Trump’s travel ban reveals its pointlessness

It’s curious that opponents of Donald Trump’s travel ban should persist in exerting so much energy to criticize it. The ban now freely admits to its arbitrariness and futility.

In fact, there is so much to recommend the ban — by virtue, that is, of its undermining its own supposed purpose, which is to protect Americans from foreign terrorists — that it’s hard to know where to begin with praise. Its exemptions are as good a place as any, though. So, in honour of Fourth of July, here are some:

The ban prevents nationals from six countries from obtaining American visas unless the person can meet one of any number of conditions.

One condition is that a visa has already been approved; in that case, the foreign national may enter. This is an admission that foreign nationals don’t pose a clear and present terrorist risk to the United States by mere virtue of being foreign nationals, a supposition which, you will have noted long before now, is reasonable.

If all foreign nationals from certain countries did pose a serious and demonstrable danger to American lives, of course, grave and verifiable enough to violate the civil liberties of members of entire groups of people, visas should not merely be denied; by the ban’s logic at least, those previously granted ought to be taken away.

So unless the claim is that terrorist risks are not terribly risky at all if a visa happened to have been granted at any time before last week through an application process that the very proposition of a ban implies was dangerously inadequate, the exemption suggests that the fact of foreignness alone isn’t evidence of risk.

In its infinite generosity, though, the ban offers a second condition: People with bona fide relationships in the United States are deemed

This is the ban that keeps on banning by not actually banning much at all.

safe. Now, what is “bona fide?” Being engaged to someone, being their elderly grandmother or being their prospective employee are not bona fide, not according to the ban’s little-known definition of bona fide anyway, which seems to mean “a relationship close enough that you are more likely to want to maintain it than to set off a bomb.” Conversely, being married to or employed by someone in the United States is evidence that you’re probably safe.

So again, foreignness isn’t dangerous — it’s some other totally random quality.

And here’s yet another condition, for this is the ban that keeps on banning by not actually banning much at all: The travel restrictions are in effect for 90 days, at which point the previous visa conditions, which have helped keep the United States relatively safe and relatively prosperous for many decades, will return, one must assume, to supporting the nation’s relative safety and prosperity.

Again, then: Foreign travel isn’t the problem. It’s one’s status in a supposedly woefully bureaucratic process. Or the location of one’s spouse rather than one’s fiancé. And the season being late summer rather than early fall.

But wait, as they say, there’s more! The exemptions to the ban aren’t alone in revealing its insincerity — the ban’s targets do the same. Even it its earliest stages, the ban never even bothered to discriminate against foreign nationals from countries that have actually produced terrorists who fatally attacked the United States.

The ban doesn’t pretend to protect America from foreign terrorists, then, except a foreign terrorist who fits a profile so obscure as to be almost certainly non-existent: a terrorist, you understand, who hasn’t yet managed to get his hands on a visa, or who cannot manage to cobble together a single strong financial or personal relationship in the country that he, an evil mastermind, plans to victimize, and who comes from one of six specific countries whose citizens have never before, in all of human history, committed an attack on American soil ... and, let’s not forget, who has both the intention and capacity to execute his plot only in the days between June 29 and Sept. 29.

This ban can’t quite bring itself to behave like a ban. It’s almost as if a ban weren’t necessary.