Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 14)

This autumn, a Ukrainian man arriving in Germany may be required to provide prior-approval to flee from Putin’s war. He may also have to show that Ukraine permitted him to leave. When Russia invaded in 2022, the European Union activated temporary protections without requiring individual asylum decisions for mass displacement, designed to shelter people displaced by war. This new system the EU introduced now requires compliance of Ukrainian military obligations as a condition of temporary protection for certain newcomers. The Council’s decision states that protection “shall only be granted to those who satisfy their military obligations in Ukraine.” Two Ukrainians fleeing the same war could now face different requirements depending on when they arrived.

In September, after the EU extended temporary protection until March 2028, Germany clarified the requirement. By August 4th, Ukrainians who previously held and continuously maintained protection within the same member state generally retained it as the new condition took effect on August 5th; however, those arriving later must prove their satisfied military requirements or qualified exemption. The cutoff allows those already protected to remain without having to prove compliance. New arrivals, however, must provide evidence that earlier applicants were never asked to produce.

While Germany processes these applications under Section 24 of its Residence Act, a Ukrainian government-approved exit stamp may help establish compliance. For some applicants, obtaining protection may now depend on whether Ukrainian authorities will provide the documents Germany requires. That does not mean every asylum seeker must go through a process where document verification is equivalent to an asylum hearing. Whether this restriction would actually help Ukraine recruit more soldiers remains unclear.

Their argument is that the 2022 arrangement should not disable Ukraine’s ability to maintain readiness, which has been consistently difficult since the inception of the war. Military recruitment remains difficult and many Ukrainian men face restrictions on departure. This new arrangement seeks to ease that difficulty. As the European Parliamentary Research Service explains, “This aims to reconcile temporary protection with Ukraine’s defence needs.” It fails to establish how many additional soldiers Ukraine would gain. Contesting its legal basis, the Council has exceeded its authority under the Temporary Protection Directive, argues International-law scholar Meltem Ineli Ciger. Noncompliance with Ukrainian military obligations does not appear within Articles 4 and 5, governing extensions, or Article 28, governing excluded individuals. It is her opinion that the Council cannot add such a condition through an extension decision. Her assessment states, “This statutory concern remains unresolved in the adopted text.” The council might be limiting an eligible group rather than adding a new exclusion, argues Steve Peers, an EU-law professor. Identifying who falls within a protected category is legally different from excluding someone who already qualified. Additionally, the directive does not clearly settle how far the council may revise those categories. The distinction is made on supporting Ukraine’s defense in an equal way. Ukrainian conscription rules disproportionately affect men, which serves as an argument against this system as it furthers unequal treatment under European fundamental-rights law. Although refusing military service does not automatically qualify someone for refugee status. A newcomer seeking to join protected family members could face a condition those relatives never encountered, despite the directive’s family-unity safeguards.

Germany will determine how much these legal distinctions affect the people applying for protection. Officials must assess the documents provided to establish military compliance or exemption; however, those who cannot meet the new requirement can still pursue asylum. Applicants must fulfill the applicable legal standards, meaning spending considerably more time waiting without any guarantee of protection. There is concern about the question of whether Ukrainians who lack military records would obtain documentation from their government in a reasonable amount of time.

At the end of July, approximately 4.43 million people were granted temporary protection from the European Union, including around 1.29 million in Germany. Most of those already protected will remain unaffected by the new requirement; however, there is no indication of how many future applicants may be denied protection or even if the restriction would contribute to Ukraine’s military recruitment. A Ukrainian arriving today may have to satisfy military requirements that someone who arrived only months earlier never faced. There is no evidence establishing how many additional soldiers, if any, Ukraine would gain as a result of Germany changing who must provide that proof.

This week’s reading had me thinking about “access” in political reporting, and how many reporters prioritize having these lines of connection above all else. In the U.S., for instance, many political reporters were excited for Trump to return to office in 2024 because he was unpredictable, made politics an exciting spectacle, and would pick up calls from any reporter (even the ones he repeatedly calls out in public as liars, like Maggie Haberman). As Panievsky points out, when this platforming becomes uncritical, like when journalists run statements from candidates without calling attention to the lies and distortions, reporting can fuel populism. The reading also made me think about how the coverage of political extremism is a potential example of “balance” leading us astray to “false balance” — by trying to get an accurate temperature check on the range of ideologies in a region, journalists can overestimate the salience of extremist viewpoints and inadvertently lend them credibility. This is commonly referenced in regards to the media’s coverage of anthropogenic global warming when the phenomenon was first being discussed by scientists, but after reading these chapters I can see why it’s also a useful framework to thinking about political extremism.

I’ve also been thinking about the reading in context of the White House’s announcement over the weekend that they would investigate the TV press pool for not covering Trump. Of course, this is remarkably ironic, given all of Trump’s criticism of the press and his actions to restrict reporters from the White House, but it also underlines a point Panievsky makes: for all the derision and hostility that populist leaders demonstrate toward the mainstream media, they still recognize its utility and its power in creating a mythology around populism. It reminds me, too, of what Jan-Werner Müller said in class last week: the far-right has never run out of scapegoats, and the media is one of the most low-risk, high-reward targets for any aspiring autocrat. 

