Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Chinese EVs are good for the world. Biden says they’re bad for America. 

Why the Solomon Islands election matters to China and the U.S.

Biden calls ally Japan ‘xenophobic’ like China, Russia, at campaign event

This masterpiece ‘Birth of Venus’ probably isn’t of Venus at all

The beginner’s illustrated guide to watching an F1 race

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Miss Manners: Offering my bedroom to guests

Ask Amy: My wife’s sister confessed her feelings for me

Carolyn Hax: Will request for a postnup offend much younger wife?

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

World Press Freedom Day, 2024

How Trump convinces Republicans to adopt extreme views

Campuses are grappling with the Gaza war. So are our columnists.

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

NASA moon capsule suffered extensive damage during 2022 test flight

Russian state media ramping up English, Spanish presence on TikTok, study finds

Apple is behind in AI and killed its self-driving car project. What’s next?

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

The 6 best things to do with kids in the D.C. area this weekend 

The 33 best things to do in D.C. this weekend and next week

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

Trump hush money trial live updates: Hope Hicks takes the stand

Any day now, President Trump is going to issue a new version of his travel ban — one designed to get around the courts, which blocked his last one. Which will renew attention to the question: what is the real motive behind his ban?

In a new interview, one of the chief architects of that ban has offered an expanded rationale for it that goes well beyond the original one. Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller says the ban isn’t just about national security; it’s also about protecting American workers from foreign competition and protecting taxpayers from the drain on public benefits that refugees represent.

Miller — who has been widely described as one of the key ideologists behind Trump’s America-first nationalism, along with Stephen Bannon — made the comments <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-28/does-stephen-miller-speak-for-trump-or-vice-versa?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam">in the big Bloomberg Businessweek profile of him</a> that has been making the rounds today. Here’s the key part:

Miller and Bannon want Trump to undertake a radical recasting of U.S. policies, from immigration to trade to taxation, that would invert this frame by making the interests of U.S. citizens (or what Miller and Bannon perceive to be their interests) predominant, almost to the point of exclusivity. This will entail confronting trade-offs most people prefer to ignore and making hard-headed decisions on emotionally charged issues, such as the status of refugees and Dreamers — decisions Miller, with Trump’s blessing, has begun tackling already.

The order temporarily banning refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries is a prime example. Miller contends that national security concerns warranted the move but adds that refugees compete with U.S. workers (“Obviously, a smaller number of refugees will have some effects in terms of raising wages”) and burden U.S. taxpayers (“because of how expensive American benefits programs are”), whereas “regional resettlement” would be cheaper. “For the prices of resettling one refugee in America,” he says, “you can support 12 in their home region.” (His numbers come from a study done by the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington.)

In this telling, the ban — which temporarily barred from entry refugees and migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries — is also necessary because refugees (and, presumably, migrants) are competing with Americans for jobs, driving down wages, and because they are accessing taxpayer-funded benefits.

The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/refugee-muslim-executive-order-trump.html">original executive order</a> is heavily focused on national security as the rationale for the ban, describing it as designed to “protect the American people from terrorist attacks.” The order adds that “numerous foreign-born individuals have been convicted or implicated in terrorism-related crimes since September 11, 2001,” including some “who entered through the United States refugee resettlement program.” It says the temporary pause is necessary to tighten the screening process.

Miller’s latest comments suggest an additional rationale, however, one rooted in a much broader set of imperatives designed to limit immigration for reasons that go beyond national security. And elsewhere in the Bloomberg piece, Miller talks about the need to restrict immigration to protect American workers.

Of course, it’s possible for the ban to have more than one rationale, and Miller himself says as much. But the point is that this raises additional legitimate questions about whether the national security rationale for the ban is merely a pretext. Such questions have been raised before. As many have pointed out, Trump repeatedly campaigned on an explicit vow to ban Muslim entry into the United States, which raises questions as to whether the executive order was designed to move towards a Muslim ban in a manner designed to get around legal hurdles, meaning it has discriminatory intent and effect. In blocking the ban, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals <a href="https://lawfareblog.com/how-read-and-how-not-read-todays-9th-circuit-opinion">agreed</a> that outside evidence, such as Trump’s public “Muslim ban” comments, can be considered in assessing its intent. Miller has added another possible motive into the mix.

Indeed, this reading is consistent with everything we now know about the immigration vision put forth by Miller and Bannon. As <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-foreigners-20170228-story.html">the Los Angeles Times reports today</a>:

Behind President Trump’s efforts to step up deportations and block travel from seven mostly Muslim countries lies a goal that reaches far beyond any immediate terrorism threat: a desire to reshape American demographics for the long term and keep out people who Trump and senior aides believe will not assimilate…

U.S. demographics have been changing rapidly — and undesirably in the eyes of top Trump aides, including his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and domestic policy advisor Stephen Miller.

Inside the West Wing, the two men have pushed an ominous view of refugee and immigration flows, telling other policymakers that if large numbers of Muslims are allowed to enter the U.S., parts of American cities will begin to replicate marginalized immigrant neighborhoods in France, Germany and Belgium that have been home to plotters of terrorist attacks in recent years, according to a White House aide familiar with the discussions…

The two men see the country’s long-term security and wage growth entwined with reducing the number of foreign-born people allowed to visit, immigrate and work in the U.S.

And so, for Miller and Bannon, the rationale for the ban is rooted in something much broader — a combined longer-term demographic reshaping project designed to protect American workers from foreign competition and prevent European-style immigrant communities (which are seen as potential incubators of terror attacks) from developing in the United States. Miller’s comments in the Bloomberg article are broadly consistent with this. (The travel ban is temporary, but it’s easy to see it getting expanded and prolonged in the event of a terror attack, and moreover, another tacit goal here could be to discourage certain types of emigration to the U.S.)

Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-rejects-intelligence-report-on-travel-ban-1487987629?mod=itp&amp;mod=djemITP_h" target="_blank">a recently leaked internal Department of Homeland Security assessment blew apart</a> the administration’s stated short-term national security rationale for the travel ban, concluding that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.”

Put this all together, and the idea that there is a serious and legitimate short term national security rationale for the travel ban is becoming harder and harder to sustain. It’s hard to say whether this will have any legal significance once the new version is introduced, but we now have very little doubt as to what is actually driving it.

An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics

Hunter College, BA in English

Greg Sargent was a columnist. He joined The Washington Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.

Greg Sargent

The Washington Post

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Submit a guest opinion

Today's Opinions newsletter

Opinions

prism://prism.query/site,/opinions/plum-line?limit=20

The Plum Line

Opinions from Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman.

Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by James Hohmann and Jonathan Capehart.