I want to talk about the immigration ban.
However, in doing so, I don’t plan on spending any time on the question, “Is Trump Hitler?” He signed an order temporarily shutting down immigration from certain countries in order to improve the vetting process for said immigrants and thus, make sure Americans are safe. Anyone who doesn’t think the president of the U.S. is well within his right to do that is being hysterical. Furthermore, just because we pride ourselves on being a country of immigrants does not mean that anyone and everyone should be able to come in at anytime or else we are hateful. That has never been the case. That’s not to say that parts of the Executive Order’s design shouldn’t be critiqued.
But let’s backtrack for a second.
In 2011, after two Iraqi immigrants in Kentucky were revealed to be Al-Qaeda (in Iraq) connected terrorists, President Obama ordered the records of 58,000 Iraqi immigrants to be reexamined and instituted a stricter vetting process for Iraqi refugees. The more thorough vetting process seemed to delay visas to Iraqi refugees. Although there was no official order to delay visas, we can infer that it was the result of the new process by looking at the numbers of Iraqi refugees entering the U.S. by year: 18,251 in 2010, 6,339 in 2011 and 16,369 in 2012. As you can see, visas to Iraqis were slowed dramatically in 2011. Thus, President Obama, determining there to be a potential threat from the refugees, instituted a stricter vetting process, and in doing so slowed the influx of Iraqis. President Trump determined a similar threat, but decided to delay visas completely to seven risk countries President Trump’s action was much more aggressive and wider in scope. Nonetheless, and as much as the media wants to deny it, these are very similar behaviors: both seek to improve the vetting process for refugees from Muslim-majority countries due to fears of terrorism.
Continue reading “The Immigration Ban Examined”