
Capital accumulation underwrites colonialism through the marketing of Filipina bodies

Muse)//PS
Suffice it here to spell out the context of this transmigrancy, an evolving diaspora of neocolonials: the
accelerated impoverishment of
millions of Filipino peasants and workers, the extremely class-ruptured system (the Philippines as a neocolonial
dependency of the US and the transnational corporate elite) managed by local compradors, landlords, and bureaucrat-
capitalists who foster systematic emigration to relieve unemployment and defuse mass unrest,
combined with the hyped-up attractions of Hong Kong and other newly industrializing countries, and so on—all these
comprise the parameters for this ongoing process of the marketing of Filipina bodies. The convergence of
complex global factors, both internal and external, residual and emergent, has been carefully delineated by numerous studies sponsored by IBON, GABRIELA, and
other groups such as the Scalabrini Migration Center. We
may cite, in particular, the studies on the devalorization of women’s labor in
global cities, the shrinking status of sovereignty for peripheral nation-states, and the new saliency of
human rights in a feminist analytic of the “New World Order.” In addition to the rampant pillage of the national treasury by the irredeemably corrupt
oligarchy, the plunder of the economy by transnational capital has been worsened by the “structural
conditionalities” imposed by the WB/IMF. Disaggregation of the economy has registered in the
disintegration of ordinary Filipino lives (preponderant in rural areas and urban slums) due to forced migration because of
lack of employment, recruiting appeals of governments and business agencies, and the dissolution of
the homeland as psychic and physical anchorage in the vortex of the rapid depredation of finance
capital. In general, imperialism and the anarchy of the “free market” engender incongruities,
nonsynchronies, and shifting subject-positions of the non- Western “Other” inscribed in the liminal
space of subjugated territory. Capital accumulation is the matrix of unequal power between
metropolis and colonies. The historical reality of uneven sociopolitical development in a US colonial and,
later, neocolonial society like the Philippines is evident in the systematic Americanization of schooling,
mass media, sports, music, religious [End Page 114] institutions, and diverse channels of mass communication.
Backwardness now helps hi-tech corporate business. Since the 1970s, globalization has concentrated on the
exploitation of local tastes and idioms for niche marketing while the impact of the Filipino diaspora in
the huge flow of remittances from OFWs has accentuated the discrepancy between metropolitan
wealth and neocolonial poverty, with the consumerist habitus made egregiously flagrant in the conspicuous consumption of OFWs returning
from the Middle East, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, and other workplaces loaded with balikbayan (returnee) boxes. Unbeknownst to observers of this commercialized
“cargo cult,” remains of these workers arrive in Manila without too much fanfare, straight from the execution chambers of the Middle East and the morgues of
Japan, Taiwan, and other sites of “foul play.”
link-- E-B5
Entrepreneurial immigration reproduces capital — wealthy immigrants commodify the
labor of ethnic migrants which prevents labor regulation and allows for endless
exploitation; only breaking down market structures shifts existing power relations and
divisions
Lee 92 — Dong Ok Lee (University of Kentucky), 12-1-1992, “Commodification of Ethnicity — The Sociospatial Reproduction of Immigrant
Entrepreneurs), SAGE Journals, [accessed: 7/26/18] — JPark
Ethnicity is commodified in the process of economic transition involved in immigration: Immigrants sell
their labor power for economic survival. While a spatially enclosed ethnic community channels the
traditional kind of mutual cooperation into the growth of the “ethnic capital,” a common ethnicity of the Korean community,
based on shared language and other cultural background, is appropriated as a pr‹xiuct to sell, a reliable source for workers, and an object of consumption. To examine this proposition, the
author analyzes Korean small businesses in the Los Angeles area, focusing oo the human capital of Korean entrepreneurs, costs of reproduction of entrepreneurial labor, and the work
processes. In researching the growth of small businesses in Europe and the United States, scholars have increasingly
focused on the relationship between the evolution of advanced capitalism and the labor of ethnic
immigrants (Auster and Aldrich 1984; Boissevain 1984; Waldinger 1986; Light and Bonacich 1988; Stepick 1989). Much of this work has documented that major cities in the highly
industrialized countries have experienced an expansion of informal employment over the past 20 years. As stated by Castells and Portes (1989), this “unregulated”
economy undermines organized labor’s control over the work process. Informal employment also
frustrates the state’s regulation of the economy in terms of taxes and social legislation.' Because of the growing
international competition to cut labor costs, some industries in advanced countries have broken down their production processes to be more flexible in terms of work organization and the
The reorganization of production further segments the existing labor market and
mobility of capital.
complements existing gender and ethnic divisions. Within a fractured labor market, immigrants provide
an important source of labor for the expansion of the informalized work processes. This expansion
generates niches for the growth of small firms. The current competitive advantages of ethnic businesses
over nonethnic businesses are contingent upon the incorporation of the family within the labor process
(Lipton 1984). Those advantages include resources available only to the ethnic community (Mars and Ward 1984; Jenkins 1984).
Despite the growing attention given to economic restructuring and the changing demand for
informalized labor, the contemporary literature on immigrant-owned small businesses has failed to
conceptualize how these structural forces transform social relations militia ethnic immigrant
communities. My principal argument is that the increased utilization of informal labor practices encourages the commodification of ethnicity. Ethnicities of the Korean community,
based on common language and other ethnic traditions, promote mutual trade in the ethnic community. At the same time, shared ethnicity creates avenues for labor exploitation. Ethnic food
and common traditions, for instance, generate products and services that small ethnic shops target for growth. Ethnic ties provide important sources of product markets. Furthermore, this
the ethnic immigrant community is

communal cooperation employs a work force that may tolerate low wages and long working hours. In this manner,
encouraged to reproduce ethnicity as an important basis for the economic advancement of the ethnic
population. I have undertaken this study to refine existing theories of immigrant entrepreneurship and to pinpoint how the reproduction of ethnicity is associated with the
transformation of social relations in the community. To achieve these goals, I assess the sociospatial ground of the Korean business community, the internal structures of the Korean
businesses, and the social relations of work within the community.
IMMIGRANT WORKERS IN THE U.S. ECONOMY
The history of immigration must be considered if one is to understand why immigrants form low-income
ethnic communities. Immigration has been a primary source of low-wage labor in the United States (Muller 1985; Sassen
1988; Cheng and Bonacich 1984). The last four waves of immigrant influx, from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-1960s, point not only to the changing labor demand of the U.S. economy but also to the differential
reproduction of ethnic and class divisions of labor. Sassen (1988, 55-84) viewed the relationship of immigrants to the U.S. labor market as being characterized by displacement, replacement, and complementarity in different time
periods and in specific labor markets. In the mid-1800s, immigrants began to displace northern blacks who held jobs in northeastem cities, especially in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The large influx of southern and
eastern Europeans was, however, halted by World War I. Expanding industries in northem cities triggered large migrations of blacks to replace the immigrants who had provided a vast supply of cheap labor. The geographical and
occupational replacement of immigrants by African-Americans continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s, while the massive rural-urban migrations dwarfed international migration to the United States. Except for Mexican
contrast laborers, the share of immigrants in the labor force significantly declined during this period. Mexican immigrants, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, and a large share of rural migrants provided low-wage labor in the 1950s.
With the decline of internal migrants in the 1960s, there was a substantial increase in the flow of immigrants from lower-wage countries into the major cities in the United States. Once again, immigrants provided a large share of
low-wage labor in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. There has been, however, a remarkable transformation in the level of entry and national composition of immigration since 1965, compared with the two preceding
decades. The actual number of European immigrants declined, while that of Hispanics and Asians increased remarkably.' The most recent wave of immigrant influx and its role in the U.S. labor market is perhaps best understood in
light of the growing importance of “flexible” modes of production. The theory of new forms of accumulation suggests that when changes in economic conditions bring about intensified uncertainty in production and increased
competitiveness in the product market, internal economies of scale within a firm begin to break down so that the entire production system is liable to display strong symptoms of horizontal and vertical disintegration (Scott 1983,
1988). For example, producers operating a garment factory may seek subcontracts to employ socially disadvantaged workers at low wages, thereby informalizing work processes. Consequently, production costs are reduced for the
original producers (Waldinger 1986; Light and Bonacich 1988), which allows them to be increasingly competitive in the international market. The expansion of the advanced capitalist economy was in part initiated by the
restructuring of production processes, but the demand for flexibility in labor processes further segmented ethnic divisions of labor. Immigrants in the major metropolitan areas of the United States often find employment in small
firms as owners or workers. The recent growth of ethnic small firms relates strongly to the use of work processes that frequently do not conform to the labor laws of the United States, as shown in studies of New York (Sassen 1987)
and Los Angeles (Soja 1987). For many small firms in the cities, immigrants act as a "reserve army” of labor power (Pahl 1988; Soja 1989). Moreover, some ethnic communities may be more exclusive in their social relations than
others, and thus the ethnic entrepreneurs may have a degree of monopolistic control over labor within the ethnic community (Wilson and Portes 1980; Portes 1983). For example, ethnic entrepreneurs may prefer informal
social relations of some ethnic communities prove more

recruitment methods that discriminate against certain groups of potential employees. Thus, the
functional to entrepreneurship than others.

HYPOTHESES AND DATA
My principal argument is that ethnicity is commodified in the process of developing ethnic entrepreneurship. Three aspects of ethnic entrepreneurship are examined in this study. First, I address the sociospatial grounds for the reproduction of Korean ethnicity through an examination of
the previous investment in human capital by Korean entrepreneurs and the territorial development of Koreatown in Los Angeles. The placement of Korean entrepreneurs in the U.S. labor market is assessed by examining their previous training at school and at work and other
demographic characteristics. The locational concentration of Korean business firms in Koreatown is examined within the context of how the Korean immigrants appropriate their economic interests across the “ethnic space.” Second, I examine the costs of reproduction of entrepreneurial
labor, which are associated with distinct labor processes, the formation of initial capital, and captive product markets. An underlying assumption in these analyses is that entrepreneurial labor is reproduced by the resources in the ethnic community. Ethnic ties that are based on shared
language and other traditions not only support the practice of infomial work processes that undermine interethnic ties but also facilitate the monopolistic provision of products and services. Finally, I examine social relations within the community that may increasingly promote
entrepreneurship, given the consequences of excessive exploitation in the labor process. Some customized services grow out of cooperative efforts that used to be noncompensated favors — for example, baby-sitting, moving, and minor repair services. When the labor power of the
ethnic population is vulnerable in exchange, the ethnic immigrants may mobilize ethnicity as an organizational form. This organizational effort may reinforce the nature of ethnicity as a commodity, which may upgrade the exchange value of their labor. The Korean Directory of southern
California (1975, 1986)lists addresses, zip codes, and types of business firms and the Korean Business Directory (1986) provides the locations of Korean voluntary associations in Los Angeles. In addition to using these sources, I sent a questionnaire to Korean entrepreneurs in the Los
Angeles area.' A disproportionate and systematic sampling plan across five business categories was devised to select questionnaire recipients.’ The total of 150 cases in the mail survey approximates a sample fraction of 59c of the Korean business firms in Los Angeles that are listed in the
yellow pages of the Korean Directory of Southern California. The response rate from the mail survey was 40%, resulting in 60 respondents. These respondents were from various business categories, and the diversity of the respondents suggests minimal sample bias.
HUMAN CAPITAL RESOURCES OF KOREAN IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURS
The recent influx of Korean immigrants into the United States, roughly beginning in 1970, is drawn from the urban middle class in Korea(Kim 1981; Hurh and Kim 1984; Park et al. 1990). Korean immigrants have tended to enter the small-business sector as owners and operators after
pursuing various other occupations in the United States (Min 1989). Because the immigrants lack the means to overcome barriers (such as culture and language) in the U.S. labor market, they find self-employment as an alternative source of economic advancement. In fact, self-
employed Koreans earn higher incomes, although the earning levels do not necessarily bring them satisfaction in relation to their previous investment in human capital.’ The divergence between the previous investment in human capital resources by Korean entrepreneurs and the
quality of the jobs they actually obtain in the United States indicates the nature of barriers immigrants face in the U.S. labor market and the costs of converting this human capital into ethnic capital. Korean entrepreneurs are a well-educated and economically active population, as shown
in Table 1. They average 45.9 years of age and are primarily male (839c). Of the survey respondents, 72% have at least a high school education, 63% are college graduates, and 22% have earned an M.A. or a Ph.D. in Korea. In addition to their advanced education in Korea, 41% of the total
respondents have obtained higher education in the United States: 18% have earned a B.A in the United States, 5% have earned an M.A., and 18% have obtained a Ph.D. or an M.D. in the United States.
[table omitted]
They are also a highly trained work force through both their precious occupational experience in Korea and their experience i n the United States. Korean entrepreneurs in the sample have lived in the United States for an average of 13.4 years, indicating that many of them immigrated to
the United States in the 1970s. Of the respondents, 45% had some work experience in the United States before they entered the small-business sector, although only 259c of them have experience in small businesses in Korea. The respondents have been involved in small businesses in
the United States for an average of 8 years, 4 months. Most of the respondents entered the small-business sector only after immigration, suggesting that they have been moving toward better alternatives in the U.S. labor market since their arrival.
THE ETHNIC COMMUNITY IN SMALL BUSINESS: KOREATOWN
Since the Korean immigrants encounter difficulties in obtaining a job that reflects their previous training in schools and workplaces, they appropriate ethnicity as an element to sell for economic survival. The emergence of Koreatown illustrates the role of Korean ethnicity in the
development of an ethnic business community. Ethnic foods, Korean language, and Korean customs provide a protected realm for the growth of Korean small businesses in competition with nonethnic firms. The development of Koreatown has taken place rapidly during the past two
decades (Yu 1984). Koreatown roughly includes the downtown area of Los Angeles along Olympic Boulevard and Western Avenue (“K oreatown: Immigrants Transform Once-Ailing Community” 1989). Olympic Boule- vard is regarded as a symbolic artery of the growing community, where
Korean shops display Hangul (Korean-language) signs. The commercial development of Koreatown has involved ethnic capital, which is carried by individual immigrants and agents of Korean corporations. Korean capital is used to purchase commercial property in the area. Koreans pay
premium prices for sites in Koreatown. A Korean doctor and his wife recently purchased a 13,3(D squate-f‹x›t site with a dilapidated building on the northeast comer of Norniandie Ave. and Olympic Blvd. forS3IXI,0fD. They paid approximately $20 per square foot for the land, a premium
price for the area. ("Xorean Town’s Extent, Population Grow Daily" 1979) As the property development around Koreatown accelerated business growth in the area, it also attracted corporate capital ftom Korea. The entrance of major Korean corporations, including Samsung, Lucky-
Goldstar Interna- tional, and Hyundai Motor America, into Koreatown provided a precondition for an ethnic monopolization over the products of the community,‘ while the new immigrants secured both product/service outlets and the labor supply for the ethnic businesses.’ In this
manner, a spatially focused Korean community, Koreatown, could provide a protected arena for the growth of Korean businesses, since spatial separation is an important element in the preservation of particular local conditions of production such as low wages, loyalty to the company,
and a concomitant lack of militancy (Thompson 1979; Massey 1984).
[table omitted]
Koreatown houses various types of small businesses that sell the products and services shown in Table 2. The businesses in Koreatown constituted 34% of Korean firms in the Los Angeles area in 1986. The varied proportion among business categories suggests that Korean businesses are
sectorally specific. Service firms, including medical services and other personal/professional services, may exercise a higher level of ethnic monopoly by locating in Koreatown than do ethnic restaurants and gas stations. Service firms depend more on c ommon language and customs. In
fact, food-related firms began to decentralize throughout the broader Los Angeles area, while service firms continued to concentrate around Koreatown between 1975 and 1986 (Lee 1989).
PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION OF ETHNIC LABOR POWER IN SMALL BUSINESSES

Although Korean entrepreneurs are already blessed with a high level of human capital resources, they have to depend on community-provided use values for
survival. Many Korean firms are highly dependent upon economic support from family and community, ranging from the creation of ethnically distinctive demand to
the formation of start-up capital. Additional
advantages of immigrant-operated firms over non-immigrant-operated
firms relate to the costs of reproducing labor power. The placement of Korean entrepreneurs in the labor
market enables them to command their own labor or that of ethnic workers at a much lower price than
the more formalized economy can. For many small firms, the immigrant labor force is crucial to their
survival, because of the excess exploitation that they can carry out, given the lack of organization of
these workers (Castells 1975).
[table omitted]
The financial capital of Korean businesses is drawn primarily from the ethnic resources (see Table 3). Most Korean
firms are financed by multiple sources, which include personal savings, a rotating credit association (Eye), and family members. Personal savings are used most frequently as a primary source
of initial capital, with 68.89» of the respondents identifying this as a source of capital. The next most frequently used source of financial assistance comes from family or friends, who have
contributed to 37.57a of the respondents. Additional informal financial sources include the use of Eye for supporting capital formation. Korean rotating credit associations are commonly used
to promote small-scale capital formation (Light, Kwuon, and Zhong 1990). Membership in this informal financial association is often based on family or alumni ties. Meanwhile, the use of
institutional capital is less important; loans from Korean banks (12.59» of respondents) and Amer- ican banks (6.29c of respondents) are primary sources. The importance of personal savings
and informal channels suggests that small ethnic business is promoted primarily by the resources of the ethnic community. Labor-intensive small businesses are liable to adopt informalized
labor processes, including the use of family labor, personalized recruitment methods, and employment of ethnic (immigrant) workers. Korean businesses are often dependent on the
entrepreneur’s own labor or on the labor of family members. Of the survey respondents, 47% employ family labor, including spouses, children, and siblings. Among family labor, spouses are
the most frequent type. Many respondents report that family members help in book- keeping and cashiering. For example, a woman who operates a garment firm reports that her husband
Employing ethnic minority workers is another means of lowering the