While Panievsky argues that we shouldn’t abandon objectivity and instead should “reinterpret it in ways that align with our normative expectations from them” (101), I don’t find that idea to be all too persuasive. For instance, I’m skeptical of the suggestion that media outlets should increase their usage of fact-checks — we’ve seen major outlets like the NYT embrace this approach, but for the most die-hard supporters of far-right movements, nothing their politicians say could be wrong. In fact, the NYT or another mainstream outlet calling it a lie would probably only embolden the idea that there is a deep-seated conspiracy to oust and shame their preferred candidate. I am in agreement with Panievsky that we still need rigorous, thoughtful reporting that aims to report the truth, but we seem to lack the necessary modes to make impact with reporting. 

This week, watching Green Border was hard. There is something so symbolic to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers to be found in those forests between Poland and Belarus. The forest feels inescapable, meandering back and forth. Barren. Border patrol from both nations using asylum seekers as pawns in a geopolitical border war, constantly pushed over, under, and through barbed wire fences. The forest, its leaves fallen, branches stabbing the cold feet of those seeking a better life, only succeeds at providing ambiguous cover for the racist atrocities committed onto refugee families.

A boy drowns. Mothers are beaten as they pay their last dollars for water, their way to their final asylum destination already paid for previously. Activists are jailed.

This film, although a dramatic and fiction, closely resembles and creates images akin to real experiences along the Poland Belarusian board during the refugee crisis. 

One part of the film, though, I found myself struggling with was the postscript at the very end. The film states that during the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, that Poland welcomed almost two million Ukrainian refugees. This contrasts the refugee crisis dating back to 2014 that the postscript explains has lead to the untimely death of “about 30,000 people…crossing various European borders, at sea, on land, in forests.” 

There are some implications I find myself struggling with in this created dichotomy. There is no doubt that the Polish Belarusian border war, which uses and abuses asylum seekers, is horrific and spurred by conflict between Poland, a member of the EU, and Belarus, an effective satellite nation for the Russians through the supranational union established by the Belarusian-Russian Union State. The film explores the racism of the Polish border patrol, referring to the refugees as “darkies.” The Ukrainian refugee crisis, though, appears to be minimized by the film makers as a war “in Ukraine” as opposed to an invasion of Ukraine with the goal of establishing increased sentimentality for refugees stuck in the “Green Border” without expedited treatment by the Polish. However, especially because of Poland’s geopolitical tensions with Russia, their accepting of millions of Ukrainian refugees has an element of geopolitical tactic to it beyond a racial construct: it is symbolic. There is a strategy by the Polish government, and by the European Union, to welcome Ukrainians. For one, Poland shares a border with Ukraine and is in the EU. The other European Union border nations with Hungary also accepted a large number of Ukrainian refugees: around 140,000 Ukrainians went to Hungary within two weeks of the invasion and within three months of the invasion, over 442,000 Ukrainians fled to Slovakia and 961,270 fled to Romania, the other two EU border nations. While Poland took the most Ukrainians by number, in proportion to the country’s population, Slovakia took in the second most with Czechia taking in the most.

Here, I view it important to contextualize that geopolitical relation, and quantitative data, can demonstrate a narrative. Two contrasting immigration stories out of the same nation do not make one more or less important, or grueling. 

What is critical is to examine, with care, the brutality that all refugees are escaping; there is space for criticizing a government like Poland’s for not treating all asylum seekers equally, but the context of geopolitical conflicts should be referenced for context.

Throughout Panievsky’s discussions of journalistic objectivity, I noticed that objectivity is frequently more of a performance than a truth-seeking method. I found it ironic that “objectivity” is often pursued by trying to mimic what journalists perceive the public’s interpretation of objectivity to be. The result is not less subjectivity, just subjectivity that goes unacknowledged.

Journalism holds on to norms like the “right to reply” even when those norms no longer serve their purpose (86), and it often treats balance as a substitute for truth (97-98). As Panievsky writes, “Journalists often avoid determining who is right, as each deviation from their neutral stance is considered unprofessional or partisan” (101). The problem is that this kind of neutrality is defined by the debate, not by facts. If one side shifts to the extreme, the “middle ground” moves with it, and a reporter standing there is no longer neutral in any useful sense. Panievsky also finds that the shift to the right was not a response to any real bias. Leaning right was meant “to perform a ‘correction’ to the supposed bias journalists believed their audience attributed to them” (109).

This reminded me of how anthropology wrestles with a similar problem. The standard of ethnography was once to observe other cultures from a neutral distance, with the implied authority and objectivity of an expert researcher. Now, the discipline has come to accept that observers do not stand fully inside or outside of their subject. Instead of claiming objectivity, ethnographers are trained to acknowledge their own position and explain how it shaped their work. Panievsky touches on the tensions between academic and journalistic objectivity (105). The two can’t be directly translated. A news story has no room for the kind of reflexive discussion an ethnography includes, and readers expect reporters to tell them what happened, not to write about themselves. But the underlying ideas may still be useful. A reporter who explains how they reached a conclusion or provides broader context on their process might be better protected against charges of bias than one who avoids reaching conclusions or acknowledging their process at all.

