Gov. Phil Scott did stumble out of the starting gate in his rush to mandate level funding for Vermont schools next year, but in another respect his administration is off to a strong, and honorable, start. He has been a notable voice in pushing back against President Trump’s sweeping executive order on immigration.
A couple of days after the White House issued the order suspending entry of all refugees for 120 days, barring Syrian refugees indefinitely and blocking entry for 90 days of citizens of seven predominately Muslim nations, Scott issued a statement evoking the important role immigrants played historically in shaping the state’s economy and culture. “I can’t imagine what Vermont, and our country, would look like today, had we refused to allow immigrants from all reaches of the world to experience this wonderful country the way most of us have, simply because they were not born here or didn’t share our exact religious view,” the governor said.
The next day, Scott ordered his legal counsel to coordinate with the Vermont Attorney General’s Office in exploring a legal challenge to the order; established a Civil Rights and Criminal Justice Cabinet; and sought legislation to bar state and local law enforcement agencies from entering into agreements with the federal government to enforce immigration laws. That legislation is now pending and has the backing of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Sears, D-Bennington. And Attorney General T.J. Donovan has joined his counterparts in 16 other states in supporting a legal challenge to the ban.
Yes, Scott is governing the bluest of blue states, so his stance is unlikely to win a place in any new edition of Profiles in Courage. Nevertheless, he is a Republican, and many people who voted for him probably also voted for Trump and support the travel ban. The politically safer course might have been the one followed by his newly minted Republican counterpart across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who confined himself to boilerplate such as, “The enforcement of our nation’s immigration policy is a function of the federal government”; “we live in a dangerous world”; and immigration was central to the founding of the nation and important to his own family. (By contrast, New Hampshire Attorney General Joseph Foster said he would join the legal challenge to the ban, declaring that, “Religious liberty has been and always will be a bedrock principle of our country and no president can change that truth.”)
Sununu correctly observed that control of immigration is primarily a federal matter. Thus, the future of Trump’s order most likely will be played out in federal courts. But that doesn’t mean that individual states don’t have a stake in this fight. As it now appears, Rutland’s plan to welcome 100 Syrian and Iraqi refugees this year appears dead, or at least dead in the water. All told, Vermont was scheduled to resettle 450 refugees during the current fiscal year. Besides that, the state depends on an estimated 1,000 immigrant dairy farm workers, some of whom are likely to be in the country illegally. More generally, higher education, the high tech industry and health care stand to take a major hit if the immigration order is upheld. Although the ban is supposed to be temporary, it stands to reason that talented foreign students, scholars, doctors, researchers and tech workers will think twice about relocating to the United States in the future if their lives can be turned upside down at the arbitrary stroke of a pen.
With the federal government in the hands of a certified xenophobe, it is vital that state officials, and the people they represent, refuse to acquiesce in what surely will be regarded by history as one of the nation’s most shameful moments. They ought to signal clearly, as Scott has done, that the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, are still welcome in America.