Seven Inconvenient Facts About Trump’s Refugee Actions

Via Breitbart

refugees

The sober and logical reasons for President Donald Trump’s executive order on refugees and visitors are rising above the noise after an evening of hysterical over-reactions and emotional meltdowns on the nation’s TV networks.

Advocates of sane, secure immigration policy have long noted that it’s almost impossible to have a reasonable discussion of the refugee and immigration issues, because it’s been sentimentalized and politicized beyond the realm of rational thought.

This weekend brings them another superb example of media-magnified shrieking about fascism, bleating about “white nationalists,” howling about “religious persecution,” falsely invocations of the Constitution, and theatrical sobbing on behalf of the Statue of Liberty.

For readers who want to wallow in the emotion, examples can be found in this handy dossier of hysteria compiled by the Washington Post. But clear-eyed adults prefer to examine plain facts about Trump’s executive order:

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1. It is NOT a “Muslim ban.” You will search the Executive Order in vain for mentions of Islam, or any other religion. By Sunday morning, the media began suffering acute attacks of honesty and writing headlines such as “Trump’s Latest Executive Order: Banning People From 7 Countries and More” (CNN) and printing the full text of the order.

Granted, CNN still slips the phrase “Muslim-majority countries” into every article about the order, including the post in which they reprinted its text in full, but CNN used the word “Muslim,” not Trump. The order applies to all citizens of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. It does not specify Muslims. The indefinite hold on Syrian refugees will affect Christians and Muslims alike.

As Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner points out, the largest Muslim-majority countries in the world are not named in the Executive Order.

More countries may be added to the moratorium in the days to come, as the Secretary of Homeland Security has been instructed to complete a 30-day review of nations that don’t provide adequate information for vetting visa applicants.

It’s also noteworthy that the ban is not absolute. Exceptions for “foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas” are expressly made in the order. The Departments of State and Homeland Security can also grant exceptions on a “case-by-case basis,” and “when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.”

There is a provision in the Executive Order that says applications based on religious persecution will be prioritized “provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.”

This has been denounced as a “stealth Muslim ban” by some of the very same people who were conspicuously silent when the Obama administration pushed Christians – who the most savagely persecuted minority in the Middle East, with only the Yazidis offering real competition — to the back of the migration line.

2. The order is based on security reviews conducted by President Barack Obama’s deputies. As White House counselor Kellyanne Conway pointed out on “Fox News Sunday,” the seven nations named in Trump’s executive order are drawn from the Terrorist Prevention Act of 2015. The 2015 “Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015” named Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Syria, while its 2016 update added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.

“These are countries that have a history of training, harboring, exporting terrorists. We can’t keep pretending and looking the other way,” said Conway.

3. The moratorium is largely temporary. Citizens of the seven countries named as security risks are banned from entering the United States for the next 90 days. Refugee processing is halted for 120 days. The longest-lived aspect of the ban may prove to be the halt on Syrian refugees, but that isn’t given a time frame at all. It will last “until such time as I have determined that sufficient changes have been made to the USRAP to ensure that admission of Syrian refugees is consistent with the national interest,” as President Trump wrote.

4. Obama banned immigration from Iraq, and Carter banned it from Iran.
“Fact-checking” website PolitiFact twists itself into knots to avoid giving a “true” rating to the absolutely true fact that Jimmy Carter banned Iranian immigration in 1980, unless applicants could prove they were enemies of the Khomenei theocracy.

One of Politifact’s phony talking points states that Carter “acted against Iranian nationals, not an entire religion.” As noted above, Trump’s Executive Order is precisely the same – it does not act against an “entire religion,” it names seven countries.

As for Barack Obama, he did indeed ban immigration from Iraq, for much longer than Trump’s order bans it from the seven listed nations, and none of the people melting down today uttered a peep of protest. Richard Grenell summed it up perfectly in a Tweet:

5. Trump’s refugee caps are comparable to Obama’s pre-2016 practices: David French, who was touted as a spoiler candidate to keep Donald Trump out of the White House during the presidential campaign – in other words, not a big Trump fan – wrote a lengthy and clear-headed analysis of the Executive Order for National ReviewHe noted that after the moratorium ends in 120 days, Trump caps refugee admissions at 50,000 per year… which is roughly the same as President Obama’s admissions in 2011 and 2012, and not far below the 70,000 per year cap in place from 2013 to 2015.

Obama had fairly low caps on refugees during the worst years of the Syrian civil war. He didn’t throw open the doors to mass refugee admissions until his final year in office. Depending on how Trump’s review of Syrian refugee policy turns out, he’s doing little more than returning admissions to normal levels after a four-month pause for security reviews.

