The U.S. has long been known as a haven for people fleeing war and oppres­sion. How might that opinion change if the country begins to ban refugees from entering the country, par­tic­u­larly if it appears as though they are being denied entrance due to their race or religion?

The United States has not always been known as a haven for people fleeing war and oppres­sion. In fact, many Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler, including Anne Frank, were denied visas to the United States and later per­ished in Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps. Pres­i­dent Roosevelt’s deci­sion in 1939 to turn away a boat filled with Jewish refugees—the St. Louis—was a piv­otal event in our his­tory and led, after the war, to the pas­sage of the first U.S. laws aimed at facil­i­tating the admis­sion of refugees. The poli­cies that Pres­i­dent Trump has just announced will go down in the his­tory books as a moral failing of the same magnitude.

Matthew La Corte, an immi­gra­tion policy ana­lyst at a public policy think tank, noted that “pulling the U.S. out of its tra­di­tional lead­er­ship role in reset­tle­ment makes it harder to jus­tify refugee reset­tle­ment as a good policy for other coun­tries as well.” What effect do you think Trump’s immi­gra­tion poli­cies might have on the fate of refugees worldwide?

The truth is that there are other coun­tries that take in far more refugees than the United States. Turkey, Pak­istan, and Lebanon, for example, are cur­rently housing mil­lions of refugees. How­ever, the U.S. refugee reset­tle­ment pro­gram has been a model for sim­ilar pro­grams in Europe and else­where, and Trump’s deci­sion to sus­pend the pro­gram tem­porarily, and then to reduce its size and stop admit­ting Syrian refugees entirely, will have trou­bling ripple effects around the globe.

Some poten­tial immi­grants say that Trump’s exec­u­tive order to ban them from entering the U.S. has destroyed their dreams of moving to this country in search of a better life. What prac­tical impli­ca­tions might Trump’s refugee ban have on the hun­dreds of thou­sands of people whose lives are likely to be affected?

This order will have direct, imme­diate effects on many people, most obvi­ously on those who are cit­i­zens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen and also on many others—including many U.S. citizens—who are their family mem­bers, co-​​workers, and friends. Dra­conian immi­gra­tion laws affect entire com­mu­ni­ties, not just indi­vid­uals. It is impor­tant to under­stand that this ban applies not only to new visa appli­cants but also those who have been living and studying in the United States for years. You would have to go back to the shameful his­tory of the Chi­nese Exclu­sion Act and the Asi­atic Barred Zone to find such an openly dis­crim­i­na­tory policy. Sev­eral fed­eral judges have already blocked imple­men­ta­tion of the order, and we will see a lot more lit­i­ga­tion in the months to come.

Last week, Trump signed an exec­u­tive order to crack down on so- called “sanc­tuary cities” that shield undoc­u­mented immi­grants from fed­eral offi­cials, a move that was widely con­demned by human rights advo­cacy groups. What are their biggest concerns?

This exec­u­tive order con­tains threats of with­holding fed­eral funds from sanc­tuary cities but I am very skep­tical that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion will be able to carry out those threats. Trump seems to be sug­gesting that sanc­tuary cities are vio­lating fed­eral law, but that charge doesn’t hold up under scrutiny; courts have repeat­edly con­cluded that state and local police do not have to honor fed­eral requests to detain immi­grants. Fur­ther­more, it is firmly estab­lished in Supreme Court case law that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment cannot force cities and states to carry out fed­eral policy and cannot with­hold funds in order to coerce them into com­pli­ance. It has been heart­ening to see so many mayors, including Boston’s own Mayor Marty Walsh, speak out in defense of immi­grants and in sup­port of diverse, inclu­sive com­mu­ni­ties in the wake of the announce­ment of this policy.