Ravi
Arvind Palat
(Professor, Department of Sociology, Binghamton University. He can be reached at palat@binghamton.edu)
It is hard
to think of a more morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest, and politically
mendacious policy than President Trump’s executive order “Protecting the nation
from foreign terrorist entry into the United States.” It barred the immigrant
or non-immigrant entry into the United States from seven Muslim-majority
countries—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Libya—for 90 days
except for Christian minorities. This ban applied initially also to US legal
permanent residents (LPR) who were born in these countries. And it barred the
entry of refugees from Syria for 120 days.
It is
morally bankrupt because LPR or ‘green card’ holders are subject to most rights
of US citizens including the right not to be discriminated against and the ability
to serve in the military. The executive order would have banned a serving US
military officer from returning to the country after fighting in one of the
numerous wars the US is waging if she or he had been born in one of the seven
‘countries of concern.’ It is telling these warriors that they can shed blood
for the United States but cannot enter it. Is there anything more morally
bankrupt than this?
The 1951
Geneva Convention on Refugees of which the US is a signatory obligates
countries to take in refugees from wars on humanitarian grounds. As an
international treaty it has the force of law within this country. Admission of
refugees, especially from Syria, is a rigorous process. As is made clear in the
official State department website (https://www.state.gov/j/prm/ra/admissions/),
processing of applications can take 18-24 months. But for many, it takes much
longer. Five years after Sgt. Ali Alsaeedy of the 82nd Airborne division filed
refugee papers for his parents—five long years during which his father
died—when his mother, Hamidyah Al Saeedi finally landed in New York’s JFK
airport last Saturday, she was held for 33 hours, handcuffed for some of the
time, and released only after her son procured a habeas petition. Can there be
anything more morally bankrupt than this?
Many of the
refugees from Iraq are people, like Sgt.Alsaeedy, who had first worked for the
US, saved US lives, and because of that, their own lives became vulnerable.
Doesn’t the US have a moral obligation to these people? Is it morally
acceptable to ban them and their aged parents? Or to hold them at airports for
long? Nada, a Yazidi woman whose husband, Khalas, was an interpreter for the US
forces in Iraq was turned back from boarding a flight in Dubai to come and join
her husband in Washington, DC because of President Trump’s executive order. She
was bundled into a plane back to Iraq where her fate is anything but certain.
Can there be anything more morally bankrupt than this?
Another
Yazidi woman, VianDakhil, the only Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament who
had pleaded with the world to save her people from extinction at the hands of
ISIS was to arrive in Washington to receive the Lantos Human Rights prize at
the Capitol—a prize named after Congressman Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust
survivor to serve in the US Congress. Yet she is barred by the executive order
from boarding a plane to receive the award. Can there be anything more morally
bankrupt than this?
We must also
investigate how the refugees were created. Take the case of Libya—it was ruled
by an autocrat but it also had high levels of income and standards of living.
It blocked migrants from Africa crossing the Mediterranean. When a small
rebellion broke out, US led airstrikes on the country which destroyed its infrastructure,
killed its dictator, and led to the country being partitioned by warlords. This
was the cause of the refugee crisis. In Yemen, the US and the UK supplied Saudi
Arabia with munitions to intervene in a civil war that created the refugees. In
Iraq, again, the 2003 invasion by US-led forces on the blatantly false claim
that the country was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, destabilized the
country and led to the flow of refugees. If the actions of the US directly
created refugees, on humanitarian grounds does this country not have a
responsibility to care for them?
When
Candidate Trump called for a total ban on Muslims entering the United States in
December 2015, Mike Pence, then governor of Indiana called it “offensive and
unconstitutional.” House Speaker Paul Ryan railed against Trump’s call for a
ban on Muslims coming to this country. Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell
said it was “completely and totally inconsistent with American values.” And
General Mattis, the new Defence Secretary, said that a ban on Muslims would
make allies think “we have lost faith in reason.” Yet, today these intellectual
titans are all offering support to the president. Can there be anything more
morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest, and politically mendacious than
this?
In the last
40 years, not a single US citizen has been killed in North America by a citizen
of the seven ‘countries of concern’ named in the executive order. Citizens of
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon have been responsible
for over 3000 deaths, chiefly from 9/11. Yet, nationals from these countries
are not included in the exclusion order. Strangely enough, the Trump
Organization has investments in most of these countries but not in the
‘countries of concern.’ Can there be anything more morally bankrupt,
intellectually dishonest, and politically mendacious than this?
If the media
and the Democrats have been relentless in critiquing the executive order, it is
important to recall that the order itself did not refer to the seven countries;
it barred the entry into the US “of aliens from countries referred to in
section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12).” This referred to the
Omnibus Appropriations Act of Fiscal Year 2016 signed into law by President
Obama in December 2015. It was the Obama administration which initially
highlighted problems with individuals from these countries—and as we have seen
none of them have been responsible for acts of ‘terrorism’ in the United
States.
Even
earlier, after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995—the perpetrators of which were
white Christian Americans—President Clinton pushed the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act which was the first legislation
to authorize fast-track deportation of refugees and even LPR. The Democrats, in
other words, created the laws that enabled President Trump to issue his
Islamophobic executive order. It is intellectually dishonest for news media to
blank out this information in its report of President Trump’s executive order.
In short,
the executive order violates international and US domestic law: there can be no
religious exceptions to immigration; signatories to the Geneva Convention have
an obligation to extend protection on a humanitarian basis. Violating these
legal obligations underlines the United States’ position as an exceptional
nation: an exceptionally morally bankrupt one.