helps in general management and her son works on accounting.
labor costs for Korean small firms, since the ethnic immigrant workers are more likely to tolerate substandard
wage rates and poor working conditions. Many Korean firms are forced to hire illegal immigrants because of the severe competition in the production
market (“Back to the Sweatshop” 1979). This is particularly the case in garment contracting firms, which are primarily operated by Koreans, Chinese, and Latin Americans (Light and Bonacich
1988, 305-8). As shown in Table 4, apparel firms employ the largest number of workers, averaging 22.3 persons. They are primarily Koreans and Hispanics. The magnitude of Hispanic
participation in Korean-operated garment manufacturing firms ranged from 3 to 100 workers, according to the survey respondents. Food-related businesses employ an average of 3.5 workers,
including Hispanics, Koreans, and other Asians. Hispanic and Asian dish- washers are oven found in the large Korean restaurants, and Korean workers serve customers and operate cash
registers. Automotive-related firms have an average of 6.3 workers. This sector draws its work force from a broad range of ethnic groups. Employing non-Korean workers can reduce the
language barriers of the Korean entrepreneurs when they serve non-Korean customers. This is the case of Korean medical firms, which employ both Hispanic and Anglo-American workers.
[tables omitted]
Korean small firms use very personalized channels to recruit workers. Table 5 shows various means of recruitment. Of the total of 60 survey respondents, 47 Korean business firms employ
wageworkers. Many firms use multiple ways of hiring new workers, but the use of ethnic community resources, including friends and relatives and Korean papers and magazines, occurs with
the highest frequency. Sonne firms use other ethnic media, such as Spanish papers and magazines, that target the workers in other ethnic communities. Additionally, the Korean firms often
display fliers along with using other means of recruitment. Mobilizing the ethnic work force through these informal channels can secure the existing labor processes of the Korean fiims, which
rarely cooperate with unionized labor. Furthermore, the informal recruitment may be conducive to excessive exploitation of labor without union-negotiated social benefits. Ethnic
customers are an important source of economic mobilization in some ethnic communities. Common language and cultural background can
help to promote ethnic business as ethnic firms cater to the population in the community. As shown in Table 6, Koreans constitute an important proportion of the clientele, although they do
not always represent the highest share of customers across the business categories. Food-related businesses serve mostly Korean (33%) and Anglo-American (33.87c) populations. Koreans
primarily buy ethnic food at Korean groceries and restaurants, whereas Anglo-Americans buy doughnuts, pizza, and ham- burgers at Korean-owned restaurants. Interestingly, automotive-
related firms cater primarily to African-American populations (37.97%) and secondarily to Koreans (21.4%). Many Korean-operated gasoline stations and automotive repair shops are found in
predominantly African-American neighborhoods (Lee 1989), although few Korean shops employ African-American workers in these neighborhoods (Table 4). Apparel-related retail stores and
manufacturers serve predominantly Hispanics (37.99%) and Koreans (24.59c). Since only a few apparel products are ethnically distinctive, it is not surprising that Korean shop owners cater to
the population group that has significant market potential in terms of its size. Clients of Korean medical service firms include Koreans (33.3%), Hispanics (30.5%), and Anglo-Americans
(26.59%). Korean doctors and other medical practitioners, such as acupuncturers, serve a significant number of Hispanics and Anglo-Americans. For other service firms offering personalized
and customized services, Koreans are almost the exclusive source of patronage, constituting 76% of customers buying legal, accounting, insurance, real estate, barber/beauty, and laundry
services.
COMMODIFICATION OF ETHNICITY
The sociospatial formation of some ethnic communities is geared to the enhancement of the exchange
values of ethnic labor power and thereby counteracts the negative effect on the earning potential of
immigrants in the general labor market. The reproduction of the ethnic labor force in Korean business involves
the commodification of ethnicity in various ways. The development of Koreatown solidified the relations in production of Korean small businesses.
Korean small firms explored the common ethnicity as a promising market outlet for their products and services and as a reliable source of work forces. For example, a Korean entrepreneur
who owns a clothing retail store on Wilshire Boulevard wrote that communication is the most advantageous in dealing with Korean suppliers . . but they do not give a credit term longer than
15 days while others give the credit over a month. I cannot communicate well in English with my suppliers, but they do behave very politely and show interests in my business . . . sometimes
Korean suppliers demand me doing things on their behalf, which exceed strictly business relations. Moreover, the “ flexible” labor processes of Korean firms indicate
the feasibility of labor exploitation in the community. With all of the consequences of the exploration and exploitation of the niches in the urban
economy, the Korean community reproduces ethnicity as an object of consumption. The family involvement in Korean small firms in financing and labor showed consistent importance,
although Korean small firms have begun to enter into non-Korean markets, selling not only ethnically distinctive goods, such as Korean food, but also products for a wider market, such as
garments. The findings discussed earlier demonstrate that self-employment was an option for Korean immigrants in advancing their social and economic compensation in exchange for their
labor power. Equally important is that ethnicity is no longer a principal means of mutual cooperation. Korean entrepreneurs take full advantage of common language in their business relations
as indicated by many respondents, but they often undermine the ethnic bond for the sake of their businesses. A Korean man who works at a gas station on Olympic Boulevard that is owned by
his relative said I don’t know exactly how much hourly wages I am earning. I cannot argue about my wages since I’m working for my uncle. I have little choice but work here. The ethnic bond
These service firms often arise out of previously noncompensated

