Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: the lawsuit to block deportation of foreign student activists, filed by faculty members in the AAUP – Jameel Jaffer will report. But first, Trump’s tariffs – they are not really about trade, instead they’re a form of blackmail of other countries – but what kind of tariffs do WE want? Lori Wallach will explain – in a minute.
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JW: We need to talk about Trump’s tariffs. He says “jobs and factories will come roaring back” because of his tariffs and that they will make the United States “a global superpower” in manufacturing, which of course we used to be, before domestic manufacturing was decimated by NAFTA, the WTO, and trade with China. Of course, Trump’s tariffs aren’t really about trade, they’re blackmail to force other countries into submission. He’d reduce tariffs on countries, he said, if they, quote, “Pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis,” close quote.
But what kind of tariffs and trade policy do we want? For that, we turn to Lori Wallach. She’s director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project. The New York Times called her “a free trade skeptic before it was cool.” She’s testified before congressional committees something like 30 times starting in the ’90s, arguing against the creation of the WTO. She’s been a guest on MSNBC, Fox, CNN, ABC, NPR – The Wall Street Journal called her “Ralph Nader with a sense of humor.” Lori Wallach, welcome to the program.

Lori Wallach: Thank you very much.

JW: Trump says tariffs are necessary to restore jobs in American manufacturing. That’s something you agree with, sort of – but obviously not the Trump tariffs. Maybe we should start not with Trump, but with the problem — the results of the trade policy we’ve had, starting with Clinton and Obama. Remind us what life has been like for people who live in Rust Belt factory towns.

LW: Even beyond the Rust Belt, people who are not college educated who live in factory towns nationwide, Texas, California, New York, the towns that built the middle class and that actually built the things we needed in our country for our resilience, for our security, just in the last few decades, we have seen 90,000 factories, manufacturing facilities closed. Net, we’ve seen about 6 million manufacturing jobs lost. And we have seen, heartbreakingly, this gap open within our society where college educated people now have a lifespan predicted eight years longer than non-college educated people. And for the first time starting in 2021, working class people, non-college educated, started dying of what were called deaths of despair: alcoholism, drug overdose, basically suicides — deaths that were avoidable to such a degree, particularly in these regions that have been so severely de-industrialized, that the entire US life expectancy started to decline for the first time in the history of the country.
We have a huge crisis that is certainly economic. It’s a prediction of economic theory that when you have a chronic large trade deficit, your country will de-industrialize and your income inequality will increase. We’ve certainly seen that. But it’s more than just an economic crisis that affects the people who lost those jobs. Everyone during COVID got the shocking wake up that we couldn’t make the basic things we needed to keep our families safe and happy. And frankly, we didn’t have diverse import sources. We had seen a hyper-globalization that was very profitable for some very big companies and for Wall Street. But we had gotten to a point where we were way over reliant on too few firms in too few countries, a lot of it in China making the stuff we needed.
And as a result of that experience, I think there was more openness during the Biden administration to realizing, heck, for some of these key things, we need to actually have a specific strategy, an industrial strategy to both make some of it at home and to diversify our imports. And we need that as a matter of social peace as well because anyone who has walked a neighborhood in the last couple of elections sees the level of rage amongst working class people who have felt totally abandoned by the Democratic Party; took a gamble on Trump. What he’s doing is not going to fix the problem, but the divisiveness and polarization that is resulting from this economic damage is very dangerous.

JW: I’m sure you’ve heard advocates of free trade argue that, okay, we lost millions of high wage jobs to China and Mexico and other places. We’ve paid a price for that, but we got a lot in return. We got cheap consumer goods. We got laptop computers, cell phones, sneakers, cars, and trucks. It’s a trade-off, we are told, that benefits both sides, benefits all of us. That’s what the free traders have been telling us. What do you say to them?