For me, these chapters show that objectivity, as often practiced by journalists, is aimed at the audience rather than the facts. That makes it easy to exploit. A party that complains loudly enough about bias can shift coverage without proving anything, because journalists are responding to how they think they are seen. Treating objectivity as a question of method rather than appearance seems like a steadier footing; as Panievsky observed, journalists can be called partisan or biased either way.

Devon Williams

Professor Amos

JRN 449: International News

11 October 2026

The Translation of International Talent in the American Job Market

 

In 2016, Syrian data analyst Almothana Alhamoud told NPR reporter Deborah Amos that one of the most difficult parts of transitioning into the American workforce was learning how to market one’s skills and past international work experience.

“To learn to sell yourself, that’s the hard part, it’s the work culture thing here,” Alhamoud told Amos.

Alhamoud came to America with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and experience as a data analyst for Syria’s Agriculture Ministry. His first American job was as a nightshift cashier, until Upwardly Global, a nonprofit that helps work-authorized immigrants and refugees reenter professional careers in the U.S., became his pathway to a more fitting job in IT.

Now ten years later, the cultural problem Amos documented has broadened. Audra Brown, National Director of Employment Services at Upwardly Global, said the organization still helps job seekers “translate their experience into the U.S. job market,” while also “working with employers to make sure they understand how to evaluate immigrant talent.”

The Migration Policy Institute reports that about 20 percent, roughly 2.1 million, of college-educated immigrants were unemployed or working low-skilled jobs in 2022, as opposed to 16 percent of U.S.-born college graduates. Similarly, foreign-born workers composed 19.1 percent of the U.S. labor force in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but still were less likely than American-born workers to hold managerial or professional positions.

Upwardly Global describes this difficulty in details as small as how an applicant describes past accomplishments.

“Many of our job seekers come from collectivist cultures, where when you’re going for a job, you’re talking more about ‘what my team did and what my duties were,’” said Brown. American hiring culture, she described, expects achievements to be described individualistically: “‘I did this. I made this impact.’”

Even “becoming comfortable speaking about their own work and self-advocacy is a cultural nuance that they need to practice,” Brown said.

Networking also is a challenge for participants who come from professional backgrounds where a credential leads directly to a career, said Brown, without the necessary secondary connection of marketing oneself to others. International CVs, in contrast to American resumes, can include photographs and several pages of information that would be unusual on a standard American resume, and this format discrepancy is vital with the rise of AI hiring practices.

Fiona Maazel, Upwardly Global’s interim Vice President of Marketing and Communications, said recruiters are facing an application pool inundated with AI-generated material.

“AI has opened the floodgates, and now you’re getting a bajillion resumes that AI has produced,” Maazel said. “You might be screening out really valuable talent, but also you’re overwhelmed.” These AI systems working to select candidates for interviews can filter out international talent when their applications do not fit the American models they are trained on.

“ATS and AI screening tools might automatically discount someone because their background doesn’t… fit the U.S. experience,” Brown said. Employers may overlook a foreign degree, an unfamiliar company name or a career uncommon in American applications.

That has given Upwardly Global the task of certifying that these candidates are still worth consideration when their applications can be less familiar.

“These are highly trained professionals who have been vetted by us,” Maazel said. “We can vouch for them. These are real people.”

Brown stated that Upwardly Global is employing AI on their end as well by building AI-enabled resume and interview practice tools because existing products are “not necessarily tested or built with an immigrant professional in mind.” It also reorganized its resume guidance around the skills that automated screening systems search for and avoid that which it is trained to reject.

Brown says these employment disparities and barriers still vary widely according to profession, English ability, immigration history, and extent of displacement. About 40 percent of Upwardly Global’s participants, she said, are refugees or asylees, some of whom arrive after years outside their professions or without documents needed to verify their past professional credentials.

Migration Policy Institute research in 2019 has identified English proficiency, race, and legal status as influential predictors of whether college-educated immigrants work below their skill level. In one analysis, 55 percent of immigrants with very limited English were underemployed, compared with 15 percent of those who were fully proficient.

Federal immigration policy is similarly making employment status more unstable for many workers. President Donald Trump suspended most refugee admissions in January 2025, and the United States only admitted 16,292 refugees in fiscal year 2026, compared to the more than 100,000 admitted in fiscal 2024. Beginning October 30, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security ended automatic extensions of employment authorization documents (EADs) in certain categories, with limited exceptions.

Mary Lee, Upwardly Global’s director of employer engagement, said it is a “common misperception” that immigrants, refugees, and asylees necessarily require employers to sponsor visas. Upwardly Global now advises eligible job seekers to write “fully work-authorized” at the top of their resumes to preempt that incorrect assumption.