also creates outlets for some informal provisions of services.
activities as the ethnic immigrants gain small-scale entrepreneurial skills. Baby-sitting, cleaning, driving, and moving, which used to
be a part of reciprocal relations within the community, are transformed into mutual trade(Harvey 1989, 268). Table 7 shows the increasing number of Korean firms selling various customized
services, which are most likely to be accompanied by informalized labor processes. Between 1975 and 1986 in the Los Angeles area, a dramatic increase occurred in small service firms
offering either labor- intensive or very personalized services. The growth of delivery firms, driving schools, nursery schools, and immigration/translation services also indicates the increasing
mutual trade within the ethnic community.
[table omitted]
The increasing level of mutual trade in the Korean community and the growing awareness of interethnic and intraethnic competition have led to the emergence of ethnic voluntary organizations. These represent a collective effort toward more successful control of ethnic labor power,
which has grown into the establishment of a Korean chamber of commerce, small-business associations, and ethnic newspapers and television broadcasts. For the Koreans in small business, the ethnic iiiedia provide a medium for attracting customers and recruiting workers (Lee 1989).
The Korean Business Directory (1986) indicates the extent of the ethnic press and ethnic broadcasting, which includes 17 newspapers, 8 periodicals, 3 radio stations, and 3 television stations. In addition, the directory lists a number of ethnic voluntary associations in Southern California,
including 218 Korean voluntary groups, excluding churches (Table 8). Foremost among these organizations are professional and business associations, including the garment industry association, the building contractors’ association, the gardeners’ association, traders’ association, the
grocery and liquor store association, nurses’ association, chefs’ association, journal association, broadcasters’ association, and acupuncturers’ association. Because these ethnic associations relate directly and indirectly to the reproduction of ethnic labor power, Korean small businesses
gain competitive advantages against non-Korean firms. The communal bond among the members in the ethnic associations can release ethnic political power on behalf of ethnic entrepreneurs.' On the other hand, however, the associations can be used for internal control over ethnic
wageworkers within the community in favor of small entrepreneurs.
DISCUSSION OF THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS
I have analyzed the commodification of ethnicity in terms of an exploration of common ethnicity as a product to sell, the exploitation of ethnic ties as reliable entrepreneurial resources, and the creation of a business community as an object of consumption for local (both ethnic and
nonethnic) markets. Although the survey data did not reveal a direct correlation between the human capital resources of the Korean entrepreneurs and their business performance, the findings suggested that the human capital could have supported the appropriation of ethnic foods,
Korean language, and Korean customs with given conditions of life in the immigrant community. The emergence and growth of Koreatown secured the product outlets of the Korean firms, while the ethnic bond helped in accumulating financial capital and in channeling the ethnic work
force for the establishment of small businesses. The family processes at work should not be underestimated, although it was hard to assess the extent of the contribution made by the unpaid and unrecorded laborers at Korean firms. Equally important was the participation of other ethnic
workers in the Korean firms; in particular, the large number of Hispanic workers employed at Korean garment firms is one indication of the way small business firms, particularly Korean firms, lower labor costs. With all the consequences of exploration and exploitation of Korean ethnicity,
the Korean community in Los Angeles has emerged as an ethnic community engaged in small businesses. This study has been directed toward the manner in which Korean immigrants were able to promote small business firms in practice. The findings have focused on examining the use
value of common ethnicity for the formation of initial capital, clientele, and work forces, whereas the exchange values of their labor were presumed to be upgraded as the ethnic com munity developed into an organizational form. A future study will need to examine the extent of
collective efforts made by the community to advance their economic power. An in-depth survey of Koreatown will certainly enhance the understanding of the place-specific nature of ethnic relations at work.
gender/fem links
**the cards under heg, domestic violence/trafficking are the same, except with different underlined
warrants and tags
link – heg
The aff’s depiction of the United States as a global protector is flawed and reifies
gendered assumptions – their security performance is a false promise of safety that
justifies endless militarism, while also silencing the people they claim to help
Wadley ’10 - PhD candidate at the University of Florida. His research focuses on sexual politics and
European identity. Jonathan has presented his work at the Annual Meetings of the American Political
Science Association and International Studies Association, as well as at numerous regional conferences
and workshops (Jonathan, Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives, “Gendering the
state: Performativity and protection in international security,”
http://spmehazem.yolasite.com/resources/ebooksclub.org__Gender_and_International_Security__Fem
inist_Perspectives__Routledge_Critical_Security_Studies_.pdf)//PS
Often, the qualities of gender norms are structured as dichotomous pairs. As signifiers of identity, they
establish hierarchy among the actors upon which they are “written.” They include, among other things:
rationality/irrationality, civilized/barbaric, autonomous/dependent, active/passive, and powerful/
weak—all of which map onto the dominant signifier pair of masculine/feminine.47 The examination of gender
dichotomies such as these has been helpful in accounting for how unequal, relational identities have been maintained and how
they have privileged some actors and marginalized others. However, there are limits to this kind of analysis. By viewing relational
gender identities in dichotomous terms, one risks neglecting the variation that exists within those categories.48 Simply put, there are different and unequal types of
masculinity and femininity. Within the range of masculinities, there are dominant and subordinate types. A
hegemonic masculinity is an
idealized, relational, and historical model of masculinity—one to which other forms of masculinity are subordinate. Although the
qualities associated with it characterize a small percentage of masculine actors, its idealization and cultural pervasiveness require other actors to position
themselves in relation to it.49 And while it is continually evolving, incorporating other forms of masculinity even as it subordinates them, it remains identifiable.50
By performing in accordance with a dominant model of masculinity, states can constitute (and thus, position)
themselves relationally as powerful subjects. For Connell, this kind of positioning is at the heart of the concept of masculinity, to such a
degree that the term “represents not a certain type of man but, rather, a way that men position themselves through discursive practices.”51 Cynthia Enloe argues
similarly that patriarchy is perpetuated by “men who are recognized and claim a certain form of masculinity, for the sake of being more valued, more ‘serious,’ and
‘the protectors of/and controllers of those people who are less masculine.’”52 A comparable process occurs among states. As with men, the
more that
states are able to constitute themselves in alliance with the norms of the hegemonic masculinity, the
more they will improve their position and boost their credibility.53 Thus, states have constant incentives to
perform in ways that not only are masculine, but that constitute them as a certain form of masculine
actor, one who embodies the elements of the hegemonic masculinity. Performances that masculinize
states by positioning them closer to the ideal of the hegemonic masculinity are likely to be most
effective in the realm of security. This is because security performances are central to the production of the state as a unitary subject and
because, so often, security performances are rendered intelligible by highly pronounced ideas about masculinity and femininity. War, in particular, demonstrates
this claim. Long ago, Kenneth Waltz observed that in times of war the state is united (and, therefore, a single entity) to a greater degree than at any other time.54
Tickner makes a similar observation but concludes that gender plays a big role in producing state unity: the state becomes a citizen-warrior in times of war.55 Jean
Bethke Elshtain and Susan Jeffords go one step further, arguing that collective identities are constructed through the types of men and women that war creates or
brings out. But absent war, security
performances are still crucial for state production and reproduction.56 By taking
dangers, threats, and other signs of insecurity to be their objects, security performances reproduce
the boundaries between a secure self and a dangerous other. Boundary reproduction is central to
processes of statecraft, and security performances occur where the integrity of the state’s boundaries
are discursively challenged, often in an explicit manner. Whether such threats are internal or external, the effect is the same. Indeed, the
distinction often collapses. One effect of successful security performances, then, is the appearance of the state as a unitary, continuous actor, and one who can
claim legitimacy over those “internal” to it. An
additional effect of successful security performances is the constitution
of the state as an actor who is hierarchically dominant to certain other international actors, frequently states.
Both of these can be accomplished by performing security in accord with the norms of the hegemonic masculinity. The relational quality of gender ensures that any
performances that give the state the appearance of personhood will necessarily position its personhood in relation to other states. Any gendered construction of
the state, even if it does not live up to masculine ideals, will be “socially defined in contradistinction from some model (whether real or imaginary) of femininity;”57
thus, the gender norms that make a state intelligible as a subject also situate it relationally to other actors. This argument may be operationalized by first
determining the dominant form of masculinity that operates among states, and then observing states’ efforts to perform security in ways that align with it. For the
first step, there
is good reason to believe that a model of masculinity centered on protection has achieved
dominant, if not hegemonic, status. While the question of its hegemonic status will have to be settled empirically, protection
appears to be both clearly masculine and sufficiently widespread. And although studies of the idea of protection are dwarfed
by studies of the idea of security within IR, there is enough work that has been done on its normative force, evolving meaning, and the growing range of
performances that it regulates to merit consideration. Work on these different aspects of protection could be usefully combined to reveal an overarching process—
one through which feminist Security Studies can study the gendering of the state that takes place at a systemic level. Over the past few decades, only a few feminist
scholars have theorized protection as a masculinizing performance. Judith Hicks Stiehm and Iris Marion Young, in particular, have offered important formulations of
its logic and effects.58 From these works, protection emerges as a pervasive model of masculinity. Although they are not cast in the
language of performativity, these works take performances that embody this ideal (i.e. the giving of protection) to be constitutive of relational identities that
privilege masculine subjects and subordinate feminine subjects. Stiehm focuses principally on protection at the hands of male-dominated
militaries, and her conceptualization of the protector and the protected remains mostly at the level of individuals (officials, soldiers, and so on). Her central
argument is that men have reserved the role of protector for themselves, relegating women to the status of
dependents—a move that not only subordinates women but leaves them vulnerable to the dangers
posed by masculine protectors. Building upon Stiehm’s analysis, Young uses the same logic to characterize the security state as the protector and
the citizenry as the protected. Importantly, she maintains that these roles are naturalized through their connection to the
protector/protected relationship that defines the patriarchal household. In her words: An exposition of the
gendered logic of the masculine role of protector in relation to women and children illuminates the
meaning and effective appeal of a security state that wages war abroad and expects obedience and
loyalty at home. In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculine protector puts those protected,
paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience. To the
extent that citizens of a democratic state allow their leaders to adopt a stance of protectors toward them, these citizens come to
occupy a subordinate status like that of women in the patriarchal household. We are to accept a more
authoritarian and paternalistic state power, which gets its support partly from the unity a threat
produces and our gratitude for protection.59 The strength of both these models is that they allow for an analysis of protection that
transverses conventional levels of analysis and highlights the variety of arenas in which protection is performed. Moreover, they capture
performances that occur in myriad sites throughout the world, yet are united by a common logic. As Young
claims, every state is at least partially a security state, and the legitimacy it derives from performances of protection
canbeexplainedbythefactthatthesamelogiclegitimatesunequalrelationships in the personal lives of men and women everywhere. In this formulation, protection
does not have any essential meaning. In fact, both authors emphasize that the protection offered, while beneficial in specific instances, is a bad arrangement for the
protected. Protection is, therefore, less about what is provided than it is about the effects of the performances undertaken in its name. This is
evident today as states form policies for the protection of trafficked women. On that issue, protection may entail practices as divergent as
temporary asylum, abolitionist policies toward sex work, educational campaigns, operations targeting transnational organized criminal
networks, border control, and deportation. A
significant effect of the performances, regardless of what forms they take, is the
production of unequal, gendered identities in the form of protector and protected.60 With protection stripped of its
essentialized meaning, it follows that the identities of protector and protected do not describe accurately any traits possessed by the state or the citizens. Instead,
the identities are relational, established by the performances of protection even though they appear to precede those performances. “What matters,”
Young explains, “is the gendered meaning of the positions and the association of familial caring they carry for people.”61 Protection does
not have an essential meaning, but it does have a political rationality, a plan that provides overall coherence to the various forms that protection takes and the
meanings that it acquires. Didier Bigo’s work has sought to understand this rationality, as well as the different meanings of protection and the technologies of
governance that are guided by it.62 To accomplish this, he proposes studying protection at the point of application, namely within the field of security professionals.
In so doing, he finds three etymologies of protection to be informing the technologies in use, each of which serves as an ideal-type and, though Bigo fails to observe
it, each of which gathers its meaning (at least partially) through a connection to gender. The first of these etymologies, tegere, represents a non-passive form of
protection, one in which the protected both desires protection and maintains her/his sovereignty as an active subject. The protector acts out of a
“sacred duty;” the subject is grateful for the protection she/he receives. Within the other etymologies, praesidere and
tutore, the asymmetry is more pronounced. Praesidere invokes the guaranteeing of security and survival by someone else. This is
a meaning of protection that is familiar to security scholars in IR, as it is often reflected in understandings of sovereignty,
security, and borders. It is also the kind of protection that the military provides within Stiehm’s framework. Tutore is a
form of protection that is carried out through profiling: monitoring and surveillance, the identification of risks, the obedience of the protected. The protector
operates not out of obligation, as in tegere, but out of love. Young, in observing the internal surveillance that characterizes the protection offered by the security
state, references this etymology of protection. It merits mention that each of these meanings that protection can acquire is dependent upon an asymmetric
relationship between the protector and the protected. Among these, tegere characterizes those performances of protection that are the least constitutive of
unequal relations—the best case scenario for protection. Within Bigo’s analysis, however,tegere appears also as the least relevant for the contemporary forms that
protection takes. Instead, protection tends to take on less desirable forms, where “ the protected has difficulty overcoming the
relation to regain voice and the capacity of acting politically.”63 Bigo does not consider that the rationalityof protection may be
better understood if it is posited in relation to gender norms. Following Young’s argument, one could deduce that rationality to be the
reproduction of gendered identities through the unequal relations that produce them. Bigo’s silence on gender is a
missed opportunity. If his work explored how technologies of security, reflecting the different meanings that protection can take, establish gendered identities in
the form of protector and protected, Bigo’s analysis would have a more complete picture of the systemic incentives that perpetuate these performances, as well as
the identities that are at stake in the outcome.
link – asylum/trafficking
Their construction of the United States as a masculine protector for helpless brown
and black victims puts survivors in a subordinate position of dependence and
obedience to the state and their abusers – it’s the pre-condition for military
intervention
Wadley ’10 - PhD candidate at the University of Florida. His research focuses on sexual politics and
European identity. Jonathan has presented his work at the Annual Meetings of the American Political
Science Association and International Studies Association, as well as at numerous regional conferences
and workshops (Jonathan, Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives, “Gendering the
state: Performativity and protection in international security,”
Often, the qualities of gender norms are structured as dichotomous pairs. As signifiers of identity, they
establish hierarchy among the actors upon which they are “written.” They include, among other things:
rationality/irrationality, civilized/barbaric, autonomous/dependent, active/passive, and powerful/
weak—all of which map onto the dominant signifier pair of masculine/feminine.47 The examination of gender
dichotomies such as these has been helpful in accounting for how unequal, relational identities have been maintained and how
they have privileged some actors and marginalized others. However, there are limits to this kind of analysis. By viewing relational
gender identities in dichotomous terms, one risks neglecting the variation that exists within those categories.48 Simply put, there are different and unequal types of
masculinity and femininity. Within the range of masculinities, there are dominant and subordinate types. A hegemonic masculinity is an
idealized, relational, and historical model of masculinity—one to which other forms of masculinity are subordinate. Although the
qualities associated with it characterize a small percentage of masculine actors, its idealization and cultural pervasiveness require other actors to position
themselves in relation to it.49 And while it is continually evolving, incorporating other forms of masculinity even as it subordinates them, it remains identifiable.50
By performing in accordance with a dominant model of masculinity, states can constitute (and thus, position)
themselves relationally as powerful subjects. For Connell, this kind of positioning is at the heart of the concept of masculinity, to such a
degree that the term “represents not a certain type of man but, rather, a way that men position themselves through discursive practices.”51 Cynthia Enloe argues
similarly that patriarchy is perpetuated by “men who are recognized and claim a certain form of masculinity, for the sake of being more valued, more ‘serious,’ and
‘the protectors of/and controllers of those people who are less masculine.’”52 A comparable process occurs among states. As with men, the more that states are
able to constitute themselves in alliance with the norms of the hegemonic masculinity, the more they will improve their position and boost their credibility.53 Thus,
states have constant incentives to perform in ways that not only are masculine, but that constitute them as a certain form of masculine actor, one who embodies
the elements of the hegemonic masculinity. Performances that masculinize states by positioning them closer to the ideal of the hegemonic masculinity are likely to
be most effective in the realm of security. This is because security performances are central to the production of the state as a unitary subject and because, so
often, security performances are rendered intelligible by highly pronounced ideas about masculinity and femininity. War, in particular, demonstrates this claim.
Long ago, Kenneth Waltz observed that in times of war the state is united (and, therefore, a single entity) to a greater degree than at any other time.54 Tickner
makes a similar observation but concludes that gender plays a big role in producing state unity: the state becomes a citizen-warrior in times of war.55 Jean Bethke
Elshtain and Susan Jeffords go one step further, arguing that collective identities are constructed through the types of men and women that war creates or brings
out. But absent war, security performances are still crucial for state production and reproduction.56 By taking dangers, threats, and other signs of insecurity to be
their objects, security performances reproduce the boundaries between a secure self and a dangerous other. Boundary reproduction is central to processes of
statecraft, and security performances occur where the integrity of the state’s boundaries are discursively challenged, often in an explicit manner. Whether such
threats are internal or external, the effect is the same. Indeed, the distinction often collapses. One effect of successful security performances, then, is the
appearance of the state as a unitary, continuous actor, and one who can claim legitimacy over those “internal” to it. An additional effect of successful security
performances is the constitution of the state as an actor who is hierarchically dominant to certain other international actors , frequently states. Both of these can be
accomplished by performing security in accord with the norms of the hegemonic masculinity. The relational quality of gender ensures that any performances that
give the state the appearance of personhood will necessarily position its personhood in relation to other states. Any gendered construction of the state, even if it
does not live up to masculine ideals, will be “socially defined in contradistinction from some model (whether real or imaginary) of femininity;”57 thus, the gender
norms that make a state intelligible as a subject also situate it relationally to other actors. This argument may be operationalized by first determining the dominant
form of masculinity that operates among states, and then observing states’ efforts to perform security in ways that align with it. For the first step, there
is
good reason to believe that a model of masculinity centered on protection has achieved dominant, if
not hegemonic, status. While the question of its hegemonic status will have to be settled empirically, protection appears to be both
clearly masculine and sufficiently widespread. And although studies of the idea of protection are dwarfed by studies of the idea of security
within IR, there is enough work that has been done on its normative force, evolving meaning, and the growing range of performances that it regulates to merit
consideration. Work on these different aspects of protection could be usefully combined to reveal an overarching process—one through which feminist Security
Studies can study the gendering of the state that takes place at a systemic level. Over the past few decades, only a few feminist scholars have theorized protection
as a masculinizing performance. Judith Hicks Stiehm and Iris Marion Young, in particular, have offered important formulations of its logic and effects.58 From these
works, protection emerges as a pervasive model of masculinity. Although they are not cast in the language of performativity, these
works take performances that embody this ideal (i.e. the giving of protection) to be constitutive of relational identities that privilege masculine subjects and
subordinate feminine subjects. Stiehm focuses principally on protection at the hands of male-dominated militaries, and her conceptualization of the
protector and the protected remains mostly at the level of individuals (officials, soldiers, and so on). Her central argument is that men
have reserved
the role of protector for themselves, relegating women to the status of dependents—a move that not
only subordinates women but leaves them vulnerable to the dangers posed by masculine protectors.
Building upon Stiehm’s analysis, Young uses the same logic to characterize the security state as the protector and the citizenry as the protected. Importantly, she
maintains that these
roles are naturalized through their connection to the protector/protected relationship
that defines the patriarchal household. In her words: An exposition of the gendered logic of the masculine
role of protector in relation to women and children illuminates the meaning and effective appeal of a
security state that wages war abroad and expects obedience and loyalty at home. In this patriarchal logic, the
role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a
subordinate position of dependence and obedience. To the extent that citizens of a democratic state allow their leaders to
adopt a stance of protectors toward them, these citizens come to occupy a subordinate status like that of women in the patriarchal household.
We are to accept a more authoritarian and paternalistic state power, which gets its support partly
from the unity a threat produces and our gratitude for protection.59 The strength of both these models is that they allow for
an analysis of protection that transverses conventional levels of analysis and highlights the variety of arenas in which protection is performed. Moreover, they
capture performances that occur in myriad sites throughout the world, yet are united by a common
logic. As Young claims, every state is at least partially a security state, and the legitimacy it derives from performances of
protection canbeexplainedbythefactthatthesamelogiclegitimatesunequalrelationships in the personal lives of men and women everywhere. In this
formulation, protection does not have any essential meaning. In fact, both authors emphasize that the protection offered, while beneficial in specific instances, is a
bad arrangement for the protected. Protection
is, therefore, less about what is provided than it is about the effects of
the performances undertaken in its name. This is evident today as states form policies for the protection
of trafficked women. On that issue, protection may entail practices as divergent as temporary asylum,
abolitionist policies toward sex work, educational campaigns, operations targeting
transnational organized criminal networks, border control, and deportation. A significant effect
of the performances, regardless of what forms they take, is the production of unequal, gendered identities in the
form of protector and protected.60 With protection stripped of its essentialized meaning, it follows that the identities of protector and protected
do not describe accurately any traits possessed by the state or the citizens. Instead, the identities are relational, established by the performances of protection even
though they appear to precede those performances. “What matters,” Young explains, “is the gendered meaning of the positions and
the association of familial caring they carry for people.”61 Protection does not have an essential meaning, but it does have a political rationality, a plan that provides
overall coherence to the various forms that protection takes and the meanings that it acquires. Didier Bigo’s work has sought to understand this rationality, as well
as the different meanings of protection and the technologies of governance that are guided by it.62 To accomplish this, he proposes studying protection at the point
of application, namely within the field of security professionals. In so doing, he finds three etymologies of protection to be informing the technologies in use, each of
which serves as an ideal-type and, though Bigo fails to observe it, each of which gathers its meaning (at least partially) through a connection to gender. The first of
these etymologies, tegere, represents a non-passive form of protection, one in which the protected both desires protection and maintains her/his sovereignty as an
active subject. The
protector acts out of a “sacred duty;” the subject is grateful for the protection she/he
receives. Within the other etymologies, praesidere and tutore, the asymmetry is more pronounced. Praesidere invokes the guaranteeing of
security and survival by someone else. This is a meaning of protection that is familiar to security scholars in IR, as it is
often reflected in understandings of sovereignty, security, and borders. It is also the kind of protection
that the military provides within Stiehm’s framework. Tutore is a form of protection that is carried out through profiling: monitoring and surveillance,
the identification of risks, the obedience of the protected. The protector operates not out of obligation, as in tegere, but out of love. Young, in observing the internal
surveillance that characterizes the protection offered by the security state, references this etymology of protection. It merits mention that each of these meanings
that protection can acquire is dependent upon an asymmetric relationship between the protector and the protected. Among these, tegere characterizes those
performances of protection that are the least constitutive of unequal relations—the best case scenario for protection. Within Bigo’s analysis, however,tegere
appears also as the least relevant for the contemporary forms that protection takes. Instead, protection tends to take on less desirable forms, where “the
protected has difficulty overcoming the relation to regain voice and the capacity of acting politically.”63
Bigo does not consider that the rationalityof protection may be better understood if it is posited in relation to gender norms. Following Young’s argument, one
could deduce that rationality to be the reproduction of gendered identities through the unequal
relations that produce them. Bigo’s silence on gender is a missed opportunity. If his work explored how technologies of security, reflecting the
different meanings that protection can take, establish gendered identities in the form of protector and protected, Bigo’s analysis would have a more complete
picture of the systemic incentives that perpetuate these performances, as well as the identities that are at stake in the outcome.
link – tech leadership
**best against aff’s that claim tech is key to checking ______ country or aff’s that defend military tech –
could probably be used against other kinds (like “solves warming”) with the right spin
Technology is inherently gendered – the quest for tech leadership and control over
nature is based on Western, masculine standards
Wilcox ’10 - PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, where she works on issues of gender and
technology in war. Lauren has presented her work at the Annual Meetings of the International Studies
Association and the Northeast Political Science Association, as well as at the Institute for Qualitative
Research Methods (IQRM), the “Gender and Security” Workshop, and the Methodology Workshop at
the International Studies Association-Northeast (Laura, Gender and International Security: Feminist
Perspectives, “Gendering the cult of the offensive,”
The question of perception of technology is a well-established issue in the offense–defense literature. Jervis notes that the
offense–defense balance
depends upon the whether offensive weapons are distinguishable from defensive weapons. If they are
not distinguishable, or the same weapons can be advantageous to both the offense and defense, then the offense–defense balance
of military technology cannot mitigate the dangers of war caused by the security dilemma.22 The
offensive or defensiveness of a particular technology or system of technologies can be seen as a social
construct. In other words, whether a technology favors the offense or defense depends upon what meanings
that technology holds in to particular actors in particular contexts. The process through which individuals estimate or use a weapon system’s
capabilities is not necessarily “rational”; in many cases, gender discourse and identities can play a role in assigning certain
meanings to different technologies. Many feminists have argued that the quest for technological development is
inherently based on masculine or patriarchal values. This argument is based on a view of gender in which “gender” does not refer to
individual bodies or representations of men and women but rather a dichotomous system of thought that has been reproduced in many ways throughout Western
culture. This symbolic structure has arisen from Enlightenment epistemologies that position men alone as
rational, as legitimate “knowers” and as producers of knowledge.23 Scientific ideology can be seen as
based on masculine projects of control over nature and built upon the gendered Western dichotomies
of mind/ body, culture/nature, rational/emotional, control/dependence, and objectivity/ subjectivity. In
each case, the first term is privileged over the second and associated with masculinity, while the second is subordinated and associated with femininity. Science
and technology are considered inherently masculine, as they are associated with the masculine values of
domination, control, and objectivity.24 The “harder” the technology, the more masculine it is. However, from this view, it would be difficult to
ascertain why certain technologies have been considered “feminine” while some have been considered “masculine” at different points in history. It is more useful to
examine how and in what ways technology has been gendered throughout history. Studies of scientific and technological practices highlight
the
ideological work that has gone into building and sustaining technology as a masculine domain and
rejecting technologies on the basis of their incompatibility with masculine ideal-types. Military
technology has not always been considered “masculine,” in the same way, and at times has not even been considered masculine at
all. In fact, many defensive developments in military technology have been seen as “emasculating” as they
lessen the importance of traditional warrior values of personal courage, physical strength, and honor in warfighting.25 Since
bravery is a key component of militarized masculinity, it is emphasized in gendered evaluations of
military technologies. Those technologies which enhance the strength and bravery of warriors are seen as
positively associated with manliness and masculinity. On the other hand, those technologies which make it strategically advantageous
for soldiers to lie in wait, to hold back, and to defend are seen as negatively associated with manliness and masculinity, because, if employed, they would not
require soldiers to display the heroism associated with courage, strength, honor, and manhood. In times (like World War I) where military technologies favor a
defensive image of soldiering, belligerents tend to downplay the role of technology and overestimate the importance of the spirit and honor of offensive war-
fighting. Thus, to understand how the perceptions of technologies change, we should look to the discourses of
gender that understand technologies as suitable or not to dominant definitions of masculinity. Innovations in military technology
perpetuate these gendered perceptions of the offense–defense balance by entrenching the association
of soldiering and manliness. Rachel Weber gives an example of this phenomenon in her study of the design of military cockpits. Weber uses the
example of military cockpits to demonstrate that military technologies are not inherently masculine, but rather their masculinity has to be constructed. In
building cockpits to the specifications of men’s bodies, the Pentagon built in a bias against women’s
bodies into military technologies. The technology of military aircraft has been marked as masculine
through engineering specification and design guidelines. This bias has wide-ranging implications for gender equality in the military
not only providing a tangible reason for arresting women’s advancementbutalsoasasymbolicmarkerofamasculinesocialspace.26 Gender-based
assumptions about whether men or women make better pilots cause the planes to be built in a certain
way, but once they were built, they served to reinforce the exclusion of women from certain military
roles. The ultimate honor of being a fighter pilot and the maleness of fighter pilots are then tied together
by the technological developments that favor male bodies and masculine characteristics. When technological
developments fail to favor either male bodies or masculine characteristics (e.g., when the developments favor the defense), they are likely to be ignored or
underestimated by belligerents in conflict. In fact, technologies
have fallen in and out of favor on the basis of their
perceived relationship with chivalry and honorable soldiering. For example, in the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, delegates were
concerned with the unchivalrous nature of the use of airplanes in combat. Belgium’s Auguste Beernaert, presiding over the Commission on Arms Limitations,
proclaimed, “to permit the use of such infernal machines, which seem to fall from the sky, exceeds the limit.” He added, “As it is impossible to guard against such
proceedings, it resembles perfidy, and everything which resembles that ought to be scrupulously guarded against. Let us be chivalrous even in the manner of
carrying on war.” At this point, the “perfidy” is linked to the asymmetry of such attacks and the difficulty in effective protection against them. The thought of
“infernal” bombs being dropped in a “perfidious” attack positions the tactic of aerial bombardment as feminine and unchivalrous in a discourse of betrayal and
treachery. The link to notions of “betrayal” and “chivalry” signal linkages to appropriate masculine behavior, to what is honorable as opposed to what is base, or
uncivilized, unmanly types of violence. This demonstrates that whether or not the use of certain technologies is considered appropriately “manly” or not varies.
World War I is a good example of ideas about gender affecting how certain technologies were used.
link – security
**this article is just really good – I think that it could be utilized if anyone ran nationalism/xenophobia,
hegemony, or generic “war with _____” impacts
The aff’s construction of [insert country/region] as a femininized security threat

reaffirms a nationalistic discourse that makes war inevitable
The process of dehumanizing or “feminizing” enemies is such a means of understanding this

