For Trump’s travel ban, third time is no charm
If Travel Ban 3 were a movie, critics would call it an improvement over the previous two releases but still not very good.
Travel Ban 1, you might recall, grew out of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s demagogic call for “a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Premiering soon after Trump took office, the hastily produced original targeted seven Muslimmajority nations, singled out Christian emigrants for special consideration over Muslims, sowed confusion for legal residents returning to the USA, and created havoc at the nation’s airports. It quickly ran into trouble in the courts.
Travel Ban 2 was an attempt to clean up Travel Ban 1. Legal residents were now clearly exempt. Preferential treatment for Christians and other non-Muslims was excised. Iraq, perhaps because of its crucial role as a U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, was taken off the list.
Even so, judges struck this version down as well. One chief appellate judge said Travel Ban 2 “speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination.”
The best that can be said about Travel Ban 3 is that it has a better chance of passing constitutional muster. Even if it is constitutional, however, it still appears arbitrary.
The latest sequel, rolled out by Trump on Sunday night and scheduled to take effect Oct. 18, places permanent restrictions of varying degrees on travelers from eight countries: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
Sudan fell off the list, and three countries — Chad, North Korea and Venezuela — were added. But adding two non-Muslim nations (North Korea and Venezuela) was likely a cosmetic change.
The Venezuela travel restriction pertains only to certain government workers. For North Korea, the order bans something already banned: immigration. Blocking non-immigrant visitors is new, yet that’s barely a trickle, just 100 people last year.
The Department of Homeland Security has worked hard, over three months, to vet the information that countries provided about their citizens intending to travel to the United States.
The result was the list of eight nations said to fail, or refuse, to provide adequate details about their citizens to warrant a visa.
But to what end this exhaustive process? DHS’ own internal research shows that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.”
A terrorist can come from virtually any nation. Moreover, no one has been killed in the USA as a result of a terrorist attack by an emigrant from one of those eight countries. None of the 9/11 terrorists came from nations on the latest list.
From almost the moment Trump took office, his vow to get tough with Muslim visitors to the United States has created ill will. This latest installment holds little promise of making Americans safer.
It’s time to stop production on the Travel Ban franchise.