The organization is also seeing participants face interruptions in work authorization due to new renewal requirements. “Sometimes it creates a gap,” Brown said.

Now that there are fewer pathways for migrants to enter the U.S., “we’re starting to see our demographic shifting to people who’ve been here longer, who have been out of the professional workforce longer,” she continued.

For Maazel, reduced immigration makes it “even more pressing, I think, and more valuable,” to aid skilled immigrants already in the country in their search for employment.

While ‘selling oneself’ is still a necessary missing skill taught at Upwardly Global, the organization now faces the more complex problems of AI screening, credential recognition, and changing work-authorization rules. The onus now falls to employers to learn how to ‘translate’ international experience and backgrounds into a U.S. lens and to train automatic hiring systems to do the same.

For the past week, I’ve been watching Green Boarder as I walk to class, brush my teeth, and stretch after runs. This has caused a stark juxtaposition between my life, and the life of the refugees trying to cross the Belarus/Poland border. Although probably not what the film makers intended, watching this film in many 15 minute chunks over the span of a week made the film all the more impactful. Just when I am stressing about midterms, or psets, I would turn on the film to watch a bit more and immediately be reminded of how privileged I am to be stressed about school work. Additionally, the very deep imagery in the film was really impactful to me as I became immersed in the film while also walking around our sheltered campus. 

 

On the topic of juxtaposition, I really liked the various stark contrasts that the film presented. First, the contrast between the normal lives of the Polish people in the story, and the suffering of the refugees trying to cross the border. Second, the juxtaposition between the Ukrainian border and the Belarus border. The way that the film presents these contrasts makes them impossible to ignore.

 

I also found the level of attention that the film gave to the lives of children crossing the border to be interesting. Of course, children are beacons of innocence, and helplessness, so focusing on the children makes the film much more heart wrenching. Especially with the death of Nur, these scenes that focus on the experience of children at the borders left a strong impact on me. However, I would have liked the film to also focus on the past of the adults more. The adults have the added strain of having to leave everything behind them, and also be burdened with the decision to leave their home, and guide their children through this experience while coping with it themselves. I understand that this film could only be so long, but I would have liked to also see more into the past of the adults and what went into their decision to leave their home countries behind. 

 

Lastly, the way that the film played with sound was very impactful to me as well. The long periods of silence, combined with the constant sound of babies crying gave more suspense and feeling into the film. The film didn’t use music to fill any of the gaps in dialogue or other sound, but instead left us in silence. I really liked this choice because it left the viewers with no cloak to hide behind in times of discomfort or strong grief and fear, helping portray the feelings of those who are crossing the border. Additionally, the song that the boys created at the end of the film helped humanify the refugees again, giving them their joy back instead of only portraying them as “crying or dying.”  This contrast again added to the film, reminding me that at the end of the day, these refugees still find ways to entertain themselves and make light of the situation, something so human that every viewer can relate to.

The small Mediterranean island country of Malta has seen an astonishing shift in ethnic groups over the past 20 years, evoking strong opinions on race and immigration. “We are a racist country, there is no shifting around that,” said Andrew Azzopardi, professor of Migration Studies at The University of Malta.

 

In 2005, merely 1% of the country’s population were immigrants from non-EU countries. Now, a quarter of the country’s population are non-EU nationals. “Two weeks ago, I was sitting in a cafe, and an Indian family came into the shop. A Maltese man refused to move his chair so they wouldn’t be able to sit,” said Azzopardi. “Some Maltese people say that Indians smell like spices and are dirty.” 

 

To understand this shift and social attitudes towards immigrants in Malta, journalist Matthew Vella, who has previously reported on immigration in Malta, gave insight about the country’s past. He explained how its demographic changed from being a “mainly white, conservative, Catholic society that had been relatively shielded from external events,” to a country that now is home to so many immigrants. 

 

Asylum seekers from Africa 

 

Through an email response, Vella explained that immigration into Malta in large numbers began in 2004, when asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa began arriving in Malta via boat. This group was first held in detention centers before working as unskilled laborers. “Immigration via boat was visible on the news, and people would panic when they saw videos of boats arriving,” said Azzopardi.  

 

As explained by Vella, this panic quickly led to racism, which was fueled by the media landscape in Malta. “The situation was made worse by the government’s constant narrative that painted the arrival of a maximum of 2,000 asylum seekers a year as a ‘crisis,’” said Vella, explaining how this “false narrative” quickly spread through the country. To add even more fuel to the fire, “far-right movements also started in Malta due to the influx of asylum seekers,” he said. 

 

However, Godfrey Baldacchino, professor of sociology at the University of Malta emphasizes through an email response that although far right groups exist in Malta, they have not gained any significant traction in elections. 

 

Legislatively, Malta has recently adopted more restrictive policies on refugees through the EU Pact on Migration asylum, but has not taken action towards setting up protections for refugee human rights. In response to this, Baldacchino said, “Perhaps the Maltese Government is taking this political stance in order to ‘protect’ itself from the absence of any burden-sharing and solidarity at European level. Should 1,000 illegal migrants arrive at our shores today, what happens?” 

