Many Americans support President Trump’s restrictions on foreign travel from some Muslim-majority countries. President Trump describes his executive action as necessary to protect Americans from potential violence by Muslim extremists. If that’s true then the travel ban is a good thing.
But it’s not true.
According to the conservative Cato Institute, President Trump restricted travel from Muslim nations whose citizens have in the past 40 years committed no act of terror on U.S. soil that took an American life.
Zero.
So the travel ban is unlikely to prevent loss of life from terrorism in the United States.
President Trump did not limit travel by residents of the nations that have accounted for most of the murderous acts perpetrated in the United States by foreign-born terrorists.
The Cato Institute reports that residents of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates committed acts of terror in our homeland that took the lives of 3,003 Americans (3,003 of the total of 3,024 American lives taken by foreign terrorists in the U.S. between 1975 and 2016).
This travel ban doesn’t appear to do much to protect Americans but it’s being sold as a necessity. That looks a lot like baloney to me.
Misguided restriction of the citizens of some Muslim-majority nations is costly. With this ban the President of the United States has shown deep suspicion and insulted Muslim people who are fighting on the front lines against ISIS, advancing America’s interests. The ban has turned away or detained people who have a right to be in our country and created anxiety and uncertainty for many employees, students and refugees, some of whom risked their lives serving America in the conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Substantial cost, little benefit and a lot of high volume marketing on the “necessity” of the product. Why is the President serving us baloney?
It is interesting to note that the Trump Organization has investments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon; countries excluded from the travel ban but which are the source of the majority of deadly terror perpetrated on American soil.
The fact that the President has hotels or golf courses in these countries may have nothing to do with excluding these known sources of terrorism from the travel ban.
Or maybe that’s where to get the choice cuts.
David Bedford
Juneau