LW: Well, there’s a dirty little secret that they don’t like to discuss, but it’s key. Here’s the thing. Free trade is supposed to be beneficial, particularly on the import side. That’s the benefit of free trade. Some people lose their jobs, but we all get cheaper stuff, so quality of life goes up. There’s just one problem. The grandfather of modern free trade macroeconomics, Professor Paul Samuelson, the guy who got the Nobel Prize for his trade theories, in 2004 writes a terrifying paper where he mathematically proves that as offshoring of jobs from the US to low wage countries has moved up the skill and wage level to the point where we’re not just offshoring unskilled manufacturing jobs but hyper skilled machinist jobs, the folks who can make airplanes, the folks who can repair stuff like that, but also accountants and people who are making computer programs, we had a point that we hit in 2004 mathematically where the loss to wages from offshoring under hyper globalization beat out the gains for lower prices. Now we have a trade regime that is a literally mathematical net loss to the majority of people.
Just on the economics, the free traders sadly no longer have the case to make. But moreover, increasingly in the face of climate crisis, in the face of shifting geopolitics, in the face of what we saw with COVID, the prospect of global pandemics, beyond just the economics, even if it weren’t through what Professor Samuelson taught us, we would need to have more redundancy and more resilience. We can’t be schlepping everything, even if it made sense economically, made in China, spewing carbon. We should have four or five production hubs for the key things: Medicines, communications equipment, transportation equipment, green energy equipment. These are things that we should have not just US only, we’re not talking about autarky, but we’re talking about resilience, redundancy and actually having basically all the benefits of blocks competing for excellence but also the redundancy of one system goes down, the whole world can have three or four others for these key products. And we need to make some of it ourselves as a continental country rich in natural resources who can be doing it as well as with our partners in Canada and Mexico.

JW: Where do the tariffs that you favor fit into this picture that you’re sketching of a different kind of trade regime in the world? That’s the big question we really want to find the answer to today.

LW: Yep. At this point, we’ve got a system, our current trade system, where there are 19 countries you could call mercantilists. These countries have chronic trade surpluses. They’re always sending more stuff out than they’re bringing in. And these countries are using what are often called beggar-thy-neighbor policies to pull this off. It’s things like suppressing wages — Vietnam, China; it is things like suppressing consumption — Germany with the way their taxes work; it is subsidies top to bottom. In China, the subsidies are the land for the factory, the construction of the factory. Once it’s operational, it’s the water and the electricity. It is obviously keeping the wages down, but then taking the products to the port. It’s subsidized shipping. No matter how good you are in a competing country, you can’t beat that because it’s not the actual cost of making it. Because now it’s not just us. In the chronic deficit camp, it is also 66 other countries. We are talking about big developing countries that should be industrializing, are getting de-industrialized because of the mercantilist actions of countries like China – I’m talking about with tariffs against China at this point.
What I would do is I would get all of the deficit countries and the balanced countries together and I would offer a new arrangement. And I would say to them, “Friends, we could all trade together with a relatively low tariff rate, but under the agreement we’re going to have balance so that we get the benefits of trade, not these enormous distortions where we’re de-industrializing most of the countries and one or two are doing okay. Oh, and by the way, we’re putting in a floor of decency in this trade system.” The good news is sovereign nations have signed up to the International Labor Organization Conventions, and we have multilateral environmental agreements that countries as sovereigns have said, “We as a country agree we’re going to follow those rules. We’re not trying to impose the US or anyone else’s rules in another country. And if you want to be in our trade club of the balanced folks who want to have the benefit of trade, you have to bring your country’s laws up to having the right to organize unions and fight for better wages.”
Another thing you do with tariffs, in my fair system, you would also want to be equalizing carbon costs. And you don’t want a scenario where the countries that have actually invested in trying to limit their carbon emissions lose out in the trade system because they’re competing against countries that have just not taken care of it. And so those are other uses of tariffs besides the balancing.
And then the third totally kosher one is you use it because you’re trying to create some domestic market share because you’re going to invest with the rest of a set of industrial policies to create demand for domestic consumption of domestic goods. That’s those excellent consumer tax credits that mean you get a great deal on your taxes if you have a US-made solar panel on your roof or you buy a US-made EV. You’re creating demand. Or you boost buy local or buy American because the government can buy local and American, and they can boost demand. Now you’ve created a market, you’ve protected the cheating stuff from coming in with a tariff, and then you actually also do tax credits, and you do some subsidies to get investors to come in and match a little money you’ll give them, and you set up the market so they can get a good return. You promise them it’s going to stick around. And then you get what happened with Biden. He raised a bunch of tariffs way, way higher than what Trump had, and then they invested with the IRA and the CHIPS Act, and they had the biggest boom in US factory construction in 30 years.