 

Economic migrants from Asia

 

From 2010-2015, there was a period of economic growth in Malta, due to the country’s efforts to “boost investment, pursue structural reforms and ensure responsible fiscal policies,” according to Malta Enterprise.

 

Vella explained that this growth attracted migrants from both inside and outside of the EU. There was “a new working class of Asian workers – bus drivers from Pakistan, nannies and care workers from the Philippines, and very soon many more Asian workers taking up service and carer jobs (healthcare, catering, logistics, manufacturing, etc).”

 

Azzopardi explained that compared to the refugees who spend many months in detention centers upon arrival, this group of migrants are much more visible to the general public in daily life. “It is a strange relationship as our comforts are highly dependent on these people, but we look down on them, and they are overworked and underpaid,” he said. 

 

“The Maltese treat such workers as walking dollars rather than members of society,” said Vella, who explained that many of these immigrants during this period “started taking up much-needed jobs that the Maltese were not taking on.” Although more integrated into the daily lives of Maltese people, “there was little to no reaction [to this wave of immigrants], but a passive acceptance of economic ‘rationality,’” he said. 

 

Baldacchino also acknowledges this so-called ‘economic rationality’ of immigrants, but states that “no strong anti-immigration sentiment exists in Malta, probably because practically all immigrants are working and subsidizing our pensions.” 

 

What influences the treatment of immigrants in Malta?

 

On the other hand, Azzopardi says that the treatment of immigrants is getting worse over time and gives several examples of ‘anti-immigration sentiment’. “There is a messy detention policy, the government chucks people out like ICE,” he said. “Immigrants are renting out mattresses, living in stables, and being killed in drive-by shootings. Not enough people are speaking out and using their voices.”

 

In 2019, two off duty soldiers killed an immigrant from the Ivory Coast. “Cisse was shot on the night of 6th April 2019 while walking back to the Ħal Far Open Centre after watching a football match in Birżebbuġa,” reported Lovin Malta. The trial for this case is scheduled for October 19th 2026, seven years after the shooting. 

 

When explaining why immigrants and racial minorities are ‘othered’ in Malta, Vella said, “people question the impact of a growing population on our healthcare system (which is tax-funded and universally free at point of service), on our traffic (increased use of private cars), and on our public transport system (today mainly used by low-income foreign workers.” 

 

However, Baldacchino views this strain that the immigrant population is adding onto infrastructure through a different lens. “No hard feelings really, but the donkey is loaded with a heavy baggage, and the straw keeps piling up – will the donkey’s back break?” he asked. “Water supply interruptions, power outages, traffic jams, overloaded public transport…”

 

To explain racism and anti-immigration attitudes in Malta, Azzopardi points towards what he calls “a strange nostalgia.”. He says that many Maltese people have an attachment to their strong Catholic identity, although many people are turning away from the religion. “People are worried that immigrants will take away their religion, but many of these immigrants are very devoted Catholics from the Phillipines,” he said, while pointing out that many Maltese people now only get married in churches because they are ‘fancy.’

 

Azzopardi also uses the term ‘strange nostalgia,’ to describe Malta’s attachment to language, which stems from Malta’s time as a British colony. Since immigrants do not come into the country speaking Maltese, “people feel like their identity is being chewed away,” he said. “I don’t think so. I can’t understand the obsession that identity is tied to language and religion. Identity is tied to togetherness and unity. If I am talking with you and speak in English, why should I be bothered that you don’t speak Maltese?” 

 

On the topic of language and identity, Vella states that immigrants generally have a lack of buy-in to learning Maltese. “My view is that the number one obstacle to integration here is, apart from the rentier mindset that treats foreign workers who lack agency as walking dollars, is a lack of buy-in to Maltese society via its language,” he said. 

 

Lastly, both Vella and Azzopardi point out Malta’s island geography in relation to this resistance to change. “Malta is an island state seemingly far away from anything else and has been colonized by other countries throughout history, which causes this feeling of insecurity,” Azzopardi said. 

 

“Today I feel inclined to concede that the racism that is prevailing amongst Maltese has a particular psychological pattern – a small society, locked into a small rock, vigilant about external pressures that can affect the serenity of a relatively peaceful, crime-free society, pressures,” said Vella. 

On September 25, the Trump Administration proposed cuts totaling $810 million. The package rescinds funding Congress appropriated to support refugee and immigrant service programs the Administration deems “wasteful spending”.

“The idea that immigrants are draining on the country and the economy is just fabricated,” warns Dr Amelia Frank-Vitale, Anthropologist and Princeton University Professor. She understands the rescission as part of “a project of telling the world: ‘the United States does not want you here’— whether you have skills, whether you have needs for protection.”

To her, it all points in the same direction: “This administration is firmly anti-immigrant.”

The move has been denounced as “illegal” by Members of the House Appropriations Committee. Timing is what makes it contentious. And the clock is no longer ticking.