misperception. David Campbell, for example, argues that state identity is secured by discourses about the threats
others pose: “for the state, identity can be understood as the outcome of exclusionary practices in which resistant elements to a secure identity on the
‘inside’ are linked through a discourse of ‘danger’ with threats identified and located on the ‘outside.’”55 These outside threats are
constructed in terms historically associated with the feminine, such as irrational, dirty, chaotic, and
evil. As others are constructed as inferior through a feminizing discourse, their abilities are
underestimated, while somewhat paradoxically, the threat they pose is overestimated. For example, the United
States and Britain underestimated the military capabilities of the Japanese during World War II because of beliefs in the inferiority of Japanese. The Japanese were
considered “subhuman” and “illogical,” and their military capabilities were downgraded prior to the outbreak of war.56 Military officials in both the United States
and Britain ignored evidence of Japanese military successes and the potential threat they posed on the assumption that the Japanese simply could not be capable of
such achievements.57 Thus, the
belief that wars will be quick and easy because “our men” are superior in strength,
resolve and technological capability has its roots in a process of “othering” in which one’s own identity is
buttressed by the distancing from and disparagement of a different national or racial group. The
feminization of enemies is a reflection of masculinized nationalism—states tell stories about
their valorized masculinity in relation to their opponents’ devalued femininity, or subordinate
masculinity. The subordinate masculinity that encouraged Britain, France and the US into the war was that of Germany’s barbarism. The discourse of
“barbarism” which was applied to the Germans in World Wars I and II, and to the Japanese in World War II as well, has had a double meaning in the West: it is
considered the opposite of “civilization,” while can be either a good thing or a bad thing. “Barbarism” is good when it involves a rejection of the feminized
“civilization” of commerce, industry, and domesticity for the more strenuous pursuits of hunting and war. However, itis considered negative, a
lower form of masculinity when it refers to racial others. This subordinate masculinity is associated with
uncontrolled aggression, a “hypermasculinity” that is to be feared and tamed. In British discourse, Germans were
“huns” who stood for despotism and militarism as opposed to British individualism and civilized values and accomplishments. While denigrating the
Germans, this construction also entails a fear that the Germans were a more vital people who might
succeed in overtaking the British Empire, a fear which led some to call for British men to emulate what
was seen as a more “virile race.”58 The role of this sort of national “myth-making” in increasing the
likelihood of war plays a prominent role in Van Evera’s list of results of perceived offensive dominance. However, Van
Evera denies the centrality of mythmaking to the concept of nationalism: [M]yth is not an essential ingredient of nationalism: nationalism can also rest on a group
solidarity based on truth, and the effects of nationalism are largely governed by the degree of truthfulness of the beliefs that a given nationalism adopts; as
truthfulness diminishes, the risks posed by the nationalism increase.59 Here, Van Evera mistakenly equates “myth-making” with “falsity.” It is these “myths” that
create the nation though the hope of a common future, and despite the relatively recent invention of nationalism, the figuration of the nation with a common,
distant, origin.60 These myths about national greatness may be argued to be constitutive of
aggressive wars, as such myths play a crucial role in the “othering” and dehumanization of
the enemy along gendered lines such that the extreme violence of war becomes fathomable,
and a viable policy option. Feminist scholars have examined these myths and their causes and consequences in terms of gendered ideologies
and found them to be influential in remaking gender roles. Rather than seeing the relationship between nationalism and the entrenchment of certain gender
identities as a matter of coincidence, feminists have theorized the ways in which national identity is produced though the use of gender discourses.
Nationalism, which was at a high point in the build-up to World War I, is a set of discourses about who “we” are and who
belongs in the political community. As such, it reproduces the inside/outside logic of the state system, in
which those “inside” the state or nation are superior to those “outside.” Nationalism therefore depends
upon “national chauvinism,” such that members of other nations, or racial, sexual, or ideological “others”
inside the nation are constructed in terms of femininity or subordinate masculinity. They are weak and
inferior, or they are hyper-masculine: beast-like in brutality and sexuality. Feminist have argued that the
boundaries between the “self” and “other” are produced by discourses of gender and sexuality.61 Feminists
have demonstrated that nationalist discourses that constitute the identity of the nation are dependent upon
discourses of gender that reproduce traditional gender roles. Feminists argue that nationalists need gendered
ideologies to gain support for their cause.62 For example, Anne McClintock writes, “All too often in male nationalism,
gender difference between women and men serves to symbolically define the limits of national
difference and power between men.”63 The “imagined community” of the nation depends upon the
homosocial relations of men to protect the nation-as-women’s-body against foreign incursion.64
Symbolic gender imagery serves not only to construct the boundaries of national identities, but
reproduces gender identity as well. Propaganda and recruitment campaigns frequently held up the volunteer soldier as the only acceptable
man—those who did not volunteer were seen as weak, effete and cowardly.65 The war also dampened the feminist movement in Britain, as many feminists as well
as non-feminists supported traditional gender roles for men and women despite women working outside the home in large numbers during the war.66 As an
example of how nationalist passions frequently prevail over attempts to reform traditional gender roles, the feminist magazine The Suffragette changed its name to
Britannia to symbolize patriotic unity and its support of the war effort despite its critiques of the political and legal order.67 As gender is a relational concept,
hegemonic definitions of masculinity necessarily entail hegemonic definitions of femininity. Nira Yuval-Davis has categorized several ways in which women function
in nationalist ideologies, symbolically or in their actions.68 Women are constructed as the biological reproducers of the
nation, as well as the cultural reproducers. After all, “group reproduction—both biological and social—is fundamental to nationalist
practice, process, and politics.”69 Under nationalist regimes, women are often expected to bear and raise young
men who will fight on behalf of the nation. The nation is therefore dependent upon women in
traditional roles as mothers and caretakers to reproduce itself. The entire nation maybe symbolized by a
woman who must be fought and died for. Indeed, nationalist discourses often present the nation as a woman, a
guardian and symbol of the nation’s values, such as Germania, Britannia, or France’s Marianne, or the cult of Queen Louise of Prussia. These
symbolic women were Madonna-like in their image as chaste mothers of the nation.70 Rape, then, becomes a metaphor for national humiliation, as in “the rape of
Belgium” or “the rape of Kuwait” as well as a tactic of war used to symbolically prove the superiority of one’s national group. Not
only do nationalist
projects construct gender identities that prescribe different spheres for men and women, but this
production of gender identities has been a necessary condition of nationalism as women have symbolically figured
as the markers of the nation who must be protected by the men who run the state (or are trying to create one). Nationalism is naturalized, or
legitimated, though gender discourses that naturalized the domination of one group over another
through the disparagement of the feminine and the constitution of separate and unequal spheres for
men and women. Gender is constitutive of nationalism, which is factor in the promotion of offensive
military doctrines and the cult of the offensive. Nationalism in terms of the assertion of the superiority
of our men over their men often legitimates war in terms of a “protection racket,” in which offensive
wars are fought in order to defend “women and children” from potential or actual threats. This “protection
racket” extends the logic of nationalism to allow for offensive policies to be legitimated as defensive.
link – crime/immigration
The interaction between the criminal justice system and immigration is inexplicable
without an analysis of gender
Harty ’12 (Allison S., Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice Volume 27|Issue 1, Article 1,
“Commentary: Gendering Crimmigration: The Intersection of Gender, Immigration, and the Criminal
Justice System,” Winter 2012, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/bglj)//PS
At the same time, however, crimmigration theory and membership theory together have ignored gender as a unit
of analysis: thus failing to examine gender as a crucial intersection with race and class." Perhaps scholars
assume that immigration law is gender-neutral, or that women are not convicted of crimes in sufficient
numbers to warrant study, or both. Of course: these assumptions are mrong. Women are a growing presence in the
criminal justice system, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of the total." Less obviously, the
ramifications of immigration law are not gender-neutral. Although the INA is facially neutral," its impact
is often not. Laws like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) legalized the status of many more male than female undocumented immigrantsm
The INA also denies admission to anyone who, the opinion of the consular officer . . . or . . . the Attomey General," "is likely at any
time to become a public charge."16Â° Under a totality of the circumstances test, the officer considers age, health, family status, assets, education,
and skillsm Although gender is not one of the factors listed in the test, it has historically been a significant
deciding factorm and the government continues to deem "receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance or institutionalization for long-term
care at goyemment expense" a relevant factonm Although men sometimes receive public assistance as well, women and children are the primary beneficiariesf"
indicating that Women and children are more likely to be prevented from documented entry into the country. Finally, becauseimmigrant women
are less likely to have jobs and work experiences!" that qualify them for employment-based visas,m they
have fewer opportunities to come to the United States legally. These factors add up to create an
immigration law with disparate impact on women and their children. Furthermore, immigrant Women-
and, especially, immigrant women of color-are clearly defined as "other" by membership theory. They
have the unique ability to reproduce more non-members, making them especially threatening. 163 For
Mexican women, for example, "their sexuality as well as their culture and language have been suspect and
considered alien."1Â°9 David .\IIora1es describes the "paradigmatic vision of 'illegal' immigration" as a Mexican woman, brown-skinned and mestiza, nine-
months pregnant, crossing the Rio Grande under cover of night. Such an image captures the full scope of the terror bound up with "illegal" immigration: the
sneaking nocturnal setting lends the tableaus the requisite feeling of legal breach (of trespass onto sovereign property) while also emphasizing the defenselessness
of the border, which is barely a "border" at all, just a river, like any other, that happens to mark a boundary. . . . That the immigrant herself is gendered as the
"weaker sex" reinforces our sense that immigrants are dependent on us. That the woman is also literally burdened with a growing child represents the perpetual
burden that We the People will bear once she and her pre-citizen fetus take residence in the United States. Her brovm skin reï¬‚ects our long-standing fear of
cultural and genetic miscegenation. 17Â° Syd Lindsley suggests that we
should see this conceptualization as an attack "on
immigrant women's ability to reproduce and maintain their families" and "an attempt to regulate and
control immigrant women's mothering."l-ll With this conceptualization in mind, any membership theory analysis that
looks at race and class but fails to consider gender will necessarily fail to understand the immigrant
experience and its popular conception as a whole. Just as important is current scholarshipÂ°s missed opportunity to discuss the way
that gender changes immigrants' relationship to the state. Although Juliet Stumpf argues that criminal law and immigration law both "primarily regulate the
relationship between the state and the indi\'idual,"m her conception of this "individual" is gendered male. If
we add gender and family into the
crimmigration equation, it becomes clear that the scope of the impact of immigration law and the
criminal justice system extends beyond the individual directly involved, whether that individual is male or female.
When male immigrants are taken into ICE custody or deported, their children and partners are left
behind to fend for themselves and are ignored by academic scholarship and popular opinion. When
female immigrants are taken into ICE custody or deported, however, the media and popular opinion
correctly recognizes that their status as primary caregiver-and thus their relationships with their family-
is compromised. If a partner remains in the U.S. and is involved in the family, he often takes over primary caregiving responsibilities leaving the mother to
survive in custody or in her home country without her family. But if the partner is also deported or is out of the picture, a
woman with children may lose her parental rights involuntarily-'-as Ms. Romero did-or make a heartbreaking choice between
leaving a citizen child in the U.S. and taking the child with her when she is deported." When we analyze gender in conjunction with
crimmigration, it is clear we are not simply talking about the relationship between individuals and the
state but rather between families and the state. Scholars' failure to include women and gender in their
examination of crimmigration represents more than simply ignoring a substantial portion of the
individuals affected by crimmigration. Overlooking gender has led to an overly individualistic analysis of
the relationship between noncitizens and the state, making it appear that only the individual who comes
into direct contact with the crimmigration apparatus is affected. Inserting gender into the equation demonstrates that this
individualistic approach harms men, women, children, and families and makes it clear that current
scholarship does not represent the lived experiences of all immigrants.
link - nationalism
**this paragraph is already in the card from the security stuff with the same underlining but this one is
more specific
Nationalism is undergirded by gendered assumptions – reinforcement of traditional

gender roles legitimate violence against foreign threats and naturalizes xenophobia
Feminists have demonstrated that nationalist

discourses that constitute the identity of the nation are dependent
upon discourses of gender that reproduce traditional gender roles. Feminists argue that nationalists need
gendered ideologies to gain support for their cause.62 For example, Anne McClintock writes, “All too often in male
nationalism, gender difference between women and men serves to symbolically define the limits of
national difference and power between men.”63 The “imagined community” of the nation depends upon
the homosocial relations of men to protect the nation-as-women’s-body against foreign incursion.64
Symbolic gender imagery serves not only to construct the boundaries of national identities, but
reproduces gender identity as well. Propaganda and recruitment campaigns frequently held up the volunteer soldier as the only acceptable
man—those who did not volunteer were seen as weak, effete and cowardly.65 The war also dampened the feminist movement in Britain, as many feminists as well
as non-feminists supported traditional gender roles for men and women despite women working outside the home in large numbers during the war.66 As an
example of how nationalist passions frequently prevail over attempts to reform traditional gender roles, the feminist magazine The Suffragette changed its name to
Britannia to symbolize patriotic unity and its support of the war effort despite its critiques of the political and legal order.67 As gender is a relational concept,
hegemonic definitions of masculinity necessarily entail hegemonic definitions of femininity. Nira Yuval-Davis has categorized several ways in which women function
in nationalist ideologies, symbolically or in their actions.68 Women are constructed as the biological reproducers of the
nation, as well as the cultural reproducers. After all, “group reproduction—both biological and social—is fundamental to nationalist
practice, process, and politics.”69 Under nationalist regimes, women are often expected to bear and raise young
men who will fight on behalf of the nation. The nation is therefore dependent upon women in
traditional roles as mothers and caretakers to reproduce itself. The entire nation maybe symbolized by a
woman who must be fought and died for. Indeed, nationalist discourses often present the nation as a woman, a
guardian and symbol of the nation’s values, such as Germania, Britannia, or France’s Marianne, or the cult of Queen Louise of Prussia. These
symbolic women were Madonna-like in their image as chaste mothers of the nation.70 Rape, then, becomes a metaphor for national humiliation, as in “the rape of
Belgium” or “the rape of Kuwait” as well as a tactic of war used to symbolically prove the superiority of one’s national group. Not
only do nationalist
projects construct gender identities that prescribe different spheres for men and women, but this
production of gender identities has been a necessary condition of nationalism as women have symbolically figured
as the markers of the nation who must be protected by the men who run the state (or are trying to create one). Nationalism is naturalized, or
legitimated, though gender discourses that naturalized the domination of one group over another
through the disparagement of the feminine and the constitution of separate and unequal spheres for
men and women. Gender is constitutive of nationalism, which is factor in the promotion of offensive
military doctrines and the cult of the offensive. Nationalism in terms of the assertion of the superiority
of our men over their men often legitimates war in terms of a “protection racket,” in which offensive
wars are fought in order to defend “women and children” from potential or actual threats. This “protection
racket” extends the logic of nationalism to allow for offensive policies to be legitimated as defensive.
link - terror
Gender underlies the motives and methods for terrorism – women’s bodies are
exploited to construct narratives that justify violent conflicts
Parashar ’10 - currently a PhD candidate at Lancaster University, UK. She specializes in gender,
feminist IR theories and “terrorism” and political violence in South Asia. Prior to entering the doctoral
program, Swati was a Research Analyst with the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism
Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore. Additionally, she has
worked as an Associate Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, where she coordinated
the International Terrorism Watch Programme. Swati was a Fulbright Fellow on a National Security
Programme at the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California, San Diego, USA
(Jan.–Feb. 2006). She has published extensively on “terrorism,” gender, and security in South Asia, and
has presented papers at several international conferences including the annual conventions of the ISA.
She has traveled to Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Nepal, and Israel as part of her field research. (Swati, Gender and
International Security: International Perspectives, “Women, militancy, and security: The South Asian
conundrum,”
spmehazem.yolasite.com/resources/ebooksclub.org__Gender_and_International_Security__Feminist_P
erspectives__Routledge_Critical_Security_Studies_.pdf)//PS
The challenge faced by “third world” theorists and feminist scholars of International Relations (IR) and Security Studies lies in deconstructing this “state-
centric” discourse and dealing with the “why” question on “terrorism.” The “why” question has other variants
that include “who” and for “whom.” These questions involve exploring issues of class, caste (in South Asia) and ethnic identities with gender as
the common factor among them. The contours of “terrorism,” or militancy as I prefer to use, therefore, cannot be mapped along the
territories of nation-states alone. The “war on terror” has been presented as a hyper-masculine war
where virile and aggressive men, fighting for the honor of their nations, and freedom, lead the forces on
either side. The Bush–bin Laden war of conflicting ideologies and worldviews strongly reinforces
gendered understandings and identities and pushes women out of the IR theater. By engaging with two categories of
militant women—in ethno-nationalist movements and in religiopolitical movements—through case studies of Sri Lanka and Kashmir, I attempt to highlight the
multiple narrativisation taking place at the margins of the IR theater. However, these categories must not be understood as mutually exclusive as ethno-nationalist
movements may draw inspiration from religious ideologies as is the case in Palestine and Chechnya. I merely wish to draw a distinction between movements which
are driven by political demands for separatism against state-led majoritarian chauvinism and those that construct the “other” on the basis of religio-political
interests. These two militant projects in South Asia use a range of violent tactics and women are engaged at
logistical, ideological and even at combatant levels. Gendered “terror” engendering in(security) Gender and militancy4 have an
intimate relationship; the strategy of militancy is a “gendered” one. Gender matters in understanding 9/11 and other identity
conflicts on various fronts. First, the largest numbers of victims of militancy, emanating from long-lasting
conflicts are women and children, who suffer violent deaths, displacement, trauma, emotional and other
physical problems as they reconstruct life in conflict zones. A gendered discourse has traditionally
looked at women as hapless victims of conflicts and militant attacks, or as women’s groups, which stand
in opposition to conflict and militarization. Feminists have argued that a more peaceful world is possible only where women realize their full
potential in an environment of equal opportunities. Feminist scholarship has brought into focus the notions of negotiation, good offices, mediation, articulation,
multi-track diplomacy and other such methods of peaceful resolution of conflicts. Second, women as cultural bearers of national identities become upholders of the
key values of the conflicting sides. In other words, women’s bodies and theirgendered identities become the territories on which militants and counter militants
wage their war, and playout their ideologies. Religious
fundamentalist groups target women as the potential bearers of
their ideology by reinforcing Women, militancy, and security 169 religious symbols like the veil and by excluding them from public
spaces. The Taliban’s radical fundamentalist form of Sharia, Islamic rule in Afghanistan, banned women’s education, activism and even physical presence in Afghan
society. The
misogynist ideology of the Taliban and Al Qaeda subjected women to extreme form of
subjugation, indignities and private forms of violence.5 States in their anti-militant operations, on the
other hand, have the “emancipation” of women on their agenda, claiming the superiority of their
democratic and liberal ideology as against the destructive and inhuman worldview of the militants. Such claims have been made
in the justification of the recent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in many wars in the past.6
A third way and an important one in which militancy and gender are linked is the increasing militarization of women
who participate in the “postmodern wars”7 and support militant activities. Cynthia Enloe argues that women’s gendered
identities and bodies become marked territories on which both states and non-state militant groups
wage their wars and construct national narratives.8 These narratives incorporate gendered variables
such as the ideology of masculinity, parades, alliances and weaponry resonated in the masculine high
politics, terror tactics and armed attacks along with feminized concepts of patriotic motherhood, armed
heroines, national sacrifice and sexualized female warriors in both state and non-state militant projects.
Many contemporary ethno-nationalist and politico-religious armed militant movements against states and
their institutions also rely upon a particular version of the idea of the “liberated woman,” an ideological rhetoric
that Enloe ascribes to state militaries. Armed groups and non-state militant organizations, like state militaries, have
traditionally been masculine domains. Though under-researched, women have performed different kinds of roles in non-state militant
projects, challenging traditional notions of femininity and also in the process displacing the masculinist paradigmatic model of political violence. In a domain which
has traditionally tested and certified the masculinity of men, the presence of women “contributes to the erasure of this symbolic feature” and destabilizes the
gender hierarchy.9 While women have participated in modern nationalist movements since the mid-nineteenth century (including anti-state subversive movements
in Europe, Russia and Latin America), the state-run armed forces in the West opened to women in the 1970s to “restore legitimacy to the armed forces which in
many countries were going through a deep crisis of public consensus.”10 In this vein, it can be argued that women’s participation provides non-state militant
movements with the much needed moral legitimacy and popular support base, a key contention in the remainder of this chapter. Women’s proximity to violence
and terror is marked by a convergence of “ideology” and “nation” and this convergence is “suffused with both organized violence and selfless sacrifice.”11
Considering that women and their concerns are excluded from state practices and discursive ideologies
and that states are gendered political constructs defined in terms of masculine values, it 170 Swati Parashar can be
argued that non-state resistance movements, at the margins of the IR theater, offer scope for gendered maneuverings
and shifting roles for men and women. Gendered roles and hierarchies are constantly being negotiated
at the margins of global politics where non-state militant actors constitute “the other” for the states
which occupy the center stage. Women militants being the “other within the other” have the onerous
task of securing socio-political legitimacy for the resistance movement. These women in their multi-pronged roles as
patrons, planners and perpetrators of militant violence, also expand the support network base of militant projects while their own status remains mired in
ambiguity due to their perceived “deviant” social behavior that transcends conventional gender roles.
alt – Politics of Curiosity
The alternative is to endorse a politics of curiosity
Schroeder 17 — Tambria Schroeder (The College at Brockport, State University, State University of New York, Program Specialist at the
US Department of State, BA in Political Science and International Studies, BS in Women & Gender Studies), Spring 2017, “Make America Curious
Again: Integrating Feminism into Undergraduate International Studies”, [accessed: 7/25/18] — JPark
The systems and institutions that exist in our country are strategically designed to maintain patriarchy and privileged masculinity. Complacency of the majority ensures that these structures remain intact. In this paper, I consider the exclusion of feminism and discussions of gender from
undergraduate political science and international studies courses, and why it is critical for us to be paying attention to it now perhaps more than ever before. I suggest that this exclusion only helps to ensure that patriarchal dominance continues into the future. We have the potential to
change by adopting a more curious mindset. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. ~Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Introduction
The systems and institutions that

