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A lot of foreign travelers have found themselves in dramatic situations over the last few months, sometimes because they waited too late in the global pandemic game to go home due to ignorance, stubbornness, or being lied to by travel agents or cruise ships. But Daniel was simply jumping through the exhausting bureaucratic hoops necessary to live and work legally in the country he’s called home for seven years. 

The endless paperwork involved in moving to another country has long been a slow-motion nightmare for most foreign nationals, but all the more so now that the coronavirus has forced border and, more importantly, embassy closures. Many expats, immigrants and asylum seekers are finding themselves in a state of legal limbo with no certainty in sight.

It’s quite common for foreign contract workers in Myanmar, like Daniel, to cross the border every couple of months for a quick visa run, sometimes for months or even years on end while they await their residency cards (the equivalent of a U.S. green card). Daniel’s process has been held up by red tape and a landlord who won’t sign his final paperwork. It’s been six years already. Like most foreign nationals, he’s nervous the virus will result in immigration policy changes that might force him to go “home.” His current health insurance wouldn’t cover him in the U.S., though. “And I have no ‘home’ to go back to,” Daniel says. “My whole life is in Myanmar. I have nothing in the U.S.”

California’s nearly $50-billion agricultural industry is bracing for a potential labor shortfall that could hinder efforts to maintain the nation’s fresh food supply amid the widening coronavirus outbreak.The immediate concern centers on a backlog in the recruitment of foreign guest workers because of the virus-related shutdown of consul offices processing agricultural H2-A visas in Mexico.

fears highlight a gap in the Trump administration’s market-centered approach to keeping vital industries running, which includes numerous measures aimed at supporting aid, credit and the major commodity crops in the nation’s heartland. There has been little done to address the labor-intensive fresh food crops that form the backbone of California agriculture.

Assurance from USDA and State were not enough to satisfy growers, shippers and contractors in California, who have been pressing for more clear answers as the scope of the pandemic comes into focus. The state has faced years of labor shortages caused by the aging of the local workforce, immigration crackdowns, improvements in job prospects in Mexico and other factors.“We don’t have enough H-2A workers coming across in normal times,”

The United States has announced it will revoke or deny visas to members of the International Criminal Court involved in investigating the actions of US troops in Afghanistan or other countries. The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said Washington was prepared to take further steps, including economic sanctions, if the war crimes court goes ahead with any investigations of US or allied personnel.

The United States has never joined the ICC, where a prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, asked judges in November 2017 for authorization to open an investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

The secretary of state said visas could also be withheld from ICC personnel involved in conducting probes of US allies, specifically Israel.

"It was almost normal that he screamed, that we worked 14 hours, that we ate on the floor," she said. "That was our America."

This club of three—as a new C-3 grouping of Canada, Australia, and Britain—has legs. But the idea must be reclaimed from the nationalist right: Not only is deepening foreign-policy coordination among Ottawa, Canberra, and London increasingly attractive amid the accelerating decay of the American-led world order, but this grouping has shown itself over Hong Kong to be far more meaningful in world affairs than seemed possible

Canada, Australia, and Britain are all facing a moment of crisis in their foreign policies. Canada’s humiliating failure to make it onto the United Nations Security Council reflects that it can now be picked on by China, or even Saudi Arabia, as the United States weakens. Australia is faced with cyberattacks and growing Chinese pressure. Britain, now outside the European Union, has been repeatedly threatened by China over Hong Kong, Huawei, HSBC, and nuclear power plants. All three are struggling to make their voices heard in international politics, in the various G-groups, in global bodies, and in President Donald Trump’s Washington.

Sadly, for all three, Germany and France are in a very different place from them on the authoritarian powers. Berlin, constrained by huge exports to China, wants to find a middle way between Washington and Beijing and is not ready to throw the EU into greater competition that could jeopardize critical trade for the sake of the interests of either Canada, Australia, or Britain. Paris, similarly, thinks differently on Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron’s emerging vision for a European Security Council or “Eurogroup”-style body including Russia, Turkey, and Britain is well outside the anti-authoritarian frame than Ottawa, Canberra, and London share.

While it remains uncertain whether economic and financial sanctions would be technically permissible under the WTO’s national security exception — which allows a member to take measures that it “considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests”– these actions would clearly violate the spirit of the WTO and have therefore been rarely used.

the United States has switched to using other tools for coercive diplomacy to punish other recent WTO entrants.