After the White House submits a rescission, Congress has 45 days to act before the funds expire. By timing the request so the window runs past September 30, the end of the fiscal year, the administration has effectively cancelled them without congressional vote.

The Government Accountability Office denounces that letting funds expire this way violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, House Appropriations Committee Member, calls the maneuver a line-item veto. Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley echoes her call, arguing it is “Congress, not the president, who decides what programs are designed and at what level they are funded.”

No need for Refugee Resettlement: the Administration has got you covered!

The proposal’s largest cut removes $567 million from the $6.3 billion allocated in FY 2024 to the Refugee and Entrant Assistance Account, which funds Office of Refugee Resettlement programs.

This is not the first reduction in the account. In its Justification of Estimates for Appropriations Committees for 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services had already lowered funds by $893 million compared to 2023.

Now the Administration deems the account “overfunded due to the Administration’s successful border policies,” citing Executive Order 14165, “Securing Our Borders,” and Executive Order 14163, “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program“. Their rescission proposal also argues that programs financed by the account are operated by “pro-illegal immigration non-profits, which provide services to refugees, asylees, and other eligible non-citizens, and put unaccompanied alien children in harm’s way”.

So what exactly is the Account financing?

This border policy rationale sits somewhat awkwardly with what the account actually pays for. The Refugee and Entrant Assistance account helps refugees, asylees and humanitarian parolees, among others, “become employed and self-sufficient as quickly as possible”.

The cuts are felt harshly on the ground and are mounting on years of financial pressure. Jennifer Chacón, who supports Refugee Resettlement at New York Catholic Charities, knows it firsthand. As she puts it, “The little funds we still have are provided by the state. We were a team of between 100 and 80 people; today we are 15.” Organizations feel increasingly discouraged; “We decided to stop applying for these types of grants,” she adds.

Following the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the account also serves another vital purpose: financing the care and placement of unaccompanied children apprehended by immigration authorities.  Looking at the 2024 account plan paints a better picture of what this entails—equalizing benefits for minors in the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors (URM) program and families separated at the US-Mexico border during Trump’s First Term; and providing immigration legal assistance to children and youth in the URM.

Fewer people crossing the border do not reduce the need for these services.  Chacón agrees, “We are assisting the same amount of people with limited personnel and resources.”

Father Fabián Arias, a volunteer at New Sanctuary Coalition and Saint Peter’s Church, has been accompanying minors at risk of deportation to court since 2000.

For him, the loss goes beyond basic services.  The cuts also strip away a sense of protection for the children he accompanies to court. “It is a matter of protection—of ensuring they are not alone—because when they are alone, they are far more vulnerable to a system that seeks to abuse them.”

His eyes water when he thinks of the children, lined up before court in borrowed suits that fall from their shoulders. “Being uprooted from the place that has seen you grow is very painful—it is overwhelming enough as it is, without having to fight alone, without any protection system.”

At Saint Peter’s Church, the legal clinic that supports them is struggling to stay afloat. “They do not even have the budget to assist the minimum number of people requiring this type of support,” Arias says.

The situation he describes is desperate. Many lack the financial means to hire a private lawyer, and “support organizations are overwhelmed and unable to take on their cases”.

Putting the American Pocket First

The Administration’s justification promises to end “the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to support non-citizens, putting Americans first.”

Where is the taxpayers’ money really going? Dr Frank-Vitale points to detention: holding more people, she says, “is what cost[s] the taxpayer more than anything.”

Spanning border security and interior enforcement, DHS has seen a record-breaking influx of funds in fiscal years 2025 and 2026.

The 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) and the House Homeland Security Committee’s budget reconciliation recommendations allocated $56.7 billion for DHS.  Immigration centers alone received $45 billion, and ICE received a further $30 billion to expand its workforce.

The Secure America Act of 2026 then added $69.5 billion to ICE and CBP for immigration enforcement functions, including transport to and from detention facilities and operational costs of mass deportations.

What worries Dr Frank-Vitale is not that the streamline is being cut, but that it is being diverted. “It’s not that there isn’t funding,” she notes. “It’s just being chosen to be directed towards enforcement, in extreme amounts, rather than towards due process.”

While humanitarian services are defunded, security enforcement has expanded; the contrast is the point: “We have to put the context of defunding services against the hyper amount of funding that’s been provided for enforcement,” she adds.

This is felt most starkly at humanitarian protection and adjudication systems. In 2025, Congress allocated just $800 million to the immigration court system. Department of Justice received $3.3 billion for immigration enforcement under OBBBA, but funding is divided among prosecutions, local-government reimbursements and counter-narcotics work. Immigration judges are only one allowable use. Even then, the same law caps immigration judges at 800 from 2028, only 100 more than when it passed.

The cap becomes more concerning as backlogs are mounting. By the middle of FY 2026, more than 3.5 million cases were pending resolution, and an immigration judge’s average caseload stood at 5,450. Congress has provided $11.4 billion to immigration courts from 2003 through 2026. This is only one-fourth of the amount appropriated for ICE detention in 2025.

