Trump bars Muslims from seven countries from entering U.S.

[Daniel]

The United States is shutting its door to refugees fleeing war-torn Syria and suspending entry by citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations, including Iraq, Iran and Libya.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing the steps on Friday, asserting the moves would help protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks.

Trump signs order to bar refugees from some Muslim-majority countries (Reuters)

The order will institute “new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,” said Mr. Trump. “We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love, deeply, our people.”

But experts and refugee advocates say the measures betray the country’s duty to help the vulnerable and undermine America’s relationships with key allies while having almost no effect on security at home.

“Tears are running down the cheeks of the Statue of Liberty tonight,” said U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, in a statement. “A grand tradition of America … has been stomped upon.” He called Mr. Trump’s order “backward and nasty.”

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump advocated a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. He later backtracked and said that he would deny entry to citizens of countries with ties to terrorism. He also repeatedly conflated the issue of refugees with the threat of Islamic extremism, calling Syrian refugees “a Trojan horse.”

The executive order Mr. Trump signed Friday is a scaled-back version of the Muslim ban, say experts. It denies entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations – Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen – for at least 90 days, with exceptions for diplomats.

The order also portrays refugees as a security threat. Mr. Trump directed the government to halve the total number of refugees entering the U.S. in the current fiscal year to 50,000. The order freezes all refugee admissions for 120 days and indefinitely stops the admission of Syrian refugees until unspecified changes are made to the program. Refugees already undergo a rigorous and extensive vetting process that can take years before they are allowed to enter the U.S.

Mr. Trump has made his pledges on national security a centrepiece of his first days in office. Earlier this week, he signed an order to push ahead with the construction of a wall along the border between the U.S. and Mexico. That led to an outbreak of tensions between the two neighbours and the cancellation of a visit by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to Washington planned for next week.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Pena Nieto spoke by phone for an hour on Friday, a conversation Mr. Trump described as “very friendly” even as he reiterated his contention that Mexico had made the U.S. “look foolish” in trade negotiations and had failed to prevent drugs from “pouring” across the border.

Later on Friday, after meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Mr. Trump travelled to the Pentagon, where he signed the executive order and a second order focused on rebuilding U.S. military capacity.

Mr. Trump signed the executive order concerning refugees on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day with painful echoes of a time when the U.S. closed its doors to Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution who sought refuge in the country.

“It’s embarrassing to me as an American that we would be so restrictive at a time when the refugee situation has never been more desperate,” said Stephen Legomsky, a former senior counsel for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and an expert on immigration law. “It sends a regrettable message to the world.”

Mr. Legomsky said that the President has the authority to decide how many refugees the U.S. will admit and from which regions. “Ultimately, the decision is his,” said Mr. Legomsky. However, Mr. Trump’s order could be subject to constitutional challenge if it was found to be a pretext for a religious test on refugee admissions.

The order mandates changes in the priorities used by the U.S. government to admit refugees. To the extent the law permits, the U.S. will prioritize refugees facing religious-based persecution, provided they belong to a religious minority in their country. The language suggests that the U.S. will focus on admitting Christian and other religious minorities from Muslim-majority nations.

In an interview on Friday with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Mr. Trump confirmed that admitting persecuted Christians would be a priority in the U.S. refugee program. “They were treated horribly,” said Mr. Trump.

The moves in Mr. Trump’s order would have done nothing to prevent the two most deadly attacks in recent years carried out in the name of Islamic extremism. In the attacks in Orlando, Fla., and San Bernardino, Calif., the perpetrators were two radicalized American citizens and a Pakistani woman who entered the country on a spousal visa.

The steps announced Friday to suspend entry by citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations are a response to a “phantom menace,” wrote Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. Foreigners from those seven nations have killed no Americans in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2015, he said.

Refugee advocates say that the order will harm both vulnerable people seeking safety and U.S. interests.

“It seems pretty likely that this is just a pretext for religious discrimination,” said Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “From a national-security standpoint, if Trump is really serious about fighting [the Islamic State], he’s going to need the co-operation of our allies like Jordan and Turkey” – countries that face a major challenge in grappling with huge numbers of Syrian refugees.

Ms. Heller’s organization represents 600 families currently in the U.S. refugee system, the vast majority of them from Middle Eastern nations. She said her focus will be on making sure that all of the refugees who are about to arrive in the U.S. will be able to enter and, where necessary, on referring their cases to other countries such as Canada.

Compared with Canada, the U.S. has taken in a small number of Syrian refugees. In the 12 months through September, 2016, the U.S. admitted 12,600 Syrian refugees, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute. In recent months, Syrian refugees have continued to arrive. Across the country, communities have been getting ready to welcome them.

About 100 refugees from Syria and Iraq were due to settle in Rutland, Vt., a small New England town struggling with a shrinking population. The first two families arrived earlier this month. Now those families “will probably be the last families,” said Christopher Louras, Rutland’s mayor, in a radio interview this week.

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 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-politics/donald-trump-refugees-syria-executive-order/article33809191/ 

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