Congress therefore created the China Commission, which was specifically formed to monitor China’s human rights practices and maintain pressure on it. Similarly, Congress passed measures designed to allow it to more effectively use visa restrictions and financial asset freezes to coerce Russia, and foreign aid to extract concessions from Vietnam, after these states joined the WTO.

The U.S. is increasingly aligning itself with wealthy countries in Europe and elsewhere to make asylum a more distant prospect. On Thursday, American authorities sent a Honduran man from El Paso, Texas, to Guatemala. It marked the first time the U.S. government directed an asylum-seeker back to that country under the new policy, which gave him an option to file a claim there. He decided against filing a claim and returned to Honduras, according to Guatemala’s foreign ministry.

In nine months, the administration returned more than 55,000 asylum-seekers to Mexico to wait for their cases to wind through U.S. courts.

The U.S. isn’t alone in asking other countries to block migrants. After about 1 million refugees traveled through Turkey and Greece to seek safety in Europe, the European Union agreed in 2016 to pay Turkey billions of euros to keep them in refugee camps. The EU has also funded the Libyan Coast Guard to stop Africans from crossing the Mediterranean, where thousands have drowned. Libyan forces have kept refugees in squalid conditions and inflicted torture.

even as immigration grows in this traditionally homogenous country, Japan appears to be avoiding the organized far-right backlash that has coursed through the West in recent years

In Europe and the United States, immigration and national identity seemingly consume all politics; in Japan, despite its reputation as closed-off, homogenous, and xenophobic, a large increase in immigration has mostly been met with a shrug. While anti-immigrant sentiments are widespread, they do not run very deep, or so suggests the lack of substantial opposition

In April 2019, Tokyo implemented historic immigration reform, expanding visa programs to allow more than 345,000 new workers to immigrate to Japan over the subsequent five years. Low-skilled workers will be able to reside in Japan for five years, while foreign workers with specialized skills will be allowed to stay indefinitely, along with their family members—suggesting that many of these workers might stay for good

African visions of an integrated continent with political solidarity and interlinked prosperity are as old as decolonization, but until recently there were few indicators that it was heading in the right direction. The Organization of African Unity, founded in 1963, was widely regarded a mere dictators’ club and was succeeded in 2002 by the African Union, whose reputation fares marginally better. Modeled to a fault on European Union institutions, the AU remains both overly centralized and lacking in capacity and accountability. But in the last three years, the AU has begun to emerge as a globally relevant actor because it overcame a major hurdle to pan-African progress.

In 2018, the African Union adopted the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest trade agreement concluded since the World Trade Organization in 1995. At more than $2.5 trillion, the economy of the African Union is nearly the size of the British and French economies, which rank sixth and seventh in the world.

Developing in parallel to this trade liberalization and harmonization is a treaty on continentwide freedom of movement, which together paves the way for a customs union and gives political momentum to the African Union passport project, which would allow visa-free travel among the AU’s 55 member states

The idea that immigrants will steal jobs from American workers assumes they compete for the same scarce pool of jobs. Studies show this is often not the case. In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are not only workers, but they are also consumers. Ultimately, the amount of jobs available depends in large part on the level of demand for goods and services, which is in turn affected by the total number of people contributing to the economy. Immigrants also become employers themselves, at rates higher than the native-born population. As such, they help put upward pressure on American wages and overall employment. Immigrants also tend to fill jobs that are complements to those held by native-born workers, making the latter more productive. And despite immigrants only making up 16% of inventors, they are responsible for 30% of aggregate US innovation since 1976, with their indirect spillover effects accounting for more than twice their direct productivity contribution. In short, immigration creates more economic opportunities for everyone: a win-win scenario.

A similar argument was also put forth by those voices who sought to discourage women from joining the labor market in larger numbers during the 1960s and 70s. Yet the huge bulge in female employment during this time and after is strongly associated with the creation of millions upon millions of new jobs due to much of the same logic we outlined above in the case of immigrants.

perhaps Americans underestimate the positive economic impacts made by immigrants, making it easier for any administration to fumble the ball on this issue. Alternatively, some folks may simply not care, the economy be damned