Challenging the Cut

California and six other states have sued President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, arguing the pocket rescission constitutes an unlawful impounding of congressionally appropriated funds.

Spearheading the lawsuit, California Attorney General Bonta firmly believes the cuts are damaging the livelihoods of his constituents: “No President has ever worked so hard to rip healthcare, childcare, housing, and educational opportunities away from families. He should be ashamed. We’re going to court — once again — to protect against the rampant abuses of power by this Administration.”

As the lawsuit pends settlement, all left to do is wait.

Nearly four years after a peace deal that ended Ethiopia’s last war, no one has answered for its atrocities, and impunity has begun to fuel the next one. 

Every evening, Mekdi Yilma calls her mother, Seble Beyene, in Addis Ababa from her home in Palo Alto, California. Since phone and internet service across Tigray went dark in late September, their calls have kept circling back to the same question. “We were told the peace would bring justice,” Beyene said. “The last time we have seen conflict reach this level, we lost two years of our country to war.”

For many observers, this lack of accountability lies at the heart of why Ethiopia is sliding back into this tumultuous conflict. The 2022 peace deal stopped the fighting, but the justice it promised never followed.

Ethiopia’s federal government fought the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the party that governs the northern Tigray region. Federal troops were backed by soldiers from neighboring Eritrea and the Fano, militias from Amhara, the large region bordering Tigray to the south. This conflict ballooned, and by some estimates, up to 600,000 people were killed marking it as one of deadliest wars in the 21st century.

Despite its scale, the war drew only a fraction of the attention given to Syria or Ukraine. “In 2020, when I told coworkers my family was in a war zone, they asked me where Tigray was,” Yilma said. Even the UN Security Council was unable to agree on a statement about Tigray in 2021, after Russia, China and India objected that it was an internal matter.

In November 2022, the both sides signed a peace agreement in Pretoria, South Africa, which committed Ethiopia to investigate abuses and hold those responsible to account. Yet an independent assessment reported by The Reporter Ethiopia this past May found that while the deal ended the fighting, it fell far short on the justice part. The UN Human Rights Council had also warned that credible accountability was crucial for lasting peace, urging Ethiopia to act. When the deal was signed, analysts at the Institute for Security Studies noted that Ethiopia had attempted transitional justice three times in the past five decades.

Amidst this chaos, accountability has also escaped. In 2023, Amnesty International cited that Facebook, Ethiopia’s most popular social media platform, amplified content inciting violence against Tigrayans through algorithms designed to maximize engagement. One of the victims was Meareg Amare, a chemistry professor who was shot dead outside his home by armed men in motor bikes after posts sharing his home address spread across the platform. His son, Abrham Meareg, said he reported the posts, but Meta only responded after his father had been killed. In 2025, Kenya’s High Court allowed a lawsuit brought by Abrham Meareg to move forward, seeking a $2.4 billion fund for victims and changes to Facebook’s algorithm. Meta, which says it has invested in safety and moderation, has contested the case.

For Yilma, a machine learning engineer, this risk feels close to home. “I build recommendation systems for a living. They reward whatever keeps people scrolling. With Tigray cut off, the outside world sees only what the algorithm chooses to show.”

The Pretoria agreement also left the war’s deepest divisions largely unresolved. For instance, Eritrea, whose troops were accused of some of the worst atrocities, was excluded from the deal. Likewise, the status of Western Tigray, land claimed by Tigray and Amhara, was left unsettled. When the federal government moved in 2023 to absorb regional forces, Fano turned against its former ally. Interestingly, the May assessment had warned of exactly this, concluding that without victim-centered accountability and reconciliation, the agreement would remain vulnerable to upturn.

On Sept. 20, seven armed groups, including the TPLF and the Fano militias that once fought against it, formed an alliance to overthrow Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The Ethiopian government blamed foreign powers for the escalation. Abiy’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, said the alliance had been operating with financial backing from neighboring Eritrea, and the army chief has accused Egypt and Sudan of supporting the rebels. In a Sept. 24 letter, the group Justice for Tigray insisted that “accountability must apply equally to everyone.”

Fighting has since spread into Amhara and Afar. Tigrayan forces seized three regional airports and Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights. The UN Human Rights Office reported that federal airstrikes, some reportedly carried out by drones, hit five schools in Tigray on Sept. 22. It has also documented allegations that the TPLF is forcibly recruiting civilians, including children. In Afar alone, a humanitarian source estimated that at least 150,000 people have been displaced.

In 2025, the International Organization for Migration recorded 922 deaths and disappearances along the “Eastern Route” from the Horn of Africa through Djibouti and Yemen toward Saudi Arabia, nearly double the year before and the deadliest year since monitoring began in 2014. Ethiopians made up 97% of migrants tracked on the route. In 2023, Human Rights Watch accused Saudi border guards of killing hundreds of Ethiopian migrants attempting to cross from Yemen, a charge the Saudi government has denied.

Beyene has chosen to stay. “I do not need anyone to tell me who is to blame,” she said. “I need someone to write down what is happening now, so history cannot repeat a third time.”