6. The Executive Order is legal: Those invoking the Constitution to attack Trump’s order are simply embarrassing themselves. The President has clear statutory authority to take these actions. As noted, his predecessors did so, without much controversy.

Most of the legal arguments against Trump’s order summarized by USA Today are entirely specious, such as attacking him for “banning an entire religion,” which the order manifestly does not do. Critics of the order have a political opinion that it will in effect “ban Muslims,” but that’s not what it says. Designating specific nations as trouble spots and ordering a pause is entirely within the President’s authority, and there is ample precedent to prove it.

It should be possible to argue with the reasoning behind the order, or argue that it will have negative unintended consequences, without advancing hollow legal arguments. Of course, this is America 2017, so a wave of lawsuits will soon be sloshing through the courts.

7. This Executive Order is a security measure, not an arbitrary expression of supposed xenophobia. Conway stressed the need to enhance immigration security from trouble spots in her “Fox News Sunday” interview. French also addressed the subject in his post:

When we know our enemy is seeking to strike America and its allies through the refugee population, when we know they’ve succeeded in Europe, and when the administration has doubts about our ability to adequately vet the refugees we admit into this nation, a pause is again not just prudent but arguably necessary. It is important that we provide sufficient aid and protection to keep refugees safe and healthy in place, but it is not necessary to bring Syrians to the United States to fulfill our vital moral obligations.

French’s major objection to the Executive Order is that applying it to green-card holders is “madness,” but unfortunately many of the terrorists who attacked Americans during the Obama years were green-card holders. Daniel Horowitz and Chris Pandolfo addressed that subject at Conservative Review:

Both liberals and conservatives expressed concern over hundreds of individuals going over to fight for ISIS. We are already limited in how we can combat this growing threat among U.S. citizens. Given that it is completely legal to exclude non-citizens upon re-entry, Trump extended the ban to legal permanent residents as well.

If a Somali refugee is travelling back to Somalia (so much for credible fear of persecution!), government officials should have the ability to prevent that person from coming back when necessary. Obviously, there are some individuals from these seven countries who already have green cards and we might not want to exclude. That is why the order grants discretion to the State Department to issue case-by-case exemptions for “religious persecution, “or when the person is already in transit and denying admission would cause undue hardship.” A CBP agent is always stationed at any international airport from which these individuals would board a direct flight to the United States (Paris and Dubai, for example). That individual would not allow anyone covered by this ban onto a U.S.-bound flight unless he grants them a hardship exemption.

Indeed, it appears that green card holders returning yesterday from those seven countries were all granted entry.

Because he is a progressive globalist, Obama deliberately blinded us to security threats, in the name of political correctness and left-wing ideology. Ninety or 120 days isn’t much time for Trump to turn all that around, especially because it is unlikely much will change in the seven countries Trump named.

The hysterical reaction to Trump’s order illustrates the very thing that worries advocates of strong immigration security: Americans’ security is the lowest priority, far below progressive ideology, crass political opportunism, and emotional theater.

We’re being effectively told by the theatrical class to tolerate a certain amount of Islamic terrorism because their feelings would be hurt by the tough measures we need protest ourselves from a tough enemy. But this time, President Trump is proving tough enough to push our security up into the top priority.

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John
John

“Those invoking the Constitution to attack Trump’s order are simply embarrassing themselves. The President has clear statutory authority to take these actions.”

Not an argument against the ban. However, I would challenge anyone to find the phrase “Executive Order” in the Constitution. Doesn’t exist. The phrase has grown out of the need for the President to provide direction to the departments for which he is responsible and has grown into essentially a power to legislate around Congress. Needs to be addressed by the state legislatures in a Convention of States, along with a huge number of other issues that have given the feds the illusion that they are the supreme government in America vs. the sovereign states that created the Federal government and also gave themselves the power to modify, or abolish, the Federal government thru Article V.

Dude

One simple question: Did you defend Obama when he used EO’s to circumvent a Republican Congress voted in by THE PEOPLE? I tend to doubt it. I am not a supporter of Trump, but I can’t help but enjoy the irony of how Obama has paced the way for our new president to take the Executive Order out of hand.

Dutchman
Dutchman

We don’t need these people.

KaD
KaD

And I’d add these people have nothing to offer us. Most of them are illiterate in their OWN language much less English as well as having NO useful skills to bring into a country that even now doesn’t have enough jobs, particularly good ones, for the people who are already here.

SONNY JIM
SONNY JIM

NO ONE SHOULD BE ADMITTED UNLESS WE NEED THEM … PERIOD …
NO DISCRIMINATION EXCEPT OUR NEEDS !

Rainstorm
Rainstorm

The ban had to take effect in an immediate fashion to prevent 50% of the citizens of the affected nations from rushing to apply for Visas or travelling to the U.S. to beat an announced effective date.