JW: Would you say Biden basically had it right, this combination of limited targeted tariffs on the one hand and industrial policies on the other that supported new manufacturing capacity? Do we need more of what Biden was doing?

LW: Yes, we need more of that. And a tariff alone does not a factory make. We are going to need more of the mix of all of those policies together where the tariff is a very important defensive part of it.
But also, what Biden didn’t do is try and do this trade balancing. And so we have this history as a country that I could tell the whole story going back to after World War II, but just to jump to the chase of the WTO and NAFTA of how we got into this, for various ideological reasons, aligning them related to big multinational companies that wanted the freedom not to have any standards for labor or the environment, there was a big push that a lot of Democrats, sadly, but a lot of Republicans bought into these agreements in this model that was this race-to-the-bottom globalization. And the outcome of that is now these dire imbalances that are going to need to be forcibly restructured. And so we can do it in a way that actually is looking out for small farmers and smaller businesses and workers and consumers, or we can try and do it haphazardly with rando tariffs. But there is going to have to be a rebalance that is beyond the industrial policy of – if we want to deal with some of these issues like distributed production resilience and less income inequality.

JW: Let’s get specific here. Are you in favor of tariffs on cars and trucks? The UAW is.

LW: We have a 2.5% tariff on automobiles, which is, relative to most of the world, way lower than any other country that block countries that makes cars in volume. We need in certain key sectors to raise what’s called our most favored nation tariff. And we should do it with Canada and Mexico as part of our block. We should make North American cars. We should do it in the basis of raising wages in Mexico. We should do it in basis of good environmental standards. But then we should, the three of us, have a 25%, a 20% tariff. We have 25% for trucks. That’s another historic anomaly. We make trucks in the US. We have union jobs making trucks. We know 25% works. Maybe it doesn’t have to be 25%. But if we did that with Mexico and Canada together, it’s the same concept I was talking about – about ring fencing the unfair stuff and creating yourself some markets in which you can actually have high standard production.
And it’s not just that. We should do what Biden did. He put 100% tariff on EV batteries from China. He put a 50% tariff on solar from China and 28 and more percent on solar from other countries. We just need to figure out what are those things we want to be able to have some domestic resilience in? But also, we want to diversify our imports.

JW: The Democrats have been arguing that what’s wrong with Trump’s tariffs is that they will raise the cost of living. That’s true, but you say that’s not the biggest problem with Trump’s tariffs.

LW: This needs to be unpacked. There are real places and times where tariffs can raise prices. But folks need to understand the tariff is charged on wholesale price of goods. A good comes in like a shoe that’s going to be $100, and the actual shoe is $20 maybe. Maybe it’s less. You even put a 50% tariff on that and it’s a $30 shoe now that costs the retailer when they buy it. You put the $10 tariff on top of the $20 shoe, and they still have a markup of $70. And from the $70, they’re doing their marketing and their advertising and their profits. Oh yeah, and their profits and then their profits and then their stock buyback and some more profits. They’ve got plenty of room while corporate taxes are record low and profits, the big companies are super high to just absorb the cost of the tariff at the wholesale and not pass it on. And that’s largely what happens during Trump’s first tariffs, which were up to 20% on $350 billion of stuff from China, we did not see a big increase in prices.
Now, if it’s a lower margin, so the T-shirt from a Walmart that’s $5, mind you, that T-shirt comes in and the wholesale price is maybe 10 cents. Even if you had 100% tariff, it’s still 20 cents on a $5 T-shirt. But in some things, there is a closer margin, and in those you could see prices increase. But the thing we have called on Trump to do immediately, which among all the other things he should be doing to accompany tariffs that he’s not, as well as making his tariffs properly targeted, but if you’re going to use tariffs smartly, you also have to do anti-price gouging maneuvers. And so, we’ve called on him to call on the Federal Trade Commission, which under its statute has what’s called Article 6B authority to surveil prices and to punish companies, fine and sanction them if they’re price gouging. They actually have right now the authority to try and find out how much of a markup actually, because of a tariff, something is going to cost at the wholesale level and to find out if a company is jacking up prices just to take advantage, hiding behind the cover of, “Ooh, tariffs. We’re scared. Prices.” They can run in there and raise prices.
And there’s been a lot of that because everyone thinks they know that washers’ and dryers’ prices went up because Trump during the first term put tariffs on. But here’s the dirty little story. There never were actually tariffs on dryers. Just because there was hysteria, they raised prices on dryers to match the price increase on washers, because there were tariffs on washers. It’s that kind of price gouging we have to stop.
And then the other question is, as with all of these questions about the market, prices can’t be the only thing we’re looking at because part of why people can’t afford things is because they have their wages decreasing. If we’re having good jobs with higher wages, I’m not for raising prices, mind you, but if actually to get production back it means that something’s going to be modestly more expensive – what’s very interesting is the polling shows there’s a very interesting CBS poll that was taken after Trump had started with all the tariffs, cars in China, et cetera, and they asked the questions in this order: Is the president paying enough attention to gain prices down? “No,” big majority. Who do you think pays for tariffs, the other country or us? “Oh, we pay for tariffs.” Can tariffs raise prices? “Yes, tariffs can raise prices.” Do you support or oppose tariffs on China? “Strongly support.”