Sources:

“As Fighting Intensifies, Humanitarian Source Estimates at Least 150,000 Displaced in Afar, Tigray TV Hit by Drone.” Addis Standard, 28 September 2026. Addis Standard article

Council on Foreign Relations. “Conflict in Ethiopia.” Global Conflict Tracker, updated 25 September 2026. CFR Global Conflict Tracker

“Former Enemies Form Alliance to Overthrow Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed.” Agence France-Presse, via inkl, 21 September 2026. Inkl Article

International Crisis Group. “Arresting the Dangerous Descent Back into War in Northern Ethiopia.” International Crisis Group, September 2026. Crisis Group statement

“Seven Ethiopian Armed Groups Announce Anti-Government Alliance.” Reuters, via U.S. News & World Report, 21 September 2026. U.S. News article

“‘Negative Peace’ Sole Outcome of Flawed Pretoria Agreement Implementation: Report.” The Reporter Ethiopia, 22 May 2026. Reporter article

Amnesty International. “‘A Death Sentence for My Father’: Meta’s Contribution to Human Rights Abuses in Northern Ethiopia.” Amnesty International, 31 October 2023. Amnesty report

“Meta Can Be Sued in Kenya over Posts Related to Ethiopia Violence, Court Rules.” Reuters, via Yahoo News, April 2025. Reuters article

“Amnesty Welcomes Kenya Court Ruling Allowing $2.4b Lawsuit Against Meta for Fueling Violence, Killings Amid War in Tigray.” AllAfrica, 4 April 2025. AllAfrica article

“Diplomats: UN Fails to Approve Call to End Tigray Violence.” Associated Press, via CFJC Today, 2021. AP article

Justice for Tigray. “Urgent Concern Regarding Ambassador Massinga’s Statement on Renewed Conflict in Tigray.” Change.org, 24 September 2026. Justice for Tigray letter

Africanews. “Facebook’s Algorithms Supercharged Hate Speech in Ethiopia’s Tigray Conflict.” Africanews, 31 October 2023. Africanews article

“Peace Agreement Pledges Transitional Justice for Ethiopia.” Institute for Security Studies, November 2022. ISS article

“HRC61 – Joint Statement on the Human Rights Situation in Ethiopia.” Government of Iceland, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2 March 2026. Joint statement

Reading this week’s passages provided a glimpse into a kind of censorship that looks nothing like the redacted and blackout sources I once imagined.

In the opening chapters of The New Censorship, Ayala Panievsky opens with Israeli journalist Ilana Dayan standing outside Netanyahu’s office in 2016, reading his attack on her, on national television where she had to broadcast the accusation that she was a traitor. For Panievsky, this moment previewed a global trend, from Trump’s “enemies of the people” to the AfD’s “lying press,” in which populist leaders attack journalists not by banning stories, but by drowning them out. She describes this new censorship as “authoritarianism masquerading as democracy.”

What struck me most was her argument that we have been defending the wrong side. Debates about the media tend to center on free speech, which protects the speaker, even one spreading lies. Panievsky instead centers the conversation on the public’s right to know the truth: our ability to vote, protest, and make decisions based on reliable, honest information we draw our own conclusions from. She is not dismissive of social media’s power to connect and mobilize, but she argues that no influencer or even chatbot can replace the years of collaborative reporting behind stories like Watergate.

Drawing on Cas Mudde and Jan-Werner Müller, Panievsky defines populism as a ideology that divides society into “the real people” and “the corrupt elites,” leaving no room for legitimate opposition. Under this logic, any criticism of the leader becomes betrayal of the people themselves. I found her example of Nigel Farage turning on the Daily Mail the moment it criticized him reveals how fragile loyalty has become, “In a single headline, the Mail went from being one of Farage’s staunchest allies to, in his view, conspiring with the Kremlin.”

Once journalists are framed as enemies, every critical story appears to confirm the accusation, so even a damning investigation becomes an asset for the populist. Social media rewards divisive content, amplifying a small, vocal minority while most users stay silent, and turns the occasional angry note on a reporter’s windscreen into constant, coordinated harassment. Having just watched the film “The Social Reckoning” this message of how hatred equates to more engagement was a tool platforms such as Meta embraced, meanwhile, the business model for news is collapsing. Lies are cheap and fast to produce, while truth is slow and expensive to verify.

Her own experience made this concrete. As an editor in Tel Aviv, she fought to put Sudanese asylum seekers being deported to third countries on her magazine’s cover, while advertisers pushed back. Given our class’s focus on migration, it struck me how easily refugees disappear from the news, not because anyone censors them, but because their stories do not sell. Panievsky also shows how populists and Silicon Valley tell a similar story about democracy: direct, majoritarian, and free of filters. In this version, journalists are no longer watchdogs but obstacles between leaders and the people, and professional expertise becomes distrust worthy rather than reliable.

These chapters left me wondering whether a public that increasingly avoids the news and has taken to social media to get their information is equipped enough to decipher reality from false agendas.