By Elizabeth Westbrook and Nick Rosenthal
On Friday, Jan. 27, President Donald Trump, signed into law an Executive Order on Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nations or as many have put it, the ‘Muslim Ban.’ In the name of national security, the new law bans travel from seven Muslim-majority countries and, in doing so, patently villainizes not only an entire religion but some of the world’s most vulnerable individuals as well, refugees.
It suspends all American refugee programs for 120 days, indefinitely bans the arrival of Syrian immigrants and refugees into the United States, and more than halves the U.S.’s immigrant acceptance cap to 50,000 individuals from 110,000.
In light of what has occurred over the course of his first week in office, it is no surprise that refugees who are fleeing a civil war and are victims of terror themselves are now the villains in Trump’s world of “alternative facts.” However, rather than lying about the size of his inauguration crowd, Trump is claiming that an arbitrary group of Muslim nations are responsible for chronically undermining this country’s national security.
In the Order, Trump defends his law by citing the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
“The visa-issuance process plays a crucial role in detecting individuals with terrorist ties and stopping them from entering the United States. Perhaps in no instance was that more apparent than the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when State Department policy prevented consular officers from properly scrutinizing the visa applications of several of the 19 foreign nationals who went on to murder nearly 3,000 Americans.”
At first glance, this argument for the increased vetting of individuals who hail from the same nations as those who carried out the horrific atrocities of 9/11 seems logical. However, as anyone who has done basic research into the 9/11 attacks knows, the 19 terrorists responsible were from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, not a single one of which is named in the Executive Order. The main reason? Trump has business associates in the above countries but not in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen or Somalia, the seven nations that are the focus of his “patriotic act.”
The ban will cause irreparable damage to individuals and families being targeted in conflict zones who rely so profoundly on foreign countries to uphold their moral duty in times of crisis. As countries around the world respond to the global refugee crisis, President Trump is ripping America from its responsibilities and founding values by driving this nation’s government away from the colossal task at hand.
Instead of combatting terrorism, Trump is condemning those individuals in the most intense, immediate danger to remain amongst those who target them. In a superficial, frivolous attempt to ‘protect the nation from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals’ the American government ignores the facts: Fewer than one percent of all refugees are settled in third countries like the United States, as of September 2015 of the 2,034 Syrian refugees admitted into the US since 2011 zero have been arrested or removed on terrorism charges, and finally, Americans are more likely to die due to cows, which kill on average 20 people a year, than an Islamic terrorist attack. Muslims living in the United States will also feel the effect of the Executive Order as it legitimizes Islamophobic rhetoric and violence. A rise in hate crimes following Trump’s election has proven beyond doubt that, whenever racism and xenophobia are normalized, harassment and violence will inevitably and ominously follow.
