A Case for Resistance: The Muslim Ban

 

Before he left office, President Barack Obama said, “I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in.”

Actually, he didn’t say that. Dick Cheney said that last Monday on The Hugh Hewitt Show.

If that isn’t a barometer for how very far from normal we are, I don’t know what is.

Last Friday on Holocaust Remembrance Day, president Donald Trump signed an executive order banning refugees from Syria indefinitely, and placed a temporary ban on all Muslims from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. It’s worth remembering that during World War II, we turned away a ship of more than 900 Jewish refugees seeking shelter from Nazi Germany. Hundreds of them died in concentration camps.

To repeat: Donald Trump signed an anti-immigration executive order on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

This executive order isn’t just morally reprehensible, it’s decidedly un-American. It simultaneously hurts American interests and erodes American values. Muslim interpreters and allies who helped our troops on the ground overseas are now barred from entry. Innocent people fleeing from warzones, with no connection to terrorism whatsoever, are going to die because of this.

We are now a nation that turns its back on men, women and children who want nothing more than to escape evil, and not have bombs dropped on their heads.

But the craven depravity doesn’t stop there. This executive order banned people with green cards from the nations listed. In other words, people who have already been vetted by our country and granted residency were being denied reentry. Sunday night, the Director of Homeland Security had to intervene to stop this portion of the order, despite the White House resisting to the point of chaos.

This executive order explicitly uses 9/11 as a reason why the ban is in place. Yet of the 9/11 hijackers countries of origin, not one is listed on the ban.

This executive order bars entry from seven countries. Yet of those seven countries, not one Muslim has killed an American on US soil in an act of terrorism since 1975.

This executive order is in direct contradiction with the facts. The Cato Institute (a Libertarian think tank) found that the odds of being killed by a refugee terrorist were about one in 3.6 billion. Your clothes are more likely to kill you. Toddlers are more likely to kill you. Since 9/11, right wing extremists have killed almost twice as many Americans on US soil than radical Islamists. In fact, every terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 was committed by US citizens or legal residents—not refugees or visa holders.

This executive order is absolutely a Muslim ban. Rudy Giuliani admitted as much on Fox News Saturday night when he said Trump asked for a Muslim ban, and ordered a commission to do it legally. Trump himself called it a ban when he tweeted on Monday.

This executive order also doesn’t include Muslim-majority countries where the Trump Organization has done business or pursued potential deals. Trump claimed on Sunday that this was only because Obama singled out those seven countries and denied people visas from there. That’s not entirely true. The Obama administration restricted access to the Visa Waiver Program, which allows people visiting the US for less than 90 days to enter without a visa. Restricted access—not a ban or denial of visa applications or a rejection of green card holders.

Lastly, it should be noted that Trump argued this ban is the same as what the Obama administration did in Iraq in 2011. This is not true. As The Washington Post points out, Obama never announced there was a ban on visa applications, and there was never policy preventing Iraqis from traveling to the US. The process may have been temporarily slowed, but there was never a stop.

When you start your presidency amidst a firestorm of lies, it becomes difficult to differentiate between facts and alternative facts.

So what’s this all about?

 

*****

 

First, some perspective.

I don’t like sharing personal stories on here, but in this case I’ll break my rule.

My wife is an immigrant. She already went through the vetting process of obtaining a student visa to go to school here, and a work visa so she could be legally employed.

We spent the better part of a year and a half trying to get her a green card. The process is painstakingly long, and requires more paperwork than a Ph.D. So we hired an immigration lawyer, who cost an eye-popping amount of money, not to mention the money we sent to the government just to actually get the green card.

It is not cheap to come here legally. We’re talking thousands of dollars.

And then there’s the process itself. The paperwork is arduous—yes, it’s mitigated by the work the lawyers do, but only so much. We had to get Americans we knew to write letters for her, vouching for her as a good candidate for permanent residency. Her work had to sponsor her, agreeing to allow her to work there on a visa and then eventually vouching for the green card. She had to set up doctor appointments for physicals, immunization shots, disease screenings, and more.

Then, more paperwork and background checks and screenings.

After more than a year, we hadn’t heard anything from Homeland Security, and began to worry. The final interview was supposed to be months ago, and yet, nothing. So we contacted our lawyers who advised us to file for an extension. This would have been another $700 to do. We opted to wait and see if they would contact us prior to the deadline—a risky endeavor given that if the deadline were to pass, she would have to leave the country, and potentially lose her job.

The stakes were very, very real.

Finally, we got the notice to come into our local Homeland Security office in Detroit. So we go into the final interview process, where a Homeland Security officer escorted us to an office in the back. She swore us in, and for the following hour we both answered questions—my wife as the applicant and me as the sponsor. By the end of the interview, the officer noticed that my wife’s medical records that she submitted over a year ago were past the date of acceptance. They had to be less than a year old, and they were literally days past the year date. None of this was our fault. Because we moved from Indiana to Detroit, the Department of Homeland Security had misplaced our paperwork, hence the delay right up to the deadline. Yet the officer politely told us that she could not accept my wife as a permanent resident until she got another round of medical examinations done.

