Free Thoughts

Adam Bates, from the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), joins us this week for our 250th episode to talk about how the Muslim ban, which President Trump initiated during his first week in office, inspired him to change his work focus from criminal justice reform to refugee relief.

Bates addresses how the Administration is “overtly hostile” towards refugees. In our current political climate, it is an extremely trying time for refugee law, but also to be a refugee. The Refugee Act of 1980 allows the President to decide each year what the refugee cap is for the following year. President Trump set the lowest cap in the last 38 years at 45,000 refugees for the 2018 fiscal year. We have only resettled 16,000 refugees so far this year. We are incredibly far away from our maximum capacity of refugees.

What is a refugee by definition? Are there exceptions to this definition? What is “temporary-protected status”? How is an asylum-seeker different than a refugee? How does the refugee process work? Which countries are accepting the most refugees? Is the United States really the “beacon on the hill” that we think we are?

Further Readings

IRAP response to the travel ban

UNHCR defines what types of refugess they classify

President Donald Trump advocated last year for dropping the refugee cap.

Related Content

The Truth About Immigration, Free Thoughts Episode

Trump’s Immigration Crackdown, Free Thoughts Episode

Immigrants and Guns: Different Issues, The Same Bad Arguments, written by Trevor Burrus

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We discuss the growth and maturity of the modern environmental movement from Rachel Carson to Paul Ehrlich and Naomi Klein. From overpopulation and pollution to pesticide use, mass animal extinctions and peak oil to global cooling and global warming (now climate change) and genetically modified food, there seems to be no shortage of potential catastrophes for us to fret over. Is humanity truly perpetually poised on the brink of destruction? Or are the solutions these environmental millenarians propose the true threat to our species?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Ronald Bailey’s new book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century is a must read on this topic.

We also recommend Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves and Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture to get a better understanding of the power of markets to allocate resources in increasingly efficient ways.

Paul Ehrlich’s 1971 book The Population Bomb is mentioned in this show. It reads as fantastic science fiction today, though the predictions Ehrlich makes were taken quite seriously when the book was first published. Similarly, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) predicted a world in which it was common for people to die of cancer-related illnesses (caused by pollutants) at the age of 45. The book was instrumental in launching the modern-day environmental movement.
Bailey also mentions an article he wrote in 2009 about the National Academy of Sciences predictions in 1980 of what the world would look like in 2010, “How Green Is Your Crystal Ball?”

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When you list successful government censorship campaigns, like the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Comstock laws, the censorship of right-wing radio in the 1960s should be right up there in the pantheon of the most egregious acts of government censorship in American history. Paul Matzko, author of The Radio Right, talks about this and more throughout the episode.

How has our mainstream media changed over time? Have Americans always mistrusted the media? Why were many radio personalities in the 1960s also members of the clergy? What were the Polish ham boycotts? What is the Fairness Doctrine and how did affect the radio landscape?

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Beyond boosting economic growth and raising our living standards, evasive entrepreneurialism can play an important role in constraining unaccountable governmental activities that often fail to reflect common sense or the consent of the governed.

What moves the needle for progress? How has the sharing economy exposed grotesque regulatory barriers? Could this be a moment of freedom and liberation, or are we gonna get a surveillance state out of this pandemic?

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