JW: Trump’s tariffs are immensely unpopular. Do you think that’s going to end up strengthening the hand of the free trade advocates, or is this really an opportunity for the more complicated industrial and trade policies that you’re advocating?

LW: Honestly, I think it could go either way. I guess my advice to folks is if you want to make sure that we have some future that has the kind of fair, sustainable, actually resilient economy that we want, with competition, and not just a big bunch of hyper-globalized multinational corporations, then we need to stand up for the concept of using smart trade policy and smart tariffs. At the same time making clear that what Trump is up to is counterproductive.
We definitely need a transition to a more fair-trade system, and one of the questions is, who’s going to pay for the transition? And it sure as hell can’t be the working people and the consumers, who’ve paid for 30 years of bad trade. It has to be these companies that profiteered off their race-to-the-bottom, offshoring and price gouging. And if they end up paying a little bit more and having a little bit less profit, so be it.

JW: Lori Wallach – she’s director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project. Lori, thanks for talking with us today.

LW: Thank you.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk about a major lawsuit challenging Trump over his efforts to deport pro-Palestinian campus activists. The AAUP and the Middle East Studies Association filed a suit in federal court in Boston on March 25th, arguing that the detention of Mahmoud Khalil and others violates the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. We’re joined now by one of the attorneys bringing that lawsuit, Jameel Jaffer. He’s executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and a former deputy legal director of the ACLU where he litigated cases on national security and human rights, including cases relating to surveillance, secrecy, censorship, interrogation, detention, and extrajudicial killing. He writes for The New York Times op-ed page, The Guardian, The New York Review, and The New Yorker. Last time we talked here, it was about his work on the defense of Edward Snowden. Jameel Jaffer, welcome back.

Jameel Jaffer: Thanks so much.

JW: Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student activist and green card holder was arrested in New York City and detained by ICE on March 8th. Rumeysa Ozturk, the grad student at Tufts, who’s a Turkish citizen with a student visa, was taken into federal custody on March 27th. They’re probably the two best known student activists in Gaza protests who’ve been recently taken into custody and threatened with deportation. There are several others. The Trump administration has promised lots more. They do have attorneys representing them, including the ACLU. How is your lawsuit called AAUP v. Rubio different from the defense of non-citizens who are being held in detention centers and threatened with deportation?

