Peter Van Buren's Blog, page 4

Visa Hard Ball with Hamas?

The State Department is finally starting to play hardball with Hamas-sympathetic visa applicants. Or is it? Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at least 300 foreign students have had their visas revoked in the course of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. “Maybe more, it might be more than 300 at this point,” Rubio explained. “We do it […]

Aliens and Deportations and Bigger Fish

What happens when two solid objects collide? And the immigration jails are full. Is that when you invoke the Alien Enemies Act? Or is there something bigger going on? ICE announced in the first weeks of the Trump administration it made 32,809 illegal alien arrests. Officials also said they had maxed out detention capacity at […]

Green Card Take-Away from Mahmoud Khalil

Whether you believe Mahmoud Khalil deserves to be deported for his anti-Semitic stance while a student at Columbia University, or whether you believe he was righteously exercising his First Amendment rights there, his green card revocation stinks. It is a perfect example of “we told you so” about powers granted so freely to the government, […]

Five Questions Explain Why the H1-B Visa Needs Reformed

Five questions to explain why the H1-B visa needs to be reformed. 1) What is an H1-B visa? Visas for foreigners to travel temporarily to the U.S. are designated by letters and numbers. B-1 is a business visa, B-2 is for tourists. H1-A allows foreign nurses to work in the U.S. while H1-B is for […]

Trump’s Five Million Dollar Gold Card Visa

If you’re hung up on the idea of selling American citizenship, that horse left the barn decades ago. What’s left at issue is just how much it should cost. “We’re going to be selling a gold card,” President Donald Trump said from the Cabinet Room recently. “You have a green card. This is a gold […]

Trump May Succeed Where Others Failed in Personnel Cutting

Disclaimer: Then-Vice President Al Gore awarded my State Department team in Seoul in the mid-90’s a Hammer Award for helping “reinvent government.” Gore was in charge of the Clinton-era plan to create a government that costs less and works better. The plan mostly depended on us run-of-the-mill employees to come up with cost saving hacks […]

Tough Times at Foggy Bottom

The DOGE tsunami is about to strike the U.S. Department of State, as well as other agencies. Let’s see what that means. The day the music died was January 28, when nearly everyone at State, along with over two million other federal civilian employees, received an email referring to “A Fork in the Road.” The […]

USAID: Can It Get Back to Promoting American Soft Power?

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a Cold War relic that has been allowed to metastasize into some sort of woke monster, racked with corruption as if squandering money grabbed ahold of the organization and shook it like the norovirus. USAID’s time has passed and it deserves the quick death Elon (“feed it […]

Viva La Resistance, Hawaiian Style!

If you were to nominate a place for being the most resistant to Donald Trump’s immigration policies, particularly those large-scale deportations, where would it be? True Blue states like California or New York or Colorado? Or just maybe so-called sanctuary cities like Manhattan, Chicago or L.A.? The jury is still out, but an early leader […]

Letter from Japan 2025

Japan 2025 is a version of Japan 2000, albeit with fewer young people, many more old people, and a society that has no idea where it is going so it simply runs in place waiting to see what might evolve next. Change comes slowly in Japan but eventually will accumulate enough to nip you in […]