00:00Donald Trump's beef with America's oldest university continues.
00:04The U.S. president has banned Harvard from bringing in foreign students for six months.
00:09The move is the latest in the escalation with the elite institution,
00:12which has refused to allow the Trump administration oversight over its curriculum, staffing and student recruitment.
00:20Trump's education secretary, meanwhile, is also threatening to strip New York's Columbia University of its academic accreditation.
00:26This despite Colombia bowing to demands from U.S. authorities.
00:31For more on all of this, we can bring in Richard Johnson, senior lecturer in U.S. politics and policy at Queen Mary University in London.
00:39Thank you so much for joining us here on the program today.
00:42Now, during Donald Trump's first term in office, he issued a travel ban from seven predominantly Muslim nations within the very first days of his presidency.
00:52Yet he's broadened it out this time around and he's waited a little while longer.
00:57Why, in your opinion, has it taken this long?
01:00Well, they're trying to avoid the mistakes of the first term, which were to move too quickly and then to fall afoul of various legal protections.
01:09So the legal basis of this is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 allows the president to suspend entry of an alien or a group of aliens who is deemed by the president to be detrimental to the interests of the United States for as long a period as the president determines to be necessary.
01:29However, that law has to be interpreted consistently with other laws and constitutional obligations.
01:38And there was a subsequent law, the 1965 immigration law, which said that you cannot discriminate on the basis of someone's nationality or race.
01:50And also, of course, the First Amendment says that there should be no Congress shall make no establishment of religion, which has been interpreted to say that the government shall not show favoritism or discrimination against the free exercise of religion.
02:05All that's to say that basically the courts found that when Donald Trump only banned entrance from Muslim, overwhelmingly Muslim majority countries at the start of his first term, he broke existing law.
02:18So this time what they're trying to do is to avoid that.
02:23And they've they've taken their time and actually reading the proclamation.
02:27It's much more beefed out in terms of various what we would call kind of rational bases for why the government is is making these steps in terms of, for example,
02:36proportion of people from certain countries who overstay their visas or the laws that that country has about returning people who are being deported from the United States.
02:48So they're trying to cover their tracks much more.
02:51And they're just thinking about the inevitable legal litigation that's likely to follow this.
02:57Because this time around, we have two sets of restrictions which have been put in place, one total bans and one partial restrictions.
03:04And how did the administration go about selecting these countries?
03:07Well, it's it's a bit of a hodgepodge.
03:11So, I mean, they go by country by country in the order.
03:16And for some of them, it is, as I said, they give statistics about the proportion of people from those countries who have overstayed their visas.
03:25Basically, they had a visa for a temporary period and they then remained in the United States after that term ended.
03:31They haven't actually specified why what's the kind of the threshold rate.
03:37So for some countries, they're citing overstay rates of eight percent.
03:41And that's deemed to be a problem.
03:44They're also citing countries that have overstayed rates of 70 percent.
03:48It's not quite clear then what the actual threshold is.
03:51They're also citing countries that have been uncooperative with the United States when it comes to returning individuals.
03:59They've also cited countries where they say the country is not very good at gathering data about individuals, say, criminal backgrounds, which makes it difficult to give out visas.
04:13And they've also just cited countries that they say are sponsors of terrorism.
04:15So they they cite, say, Iran in that case, or actually Cuba.
04:19They've also cited as a sponsor of terrorism.
04:21So it's basically they're kind of throwing everything they can at the wall to see what will stick in a court of law.
04:30It was interesting that the president used the attack in Boulder, Colorado to explain why he's doing this,
04:37even though the person who carried who allegedly carried out that attack was an Egyptian national who overstayed their visa and applied for asylum in the United States.
04:47But Egypt is not on the list. But I want to move on from that because Donald Trump's fight with Harvard seems to continue.
04:54He's banned the institution from bringing in foreign students for six months.
04:59So their incoming class clearly this fall is impacted.
05:02Will the university have no chance but at some point to change the way it's taking on Donald Trump?