The current year is 2017. The bastards are grinding away and patriarchy is rearing its ugly head in the United States of America.
exist in our country are strategically designed to maintain patriarchy and privileged masculinity.
Complacency of the majority ensures that these structures remain intact. However, since the middle of
the 20th century, groundswells have been shaking these foundations. There are now a number of
visible cracks in the walls and ceilings, rays of light shining through to remind us that there are
opportunities for even greater change to take place. We the people, of these United States, just need to
make a more conscious and concerted effort to do so. And how do we do that? We become curious and
critical about the world in which we live. These efforts must start, at the very least, in our higher
education institutions. Colleges and universities are key sources of knowledge dissemination. When
knowledge is withheld at the higher education level and patriarchy and masculinity are reinforced
through teaching, our whole country suffers. This may seem like an extreme claim to make but, in reality, it is these institutions that are responsible for educating and preparing
the next generation of American professionals. If this is what we teach, it will be what we practice. This cannot be underestimated, especially as we turn our attention to undergraduate
political science and international studies programs. Graduates of these programs will go on to participate in government and lead of our country. Over the last 30 years, feminist international
relations (IR) and gendered approaches to foreign policy and national security have been gaining attention in both the academy and in government. In 2000, the United Nations Security
Council formally acknowledged the importance of including women’s experiences with conflict in security and peace decisions through Resolution 1325. There are currently 64 countries with
National Action Plans on how they plan to integrate women, peace, and security into their domestic and foreign policy (Peace Women, 2017). On one hand, these National Action Plans are
evidence of commendable progress. On the other, this progress is rather elementary and somewhat insignificant because many of the plans are little more than words on paper. Furthermore,
a majority of the world’s countries have yet to indicate any intention to pursue a National Action Plan in the near future. It is easy to blame those in the federal government for failing to
address gender equality in more meaningful ways. It is much harder for us to take a step back and consider how we, as citizens, have contributed to these failures as well. In this paper, I argue
that one reason for patriarchal dominance in government ideology and practice is the exclusion of gender from undergraduate political science and international studies courses. I reflect on
my unique journey as both a student and federal contractor, and why it is imperative that universities begin paying attention to feminist IR in security and foreign policy courses. I examine
some of the divides that exist within IR academia through a sample of public, comprehensive colleges in New York State. Using knowledge from transnational feminists and feminist IR scholars,
I explore and analyze some of the reasons professors provide for not integrating gendered perspectives into their coursework. I arrive at the conclusion that the absence of this knowledge
from instruction is due, in large part, to a general lack of respect for feminist thought throughout the discipline. The purpose of this paper is not to debate the merits of different IR theories,
but rather, to think critically about why feminist IR is not being included in security and foreign policy studies and the potential consequences of its continued exclusion. The paper ends with a
call to action.
Key Terms
The purpose of this section is to provide clarification to readers from diverse backgrounds on a number of discipline-specific Political Science and Gender Studies terms that I use throughout this paper. International Relations (IR) is used to refer to the academic discipline that focuses on
the interaction of actors in international politics. Theorists tend to focus primarily on the state. Feminist IR is a subfield of IR that focuses on interaction of actors in international politics through a gendered lens with a primary focus on individuals and their experiences within the state.
Foreign Policy is defined as a government’s strategy in dealing with other states (It is worth noting that “state” is used to refer to a country, whereas “government” refers to an administration. When governments change, foreign policy approaches and priorities change). National Security
is the concept that a government should protect the state and its citizens against crises. Sometimes this is achieved through displays of power, other times through peace. Subaltern are people who are thought to be and are treated as subordinate, inferior, or of a lower rank. In this
context, subaltern individuals are those who live socially, politically and geographically outside of hegemonic Western power structures.
Becoming Curious, Gaining Authenticity

My curiosity in feminist international relations began during the third year of my undergraduate studies. By simultaneously pursuing degrees in Political Science, International Studies, and
Women and Gender Studies, I put myself in a unique position to consider the intersections of these disciplines. I loved studying feminist and political theory and found myself particularly
It became an exciting space where I could merge theory with practice, where I
intrigued by my National Security course.
could analyze different threats to certain types of security (i.e. military, human, environmental, etc.) through the lenses of
realism, liberalism, and democratic peace theory. When I returned in the fall of the following year, I
started talking with a professor about the role of women in security and wondering what knowledge
existed on the topic. To my surprise, and that of my professor, there was a whole school of thought and a number of government initiatives devoted to it. This
discovery was both fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating because all of my interests converged in one
space, but also frustrating because I had not been introduced to any of it in my National Security or IR
courses. I realized that we had learned about the effects of certain decisions on states, but we had not discussed the effects on individual lives in as much detail. We had
debated a variety of international security issues, but considering who is and isn’t allowed to participate
in security decision-making processes wasn’t one of them. And finally, I realized that we had read the theories of
many prominent male IR scholars (i.e. Doyle, 1986; Fukuyama, 1989; Huntington, 1993; Waltz, 1995), but we hadn’t even heard mention
of any leading feminist IR scholars (Enloe, 2014; Steans, 2013; Sylvester, 2001; Tickner, 2014). This is where my questioning of undergraduate Political Science and International Studies courses
began. In search of what was missing, I started doing my own independent research on the connection between gender relations and state security. I was pulled in by Mary Caprioli’s (2000)
empirical research on gender equality and state conflict, studies (Anderlini, 2007; Gizelis, 2011) demonstrating that women’s participation in peace processes leads to more sustainable peace
deals, and the number of different perspectives offered by feminist IR scholars (Enloe, 2014; Runyon & Peterson 2014; Tickner, 2014). There certainly wasn’t a shortage of knowledge to
explore. I found myself particularly interested in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and the subsequent National Action Plans and initiatives that emerged from it. Again, I
was struck with fascination and frustration. I loved knowing that there was work being done to integrate women into conversations about peace, conflict, and security, but I couldn’t help
feeling that, over the course of more than 16 years, very little substantial progress had been made towards fulfilling the original charge of Resolution 1325. Beginning in February 2016, I was
fortunate enough to augment this research by working as an intern and then contractor for the U.S. Department of State. This allowed me to witness and take part in foreign policy decisions at
the federal level as they were being made. I had the opportunity to analyze how the United States government was implementing its National Action Plan and to contribute to conversations
about its quinquennial revision. I observed how women engaged in conversations about foreign policy decisions and the incredible outcomes of granting them access to this work. I also
learned about the unfortunate consequences that can result from governments excluding women from peace and security efforts. While working at the Department of State, my colleagues
commented that it was uncommon for a student my age to be so versed in the details of the women, peace, and security agenda. They wondered if I had been taught about it in school; I
wondered why I had not been. After leaving Washington, D.C., for my final year of undergraduate studies, I reflected on all of the knowledge that my studies and fieldwork had introduced to
me. As a student, I experienced a complete absence of feminism from international relations until I became curious and started exploring it on my own. While working for the government
under the Obama Administration, I saw women and feminism every day in the policies and approaches being taken across federal agencies and within various bureaus. I realized that there was
a rift between the theories we were being taught and those that were being acted upon in practice. To close this gap, we need to look to where we learn about different theories, policies, and
practices. Secondly, to improve the work being done for women, peace, and security, people need to actually know that the concept exists. Where do theory and praxis meet? In the
classroom. How do people find out that things exist? They become curious and then they share their knowledge.
What We Are Taught…
Liberal and realist thought are largely considered the two theories that dominate mainstream IR
academia. Both are rooted in three basic ideas: (1) states serve as the key actors in the international
system, (2) states are selfish, and (3) the international system is anarchic, meaning that there is no
overarching, international authority (Mingst & Toft, 2014; Thayer & Ibryamova, 2010; Waltz, 1979). Where realism and liberalism depart from one another is how
to approach and understand state relations. Liberal theorists maintain a fairly positive outlook on human nature and believe
that cooperation between states will ultimately create order in the international system (Axelrod & Keohane, 1985;
Fukuyama, 1989; Mingst & Toft, 2014). Neoliberal thinkers, such as Michael Doyle (1986), are responsible for popularizing a subdivision
of knowledge known as democratic peace theory, which states done for women, peace, and security,
people need to actually know that the concept exists. Where do theory and praxis meet? In the
classroom. How do people find out that things exist? They become curious and then they share their knowledge. What We Are Taught… Liberal and realist thought are largely
considered the two theories that dominate mainstream IR academia. Both are rooted in three basic ideas: (1) states serve as the key actors in the international system, (2) states are selfish,
and (3) the international system is anarchic, meaning that there is no overarching, international authority (Mingst & Toft, 2014; Thayer & Ibryamova, 2010; Waltz, 1979). Where realism and
liberalism depart from one another is how to approach and understand state relations. Liberal theorists maintain a fairly positive outlook on human nature and believe that cooperation
between states will ultimately create order in the international system (Axelrod & Keohane, 1985; Fukuyama, 1989; Mingst & Toft, 2014). Neoliberal thinkers, such as Michael Doyle (1986), are
responsible for popularizing a subdivision of knowledge known as democratic peace theory, which states advocate for conducting foreign policy without too much of a care for morality
(Kennan, 1986). In 1993, Samuel Huntington provided an important perspective on the imminent Clash of Civilizations, in which he states, “the great divisions among humankind and the
dominating source of conflict…will be cultural” (Huntington, 1993, p. 22). Although it’s been more than 20 years since the piece was published, it’s clear that we are currently experiencing this
very clash firsthand.
…And What We Are Not
the
J. Ann Tickner (2014) asserted that until 1988, “it is safe to say that…the presence of women and gender issues had been completely ignored by the IR discipline” (p. xv). Since then,
field of feminist international relations has gained strength and the attention now being granted to
women and gender issues in the international community and foreign affairs is unprecedented. Feminist
IR scholars do not seek to completely reinvent the field of international relations. Rather, they ask us to be critical of the
knowledge within it “because it is based on assumptions about human nature that are partial and that privilege masculinity” (Tickner, 2014, p. 8). Cynthia Enloe (2004; 2014) became one of
the first prominent feminist scholars in IR and began with a very simple question: “Where are the women?” No one was asking it, but she made the case that we needed to. Since then, a
number of feminist scholars (Blanchard 2003; Steans, 2013; Runyon & Peterson 2014; Sylvester, 2001; Tickner, 2014) have entered into IR and offered important knowledge about challenging
Scholars advocate
our understandings of power, security, and protection within the state system because they have been defined absent of the individual and gender relations.
for disassociating women and femininity with peace when considering international affairs. Much of our
language is structured in dichotomies that work in tandem with one another (i.e. male-subject vs. female-object) and
support existing power structures. Linking women and femininity to peace (while linking male and masculinity to power)
ensures that “female” continues to be seen as soft and weak (and male as hard and strong). Like most
feminists, those in IR seek to expose this privileging of masculinity and androcentric ideologies in
mainstream academia (Harding, 1986; LeSavoy and Bergeron, 2011; Tickner, 2014). Feminist IR scholars ask us to shift our focus from state to individual and to notice the
role that gender has in both inter- and intrastate relations.
Putting Feminist Thought into Practice

In 1995, at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China, Hillary Clinton famously declared that “women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.” In The Hillary Doctrine, Valerie Hudson and Patricia Leidl (2015) note “linking women
to ‘hard’ national security affairs…was the obvious next step after Beijing” (p. 21). In 1997, then-President Bill Clinton named Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State, which effectively put a female at the helm of the federal agency that manages U.S. foreign policy for the first time ever.
In 2000, the United Nations Security Council formally recognized the unique role that women play in peace and sec urity, as well as the adverse effects they tend to suffer in conflict, through Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security. Around this same time, feminist empiricists
(Caprioli 2000; Caprioli, 2005; Hudson, Caprioli, Ballif-Spanvill, McDermott, & Emmett, 2008) began conducting quantitative studies that proved that state stability and conflict were inherently linked to gender equality Gradually, the Security Council released a number of resolutions
clarifying and expanding the scope of their original declaration.1 Member states were called upon to create country-specific plans on how they intended to implement the women, peace, and security agenda initiatives (United Nations Security Council, 2005, p. 1). In 2010, Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, proclaimed, “the status of the world’s women is not simply an issue of morality – it is a matter of national security” (Hudson & Leidl, 2015, p. 53). Within one year’s time, the Obama administration affirmed this claim and formally committed U.S. foreign policy to
advancing women around the world through the launch of the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (Executive Order No. 13,595, 2011). Federal agencies took this commitment seriously. The Department of State, Department of Defense, and USAID are responsible for
leading implementation efforts of the U.S. NAP within our borders and beyond. As the plan states, its “goal is as simple as it is profound: to empower half the world’s population as equal partners in preventing conflict and building peace” (The White House, 2016, p. 2). It focuses on five
major themes, national integration and institutionalization, participation in peace processes and decision-making, protection from violence, conflict prevention, and access to relief and recovery (Executive Order No. 13,595, 2011). Some of the most visible products of the NAP can be seen
in initiatives through the Office of Global Women’s Issues that seek to address women’s economic empowerment and education and ending violence against women, as you’ll notice in Figure 1. Men and women across government agencies were equally committed to promoting gender
equality because they all understood that “the subjugation of women is a threat to the common security of our world” (Hillary Clinton as cited in Hudson & Leidl, 2015, p. 3). Throughout the Obama administration, there was clear evidence of feminist thinking being put into practice, but
this work was not emphasized or even discussed in my courses on national security.
Finding the Missing Link
I thought more about what we are taught and what we are not, I became evermore curious to know if,
As
and how, undergraduate political science and international relations programs in New York State are integrating feminist IR and gendered
policies into their courses. In search of some answers, I designed a small research project.2 I reached out to six comprehensive, public higher education institutions requesting copies of syllabi for national security and
foreign policy courses as well as interviews with the professors teaching those courses. Although my sample size was small and my results are only generalizable for the schools that were included, a majority of professors did not
include women, gender, or feminism in their courses. In order to address the issue, I needed to also understand professors’ reasoning for excluding gendered perspectives. Most of the professors agreed that feminist IR and
Participants stated that feminist IR in political science

gendered approaches were too far outside mainstream teaching and curriculum approaches.
instruction lacks both presence and legitimacy within the field, and that, as a theoretical approach, it is
still new and under development. Related to this, they each expressed that there was a lack of available and easily accessible
scholarship on the subject matter. All three professors stated that they did not have enough time to teach “the basics” and feminist IR or the role of women in security. They also
expressed that there simply wasn’t enough student interest in the topic to devote significant amounts of time to discussing it. Responding to Reasons for Exclusion How can we be interested in something that we don’t know exists?
That is my response to the final reason cited above. We don’t go into our courses knowing what realism and liberalism are or what they each say about the international system. We become curious and take an interest in them
once we have been introduced to them. That is what needs to happen with feminist IR; if it were introduced, students would at least have the
opportunity to consider it. The main two points that I want to focus on are scholarship and legitimacy. As far as available scholarship is considered, we have to consider it from two different
perspectives. To claim that there is not enough scholarship or knowledge on feminist IR and women in security is absolutely false. Feminists have been contributing their perspectives to International Relations through both
qualitative and quantitative research for over 30 years and it has been almost two decades since the women, peace, and security agenda was first introduced within international community. As if this is not enough proof of its
existence, the U.S. has been integrating feminist ideals into its foreign policy priorities for more than five years and there are even entire research institutes solely devoted to producing knowledge on the role of women in peace,
conflict, and security.3 This body of knowledge is available. When we consider scholarship that is both available and easily accessible, we are faced with a different situation. I want to bring you back to the image of the books at the
beginning of this article. When I went looking for textbooks in the security studies section of my college library, I found one pink book titled Gender in International Relations (Tickner, 1992). I was able to find other sources in a
section devoted specifically to gender and IR, but the rest were located in the women’s studies stacks. This is problematic. Feminist IR is as much a theory about IR as any other IR theory, yet it is relegated to gender-specific
sections of texts in the library, which further obscures its visibility and reach as important to the IR field. As I explored the available introductory texts on international relations (Mingst & Arreguin-Toft, 2014; Jackson & Sorensen,
1999; Steans & Pettiford, 2001), the missing feminist IR problem goes deeper. Out of these three sample texts, only one (Steans & Pettiford, 2001) gives equal attention to all perspectives and themes of IR theory. Co-author Jill
Steans is a leading feminist IR scholar, so this makes sense. The other two texts only mentioned gender in the table of contents or as a heading within a chapter. Jackson and Sorenson (1999) address “gender” as a source of a
dissident voice and an alternative approach to IR as an academic subject (p. 59-61). The authors later devote approximately six pages to considering gender as a “New Issue in IR” to international relations (p. 257-262). I would not
consider feminism to be a “new issue” today, but, at the time this textbook was written in 1999, it was still a relatively new theoretical approach. I call attention to this because it demonstrates the fact that much of IR continues to
rely on outdated knowledge rather than seeking newer, more contemporary thinking. The textbook by Mingst and Arreguin-Toft (2014) is a more recent publication and still does not mention gender or feminist IR in its table of
contents.4 Rather, readers will come across such topics under alternative approaches, radical perspectives, and in a nifty “you decide” section. This final section is the most problematic of the three because it implies to the reader
that they get to decide whether feminist IR is a legitimate body of knowledge. For example, the prompt is: “Assume for the sake of argument that due to systematic exclusion from state leadership opportunities (or female
selfselection out of such opportunities) Tickner is right. Would a world led by women be more peaceful?” (Mingst & Arreguin-Toft, 2014, p. 99). The language used by the authors is condescending and treats feminist IR as a joke.
The authors suggest that, for the purposes of the exercise, students should assume Tickner’s work is credible, but they do not offer any commentary on why students should maintain that belief beyond the prompt. Furthermore,
the prompt fails to accurately depict feminist IR theory because it associates women with peacefulness, which is one of the very social constructs that feminist IR scholars encourage us to challenge and disrupt. If introductory
textbooks in the discipline chose not to include gender or do so in negative, inaccurate, and surface-level ways, it is valid for professors to cite accessible scholarship as a challenge to teaching feminist IR. The issue with textbooks
International Relations is incredibly masculine and does not allow very

