‘Extreme’ screening could delve into ideology
Trump’s idea about vetting immigrants to keep out terrorists harkens to an earlier era when political beliefs could mean rejection
In calling for “extreme vetting ” of foreigners entering the USA, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested a return to a 1950s-era immigration standard — since abandoned — that barred entry to people based on their political beliefs.
“We should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people,” Trump said Monday, explaining how he would deter terrorists from entering the USA.
He cited an immigration law passed in 1952 over a veto by President Harry Truman that allowed consular officers to judge applicants based on their ideological views. In the years that followed, homosexuality was included as a reason for barring entry.
“It became an embarrassment for America,” said Barney Frank, a Democrat and former representative from Massachusetts.
The ideological screening and ban on classes of individuals such as homosexuals were excised in a series of immigration law revisions from 1986 to 1990. Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress, co-authored the 1990 law.
“We were going to scrub this and get rid of all these categories of exclusion and instead say, ‘You can’t come here if you are going to do us harm,’ ” said Frank, who served in Congress from 1981 to 2013. “In other words, your political opinion was irrelevant.”
Frank worked with Alan Simpson, then a Republican senator from Wyoming, on the changes, which received near unanimous approval by Congress in 1990.
Both men said they can’t fathom how ideological screening based on American “values” — as Trump suggested — could work in a nation of diverse beliefs. “What are the values? How do you decide them? And who decides whether they’re good or bad?” Frank said.
“Don’t give me the American values stuff. I can’t handle that,” said Simpson, who retired in 1997. “Those are individual values. The only thing we have in common is a common flag and a common language.”
Trump spent several minutes during his speech on terrorism calling into question the toughness of vetting policies for the millions who enter the USA, a complex security review process that admits 40 million foreigners each year on temporary visas for business, education and other reasons. Some people enter more than once, and more than 1 million arrive to live here permanently.
Nearly 1,200 people who tried to enter the USA on temporary visas in 2014 were rejected based on terrorist grounds, according to a Congressional Research Service report last year.
“The burden of proof is always on the foreign national to prove they’re eligible,” said Ruth Wasem, author of the report and professor of public policy at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin.
A triad of government departments — State, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services — work together to conduct thorough immigration reviews for the roughly 70,000 allowed to enter the USA as refugees seeking asylum, often from war-torn countries, according to Homeland Security. President Obama raised that figure to 85,000 for this year.
In 2014, this included 14,582 refugees from Iraq, 12,514 from China, 9,804 from Myanmar and 652 from Syria. Obama promised last year to take in 10,000 refugees from Syria.
When Congress raised concerns last fall about the risk of allowing “sleeper” terrorists to infiltrate the USA through the refugee program, the State Department publicly outlined the security screening, which admits asylum applicants “only after subjecting them to the most rigorous screening and security vetting of any category of traveler to the United States.”
The process can take up to two years. Applicants identified as refugees, most of them by United Nations officials, have their personal data collected and files started on them at resettlement support centers operated by the United States around the world — in places such as Amman, Havana, Beirut, Nairobi and Moscow.
The State Department describes refugees as people with a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group. Syrians seeking refugee status go through additional scrutiny because Islamic State terrorists are based in Syria.
Refugee applicants can be questioned about their religious affiliations, but there are no grounds for barring them based on their adherence to Sharia law, an Islamic religious code of behavior, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
In his speech, Trump said foreigners should be barred if they believe “Sharia law should supplant American law.”
Donald Trump says the U.S., as a way to keep out terrorists, should admit only those “who share our values and respect our people.”