05:07Well, look, Harvard has had an enormous endowment and it is therefore has a sort of degree of autonomy that pretty much almost no other university or institution might have to to weather this out.
05:23Nonetheless, this is clearly far from an ideal situation for Harvard.
05:28Various parts of the university are going to be very, very badly hit by this.
05:32You know, Harvard Business School or the Kennedy School of Government, for example, both attract very high proportions of international students.
05:42In fact, that's sort of part of the MO of these parts of the university is that they are international schools with international cohorts.
05:51And if you don't have any international students, that kind of is missing a huge element of the educational basis of those parts of the university.
05:57So this is not something that Harvard, you know, it can't carry on like this forever.
06:03I think there's a debate as to whether Harvard can weather this for the next three years, you know, and basically wait out the Trump administration and wait for a different president to come in and reverse some of this.
06:17But the bigger impact of this, I guess, is the chilling effect that this will have, not just for Harvard, but for other institutions who basically know that they could not weather this out even if they wanted to.
06:33And so although Harvard is the target and Harvard may be able to work through this because of the size of its own resources, it's the much bigger ripple effect of this that will have a huge impact.
06:51Because what I don't understand is that Columbia seems to have bended the knee and done things that the administration wanted to do.
06:58Yet now the administration is threatening Columbia University.
07:02So even if you, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't, essentially.
07:07Well, yes.
07:08I mean, this isn't to say that, you know, this is the first, you know, this is the first but not the last step in this process.
07:17I mean, the Republican Party and certainly the sort of the Trump wing of the Republican Party view America's elite institutions as, you know, bastions of extreme liberalism and hostility to their, you know, Trump's kind of governing agenda and philosophy.
07:37And they, I suppose, see very few political costs for targeting them.
07:44So, yes, you know, some universities have already bent the proverbial knee to the administration.
07:51But I think from the administration standpoint, why stop there?
07:54Even though many of these people went to these institutions themselves.
07:58Now, yesterday, Donald Trump was very busy yesterday.
08:00In the middle of all this, he also announced a probe into claims of what he says was a conspiracy to cover up the shortfalls of the Biden presidency, given that Joe Biden's health was declining.
08:15We all saw the last year what happened before he bowed out of the race.
08:23We saw his failing health.
08:25Now, Joe Biden is no longer a threat to Donald Trump, yet he's going after him.
08:31What is Trump's end goal here?
08:33And is he going to stop at Biden?
08:35Could he potentially go after people he's threatened to in the past, like Hillary Clinton?
08:40Well, I think two things on this.
08:42So the first thing is to think carefully about the timing of when this has been announced.
08:48And this has been announced when the president's legislative agenda, this huge tax and spending bill, it has had some embarrassing numbers come out with respect to the amount that it's going to add to the national debt.
09:06And that's going to be unpopular with the remaining fiscal hawks in the Republican Party.
09:12So, you know, we have to remember Donald Trump as a master of political timing.
09:17And so to kind of announce this about going after Joe Biden is a way of uniting the Republican Party around him at a moment when there are some elements of dissatisfaction with the president in certain parts of the party.
09:30On your specific point, you know, when Joe Biden left office, he made a raft of pardons of people who were in his intimate circle and also key administration figures, including, say, Anthony Fauci, to protect them from vexatious litigation from Donald Trump.
09:50I think the president himself, former president himself, I should say, former president Joe Biden, is probably not someone who's going to face, you know, any particular legal jeopardy, partly because of actually what the Supreme Court has said about the insulation of the president from prosecution for official acts on their president.
10:09But it's actually the people who were not covered by Joe Biden's pardons at the end of his presidency in his inner circle, who particularly his political team, who may may be in the line of some fire here.
10:23And we have to see how that develops. We're in we're in fairly uncharted waters here.
10:27Indeed. Interesting point, Richard Johnson.
10:30We're going to happily be there. Thank you so much for joining us on the program today with your analysis.
