USA TODAY International Edition
Trump’s travel ban remains arbitrary and unnecessary
The highly anticipated sequel to President Trump’s Jan. 27 travel ban is an improvement on the original, which spurred mass confusion at airports and was blocked by the courts. But, as with most sequels, the revised plan is still a disappointment.
The do- over version, announced Monday, strips away some of the more onerous and legally questionable sections of the hastily produced original.
Legal U. S. residents are now clearly exempt from the ban, along with visitors with existing visas. The White House also excised wording that appeared to require preferential treatment for non- Muslim refugees, and cut another area of the order that indefinitely banned refugees from war- torn Syria.
But core restrictions from the original order survive, and the rewrite remains stubbornly arbitrary about who it bans. The new directive still blocks people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the U. S. for 90 days. ( Iraq, a crucial ally for the U. S. in fighting the Islamic State, has been pulled from the list.) The order also continues to bar all refugees for 120 days.
The almost leisurely pace with which the second version was rolled out undermines the president’s argument that the original needed to be sprung without warning to keep “bad dudes” from rushing in. The sequel allows a 10- day grace period.
Whether the new order passes legal muster remains to be seen.
To be sure, the responsibility of safeguarding the U. S. homeland is Job # 1 for any president, and there’s nothing wrong with a review of vetting procedures. But in a global war with radicals who offer twisted interpretations of Islam, much of battle terrain is a struggle over ideas.
The military and law enforcement need cooperation from Muslims at home and abroad to uncover terror plots and identify targets. Alienating them with sweeping policies that cast suspi- cion on entire populations is a dangerous game.
That’s especially true when the facts don’t support wholesale bans, even if they’re temporary. Research by the Department of Homeland Security, obtained by the Associated Press, concluded that immigrants from the named countries posed no unique risk of becoming terrorists and that, in any case, “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.”
Trump often raises the specter of fear when pushing these policies, telling a joint session of Congress last week that “we have seen the attacks at home, from Boston to San Bernardino to the Pentagon and, yes, even the World Trade Center.” So true, as the president likes to say. But none of those attacks were conducted by emigrants from the countries in his new order.
One man who faced exclusion from the U. S. because of the original Trump dictate was Asghar Farhadi, an acclaimed Iranian filmmaker who won an Oscar for best foreign language film. Farhadi never made it to the Academy Awards, boycotting last month’s event to protest the travel ban.
“Dividing the world into categories of ‘ us’ and ‘ our enemies’ creates fear,” Farhadi said. That’s what the president’s executive order still does, and it’s no way to fight terrorism.