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I am honestly astounded that anybody is upset about President Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from a handful of countries.
And maybe that makes me a blockhead, or maybe it just makes me a truth teller.
First of all, let’s get this straight: it’s not a Muslim ban.
86% of all Muslims on earth are still completely free to come to America; they’re in the other 43 majority-Muslim countries not affected by the order.
The fact is that the 7 countries that are subject to a 90-day hold on people coming in from them are very special countries.
The reason these countries were chosen (originally by the Obama Administration) is because one of them - Iran - is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and they will not share anti-terrorism information with us.
The other 6 countries (the likes of Yemen, Somalia, Libya, etc.) do not have functioning central governments or a police data system, so we can’t verify immigration information.
They don’t have any records we can check.
There’s no way to truly vet people coming in.
Other Muslim countries, just like most countries in general around the world, do have diplomatic structures and police systems and criminal databases, so we can verify information.
We can check names with them and they can check names with us and it’s all good.
So President Trump’s plan simply calls for us to take 90 days to figure out how to properly vet folks coming from the unstable governmental systems so they too can enter the country appropriately.
To interpret that as xenophobic or hateful or anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim is not to be confused, it is to tell a bald-faced lie.
And here in Syracuse specifically, I sure wish someone would contact the mayor and straighten her out on that.