Weekly Writers Round-Up: Immigration, War Funding, and Media Bias

Each week, we’ll be featuring the work of the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. For more information on the program, see here. Applications for the fall session are now open!

We Need to Keep Top International Talent, but Trump Spouse Visa Plan Would Drive it Away by Sam Peak (Spring 2018) in USA Today
The Trump administration last month confirmed its intent to rescind a policy that allows spouses of highly skilled guest workers to seek employment in the U.S. This would force roughly 105,000 mostly-female spouses into unemployment as they wait years in line for their green cards. And it would be a big mistake…

When We Raised Taxes to Fund Wars by Jerrod A. Laber (Fall 2017) in The American Conservative
On Saturday, July 7, Army Corporal Joseph Maciel was killed in Afghanistan during an attack at the Tarin Kowt airfield in Uruzgan province. He was 20 years old, meaning that when the war began in October 2001, he was a toddler. You can be forgiven for not having noticed Maciel’s death, as media coverage of America’s presence in Afghanistan is fairly hard to come by…

Conservative Media Skew Story on ‘Dreamer’ Arrest by Josh T. Smith (Summer 2015) in Real Clear Policy
Last month, Fox News reported that 13 percent of “Dreamers” have an arrest record and highlighted that some of those arrests were connected to crimes like murder and rape. Many other right-leaning groups have pointed out the same figures. Unfortunately, these reports lack both context and accuracy. Dreamers are actually less likely to be arrested than U.S. citizens…

More Evidence Student Borrowers Prepay Their Loans by Preston Cooper (Fall 2015) in Forbes
A new game show aims to help student borrowers pay off their loans ahead of time. While the vast majority of former students will not be contestants, most borrowers will still fully pay off their loans before they are required to do so, according to a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)…

On Education, Trump Needs More Aristotle and Less Betsy DeVos by Michael Shindler (Spring 2016) in The American Conservative
The United States government has a frustrating habit of enlarging its bureaucratic apparatuses rather than consolidating them. So when the Trump administration recently proposed merging the Departments of Labor and Education because, in the words of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, “artificial barriers between education and workforce programs have existed for far too long,” it seemed like cause for celebration. However, there’s a vital reason that the Department of Education is distinct from the Department of Labor: its chief purpose—as opposed to facilitating a robust workforce—is nothing less than the conservation of democracy…