JJ: Well, let me start by what the lawsuits have in common. All of these lawsuits are in one sense or another challenges to this Trump administration policy, which involves the arrest and detention and deportation of students and faculty who participated in pro-Palestinian protests or engaged in other related expressive or associational activities. This is a policy that involves essentially throwing people out of the country because the government doesn’t like what they have to say. As you say, Jon, some of these students have brought lawsuits of their own. Some of them are in detention, and so they filed habeas petitions, challenging the detention. Others have not been detained but have challenged the threat to detain and deport them. And in all of those suits, the students, in some cases, faculty members are challenging the constitutionality of this policy. Our suit also challenges the constitutionality of this policy.
But our suit is brought on behalf of listeners rather than speakers. You can think of the other lawsuits as speaker lawsuits. There are lawsuits in which students or faculty members again have been sanctioned in one way or another for their lawful political speech. Our suit is brought on behalf of the American Association of University Professors, the Middle East Studies Association, which are associations of faculty members at universities across the United States. These associations are asserting the rights of their US citizen members to hear from and associate with the non-citizens who are the targets of this policy.

JW: Some of my friends were not aware that there’s a First Amendment right, not only to speak but to listen, to hear. How clear is that in the past rulings of the Supreme Court?

JJ: Yeah. This is actually very well established in Supreme Court case law. For the past 50 years, the Supreme Court has recognized that the First Amendment protects not just the right to speak, but the right to hear as well, the right to receive information, including the right to receive information from abroad. This is well-settled First Amendment case law. I don’t think there’s going to be any dispute on that particular issue. One of the reasons we wanted to bring this lawsuit is that we wanted to emphasize that the targeting of these students has implications. Obviously, it has very severe implications for the students themselves, and that’s reason enough to oppose the policy. But the policy also has broader implications for everybody at these universities. What we described in the complaint is a climate of repression and fear at universities across the country with non-citizens, both students and faculty, really terrified of speaking out on political issues because of the threat of arrest and detention and deportation.
This is easy to understand. If you were told that you might be imprisoned tomorrow or thrown out of the country tomorrow, if you spoke on a particular political issue, then you would probably not speak on that particular political issue. That’s what’s happening at universities across the country. That has implications not just for the people who aren’t speaking, but for the people who aren’t able to listen or to associate with the people they would otherwise associate with. It really goes to the character of universities as places where people can share ideas and share information and engage with one another in scholarly and other expressive collaborations. That’s the whole point of universities, but this policy is really compromising that core purpose of these institutions.

JW: The argument from the other side, from Secretary of State Rubio is that – I’m quoting him, “Those who support designated terrorist organizations including Hamas, threaten our national security, the United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists.” What evidence do they look for to determine whether somebody supports terrorist organizations? 

JJ: That’s really the important question. If we were talking about people who were accused of having sent money to a terrorist organization or having joined a terrorist organization, these would be very different cases, but in none of these cases, has the government alleged that kind of activity. In fact, none of these people are alleged to have engaged in criminal activity of any kind. In fact, they’re not even alleged to have engaged in activity that would make them independently inadmissible to the United States. The only thing that they’re alleged to have done is engaged in pro-Palestinian protests that is protected by the First Amendment and the ground that the government is pointing to justify their deportation is foreign policy.
The argument that Secretary Rubio is making, he’s relying on a provision of the 1952 Immigration Act, the McCarran-Walter Act. It’s a provision that says that a person can be denied a visa, or their visa can be revoked if giving them a visa would undermine US foreign policy interests. His argument is that having these people inside the United States protesting in favor of the ceasefire or against the war or in favor of Palestinian rights, that undermines American foreign policy interests. This argument has almost never been made before in this way, never been used as a justification for the deportation of people who are lawfully inside the United States. It was a big deal.

JW: I wanted to ask about that. The McCarran-Walter Act was a key element of what we call McCarthyism, or the Red Scare, but Joe McCarthy or HUAC or J. Edgar Hoover in that era — did they try to deport student activists in the ‘50s? Did they try to deport anybody?

