Not serious, only cruel
I suppose the Trump administration’s revised immigration ban is an improvement over the previous attempt. Yesterday’s executive order removes preferential treatment for Christians living in Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Libya, which previously had been an explicit case of religious discrimination. It now also protects foreign nationals who hold visas and those who are permanent residents. So we’ve gone from clearly unconstitutional and breaking existing immigration laws to maybe constitutional and breaking existing immigration laws.
The original executive order, which was written in secret and without consulting the people who would actually enforce it, created chaos. Courts around the country issued injunctions within a couple of days after questions arose, decisions were made inconsistently, and legal residents were stranded and detained. The revised ban is unlikely to cause quite the same mess, if for no other reason than it is going to be phased in over ten days.
Regardless of the ban’s constitutionality or the amount of distress and disarray it causes, the motives behind it are the same as they ever were. As Cody Wofsy of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project explains:
“In a statement ‘ON PREVENTING MUSLIM IMMIGRATION’ posted to his campaign website — and still available on it as I write — then-candidate Trump called for ‘a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’…Instead of abandoning this odious idea in response to widespread criticism and outrage, Mr. Trump candidly explained that he would change the wording of his proposal but not its substance. ‘I’m looking now at territories,’ he said. ‘People were so upset when I used the word Muslim. Oh, you can’t use the word ‘Muslim.’ Call it whatever you want…’”
It is still a ban, signed by a president who promised to bar Muslims from entering the United States, motivated by an intent to discriminate against Muslims, and that overwhelmingly affects Muslims rather than those of other faiths.”
Call it whatever you want, the order remains ugly and misguided. It aims to give a portion of American citizens a false sense of security, without actually providing that security. Every human endeavor can be improved, and screening immigrants is no exception. Improvements can be made while protecting our country and while respecting its residents. They will come in the form of data- and impact-driven policies rather than bigoted religious tests.
Muslim extremists have been responsible for 16 of the 240,000 murders in this country since September 11, 2001, according to an analysis by a Middle East expert at the University of North Carolina. That’s about 1/1,000th of one percent. Include the 9/11 attacks, before significant security changes were made, and it is about one percent. White supremacist Dylann Roof alone is responsible for nine of those 240,000 murders. Adam Lanza murdered 27 — including 20 elementary school students — at Sandy Hook in 2012. We should work to reduce all of those threats.
Trump is fulfilling a thoughtless campaign promise without any concrete ideas for making us safer. He first suggested an immigration ban in December 2015 and hasn’t discussed a single proposal for permanently tightening immigration in the 15 months since. In demonizing Muslim people without any further thought, he’s not serious, only cruel.
Most shamefully, those hardest hit continue to be refugees. Refugees are vetted for more than two years by multiple agencies with constant checks for terrorist ties. It’s already extreme vetting.
Yet Trump’s executive order reduces the number of refugees admitted from 110,000 to 50,000.
Whether this executive order is struck down or remains, something terrible will happen again someday. It always does. But we’re trading our principles of respect, religious freedom, humanitarian care, and pluralism for laws and attitudes that will reduce that threat by a fraction of a percent, if at all. The president known for The Art of the Deal is making an awful one.
