USA TODAY International Edition
Hasty ban on travel disrupts lives and undermines values
In President Trump’s dark view of America, thousands of shadowy foreigners from the Middle East are infiltrating our neighborhoods and waiting for an opportunity to kill us. “We have evil that lurks around the corner,” he told Fox News last week. “They’re sneaky, dirty rats.”
This kind of indiscriminate fear- mongering is bad enough as campaign rhetoric. It’s outright harmful to innocent people when ham- handedly translated into White House policy.
On Friday, which happened to be International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump signed an executive order suspending admission of any refugees to the U. S. for 120 days and banning entry for 90 days of people from seven predominantly Muslim nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The prohibition on Syrians, millions of them women and children fleeing a war- ravaged humanitarian crisis, is open- ended.
The predictable result: chaos and confusion at the borders for people who had been legally eligible to enter the United States. Refugees were halted at airports. An Iraqi man who had risked his life working as an interpreter for U. S. troops was temporarily barred. Students admitted to some of the nation’s finest universities were prevented from starting school. And an Iranian scientist who had been awarded a fellowship to study cardiovascular medicine at Harvard found that the visas for him and his wife had suddenly been suspended.
Amid growing protests, Trump insisted Sunday that his order is not the ban on foreign Muslims he called for during the campaign. No, but it is discriminatory. He directed that Christians and members of other minority religions be given preferential consideration over Muslims on future immigration decisions involving the nations covered by the order.
Considering the threat from terrorism, a temporary and measured pause in immigration to examine program efficacy is not an unreasonable step. But Trump has now disrupted countless lives with a heedless, bludgeoned approach to the issue.
For an executive order aimed at keeping out terrorists, it is strangely arbitrary. The 9/ 11 terrorists were from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of which were exempted from the order. And since 9/ 11, no one has been killed in the USA as a result of a terrorist attack by an emigrant from the seven targeted nations. Much of the threat has come from homegrown extremists.
The president has enormous discretion under the immigration laws, but he doesn’t have a blank check. The legality of the immigration ban is likely to be fought out in court; late Saturday, a federal judge temporarily blocked part of Trump’s order.
For all of the new president’s tough talk about imposing “extreme vetting,” the policies were already pretty stringent. The 12,587 Syrian refugees allowed into the country last year waited, on average, two years.
The libertarian Cato Institute estimates that the chances of a refugee killing an American in a terror attack are extremely remote: one in 3.6 billion annually. Trump would caution us to be afraid, very afraid. But fear itself shouldn’t be allowed to undermine America’s values.