This week President Donald Trump issued a revised executive order restricting immigration from six majority Muslim countries and more than halving the US refugee programme.
This version includes some significant changes: it is more carefully written; it removes Iraq from the list of countries falling under the ban; and it exempts those with green cards and valid visas.
Nevertheless, it remains a false, dangerous, cruel, arbitrary, and bigoted assault on Muslims and the very idea of America as an open, welcoming society.
The order is based on the false premise that it is designed to protect Americans from foreign terrorists. Arguments to this effect peppered the order and were used by the three Cabinet Secretaries who spoke after it was issued. Attorney General Sessions, for example, in addition to citing the single case of a naturalised Somali American who was convicted of planning a terrorist attack in 2014, claimed that the FBI is currently investigating 300 refugees for possible terrorist activity (a charge that is included in the order).
The Somali American case is the only known instance where a former refugee from one of the six countries sought to engage in violence. Given the administration’s penchant for “alternative facts”, the first ever mention of 300 individuals “under investigation” must be taken with a grain of salt until it can independently be verified. In fact, just a few days before the release of the order, the Department of Homeland Security released a study concluding that immigrants, in general, are not a security threat since most recorded terrorist crimes were committed by individuals who became radicalised after living in the US, and that, in any case, “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity”.
The order, itself, is designed to set up Muslims as a “bogeyman” in order to win support for Trump’s efforts to overhaul of the entire immigration/refugee programme. Just as the “bogeyman” of the Mexican rapist and drug dealer was used to justify the wall and planned mass deportations, Muslim terrorists are being used to validate gutting the refugee programme and limiting admission of “undesirables” from North Africa, and Southwest and South Asia.
Some have argued that this is the precursor to President Trump making good on his promise of a general “Muslim ban”. It very well may be that more countries may be added – with an administration spokesperson suggesting that 13 or 14 countries may soon be included.
Additionally, the order includes mention of a still undefined ideology test for admittance to the US. Arabs, including US citizens, who have already undergone similar screening by Border Patrol officials, can testify to how insulting and intrusive this process can be.
Just as insidious as the “temporary ban” and the mechanisms that will be developed to exclude more individuals after it is lifted (if it is lifted and not expanded) is the suspension of the refugee programme and the pledge to significantly reduce the number of refugees from all countries being allowed into the US.
From the earliest days of his presidential campaign, when candidate Trump first warned about the dangers of refugees, saying “we don’t know who these people are”, major church-based refugee resettlement groups responded forcefully with evidence demonstrating the thoroughness of the vetting process.
But preying on fears of Muslims, Trump has persisted with the lie that refugees are not screened. Now he has issued this order establishing that his administration after ordering a freeze on refugee admittance for 120 days, will ultimately reduce the number of refugees allowed into the US from 110,000 to 50,000.
This is unconscionable, since those who apply for admission as refugees are desperate souls seeking to escape life-threatening situations.
The architects behind all of the administration’s machinations are a small cadre of ultra-nationalist advisers who have argued that America is a white Judeo-Christian culture facing an existential threat from foreigners – specifically Latinos and Muslims.
On the one hand, they are right. America is changing, as it always has. Where they are wrong is that the very idea of America is found not in exclusion, but in its inclusiveness and its absorptive capacity to become new.
The idea of America is bigger than the one the xenophobes have espoused and so, time and again, they lost. Thank God they did, because what kind of country would we be, had they won?
Not learning the lessons of history, this administration is trying once again to impose exclusionary policies.
When all is said and done, it’s not refugees and immigrants, Latinos or Muslims, who pose an existential threat to the American idea. That threat comes from this administration and its policies.