JJ: I don’t know of any other instance, over the last 100 years in which the government has used immigration law as a justification for deporting people on the basis of viewpoint. There were some incidents like that, a lot during the First Red Scare right after the First World War. It’s conceivable that there’s something I’m not thinking of from after the Second World War, but even if it had happened during the McCarthy era, the First Amendment has evolved quite a bit since then. All of the cases that we think of as defining the First Amendment we’re decided in the 1960s and the 1970s like Brandenburg, New York Times v. Sullivan and the Pentagon Papers case. Those are the cases that define the First Amendment as we think of it today. There’s certainly nothing in the modern era like this. The other thing though that’s worth noting is that there have been cases over the last 50 years in which the government has tried to exclude people from the country on the basis of their political views.
We’ve been talking about deporting people who are lawfully in the country, but there are also cases in which the government has tried to exclude people on the basis of their political viewpoints. In that context, the courts have said the government has very broad power to decide who can come into the country and who can’t. But even in that context, the courts have said, over and over again, that the government does not have the power to exclude somebody from the country solely because of their political viewpoints. The appeals courts in this country have said that before 9/11, and they repeated it again after 9/11 in some cases brought during the Bush administration. I think even with respect to exclusion, this prohibition is well established, and if it’s well established with respect to people who’ve never set foot in the country, then it’s certainly true that people who are lawfully in the country can’t be deported on the basis of viewpoint alone.

JW: What exactly are you asking the court to do?

JJ: Basically, enjoin the policy. Prevent the Trump administration from arresting, detaining, or deporting people based on political viewpoint alone. Right now, they’re using this foreign policy provision to justify their actions, but the relief we’re asking for would prohibit them from using any other provision in this way. We want the court to make clear that the First Amendment fully protects noncitizens who are lawfully inside the United States. That means that the government can’t come after them simply because they’ve engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy.

JW: Where do we stand on the calendar? When do you expect a response from the court on this?

JJ: Well, we are filing our preliminary injunction motion as we speak, Jon, in the next few minutes.

JW: April 1st.

JJ: Yeah. We are expecting that the motion will be fully briefed in the next two and a half weeks. There’ll be a hearing very shortly after that. I wish it would move even more quickly; I think that’s the realistic schedule.

JW: Is this the thing that Trump might appeal all the way to the Supreme Court?

JJ: I think so. They’ve made clear that this is their policy. They’re not pretending that the policy is anything other than it is. They seem to believe that they have the authority to do this. They seem to think that it makes political sense for them to make a big deal of doing it. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they appeal it all the way up if we managed to win in the district court. I mean, we’ve been talking about as if this is an ordinary legal case, in some respects it is. But I do think it’s worth noting the power that the government is claiming here. If the government has this power, then it doesn’t make sense to call this a democracy anymore, because this is the power that defines autocratic regimes. The power to put people behind bars on the basis of their political viewpoints.
If the Trump administration can do this to pro-Palestinian protesters on the basis of foreign policy concerns, there’s no reason why it couldn’t do the same to people who support Ukraine or for that matter Greenland or Canada. If you happen to believe something that the Trump administration doesn’t like, they’ll just say, well, you know what? It’s not good for our foreign policy for you to be saying those things, we’re going to put you behind bars as a result. It’s also not true that this will be limited to non-citizens. The administration has already made the jump from visa holders to green card holders. A couple of the people who’ve been detained so far have been green card holders, legal permanent residents whose status has been “revoked” — to use the word that the administration is using. They’ve made clear that they’re going to come after naturalized citizens as well. I just think that it’s a mistake to think of this as a case about non-citizen students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. I mean, it is, but the legal principles that are at issue here are much, much broader, and the case is extremely significant for those reasons.

JW: In the meantime, we know of, I don’t know, six or eight or 10 or 12 people who have been detained on these grounds. What is their status right now and what could happen to them in the next few weeks?

JJ: Yeah. Well, they’re all in slightly different positions. I mean, some of them are detained, others have, this is very sad, “self-deported,” to use the phrase that some of the news stories have used. They’re just so terrified of detention that they’ve just decided, I don’t have it in me to defend myself from a jail cell, I’m just going to go back to where I came from, go back to Canada.’ It’s a terrible thing to do to those students who did nothing other than exercise their First Amendment rights. But it is also a terrible thing for the United States. One of the things that makes American universities so great is that they have people from all over the world. People come from all over the world to learn, study, and teach at American universities. They do that because there are other people from all over the world at those places.
We all get the benefit of a diversity of viewpoints, a diversity of perspectives. It really is one of the things that sets American universities apart from universities almost everywhere else in the world. Now I think lots of people are going to hesitate to come to American universities. They’re just going to think, ‘you know what? I want to be somewhere where I can say what I think, where I don’t have to worry about the possibility that something I publish is going to land me in a jail cell or that one day the government is going to dislike my political views and keep me from re-entering the country.’ They’re just going to go somewhere else. That may be terrible for them, but it’s terrible for us too.

