Foreign Students Help Make America Great

by Michael Crow, Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2025 (electronic version)

Excerpts:

The administration’s actions this spring to terminate visas of international students for minor legal infractions such as traffic violations and its scrutiny of students’ social-media accounts have sent a message that foreign students aren’t wanted here.

And:

Joaquin Duato, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, and Ramon Laguarta, CEO of PepsiCo, were student immigrants—both graduates of ASU’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin (a Google co-founder), Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO), and Indra Nooyi (a former CEO of PepsiCo) are among the thousands of U.S. CEOs and founders who were immigrants.

These talent acquisitions add to U.S. economic success and innovation. More than 50% of all U.S. startups with more than $1 billion in valuation have at least one immigrant founder, many of whom came in as students. The return for the U.S. is in the trillions of dollars.

This Court Case Could Normalize Vibes-Based Regulation

by Veronique de Rugy, Reason, June 19, 2025.

Excerpts:

Emotion-based regulation is a destructive way to regulate the complex and dynamic U.S. economy—unless you happen to favor the lesser freedom and dynamism found on the European continent. In the case of this U.S. rule, the government admits that it has no actual evidence that two-person crews are safer than one-person crews. Instead, the agency has asked the court to defer to what it calls a “common-sense product of reasoned decision-making.”

And:

The government’s own data don’t support the notion that mandating two-person crews would improve safety. My former colleague Patrick McLaughlin showed that there is no reliable, conclusive data to document that one-person crews have worse safety records than two-person crews. Many smaller U.S. railroads have long operated safely with single-person crews, as do the Amtrak trains that haul Washington’s elite up and down the East Coast. We also have a wealth of data from Europe and other nations where single crew members operate.

ICE Insists That Congress Needs Its Permission To Conduct Oversight

by Joe Lancaster, Reason, June 19, 2025.

Excerpts:

This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released new guidance on “facility visit and engagement protocol for Members of Congress and staff.”

“ICE detention locations and Field Offices are secure facilities. As such, all visitors are required to comply with [identity] verification and security screening requirements prior to entry,” it specified. “When planning to visit an ICE facility, ICE asks requests to be submitted at least 72 hours in advance.”

Incidentally, it’s perfectly legal for members of Congress to visit ICE detention facilities, even unannounced. And ICE’s attempt to circumvent that requirement threatens the constitutional system of checks and balances.

And:

This isn’t uncharacteristic of the agency: Earlier this year, ICE agents denied Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella access to an immigration court at a federal detention facility in Miami, in defiance of both federal law and guidance listed on the agency’s own website. (ICE later admitted the facility was “open daily to the public.”)

Strategies for Libertarians

by David Friedman, David Friedman’s Substack, June 21, 2025.

Excerpt:

McArdle’s talk was a defense of the strategy of which this was an example, in her view a successful one, the strategy of trading libertarian support for small wins, that being the most that libertarians could expect to get in exchange. It is a defensible strategy but it occurred to me that there were two costs neither of which she mentioned.

The first is to the reputation of the libertarian movement. The Libertarian Party has long labeled itself “The Party of Principle;” part of the attraction of the libertarian movement is the appearance of consistent support of liberty across a wide variety of issues, from drug laws to professional licensing to immigration, of being motivated by a consistent philosophy of freedom. If the party is seen as visibly supporting Trump, as it will be by anyone who listened to McArdle’s webbed talk, it will be seen as sharing the responsibility for all of his actions, some of them far from libertarian. That will make it harder to recruit or retain as members, of the movement as well as the party, anyone opposed to Trump’s policies. Since Trump is not a libertarian that is likely to include not only anyone left of center but also anyone seriously committed to libertarianism.

The second cost is the effect of alliance with Trump, or with any other non-libertarian movement, on libertarian doctrine. Libertarians who are Trump allies will feel pressure to minimize the conflict between his beliefs and theirs, to create libertarian defenses for unlibertarian policies in order not to feel obliged to attack their allies. That effect will be reinforced by the change in the personnel of the movement as Trump supporters join, libertarians hostile to Trump’s policies leave. In enough time the result is likely to be a “libertarian” party, possibly a “libertarian” movement, that is no longer libertarian.