Noah Feldman, Columnist

A Win for Immigrants, and a Win for Liars

The Supreme Court's sympathy for refugees comes at a cost.

June 22, 2017 at 5:45 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Under oath.
Photographer: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

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What lies should make you lose your citizenship? The question irresistibly combines two of the most contentious issues in the age of Donald Trump: the culture of falsehood and the hot-button problem of immigration. On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in. Its solution bucks the anti-immigration trend by making it harder than before to strip immigrants of their citizenship status. At the same time, the court’s decision further weakens the basic norm of truth-telling.

The facts of the case, Maslenjak v. U.S., perfectly capture the interaction between lies and immigration. Divna Maslenjak is an ethnic Serb from Bosnia who with her husband, Ratko, and two children sought refugee status in the U.S. in 1998.