Jake
Jake

Stop with all the garbage. When confronted, our argument should be something like this….The USA has $20 Trillion in national debt. In the last 8 years, the USA under Obama added $10 Trillion of new debt. The average rate on the nation debt hovers around 2.23%. The interest alone on the $20 Trillion is around $450 billion. The Treasury collects roughly $3.6Trillion but spends $4.3Trillion. So…the logical solution would be to either tax more or spend less. If things don’t change quickly, in less than 12 years, the interest could exceed the amount collected by the Treasury. So tell me what is your solution? Its obvious Trump is trying to increase the growth of the economy to collect more revenue for the Treasury. What’s your idea of saving the country?
I’ve tried this on progressives and they can’t respond. They spew their hatred of Trump which exceeds comprehension. The USA is headed for a major catastrophe folks. Prepare.

kokoda the deplorable
kokoda the deplorable

Jake….just listened to a long speech by V. Orban. A small portion described how Hungary went from an economic disaster to growth. One of the items was reducing all gov’t by 50%.

rhs jr
rhs jr

If liberals want Islamist here so bad, sponsor and support them at their own expense and in their own neighborhoods. If liberals want abortions, then pay to kill their own babies. If liberals want dope, then tax the heck out of it to pay for all the pot heads that become so screwed up they kill somebody on the roads or can’t hold a job anymore. If liberals want to pack fudge in strangers daily, then bear the financial responsibility for STDs like AIDS. If you don’t like the way Conservative Americans voted, go to Canada, Venezuela, Cuba or anywhere far far away so we don’t have to put up with your constant childish whining and ignorant destructive protests. The Wall was definitely not meant to keep you here.

Angus
Angus

Exceptionally strong article. I therefor expect the libtards to increase their propoganda and misinformation campaign and use rent a mobs.

But I do enjoy seeing libtard heads explode and Mussies crying. Why we ought to provide them with heaps of bacon sandwiches while they are rioting at airports to show our support.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

The sum total of the populations of these 7 Obama-picked countries is 13.7% of worldwide Muslim population. 86.3% of Muslims are not affected. And really, how many people are traveling to the US from Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. A lot of “bad hombres” in those countries. Iran seems to me a different story – put on the list because Israel wanted us to bomb them, so they are “Our Official Enemy”.

Stucky

“3. The moratorium is largely temporary. ” —– from the article

Uh-huh. Sure.

I believe the income tax was temporary also.

Pretty much NOTHING the government does is temporary. And in this case … I LIKE IT!! I hope this fucken (non) mooslim ban last forever.

overthecliff
overthecliff

If we held another election tomorrow, Trump would probably win with a little larger vote. He has shown the people he will honor his word.The left has shown us their ass and pussies. We do not trust the media to tell the truth. The demonstrators are the same people. Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street,Black Lives Matter- they just change t-shirts and signs and go to the next riot. Fuck them and fuck the media.

TrickleUpPolitics
TrickleUpPolitics

Obama and Hillary should have shut down the angry protests as soon as they started after Nov. 8th. Now, we are all going to reap the whirlwind. With CA threatening to secede but first to stop sending its taxes to DC, and constant violent protests, this country is starting to come apart at the seams. There will be a constitutional emergency if this keeps up. Double plus not good.

Suzanna
Suzanna

everyone has a comment I think is pretty darn good…
allow me to commend you all. Fantastic smarties!

RiNS

Not sure if you folks heard but there was an attack on Mosque in Quebec City. At least one had an AK-47. It was at first being reported that those responsible were “White Nationalists”. Reading the initial reports you can almost read thru the lines the hope that that was true. Further the anti-Trump Hysteria. But not to be. Seems at least one was a recent Immigrant from MENA. Might be why there are prayer and vigils spreading across Country instead of protests.

Maybe that moratorium isn’t such a bad idea!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-city-mosque-gun-shots-1.3957686

James the Wanderer

Scott Adams’ recent column on cognitive dissonance / distress was right on. Liberals feel that Obama’s executive orders are reasonable and restrained, because they promote and are in agreement with OUR worldview. Trump’s executive orders are racist, discriminatory and unConstitutional, because they conflict with OUR worldview.
We kept quiet (largely) for eight years of Progressive disasters and insanity; you can keep (mostly) quiet now, while we rebuild what you destroyed. And you might notice; while the courts may have a say in some of these matters, We The People have a larger say, and are saying it. I hope Chuck Schumer weeps a LOT over the next couple of years, until he is replaced, at which point he can STFU. And Obama is still stirring the pot, I read; he can STFU as well, for the rest of his days, preferably.

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