This is simply madness.
An Iraqi who had risked his life serving as an interpreter for US forces was detained overnight and handcuffed Saturday after he got off the plane in New York City. Another former interpreter had to cancel his plans to move to the US. A young Somali man who had been living in a refugee camp in Kenya for years, had been cleared for resettlement in the US, and was preparing to leave, has now been told he can’t come.
A refugee family from Syria who had already boarded the plane for their promised asylum in the US were removed and told they couldn’t come. Also taken off their plane and turned away: an Iraqi family with valid visas who had sold their home and everything they owned to be able to move to the US.
At the San Francisco airport, a non-Muslim Iranian man with a valid visa, coming to the US for his first meeting with his brothers and mother in six years, was sent back home. A Stanford University PhD student – a legal immigrant with a green card – was detained, handcuffed, and grilled about her thoughts about terrorism.
Amazon, Microsoft, and other tech giants are scrambling to help stranded employees who work in the US with green cards or temporary visas.
All weekend, the media added examples. Two University of Massachusetts professors who had been in France for a scientific conference: detained at Boston’s Logan Airport. An Iranian scientist with a valid visa, preparing to move to the US: prevented from boarding her plane. An Iranian scientist headed to Boston to do cardiovascular research: plans canceled.
Academics planning to come to the US for conferences, foreign students at US universities who had been abroad visiting families, elderly people preparing for long-awaited trips to the US to visit relatives: all of them carefully vetted previously and cleared. Now, they’re wrapped up in Trump’s nativist, extreme-vetting net.
OK, so a few people were inconvenienced. Maybe some felt humiliated. Maybe some were frightened. “That’s a small price to pay,” as Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway put it, to protect millions of us from terrorist attacks.
We’ve had terrorist attacks, certainly, large and small. But the big one, on September 11, 2001, was planned and executed predominantly by people from Saudi Arabia, which isn’t on Trump’s banned-nations list. And the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings were carried out by two young legal immigrants from… the Soviet Union. The oldest still had Russian citizenship. (Russia’s not on Trump’s banned-nations list either.)
The other attacks that were apparently inspired by foreign terrorist propaganda – San Bernardino, Orlando – were carried out by US citizens who said they got that inspiration from the internet. Trump has banned entry of human beings with a legal right to come here, not the internet. (Not yet, anyway.)
If we had any doubts before, now we know: Donald Trump plans to do exactly what he promised during his campaign. And as the weekend’s chaos shows, he doesn’t understand the ramifications of those promises, nor does he care.
That’s frightening enough. Worse, though, his vice president and key Republican leaders in Congress don’t seem to care, either. And given their intelligence and their experience, we have to assume that they do understand the ramifications.
So the chaos may continue. As I read the news spilling out Sunday morning, I imagined Vladimir Putin and his close aides following the same reports from their side of the world. And laughing. Slapping their thighs, raising their glasses in a toast, and laughing.
I don’t imagine Chinese leaders are reacting much differently. And we don’t have to guess how actual terrorist groups will use this in their propaganda.
All the way through the dreadful election campaign, I kept trying to convince myself that Trump doesn’t represent most Americans. This isn’t who we are. It isn’t.
Is it?
This article appears in The Smallest Minority.
“This isnt who we are. It isnt. Is it? ” No, I don’t think so, but we are a nation of ESCAPISTS. We constantly look for ways to remove ourselves from our political and personal problems.
Enter, Donald Trump and his crazy people. There is now no escaping. He is all pervasive. He and his people are on the news, constantly and they are in our discussions with family and friends.
So, now, we have to FIGHT BACK, whether we want to, or not. Our sanity depends on our involvement. We are all involved, like it our not. It is like fighting a DIS-EASE.
And here in Rochester, we are also confronted by some of the same craziness, the same lies, the same threats. But we can fight back. We can fight poverty and ignorance, everywhere we can. It is a matter of conscience, now.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Donald Trump may be a blessing in disguise, to wake us up to our potential for good.
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There is much that can be legitimately debated regarding President Trumps executive order on immigration but the February 1-7 Urban Journal was uncharacteristically for Ms. Towler light on facts and reasoned discourse, and excessively alarmist. Here are some of the facts missing from that piece:
1. It was not Trump, but President Obama who concluded that the 7 countries at issue are so dangerous that if a European citizen or anyone else eligible to enter the US without a visa merely visited them, that citizen lost the right to enter our country without a visa.
2. The Trump order says that for 90 days, citizens of these countries are denied entry into the US while we investigate how better to review a visa applicants possible terror connections.
3. Case-by-case exceptions are available.
4. The 1965 law that some cite in opposition to the order was not a security measure it was directed toward previous immigration quotas designed to preserve the countrys ethnic balance. The presidents constitutional power over national security takes precedence over a congressional anti-discrimination clause. Also, prior administrations agreed with Trumps interpretation e.g., President Carter banned all visas issued to Iranian citizens after his Justice Department concluded that national origin exclusions were legal, notwithstanding the 1965 law.
The order certainly could have been planned, implemented and explained better, but lets stick with the facts. It is true that terrorism comes from many sources, domestic as well as foreign, but I for one am certainly willing to trust the Obama Administrations designation of these 7 specific countries as particularly dangerous.
Like most City articles, this is uninformed and disgustingly biased.
These countries were place on a list during the OBAMA Administration, Trump is simply moving it forward.
More so Obama did a similar ban in 2011 for Iraq. Where was the outrage then?
I’ve lived in Rochester half of my life now, and am truly saddened by it’s lack of diversity of thought.The city of Rochester, like the rest of NY state , claims diversity but the communities show otherwise. The City “Newspaper” is a perfect example of a Slanted, dishonest, “news” organization the uses “facts” conveniently enough to propagate their agenda.
BTW, this is in the constitution.
The first provision is Article I, Section 8, Clause 4, which empowers Congress, To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization. Combined with Congresss shared power with the president to govern the foreign policy of the nation, this provision gives the two elected branches discretion on who enters this country, how long they can stay, under what conditions, and by what process some of them can become citizens.