also speaks to a larger issue in the discipline as a whole. As a discipline,
much space for feminism to take hold. It is unfortunately not surprising that feminist IR theory is not
considered to be a legitimate field of knowledge because Women and Gender Studies, as a discipline, is
often met with skepticism throughout academia. This is especially evident in the latter example of textbooks and in the comments made by the professors in my study.
The male participant in my study stated that he preferred "more realist approaches," and that feminist IR is "too idealistic." In other words, this professor values the privileging of, and power conferred to, masculinity in realist
Epistemological issues have been challenging feminist IR scholars for over three decades and are
theories.
sure to continue into the future (Tickner, 2014). Epistemology is the term given to theories of knowledge and knowledge production (Letherby, 2003, p. 19). When we think of knowledge, we
must ask ourselves who has the privilege of creating it, possessing it, and controlling it. Knowledge production has historically “been dominated by patriarchy and men have used their positions of power to define issues, structure
language, and develop theory” (Letherby, 2003, p. 20). Because of this, the contributions of feminist researchers and the validity of their work are often called into question. Gayle Letherby (2003) distinguishes between two
Men are
different types of knowledge – “authorized knowledge [or] the knowledge of the academy and experiential knowledge,” which can be defined as “the knowledge generated from experience” (p. 20).
privileged in the sense that their work is considered to be more legitimate in the eyes of the academy,
and consequently, they have greater authority than feminist knowledge that has been derived from
lived experiences and constructed outside the patriarchal code.
Why Feminism? Why Now?
For much of history, knowledge within the international relations discipline has been produced by men
and for men . Much of this scholarship focuses on war and the state but fails to consider how the individual experience of war and peace affects state security. Feminist perspectives on international relations, which account for these impact experiences and which
suggest that women play critical roles in global politics, are therefore seen as less credible and less legitimate than traditional, male-centered/maledominated knowledge. The field of IR also, ironically, neglects to consider the role that colonialism played, and continues to play, in the
international system. By focusing only on the state, IR has effectively silenced the voices of the individuals living the reality of what is “state.” Postcolonial and transnational feminist thinkers, such as Chandra Mohanty (2003) and Gayarti Spivak (1993), discuss how western feminisms tend
to overshadow or silence the experiences and feminism cultivated by women in the developing world. While feminist IR scholars do try to bring these perspectives into the field, postcolonial and transnational thinking provides a unique lens for thinking about the dilemma of feminism
within IR as a whole. In her 1988 essay Spivak asks, “Can the subaltern speak?” She considers the ways that western logics have supplanted the local logics (i.e., ways of living, thinking, being, etc.) of individuals living on the margins in the developing world and concludes “the subaltern as
female cannot be heard or read” (Spivak, 1988, p. 105). In the field of International Relations, women and feminists are the subaltern. Just as Spivak (1988) says, this perspective cannot be heard or read and, if professors are expecting feminism to enter mainstream theories like realism, it
never will be. During the Obama administration there was a marked commitment to promoting and empowering women both domestically and abroad. Women served as some of President Obama’s top advisors (Figure 2) and he explicitly stated that he “made advancing gender equality
a foreign policy priority” (Office of the Press Secretary, 2016). Despite the fact that women were present and actively participating in foreign policy decisions for the last eight years, professors were not talking about feminist IR and gender concerns in their national security and foreign
policy courses. Now, we have President Trump. Within his first 100 days, the Trump administration and Republican Congress hav e made it unbelievably clear that advancing women is not one of their priorities. Rather, it appears to be the exact opposite. This was first made clear only
three days into his presidency by signing an Executive Order to reinstate the Mexico City policy, more commonly referred to as the global gag rule. This law prohibits international organizations that provide family planning services from receiving U.S. funding. Other restrictive measures on
women’s heath have been passed since, but what remains so jarring about the image of this Executive Order being signed (shown in Figure 3) is the fact that it is a group of white men smiling as they strip women around the world of their ability to access safe healthcare providers. The
absence of women in this frame is similar to the absence of feminism in the IR discipline and undergraduate classrooms. Women are nowhere to be seen or heard now. We know, from a variety of empirical feminist studies (Caprioli, 2000; Caprioli, 2005; Hudson et al., 2008), that
state stability is inherently linked to gender equality, that states with greater gender equality are more
stable. This is precisely why we need feminism in international relations and we need to start paying
attention to it now. We need it in our ongoing government operations, and we need it to be introduced
in political science and international studies undergraduate courses
A Call for Curiosity

Over the last year, Margaret Atwood’s (1985) The Handmaid’s Tale has become remarkably popular and relevant again. When asked if the dystopian novel was written as a prediction for what
was to come in American society, Atwood (2017) responded that it wasn’t. Rather, she said that she wrote it in the hopes that “if this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen”
(Atwood, 2017, p. 6). The society she describes is governed by the subjugation of women, religious tyranny, and totalitarianism (Atwood, 2017). Unfortunately, these oppressions
are becoming all too familiar in contemporary America. Our responses to these forces are somewhat different but also somewhat similar to those
of the people of Gilead. Just as in Gilead, some American citizens do not realize what is currently taking shape behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. In Gilead, “there wasn’t even any rioting
in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction” (Atwood, 1985, p. 174). In America today, there are a number of people taking to the streets to
advocate for rights and protections of all, but there are equally as many just sitting at home accepting and not questioning what’s going on around them. Beyond the reasons given in official
we’ve stopped being curious. Feminist IR scholar Cynthia Enloe (2004) wrote about
statements and through different media outlets, many have stopped asking why;
in becoming curious about something, we must also

becoming “more and more curious about curiosity and its absence” (p. 2). She said that
confront our previous lack thereof. And what we find, as Enloe states, is that “so many power structures – inside
households, within institutions, in societies, in international affairs – are dependent on our continuing
lack of curiosity” (p. 3). It is for that reason, that I conclude this paper with a call for curiosity. Students, the time has come to be curious about the education you are receiving. I
want you to invest in an exploration of your education and ask questions like what is missing, who is being silenced, and why are certain groups absent from what I am learning? Conduct your
Professors of mainstream IR theories and approaches, I call upon

own research, advocate for your interests, and make your voices heard.
you to become curious about feminist IR theory and the role of women and gender in the field. Seek out
research by feminist scholars; consider how your own language and research is gendered; recognize
the ways that gender is a prominent factor in government practices and policies. I want you to attend the sessions on
feminism and gender when you go to annual conferences for your discipline and, most importantly, I want you to be curious about your students. Give them the chance to consider feminism
as one of the many perspectives on international relations. Feminist IR scholars, this is a call to become curious about new ways of being curious. Start asking why you are not being included
and represented fairly in textbooks; consider ways you can move out of the safety of your feminist circles and into less accepting spaces where your voices are needed the most. Continue to
Ask why and where

penetrate the mainstream; do not give up. Textbook editors and publishers, I call on you to become curious about equal representation of all theories.
feminist IR and gender is missing; do not allow the legitimacy of feminist knowledge to be up for debate
if you are not going to do the same with all other theories. To those in our government agencies, become curious about academics. Reach outside your immediate circles to better understand
the knowledge being produced by scholars and then share how your policies align with or differ from their theories and research. Consider ways to connect with American higher education
This is a call for everyone to challenge commonly held perceptions

institutions and help bridge the gap between theory and practice.
and seek new ones; to question the power dynamics that are operating between individuals and within
the state system; to not fear feminism or women having a voice in the study or practice of foreign
affairs; to not let the bastards grind you into a state of complacency. This is a call to everyone to make
America curious again.
bad cards, good background
read this
International state action and gender are inseparable – examining the feminization
and masculinization of states is a necessary pre-requisite to the plan – the perm is
mutually exclusive – states reproduce gendered norms with each policy attempt to
reaffirm dominance
For anyone who wishes to bring a more thorough consideration of gender into the study of International Relations, this should set off alarm bells. Feminists have
shown that it is problematic to study actors as if they are genderless things. Ignoring gender too often means
elevating the masculine subject to universal status, leading to the production of theories that not only
are partial, but that mask their partiality through claims to universality. In IR, ignoring gender means not
recognizing the ways in which key actors are defined and differentiated by their relationship to norms of
masculinity and femininity. Leaders, states, international organizations—all of these act in accordance with gender norms, albeit in different ways at
different times. Additionally, by ignoring gender, the analyst remains blind to processes through which these gendered
identities are produced—processes that are in many ways central to the operation of world politics. The
arenas in which the actors engage each other are saturated with gendered meaning and it is this fact
that enables, for example, a state to “act like a man” or “act like a woman.” Thus, gender, which was defined
earlier in this volume as “a system of symbolic meaning that creates social hierarchies based on perceived associations with masculine and feminine
characteristics,”3 is
not simply an attribute possessed by certain actors, but a system through which those
actors are constituted and positioned relative to each other. One great contribution of feminist IR has been to draw the attention
of other IR scholars to these arguments, despite the reluctance of “conventional” theorists to incorporate gender into the processes they are attempting to explain.
Given the work that has been done to demonstrate the dangers of theorizing without gender, it is highly questionable for the bulkof IR scholars to write about the
state as if it is not gendered, especially when it is understood, conceptually, to exist and act as if it were a person. Failing
to consider the role of
gender does not make one’s theory gender-neutral, and conceptualizing the state as ageneric, non-
gendered actor does not make it so. Nowhere is the silence toward gender more deafening than in the
field of International Security. The study of war, anarchy, alliances—all observably gendered
processes—stands to benefit the most from the recognition that the key actors do not act without, or
outside of, gender. Yet, the field has been slow to incorporate the study of gender, even though almost twenty years have passed since Ann Tickner
criticized its dominant paradigm for projecting the “values associated with hegemonic masculinity” onto the international behavior of states. Within realism, she
argued, the
state has been conceptualized through an historical worldview that privileges the experiences
of men. Other approaches can be, and have been, criticized on the same grounds, offering similarly partial theories owing to their common
reliance upon “the Western political and philosophical tradition,” which has produced “a foundation of political concepts” that
assumes the political actor is a man. The proliferation of constructivist and post-structuralist scholarship over the past twenty years has, despite much promise,
brought little help, largely sidestepping questions of gender. Nonetheless, the epistemological pluralism of Security Studies today means that the field is much more
amenable to approaches that incorporate gender, and that incorporate it in new ways, than it was at the time when feminists within IR first raised these concerns.
The argument that states are produced within, and not outside of, their environment is no longer esoteric. Security and insecurity are understood by many to be
interpretations made within an intersubjective realm of interaction among states, rather than the absence or presence of objective threats.4 And the role of
representation, speech acts, and discursive structures in outlining the parameters of security practices and giving them meaning is better appreciated, as well.5 As a
result of these developments, the field of feminist Security Studies is well positioned to theorize the role of gender in innovative ways. Specifically, there is more
room now to apply post-positivist insights into how gender works onto the field of Security Studies. The analysis presented here challenges the discipline’s tendency
to treat states as genderless persons by exploring the role of gender in the security performancesofstates.Insodoing,itdrawsupontheconceptofperformativity— the
idea that, in the words of Judith Butler, “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”6 It argues that
performances within the field of security, much like performances within the daily lives of people, carry no intrinsic meaning, but must
be made sense of through “a system of symbolic meaning” that cannot be but gendered. Through such
performances, identities become salient, and masculine and feminine subjects are created. While this process is
States can be observed reifying
less palpable for states than it is for humans, it is nonetheless observable in broad patterns.
themselves through performances of security, particularly through those which establish

them as stable and masculine protectors. Recent work on the politics of protection, particularly that done by Didier Bigo, suggests the
constitutive effects that protection has upon both providers and recipients. It stops short, however, of recognizing that these effects may be enabled by the
gendered meaning that different forms of protection carry. When such meanings are considered, it becomes evident that by
“being” masculine
protectors, states can position themselves favorably in relation to other international actors and gain
legitimacy from their domestic audiences. This means that states are gendered and are gendered in much the
same way as people are: through repeated performances. When state identity is viewed in this light, the anthropomorphic
assumption, as it is commonly used, appears woefully inadequate. To be clear, it is not being suggested that drawing parallels between human subjects and state
subjects is bad in-and-ofitself. Indeed, useful parallels can be drawn, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the notion that “both states and persons are fuzzy sets.”7 The
trouble lies in assuming that states, or people, are constituted outside processes of interaction, and that either can be made sense of without considering the
relational identities they take on through the systems of symbolic meaning through which they operate. Anthropomorphic assumptions tend to treat the state as a
genderless, unitary actor—often, one that is ontologically primitive to its interactions—while neglecting the ways that the “actor-ness” and “unity” of the state are
an effect of iterated, gendered performances, particularly in the realm of security. By
viewing security performances with an eye
toward their constitutive effects, and by moving gender to the center of that analysis, one gains not only
a richer understanding of how states reproduce themselves (i.e. where their person-like “identities” come from), but a
clearer picture of the hierarchical relations that exist among states and between states and domestic
populations. This chapter begins with a consideration of how the state has been conceived of as a person throughout the discipline, arguing that such
practices almost always import an inadequate understanding of how people are constituted. In both cases—conceptualizing states and conceptualizing humans—
this is a result, largely, of substance-oriented, as opposed to process-oriented, approaches. It argues that by
making processes, rather than
substances, the core of research, scholars will be able to more fully explain how states reproduce
themselves as actors in world politics, how they garner power for themselves (in relation to other international actors,
particularly states), and how they gain legitimacy from their subjects. Following that, the chapter argues that a theory of performativity
can fill this need, especially in the realm of Security Studies. Moreover, such a theory would facilitate the study of gender within
these processes and shed light on the incentives states have to behave as masculine actors. The final section of
the chapter offers, tentatively, a way forward for scholars within feminist Security Studies who wish to bring empirical research to bear on the theoretical sketches
presented here. It submits that “the
rational protector model” may be examined as a type of dominant masculinity
for states, one which allows them to “do” security in ways that cast them as unitary, masculine actors.
History
1
Prevailing gendered constructions of identity in the form of chivalric myths in the upper classes contributed to offensive strategies and the cult of the offensive in
the British military in World War I. Tropes of “defending civilization” or “civilized values” as a reason for mounting
offensive military campaigns have a long history. The
resonance of such discourses, such as World War I as a crusade to
defend civilization against the barbarity of the Germans, is based on gendered discourses in which
medieval knights saved damsels or madonnas from cruel beasts.76 War would provide an escape for
young men, a chance to gain honor, as well as a purge and regeneration of society.77 That war would
cure societies of the weakness, decadence, and emasculation of peace was a prevailing cultural
assumption among the upperclass members of the political elite across Europe, a fear linked to Social
Darwinism and the threat of “racial degeneration.”78 Alarmed at the lack of physical fitness of urban volunteers for the Boer War,
Britain began a campaign of encouraging hunting and other sports to increase the physical fitness and
virility of British youth, a task seen as essential to maintaining the British imperial holdings and racial
dominance. The Scouting Movement, begun by Lord Baden-Powell and emphasizing outdoor
expeditions, action over reflection, and developing the skills for war, was linked to concerns over
military fitness and colonial expansion.79 In Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys and in many popular adventure books of the time, boys and
young men were encouraged to conduct themselves in accordance with the chivalrous values of bravery, sacrifice, honor, and loyalty to the nation and religion.80
While this image of the just warrior as defender of civilization at first glance seems to favor the defensive (and, would therefore not contribute to the cult of the
offensive), a closer look shows that the discourse of the protection racket is actually offensive in three distinct ways. First, it leads states Gendering the cult of the
offensive 75 to value offense in order to be the best possible protectors, since offense is associated with increased chance at victory and a
perception of an active approach to protection. Second, it allows militaries aspiring to the idealized or hegemonic masculinity to identify those
in need of protection outside of its borders, and to start aggressive wars to protect those in need.81 Third, insomuch as protection is a
performance rather than an actual service, the appearance of boldness and bravery in actions taken on behalf of this chivalrous ideal brings
attention to the protecting which is being done. In these ways, the
protection racket can be associated with the increased
likelihood of pursuing offensive military strategies. Thechivalriccodesinvogueattheturnofthecenturyidentifiedthevulnerable
female body as the main cause for war. The enemy was cast as an inhuman, sexual predator. Propagandists
described German attacks on Belgium towns in late summer, 1914 as the “rape of Belgium.” The famous
World War I propaganda poster illustrates this melding of race and gender: a large brown gorilla-like
creature with a bloodied bat labeled “kulter” grasps a half-naked white woman who appears to have
fainted. “Destroy this mad brute: Enlist,” the poster demands. Posters in Britain encouraging men to
volunteer evoked women and children as defenseless targets of war and drew upon chivalric discourses
of honor and protection, declaring, “Your rights of citizenship give you the privilege of joining your
fellows in defence of your Honour and your Homes,” and “There Are Three Types of Men: Those who
hear the call and Obey, Those who Delay, and—The Others.”82 Discourses of chivalrous masculinity
served not only make offensive approaches to international politics in World War I possible but also to
constitute a set of gendered power relations that posited white men as protectors of the nation against
racialized others who threaten the purity of naïve and defenseless women. Examples of the influence of
the protection racket on perceived offensive dominance and the cult of the offensive are common in
present-day politics as well. This chivalric narrative has been resurrected in the post-Cold War era, and
gendered identities have not only legitimated but also promoted wars. The various humanitarian wars of
the 1990s are read as a narrative in which NATO, and other actors re-invent themselves as masculine,
heroic, rescuers of weak and passive victims.83 Farmanfarmaian describes how the reports of the Iraqi army
raping women in Kuwait were used to construct Iraq as a barbaric enemy so that war was not only
thinkable, but necessitated.84 This new American masculinity was “tough and tender,” capable of
awesome military prowess but also compassion and empathy.85 The mission of “liberating” Afghan
women was used to garner public support for the invasion of Afghanistan, and served also to silence
feminist protests against the war.86 Two and a half years later, this same discourse of “liberation” was
used to fuel support to overturn the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, represented in racialized terms as
an inhuman despot when the evidence against weapons of mass destruction turned out to be fabricated
or exaggerated. This narrative of rescuing the Iraqi people (as “damsels in 76 Lauren Wilcox distress”) from the
clutches of an evil man may help to explain why many people in the US and its allies came to believe,
with little evidence, that the invading forces would be “greeted as liberators.” These rescue narratives
demonstrate that the protection racket encourages offensive military policies even when it is couched in
the language of defense and protection. The protection racket is a gender discourse that produces the gender identities of just
warriors and beautiful souls. It is also the backdrop that allows for offensive military policies to be viewed as defensive, thereby gaining traction
and legitimating war by enabling offensive wars to take place under the mantle of “protection.” The existence of discourse of protection can
therefore help us understand the occurrence of offensive policies in the light of an ostensible defensive dominance.
2
For example, the United States and Britain underestimated the military capabilities of the Japanese
during World War II because of beliefs in the inferiority of Japanese. The Japanese were considered
“subhuman” and “illogical,” and their military capabilities were downgraded prior to the outbreak of
war.56 Military officials in both the United States and Britain ignored evidence of Japanese military
successes and the potential threat they posed on the assumption that the Japanese simply could not be
capable of such achievements.57 Thus, the belief that wars will be quick and easy because “our men”
are superior in strength, resolve and technological capability has its roots in a process of “othering” in
which one’s own identity is buttressed by the distancing from and disparagement of a different national
or racial group. The feminization of enemies is a reflection of masculinized nationalism—states tell
storiesabouttheirvalorizedmasculinityinrelationtotheiropponents’devalued femininity, or subordinate
masculinity. The subordinate masculinity that encouraged Britain, France and the US into the war was
that of Germany’s barbarism. The discourse of “barbarism” which was applied to the Germans in World
Wars I and II, and to the Japanese in World War II as well, has had a double meaning in the West: it is
considered the opposite of “civilization,” while can be either a good thing or a bad thing. “Barbarism” is
good when it involves a rejection of the feminized “civilization” of commerce, industry, and domesticity
for the more strenuous pursuits of hunting and war. However, it is considered negative, a lower form of
masculinity when it refers to racial others. This subordinate masculinity is associated with uncontrolled
aggression, a “hypermasculinity” that is to be feared and tamed. In British discourse, Germans were
“huns” who stood for despotism and militarism as opposed to British individualism and civilized values
and accomplishments. While denigrating the Germans, this construction also entails a fear that the
Germans were a more vital people who might succeed in overtaking the British Empire, a fear which led
some to call for British men to emulate what was seen as a more “virile race.”58 The role of this sort of
national “myth-making” in increasing the likelihood of war plays a prominent role in Van Evera’s list of
results of perceived offensive dominance. However, Van Evera denies the centrality of mythmaking to
the concept of nationalism:
**Misc Things
AI Advantage Uq
AI is inevitable – other countries and political incentives prove – BUT rapid US
development now is key to US leadership
13D 18 (13D research, and Independent global research team, “The U.S. is losing its lead to China in the
technologies that will define the 21st century. Will the wake-up call be heard?”,
https://latest.13d.com/us-losing-lead-to-china-technologies-define-21st-century-ai-wake-up-call-
e3edeea4c455, 1/20/18, NRG)
We have often dissected why AI is the most-significant enabling technology since the internet. No one has put the technology’s
power in clearer terms than Vladimir Putin, telling a group of Russian students in September: “ Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere
will become the ruler of the world.” For many pundits, politicians, and technologists around the globe, 2017 was an awakening: China is
rapidly gaining ground on the U.S. and may be the leading bet to be that ruler. But is Chinese AI dominance more
hype than inevitably? The answer lies in the three-ingredient recipe for machine learning: the talent that creates the code; the data that
educates that code; and the computing power that processes that data. Evidence today suggests China leads the
U.S. only in computing power. However, with America taking a regressive stance — whether research
funding, immigration policy, or the abdication of regulatory leadership — its supremacy in talent and
data appears more tenuous than ever. No doubt China’s ascendancy is not assured. Its AI policy of “military-
civil fusion” may hinder its ability to recruit top foreign talent and cause politicians in the West to erect barriers against Chinese
technological supremacy. However, the advantage that could assure Chinese victory in the “tech cold war” is clear. As James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, told The New York Times in May: “The difference is that Chinaseems to think it’s a race and America
doesn’t.” In a report released in December, the Eurasia Group breaks down “China’s Artificial Intelligence Revolution”, offering clear evidence China is
gaining ground on the U.S.. With the technology a national priority, Chinese talent has flooded to
machine learning. China’s Microsoft Research Asia alone has trained over 5,000 AI professionals. The results of this talent boom is reflected in the
escalating quantity and quality of Chinese research output: This talent spike has, in turn, fueled the Chinese AI startup ecosystem. Between the beginning of 2012
and 3Q17, investors poured roughly $4.5 billion into more than 200 Chinese AI startups. Over half of that investment has been made in just the last two years:
Marquee advances have already resulted from that investment. This year, a prominent Chinese startup, Beijing-based Face++, beat teams
from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Carnegie Mellon to take first place in three computer vision
challenges, a prowess that earned the company the largest-ever AI venture capital round — $460 million — in early November. By all accounts, this rapid
Chinese AI progress has caught the U.S. off guard, too blinded by its past technological dominance to recognize the threat to its future. As former Alphabet
chairman Eric Schmidt said at a tech summit in November: “Weren’t we the ones that invented this stuff? Weren’t we the ones that were going to go exploit the
benefits of all this technology for betterment and American exceptionalism, in our own arrogant view…Trust me, these Chinese people are good.” As we read the
landscape today, the three primary advantages currently possessed by each country break down as follows: The U.S. ƒ
The top AI talent: Google alone employs roughly 50% of the world’s top 100 AI scientists, according to the Eurasia
Group. ƒ Established global networks: Google, Facebook, and Amazon all possess far more total active users from far more
countries than their Chinese counterparts. This is both an advantage in data aggregation and leveraging existing consumer, business-to-business, and government
relationships in the transition from the platform era to the AI era. ƒ Data
privacy: Despite the Snowden leaks and the recent
Meltdown and Spectre revelations, consumers and governments still place more trust in U.S companies
to protect privacy and allow personal freedoms. China’s strict cybersecurity law implemented last year reinforced concerns about Chinese government control of
data. Theseconcerns will influence AI talent recruitment, consumer adoption of Chinese AI products, and
foreign openness to Chinese AI systems. China ƒ Government leadership: From spending on research
support and domestic talent cultivation to clear policy priorities that provide a unified roadmap to success, China is far ahead of
the U.S. ƒ Hardware: China now possesses 202 of the top 500 supercomputers, while the U.S. has 143. It has the most-
prolific manufacturing ecosystem on the globe. China appears best-positioned to be the world’s leading provider of the computing power necessary to support AI
systems. ƒ Domestic data prowess: According to Goldman Sachs: “China…generates (about) 13% of the digital information
globally. By 2020, we expect this to grow to around 20% to 25%.” This provides a more secure data stream than the U.S.’ cross-border data dependence, which
can not only be disrupted by consumer demand, but political headwinds. Given each country’s advantages, we see an AI duopoly as a likely outcome — influence
split between the U.S. and China, with each nation leading in different applications of the technology. The global AI ecosystem could therefore fragment, split based
upon regional consumer demands, political alliances, and privacy standards. We are already seeing these lines drawn. Along with China, Russia has implemented
tough cybersecurity laws and erected barriers to cross-border data flows. This will make the two countries — along with others prioritizing strict control of
information flows — more aligned in the consumer AI products they allow and how they apply AI technologies to govern their nations. Meanwhile, we’re seeing U.S.
and European resistance to Chinese tech infiltration. The
Trump Administration has cracked down on foreign direct
investment in U.S. technology sectors, and urged European allies to do the same. Germany acted in July, becoming the first
E.U. country to tighten rules on foreign corporate takeovers. As Eurasia Group writes in its recent report on the top risks facing
the globe in 2018: “as China’s products become ever-better… Europeans and others begin to question the security challenges of doing tech business with Beijing.”
However, while an AI duopoly appears most-likely, more and more evidence is emerging that the
U.S. may squander its AI advantages.
The U.S. has failed to build legal and regulatory frameworks capable of meeting the challenges of the platform
era. This was laid bare in 2017 by Russian election meddling and escalating global concern about Silicon Valley’s platform monopolies. Why should governments
around the globe look to the U.S. to lead in the AI era given its floundering in the platform era? For one example of what this could mean, Europe has become
increasingly concerned about data ownership, which could lead to regulations that could prevent tech giants from leveraging valuable data assets. Given the
U.S.’ waning credibility in tech issues, it may have less ability to influence E.U. policy and protect its data
interests. However, the regression goes beyond international politics. The U.S. seems willing to sacrifice its advantages in order to satisfy short-term domestic
political whims. From research funding cut proposals to immigration policy to electric vehicle subsidies, the
Trump Administration has demonstrated that AI dominance is not a priority. Consider the potential consequence of the
U.S.’s retreat from alternative energy. AI will be used to determine optimal energy generation and distribution, therefore
maximizing efficiency across a nation’s web of traditional and alternative energy sources. The further the U.S. falls behind China in deploying new
energy technologies, the more decisive China’s data advantage will be in educating those systems: If the U.S. continues to regress while
underestimating China’s escalating capabilities, a winner-take-all victory could be the result. And the cost of squandering the AI-
opportunity cannot be overstated. As Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer writes: “ AI will shift the balance of power in both the
global economy and international relations, because the countries that master AI first will have a crucial
strategic advantage in writing the rules for the next global order.”
Domestic Violence/T-Visa K Link
**I think this ev could be used as a security link or a general turn on case—it’s a reason why the aff
ignores structural conditions that condition trafficking. It’s not just a link of omission, but how the aff
doesn’t resolve the narrative of survivors that already exists.
Their victimized framing of asylum seekers reifies institutional unfreedom that