We sat in the parking lot afterward, distraught and frustrated. After 15 months, we weren’t done yet because of mistakes that weren’t ours. But we trudged on. We called immigration doctors and booked the quickest appointment we could. We paid another $300 or so for those exams.

I took the results back into Homeland Security and a couple weeks later, after almost a year and a half, my wife had her green card.

Oh, I should probably tell you my wife is Canadian. Canada is not exactly an enemy of the state.

I tell you this story not to garner sympathy for what she went through, but rather as an example of how grueling and exhaustive our immigration process already is. And all this for a Canadian who already had visas to go to school and work in the US, was already paying US taxes, and who didn’t have a criminal history, or any ties to terrorism, or any reasonable reasons to deny a green card.

Our country already has extreme vetting. “Open borders” is a myth. Thanks to the policies of the Bush and Obama administrations—and I say this with all sincerity—our country is safer than at any point prior to 9/11.

People emigrating from Muslim-majority countries have it even tougher. Refugees have it tougher than that. They typically have to go through about 20 steps to gain entry, including registration with the United Nations, an interview with the State Department, multiple background checks (some higher-level, depending), three fingerprint screenings, case reviews and further interviews by Homeland Security and possibly the FBI. The entire process usually takes between 18-24 months.

Again, everything we went through, and everything I listed was all proper procedure during the Obama administration. Getting into this country legally is anything but easy.

So here’s something to ponder. Our economy is growing, unemployment is fairly low, and we’re not at war with any country—only terrorism. So if things are going relatively well, and the Trump administration feels the need to send out this awful executive order, what happens if things take a turn?

I’ll let you contemplate that question. I’ll answer the next one.

 

*****

 

So what’s this about?

It’s about power and fear.

Trump’s inner circle is tightening, and power is being consolidated. Over the weekend Steve Bannon was appointed to the National Security Counsel, while the Joint Chiefs and Director of National Intelligence were kicked off. Those State Department resignations may not have been resignations at all, but rather a mass purge by the Trump administration, leaving many critical roles in the State Department vacant over a tumultuous weekend. And the Department of Homeland Security—the key role for anything regarding immigration—was left out from construction of the executive order, and had very little instruction as to how it would work.

This does not breed cohesion. This breeds chaos on a national scale, felt on a global one. This Muslim ban isn’t based on facts or logic. It’s based on emotion and power, preying on our worst fears and leveraging them into xenophobic law. The executive order may even have an adverse effect on our war against ISIS. Interpreters and Muslim allies may not be so quick to help us without the possibility of immigration, and a known ISIS recruiting tool is anti-Muslim propaganda, which we are now readily supplying.

We should remember that it is perfectly possible to be vigilant against radical Islamism while maintaining our core values and not ignoring the plight of refugees. If we’re being honest, the Obama administration kept us fairly safe, and they weren’t exactly liberal when it came to refugees and immigration policy. As David French correctly points out in the National Review, the ceiling for how many refugees we let in each year has been steady since 2002, and almost each year we never reach it. The Obama administration’s Syrian refugee admission record was paltry prior to 2016, and that’s putting it nicely. 2016 was an exception because of the heightened Syrian crisis, but it’s clear Trump wants to return to the standard of years prior.

Reasonable people can debate this. But implementation and execution matters. It does not appear the Trump administration took this into consideration. Or worse yet they did, and got the fear and chaos they wanted.

The next four years may be the biggest test our democracy has ever faced. America has always been brave enough to fight battles, but seldom brave enough to fight our own prejudices. Our values and principles may be challenged with alarming regularity.

But if there is one good thing—one silver lining—to come from all of Trump’s misguided demagoguery, it’s that people haven’t exactly taken it lying down. There were protests at JFK airport. There was a crowd cheering as people got off international flights at Dulles airport in Dallas. The ACLU received over $20 million in donations over the weekend—four times their typical annual amount. And when the International Refugee Assistance Project pressed the panic button and put out a call for help from lawyers, they got 3000 volunteers in four hours. Then those lawyers fought Trump in court and won, with the judge granting a stay on the executive order.

None of this mentions the millions of people who participated in the Women’s March, in this country and around the world.

Trump has galvanized Americans, and not in the way he thought he would. People have come together in defense of American values, core liberties, and protection of our most vulnerable under this administration. Calling senators and state representatives, signing petitions, donating to humanitarian organizations and/or legal aid groups, peaceful protesting, posting on social media or just talking about this are all forms of defense.

As Americans we now must choose whether to continue this defense, or follow the chaos wrought by the Trump administration. Of course, I’ve already made my choice.

My advice can be summed up in one word: Resist.