JW: Maybe we should just clarify, does the First Amendment apply only to citizens of the United States?

JJ: No, the First Amendment applies to non-citizens as well. This has been clear for 70 years. The Supreme Court in fact, heard a case, I think it was 1952, Bridges v. Wixon involving a guy called Harry Bridges, who was an Australian whom the government wanted to deport for suspected membership in the Communist Party. The Supreme Court said very clearly in that case that the First Amendment protects non-citizens lawfully in the United States. The lower courts have said that again and again since then.

JW: I have to ask you about one more thing. Since you are a member of the faculty at Columbia University. Columbia University this week appointed a third president in the last few months in an effort to submit to Trump’s demands. The third president is Claire Shipman, formerly co-chair of the board. But already, Elise Stefanik, the Republican who ran the hearings in the House on Columbia and other universities, has said she does not want Shipman in that job. “I think it is only going to be a matter of weeks before she’s forced to step down as well,” member of Congress, Elise Stefanik said on Fox News. The New York Times reported last December that Claire Shipman wrote to the president of Columbia at that time, suggesting the administration should engage with the pro-Palestinian movement rather than just discipline. She suggested that Columbia quote, “Think about how to unsuspend the groups, students for justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace.” The two student groups that had been suspended for repeatedly violating university rules. She also suggested working with Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian historian, very distinguished, now retired, who had been at Columbia. How much farther can Columbia go to submit to Trump? Will the third president also leave now?

JJ: Well, let me just correct you on one small point, an important one, Jon, which is that those two groups weren’t suspended for repeatedly violating university rules. When the university suspended those groups, it explained in a public statement that it was doing so in part based on their rhetoric. I think it was very clear at that time that the university didn’t like their political viewpoints, or that trustees didn’t like their political viewpoints, and they were being suspended, at least in part, for that reason.

JW: Thank you for that. I was quoting from The New York Times story.

JJ: Yeah. Well, okay. First of all, I mean, I think that Columbia needs to make very clear that Elise Stefanik doesn’t get to decide who the president of the university is. This is a larger issue with universities across the country. I don’t want to talk about any specific university here, but collectively, the universities have failed, utterly failed to defend their own autonomy. That autonomy is protected by the First Amendment. The universities get to decide who is part of their community, what gets taught at the university, who gets to teach it. Those things are things that the First Amendment gives universities the right to decide and prohibits the government from influencing. I think that the universities should have been saying that all along and should have been making that very clear to the Trump administration all along and needs to make it clear to the Trump administration.
Now, the second thing I would say is that I don’t think that there is any appeasing, the Trump administration. I don’t think that there’s any set of concessions that Columbia or Harvard or any other university could make to the Trump administration that would lead the Trump administration to just move on to some other institution. The reason I say that is that I don’t believe that the Trump administration is really interested at all in protecting students against anti-Semitism.
I don’t think that’s what this is about. Trump himself has repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks. He’s always going on about globalists, his closest advisor, Elon Musk is a supporter of far-right groups in Europe who is sieg-heiling at public events. These are not people who care about anti-Semitism. They are using anti-Semitism as a pretext to destroy institutions that they want to destroy for totally different reasons, and as an opportunity to drive a wedge between the Jewish community and other minorities. That’s what they’re doing.
To the extent the concern is anti-Semitism, there are a lot of people at Columbia, including a lot of people who participated in the pro-Palestinian protests, who would be very eager to address the real anti-Semitism problems that unfortunately do exist at places like Columbia and elsewhere. That is not what this is about. I don’t think that there’s any set of concessions that Columbia or Harvard could make to the Trump administration to make it go away. The Trump administration wants to destroy these institutions. It is just going to keep adding demands to the list. The more they concede, the more they’ll demand.

JW: Jameel Jaffer – he’s executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, and former deputy legal director of the ACLU. Jameel, thanks for everything you do, and thanks for talking with us today.

JJ: Thanks so much for having me, Jon.