collapses individual narratives into broader securitization and policing
Lawrance 17 (Benjamin N. Lawrance— Rochester Institute of Technology. This article was originally
presented at a conference in Milan-Bicocca University, organized by Alice Bellagamba and Antonio di
Lauri called “Freedom: Bondage, Future and Selves in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.”
"Unfreedom Papers: Trafficking, Refugee Protection, and Expertise after Neo-Abolitionism." Journal of
Global Slavery 2 (2017) 139-161. Brill Online. DOI: 10.1163/2405836X-00201003//sabín)
The persistence of unfreedom in the contemporary epoch is a cause of much consternation on the part
of government agencies, anti-slavery activists, and neoliberal economic theorists.17 How to characterize
contemporary forms of labor exploitation against historical patterns of slavery and slave-trading is
among the more vexing issues.18 While the Palermo Protocol provides a coherent global definition of
“trafficking,” it seems far too uncritical to view it simply as a “new form” of slavery; it is a complex,
unstable, multivalent and multisited process.19 Slavery, trafficking, and forced labor are all subsets of
unfree labor, and “unfreedom” resides on a dynamic “continuum of exploitation.”20 Just as a state’s
capacity to authorize or deny people entrance to national territory has been shown to produce “illegal”
immigration, so too the conflation of anti-trafficking with migration and refugee protection produces
new forms of unfreedom by classifying trafficking subjecthood with terms such as “historic,” “live,” or
“on-going.”21 And transnational trafficking victims, such as Ms. Oduro, forced into domestic work, are
buried by an “additional layer of unfreedom,” as Bina Fernandez observes. The domestic context
devalues work, recoding trafficking subjecthood within a “position of subservience” as “service.”22 .23
In a wide-ranging discussion of the persistence of unfreedom, John O’Neill remarked, almost in passing,
that “the constraints on exit which keep a worker within conditions of unfreedom might matter more”
than those of entry. While mostly dwelling on laboring subjects who remained in close proximity to their
erstwhile master/owners, his observation that the “constraint of exit” for laborers “often lies” in “the
absence of protective labour and citizenship rights” is equally perspicacious for transnational laboring
subjects, like Ms. Oduro. In particular, he notes, “the illegal status of many migrant workers robs
workers of social protections that allow them to exit.”24 Viewed in this light, we must distinguish
escaping a trafficking context—such as domestic servitude or forced prostitution and imprisonment—
from resisting bureaucratic incredulity that would reinstantiate the conditions giving rise to trafficking.
The continuum of unfreedom and migration policy and securitization has given rise to a new liminal
trafficking subjecthood, somewhere between exploited escaped person and a legally free autonomous
laboring subject. Asylum-seeking by trafficking survivors operates as a “infrapolitical” strategy whereby
applicants instantiate an incomplete liberated subjecthood in order to move further along the
unfreedom continuum. Asylum-seekers have already escaped their traffickers when they file a claim for
protection, but they view themselves as remaining unfree until they successfully resist attempts to
remove them back to the context whence arose their subjugation. Drawing on James Scott’s
theorization of resistance as a hidden transcript located somewhere between structure and agency, I
see the mobilization of unfreedom papers as operating in a middle ground whereby trafficking victims
move nimbly between “overt collective defiance” and “complete hegemonic compliance” to dismantle
their unfree status.25Unfreedom papers are an authoritative and provocative mechanism in a context of
deeply uneven power relations, often accompanied by threats of deportation, incarceration, and
violence. They permit a “veiled discourse of dignity and self-assertion” in a public setting (a court) and
disguise, mute, and cloak ideological arguments “for safety’s sake.”26 Unfreedom papers are just one of
many strategies that have evolved in the highly mobile transnational world of asylum-seeking.27 The
rapid emergence of documentation—of unfreedom papers—as a tool of resistance by trafficking
survivors has multiple points of origin, of which two are particularly relevant here. The first concerns the
operation of subaltern global citizenships and asylum politicization. The politicization of asylum
procedures is part of a broader current of securitization whereby humanitarian protection and
economic migration collapse into a unitary phenomenon to be curtailed.28 Because the European
Union and other nations are increasingly pressured by the general public to reduce immigration, and
because asylumseekers are often viewed by the public generically as immigrants—not as a distinct
category of recipients of humanitarian protection—policies limiting access to asylum are coupled to the
criminalization of illegal migration.29 In violation of international agreements, countries and supra-
regions routinely innovate securitization strategies, such as new visa requirements, mandatory
detention, and prevention/return policies.30 Seeking asylum, although a universal human right, is
reframed as “illegal” and subject to the review processes of criminal actions, such as trials and appeals,
witnesses and evidence.31 Kamal Sadiq has drawn attention to how “modern citizenship regimes have
introduced new institutional and documentary statuses: the worker visa, the permanent resident, the
sponsored spouse, the naturalized citizen, and the frequently traveling dual citizen.”32 Sara Friedman
has demonstrated how official documents such as “passports, national id cards, travel passes, visas, or
entry permits … ostensibly sanctify both the identity of their bearers and the standing of the body that
issued them.”33 And Amanda Flaim argues that “the forensic or evidence criteria used for assessing
claims to belonging” among Thailand highland minorities constitutes a “self-referential cycle of call-and-
response upon which the state’s claim to sovereignty is ultimately founded.”34 Documentation—real,
fake, and fraudulent—plays a particularly powerful role in realizing the conditions of trafficking too.
Kevin Bales highlights how (what he calls) modern-day slavery “uses false passports and airline tickets. It
packs slaves into trucks and bribes border guards. It covers its tracks with false work contracts and
fraudulent visas.”35 Similarly, Fernandez notes, that the“formal employment contracts” for Ethiopian
migrant workers departing for Lebanon are a “tacitly acknowledged fiction.”36 A second reason for the
importance of documentation emerges from the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which envelops many
immigration proceedings.37 Trafficking survivors, who relocate voluntarily or forcibly to Europe or North
America and submit asylum, refugee, or humanitarian protection claims, are subjected to intense
scrutiny. As a refugee narrative may provide access to legal and political membership in a host country,
juridical and immigration authorities view misrepresentation or lying very seriously. April Shemak
observes that the scrutinizing of testimonies makes narratives the “sites of surveillance and policing of
national boundaries.”38 Jacques Derrida highlighted how confirmation of the veracity of the claimant’s
story can never be achieved through expert testimony, which is, in effect, testimony about testimony,
when he observed, “there is no testimony which does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of
fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury.” For “if testimony thereby became proof, information,
certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony.”39 Extending Derrida further, Shemak
reminds us that, “testimony is … always linked to the possibility of perjury, even as a witness swears to
its truthfulness … Testimony always holds the potential to trespass, to breach trust and perjure.” And as
has recently been observed, because of the “improvability” of testimony, the asylum-seeker “is most
often already perceived as lying, and therefore treacherous, before the first word is uttered.”40
AT: cap perm
The permutation is nothing more than an attempt to disguise the violent

underpinnings of the 1ac with its engagement in anti-capitalist action
Žižek 08 (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology @ Univ. of Ljubljana, Violence, p. 36-
37//EY)
We live in a society where a kind of Hegelian speculative identity of opposites exists. Certain
features, attitudes, and norms
of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked. They appear to be neutral, non- ideological,
natural, commonsensical. We designate as ideology that which stands out from this background:
extreme religious zeal or dedication to a particular political orientation. The Hegelian point here would be that it
is precisely the neutralisation of some features into a spontaneously accepted background that
marks out ideology at its purest and at its most effective. This is the dialectical "coincidence of opposites": the
actualisation of a notion or an ideology at its purest coincides with, or, more precisely, appears as its opposite, as non- ideology. Mutatis
mutandis, the same holds for violence. Social-symbolic violence
at its purest appears as its opposite, as the
spontaneity of the milieu in which we dwell, of the air we breathe. This is why the delicate liberal
communist-frightened, caring, fighting violence-and the blind fundamentalist exploding in rage are
two sides of the same coin. While they fight subjective violence, liberal communists are the very
agents of the structural violence which creates the conditions for the explosions of subjective
violence. The same philanthropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined
the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the
very intolerance that is being fought. In the 1960s and '70s it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards of a girl clad in a bikini
or wearing an evening gown; however, when one moved the postcard a little bit or looked at it from a slightly different perspective, her
clothes magically disappeared to reveal the girl's naked body. When
we are bombarded by the heartwarming news of
a debt cancellation or a big humanitarian campaign to eradicate a dangerous epidemic, just move the
postcard a little to catch a glimpse of the obscene figure of the liberal communist at work beneath.
We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every progressive struggle today.
All other enemies-religious fundamentalists and terrorists, corrupted and inefficient state bureaucracies-are particular figures whose rise
and fall depends on contingent local circumstances. Precisely
because they want to resolve all the secondary
malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong
with the system as such. This needs to be borne in mind in the midst of the various tactical alliances
and compromises one has to make with liberal communists when fighting racism, sexism, and
religious obscurantism.
R&D AI solvency
R&D solves AI
Corrigan 7/11
(Jack, Staff correspondent for Nextgov, “U.S. Needs a National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence,
Lawmakers and Experts Say”, 7/11/18, https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2018/07/us-needs-
national-strategy-artificial-intelligence-lawmakers-and-experts-say/149639/, Date Accessed: 7/26/18,
//EY)
The Trump administration has taken a largely hands-off approach in regards to AI, arguing it’s still too
early for the government to get involved in the technology and any attempts at oversight could stifle its
growth. But in a panel hosted Wednesday by Politico, experts were quick to point out the difference
between burdening industry with regulations and addressing the issues at hand today. “Their notion
that [artificial intelligence] isn’t already upon us, or the view that it’s not already affecting our lives in
very profound ways … is in fact short-sighted. The toothpaste is already out of the tube,” said Rep. John
Delaney, D-Md., who founded the Congressional AI Caucus. In its budget for fiscal 2019, the White
House designated artificial intelligence as a federal research and development priority and in May
assembled a committee of AI experts to coordinate those governmentwide efforts. But while China,
France, Canada, the European Union and others have outlined broad plans for moving artificial
intelligence R&D forward, the U.S. lacks such a unified strategy. But just as the launch of Sputnik
spurred the country to create a long-term plan for the space program, the threats competitors like China
pose to America’s leadership in AI should push the government and private sector to adopt a set of
common goals for future development, said Delaney. And those goals could potentially cover a wide
array of areas. The government is well-positioned to flag specific research areas that would have the
biggest impact on national interests and drive partnerships among agencies, industry and academia to
address those topics, said Walter Copan, the Commerce Department undersecretary for Standards and
Technology and director of the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Additionally, he noted a
national strategy could set ethical standards for artificial intelligence and define areas where it should or
should not be used. “This is going to be something that impacts the entire world, and if we show
leadership on this and start driving international norms, we can make sure this tool does more good
than bad,” said Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas. And that might not be the case if a more authoritarian country,
like China, wins the global AI race. Experts widely consider China to be the biggest threat to American
dominance in artificial intelligence, and in recent years its government has made tremendous
investments in R&D and built a collaborative innovation ecosystem that’s begun to mirror that of the
U.S. Given the authoritarian government’s ability to dictate every aspect of the R&D enterprise, make
even more critical for the U.S. to point its long-term efforts in the right direction, lest it lose even
more ground. “Best case scenario, we’re tied with China,” Hurd said on the panel. “We’re still the
benchmark because the greatest innovators, the smartest people are here in the United States of
America, but … [China’s] ability to move quickly because they can force action is one of the reasons they
could potentially get a leg up on us.”
R&D solves AI leadership – assumes the worker shortages
Ehlinger ’16
(Samantha, Technology and Government correspondent @ Fedscoop, “To lead in AI, U.S. needs
government investment in R&D, workforce — experts”, 10/26/16, https://www.fedscoop.com/u-s-
government-needs-to-work-out-its-role-in-promoting-ai-or-risk-falling-behind-expert/, Date Accessed:
7/25/18, //EY)
Officials and an industry expert tried to sort out Wednesday exactly what government’s role should be
in helping America become a global competitor in artificial intelligence. “It’s a global race now to see
who is going to be the leader in artificial intelligence,” Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president
of research at NVIDIA, said during a panel discussion at the company’s GPU Technology Conference.
Dally said the government needs to invest in research “that will lead to even better AI” and work on
developing the workforce. “People say there’s a huge shortage of programmers today, but actually as
AI changes the rules and computers basically program themselves by learning, what we need to be a
‘programmer’ changes,” Dally said. “It’s no longer somebody who writes code — it’s somebody who’s
more of a data scientist who curates the data, who understands neural networks [and] can configure
them to solve a certain task.” Panelist Lynne Parker, division director for information and intelligent
systems at the National Science Foundation, co-lead the task force that developed the recently released
national strategic plan for research and development around AI. When thinking about government’s role
in this space, Parker said it is important to note that R&D informs policy and visa-versa. She noted that
regulators can use R&D as an opportunity to get questions answered that help thm develop the best
rules. “There is real research needed in a lot of these areas to help us understand how we address
issues of security, issues of privacy,” agreed Alan Davidson, director of digital economy at the
Commerce Department.
China cooperates
Cooperation with China over AI are at unprecedented levels –info-sharing means 0 risk of
Chinese Dominance
Alderman and Ray ’17
(Daniel Alderman, a deputy director at Defense Group, Inc. (DGI) oversees analytic production at DGI’s Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a DGI research
associate, conducts Chinese-language studies of national security, science, and technology issues, “Best Frenemies Forever: Artificial Intelligence, Emerging
Technologies, and China–US Strategic Competition”, 07/28/17, SITC Research Briefs, Series 9(2017-10), Date Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
China–US competition in emerging technologies like AI is unlike any other not only because the
technology is dual-use, but also because the interactions between actors is fluid to an unprecedented
level. Instead of the Cold War’s managed interactions between the academic, defense, and commercial
communities, US and Chinese companies are incredibly intertwined. The economic gains, strategic
risks, and fluid interactions of communities across borders make this competition unprecedented. It is
also clear that the United States and China have fundamentally different advantages and disadvantages.
While the United States has long-held advantages in its commercial and academic R&D, major structural
problems in the DoD procurement system often make it incompatible with startup endeavors. In
contrast, China’s defense procurement system may have problems but there are few structural barriers
to leveraging commercial industries for defense purposes. China’s advantage of picking national
champions can also prove crucial if it is able to predict both the key players and potential
breakthroughs. Its longstanding disadvantage continues to be a lag in indigenous innovation, which the
six models assessed in this brief seek to address through means ranging from domestic investments to
foreign acquisitions to espionage. Ultimately, the contest of “frenemies” will come down to the US
ability to reform defense procurement and engage the private sector, versus the Chinese capability to
truly indigenize innovation.
AI bad framing – Bostrom
The advancement of AI and superintelligence constitutes the greatest existential threat

