Fixing a problem that does not exist

President Donald Trump has issued a revised travel ban that attempts to address several of the most glaring errors from the original January executive order. But it does nothing to fix the original’s existential flaws: it attempts to fix a problem that does not exist, while offending US ideals and making the country less safe in the process.

Monday’s executive order suspends the US refugee programme for 120 days and imposes a 90-day ban on new visas for citizens of six majority-Muslim nations; a seventh, Iraq, was removed from the original plan.

The new travel order no longer targets travellers who already have valid visas, people with US green cards or those who have been granted asylum or refugee status. Those are all welcome changes.

The executive order was also improved by degrees by the removal of language that explicitly protected religious minorities, which seemed to favour Christians over Muslims in the Middle East. The indefinite ban on Syrian refugees has been reduced to a 120-day ban. And it will avoid some of the chaos that ensued in the sudden implementation in January; this policy won’t go into effect until March 16.

And yet: the insistence on a travel ban at all is a mistake. Trump lacks compelling evidence that this order will make the US safer. Refugees already undergo a vigorous vetting before coming to the US. In addition, the intelligence and analysis branch of the homeland security department concluded in February that citizenship of a specified country itself is an “unlikely indicator” of danger to the US. The same report found that very few people from the targeted nations had been linked to terrorism in the US over the past six years. The US intelligence community also notes that the most serious terrorist threats to this nation are from US citizens who have been radicalised by Islamic State propaganda, not new entrants. Dallas, March 6.