Mulgan ’15
(Tim, Professor of Moral & Political Philosophy @ the University of St. Andrews, “Superintelligence:
Paths, Dangers, Strategies”, 4/26/15, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 262, 1 January 2016,
Pages 196–203, Date Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
Bostrom explores the possible future emergence of an artificial superintelligence: a machine (or other
AI) with an ability to perform general cognitive tasks that ‘is smart in the sense that an average human
being is smart compared to a beetle or a worm’ (p. 93). Superintelligence could emerge very
suddenly—once machines reach a human intellectual level, they may take over the design of future
AI, and technology will then advance at an ever-increasing pace. Bostrom argues that, while this future
is far from inevitable, superintelligence is a threat worth taking seriously. He concludes his introductory
survey of the evidence thus: it may be reasonable to believe that human-level machine intelligence has
a fairly sizeable chance of being developed by mid-century, and that it has a non-trivial chance of being
developed considerably sooner or much later; that it might perhaps fairly soon thereafter result in
superintelligence; and that a wide range of outcomes may have a significant chance of occurring,
including extremely good outcomes and outcomes that are as bad as human extinction. At the very least
… the topic is worth a closer look. (p. 21) Bostrom's book seeks to inaugurate that closer look. Given
their vast intellectual superiority, superintelligent AIs will easily dominate humans. (Bostrom nicely
illustrates the difficulties surrounding any long-term attempt to confine superintelligent AIs to any
subservient role.) And the first superintelligence will enjoy a strategic advantage that may be decisive—
leading to a world dominated by a single superintelligent AI. In this AI-dominated future, everything
turns on the motivations of that dominant superintelligence. If it cares for humans, things might go
unimaginably well for us. If it doesn't, then our future might be very nasty or very short. From the
superintelligent perspective: ‘Human beings might constitute potential threats; they certainly
constitute physical resources’ (p. 116). An indifferent superintelligence might reconfigure the matter in
our bodies and/or our environment to suit some alien purpose of its own. The philosophical heart of
Bostrom's book, and the part that will most engage the attention of moral philosophers, is his discussion
of superintelligent motivation in chs 7, 9, 12, and 13. How could we design, predict, or constrain the
motivations of future superintelligent AIs? And if we could choose their values, what values would we
want them to have? Bostrom first undermines any naive optimism about superintelligent motivation.
Higher intelligence is not necessarily correlated with either moral superiority or greater benevolence
towards humans. Bostrom defends the following orthogonality thesis: ‘Intelligence and final goals are
orthogonal: more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any
final goal’ (p. 107). For philosophical readers, Bostrom is at pains to underline the modesty of this thesis:
it does not presuppose Humeanism about motivation, deny the possibility of irrational preferences, or
reject moral facts. A machine might be superintelligent—in the practical sense of being ‘skilled at
prediction, planning, and means-end reasoning in general’ (p. 107)—without being ‘rational’ in any more
sophisticated philosophical sense of the word. Given the vast space of possible minds, we cannot simply
assume that future artificial intelligences will share our values or goals. The first superintelligence could
be an accelerated digital copy of a rodent brain, a run-away financial trading algorithm, or a programme
designed to myopically prove logical theorems. Who knows what such a superintelligence might want?
The first superintelligent AI might turn everything in the universe into paperclips, or into a computer
to explore the Riemann hypothesis. Any ethic of superintelligence must thus confront the control
problem: ‘How can the sponsor of a project that aims to develop superintelligence ensure that the
project, if successful, produces a superintelligence that would realize the sponsor's goals?’ (p. 127).
The search for a reliable robot ethics has been a staple of science fiction, at least since Isaac Asimov
formulated his famous three laws of robotics. Bostrom brings out the difficulties surrounding any
attempt to directly specify or pre-programme superintelligent values. A superintelligent AI programmed
to maximize pleasure might plaster the observable universe with microscopic minimally-sentient tiles
each experiencing one hedon—eliminating all human life in the process. And don't ask a
superintelligence to ‘make all my wishes come true’—unless you want it to rewire your brain so that you
only wish for logical tautologies! While these look like cute philosopher's puzzles, they are surprisingly
difficult to circumvent. Indeed, Bostrom concludes that the problem of loading suitable human values
into future AIs ‘is a research challenge worthy of some of the next generation's best mathematical
talent’ (p. 187). The control problem and the value-loading problem are engineering challenges. One
might think that the role of philosophers lies elsewhere. Their job is to choose the values that others will
(somehow or other) programme the AIs of the future to follow. Bostrom notes the obvious problem
with this division of labour: ‘No ethical theory commands majority support among philosophers, so most
philosophers must be wrong’ (p. 210). Philosophical ethics is simply not sufficiently developed to offer
clear guidance to the designers of AI. ‘In such circumstances to select a final value based on our current
convictions, in a way that locks it in forever and precludes any possibility of further ethical progress,
would be to risk an existential moral catastrophe’ (p. 210). The obvious solution is to rely on the
superior intellect of the superintelligent AI itself. Perhaps the discovery of correct values is another
cognitive task we can off-load to future smarter AIs, programming them to follow the correct morality
whatever it may be.
AT: AI bad
There is 0 risk for AI superintelligence – their turn is incoherent

Medium ’17
(Medium, an online publishing platform , “AI as an existential threat to humanity?”, 1/8/17,
https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/ai-as-an-existential-threat-to-humanity-a45dc2e0db76, Date
Accessed: 7/26/18, //EY)
Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher turned futurist, argues that “AI” will become “superintelligent”
and this is an existential threat to humanity. This has some people worried and has spurred a lot of
discussion, is this realistic or science fiction? I’m sure Professor Bostrom is a good guy, and I’m fond of
philosophers (although not necessarily of the academic kind). To be fair he’s not the only pessimist
forecasting the end of humanity at the hands of AI. Several others have predicted the rise of super-
intelligent machines at the peril of humanity, including Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Hawking.
Now these are fairly intelligent people, but what is their futuristic prediction based on exactly? It’s
tempting to draw attention to a doomsday scenario associated with something the vast majority of
people don’t comprehend. The news is full of existential threats, why not add to that? After studying
Bostrom’s book, it’s clear that the entire thesis hinges on one relatively straight-forward assumption:
that software will be able to evolve itself. This is quite simple actually: a computer program that is able
to make itself more advanced becomes out of control and “takes over.” It makes a lot of copies of itself,
propagates across the Internet, and so on. The philosophical conundrum posed by Bostrom and others
has to do with the ways in which humanity might be able to “control” such a thing, while that’s still
possible. Indeed this cornerstone idea makes logical sense, even to non-coders. So long as humans are
the only ones creating code then they have control. Code that doesn’t create itself cannot evolve
without human involvement. If you prefer to not read the entire book, watch here beginning at 43:25
(below is the verbatim) “And at some point, presumably in this whole-brain emulation, at some point
probably fairly soon after that point, you will have synthetic AIs that are more optimized than whatever
sort of structures biology came up with. So there’s a chapter in the book about that. But the bulk of the
book is — so all the stuff that I talked about, like how far we are from it and stuff like that, there’s one
chapter about that in the beginning. Maybe the second chapter has something about different
pathways.” “But the bulk of the book is really about the question of, if and when we do reach the ability
to create human-level machine intelligence — so machines that are as good as we are in computer
science, so they can start to improve themselves — what happens then?” The bulk of the book, he says,
and the entire premise of AI as an existential threat to humanity is — code evolving itself. Intelligence is
not understood The vast majority of the software carrying the label “AI” is simply automated
knowledge work. The scientific work referred to as “AGI” (artificial general intelligence) has relatively
few resources applied to it, particularly with the commercial attention increasingly paid to so-called
“AI”. The knowledge work misleadingly labeled “AI” doesn’t lead to this “singularity” event futurists
proclaim, rather it leads to more knowledge work being done by software. A human toddler can
acquire knowledge, make choices through reason, it can think and conceive the world in adaptive ways.
No software has this cognitive capacity today. Software is ultimately a set of equations, and we are very
far from having equations for human thought, in fact we don’t have equations for the thought of insects,
including ones that are known to have high degrees of social intelligence. A bee has roughly 800k
neurons, it acquires information, communicates position of food, navigates 3-dimensional space,
manufactures honey, collaborates in a social hierarchy, etc. If we had software as “smart” as a bee that
would be significant. We’re nowhere near that today, and most of the attention is elsewhere,
unfortunately. The unbound intellect of homo sapiens? Noam Chomsky and others have argued that the
scope and range of human intellectual capacity could easily be insufficient to produce comprehensive
theories of thought. Humans are organic creatures with limited capacity. Why would we assume the
opposite: that human mental capacity is so expansive as to thoroughly understand the mind and
cognition? We have formulas for accounting, therefore we can program computers to perform
knowledge work in accounting. We have patterns for winning chess moves, therefore we program
computers to win at the game. We simply do not have a theory of thought, even for simple organisms,
therefore creating software that thinks is still beyond our capacity. One thing is certain: to create code
that evolves itself the code would need cognitive capacity far beyond that of an insect or a toddler.
Will we ever be able to achieve this? We cannot know, however it seems that other existential threats
to humanity are far more deserving of attention.
No AI
Their automation internal link’s overblown

— expert consensus
Sherman 15 — Erik Sherman (staff writer for Fortune Magazine); citing David Autor (Professor of Economics and Associate Department
Head, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Jeff Hawkins (Executive director and chairman of cognitive theory
research organization Redwood Neuroscience Institute, co-founder of Palm Computing, and co-founder of machine intelligence company
Numenta); Eric Horvitz (Distinguished Scientist & Managing Director, Microsoft Research), Deborah Johnson (Anne Shirley Carter Olsson
Professor of Applied Ethics in the Science, Technology, and Society Program in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University
of Virginia); Michael Littman (Professor of Computer Science, Brown University), 2015, “Many scientists dismiss the fear of robots -- here's
why,” Fortune, March 5th, http://fortune.com/2015/03/05/forget-the-naysayers-robots-pose-no-threat-to-humanity-these-experts-say/
Here are five voices that say worries are overblown and leaps in technology will bring the human race
along with them . David Autor Professor of Economics and Associate Department Head, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “In 1966, the philosopher Michael Polanyi observed, ‘We can know more than we can tell… The skill of a
driver cannot be replaced by a thorough schooling in the theory of the motorcar; the knowledge I have of my own body differs altogether from the knowledge of its physiology.’ Polanyi’s observation largely predates the computer era, but the paradox he identified — that our tacit
commentators overstate the extent

knowledge of how the world works often exceeds our explicit understanding — foretells much of the history of computerization over the past five decades. … [J]ournalists and expert
of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities. The challenges to
substituting machines for workers in tasks requiring adaptability, common sense, and creativity remain
immense The machine-
.” Jeff Hawkins Executive director and chairman of cognitive theory research organization Redwood Neuroscience Institute, co-founder of Palm Computing, and co-founder of machine intelligence company Numenta “
intelligence technology we are creating today will not lead to self- replicating robots with , based on neocortical principles,
uncontrollable intentions. There won’t be an intelligence explosion. There is no existential threat. This
is the reality for the coming decades, and we can easily change direction should new existential threats
appear don’t think that’s
.” Eric Horvitz Distinguished Scientist & Managing Director, Microsoft Research “There have been concerns about the long-term prospect that we lose control of certain kinds of intelligences. I fundamentally
going to happen . I think that we will be very proactive in terms of how we field AI systems, and that in the end we’ll be able to get incredible benefits from machine intelligence in all realms of life, from science to education to economics to daily life.” Deborah
tasks are
Johnson Anne Shirley Carter Olsson Professor of Applied Ethics in the Science, Technology, and Society Program in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Virginia “Presumably in fully autonomous machines all the
delegated to machines. This, poses the responsibility challenge then, . Imagine a drone circulating in the sky, identifying a combat area, determining which of the humans in the
the description is somewhat misleading. In order

area are enemy combatants and which are noncombatants, and then deciding to fire on enemy targets. “Although drones of this kind are possible,
for systems of this kind to operate, humans must be involved. Humans make the decisions to delegate
to machines; the humans who design the system make decisions about how the machine tasks are
performed or, at least, they set the parameters in which the machine decisions will be made; and
humans decide whether the machines are reliable enough to be delegated tasks in real-world situations .”
Michael Littman Professor of Computer Science, Brown University “To be clear, there are indeed concerns about the near-term future of AI — algorithmic traders crashing the economy, or sensitive power grids overreacting to fluctuations and shutting down electricity for large swaths of
the population. There’s also a concern that systemic biases within academia and industry prevent underrepresented minorities from participating and helping to steer the growth of information technology. These worries should play a central role in the development and de ployment of
new ideas. But dread predictions of computers suddenly waking up and turning on us are simply not realistic .”

Everything

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Everything

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

**Topicality Things

Regulations are substantial restrictions

The Constitution gives Congress the power for immigration reform

2. Plenary Congressional Power

Courts can only make a law unenforceable – it can’t restrict itself

II. THE DOCTRINE OF CONSULAR ABSOLUTISM. ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT

A. Enunciation of the Doctrine

B. Arguments in support of the doctrine

1. The Inapplicability of the APA

The executive branch has as much power as Congress delegates to them

Executive actions are subject to the court, not to congress

2. Courts have standards to apply

‘restriction’ refers to a legal instrument that is defined in context

$ (Rule 1-500$ ) permits a restrictive covenant in a law corporation, partnership, or employment

IV. Analysis and Recommendations

a. proper construction of the rules of professional conduct

. If the local rule's discouraging

Regulations can have the intent of substantially limiting immigration

Major components of legal immigration

Including refugees is unpredictable – there is no brightline as to when they become

This form of trafficking is harmful for donors and dangers tourists

Scenario 1 is Structural Violence:

Organ trafficking is detrimental for victims—poor conditions for transplants ensure

Transplant tourism increases the risk of infectious diseases

This is ensured by a lack of medical follow-up and corrupt physician networks

Current donor screening fails

4. Recipient and donor screening for tropical infections Given

3.1. Viral infections and transplantation Many

New diseases and globalization ensure extinction—assumes new advances

The aff challenges the victimized meta-narrative of human trafficking by recognizing

Agencies operate effectively without reauthorization

Kosovo profits off organ trafficking—military involvement and government coverup

South Africa faces organ trafficking—prosecution isn’t an effective deterrent

Mozambique encourages organ trafficking—doctor discretion

India faces serious organ trafficking—entrenched poverty encourages quid-pro-quo

Their ev assumes perfectly regulated markets—they won’t be, markets are

Legalization is insufficient—Iran proves—altruism empirically works to eliminate

Travel ban doesn’t improve national security

They say it harms U.S. national security interests by perpetuating the

The premise of the retired military leaders’

A concern about unfettered executive discretion, so long

There’s no basis for National security claims

The risks posed by entrants from the nations covered by the

The administration's defenders argue that the government deserves special

he move away from investing in early stage research has

The authors point to the low levels of research

Labor shortage in biotech

turnover than in many other industries.

While some of the boundaries

regional enrichment patterns of N, P, Si and Fe within marine systems

similar proportions of productivity flow to fisheries on continental shelves as is appropriated by humans

HANPP highlights the highly

heterogeneous distribution of society’s appropriation of primary productivity; the regions of least

major PB papers [2,3]

, one further misrepresentation and one additional point are useful to

consider The PB framework is designed explicitly for the global level

understand the functioning of theEarth system as a whole. ThePBframework is therefore meant to

. Biodiversity and Ecosystem/Earth System Functioning

, the PB framework is concerned with the role of the

Organ legalization prevents organ shortages that fuel black markets

Other countries are an alt cause

The 1AC’s autoethnographies are a move to reconciliation as their retelling of history in

Jackson argues that a

their ev says the backlog is around 10,000