Loud voices consistently cry out against the President’s intent to protect U.S. citizens by putting a temporary ban on those coming from seven countries with governments so unstable that no one can verify an individual’s identity, his nationality, or his reason for coming into the United States. The left, most of whom believe in “open borders,” decry this move as being un American. “We are a country of immigrants!” they shout. And in that, they are correct. But let’s look at this argument logically and in the context of our history, something they rarely do.
Let’s consider Native Americans who were the first to have open borders, albeit not by choice. Look at how that worked out for them! Those same immigrants (we call them “pilgrims” and “colonists”) learned what not to do. Even as a fledgling country, the United States began to monitor other immigrants who wanted to come to our country to live, imposing quotas and regulations that limited the number of immigrants from certain countries and areas of the world. It is only in the last few decades that people have begun flooding across our southern borders, and only recently that little effort has been made to stop that flood.
The problem of Islamic Extremism has added a new dimension to that growing problem following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and even earlier, following the first World Trade Center attack. We are now faced with an implacable enemy who often hides among the innocent visitors to our country, among the college students and the tourists, among the immigrants and the refugees. Nothing identifies them until they commit an act of terror. To believe that there would not be terrorists among those coming to the U.S. from countries where we can not verify their background is naive at best and self-destructive at the worst.
Let’s look at what has happened to countries with large populations of Muslim immigrants. France suffered the attack on the Paris newspaper, then on the nightclub and sports stadium, on a business in southern France, and finally in Nice during the Bastille Day celebration. Over 230 were killed and hundreds of others injured.
Germany, who has taken in more refugees from the Middle East than any other country, has seen such a spate of terrorist attacks that, according to CNN, “many Germans have expressed opposition to the sudden arrival of so many, predominantly Muslim, migrants, questioning their ability to adapt to a European way of life.”
On New Year’s Eve 2015, bands of refugee men roamed the square in Cologne, Germany commiting ninety criminal acts, about a quarter of them sexual assaults and a number of similar assaults were reported that night in Hamburg, Germany.
On July 18 of this year, a teenage Afghan refugee hacked passengers on a train in Wurtzburg with an ax and a knife, wounding five.
On July 22, an Iranian teenager shouting “Allahu Akbar” went on a shooting rampage in a mall in Munich, killing 9 and wounding 18.
On July 24, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee killed a woman with a machete and wounded 5 others.
That same day, a Syrian refugee who had been denied asylum, strapped on a bomb and blew himself up outside a bar in Ansbach, wounding 15 although he only succeeded in killing himself.
In November, a 12-year-old Iraqui boy tried unsuccessfully to blow up a Christmas market in Ludwigshafen.
And on December 19, a man drove a truck into the Christmas Market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 48.
In recent years, we have not been immune from attacks: Fort Hood, San Bernadino, Orlando, the Boston Marathon, the recruiting office in Tennessee. There are currently terror related investigations going on in all fifty states involving some 900 Muslim individuals. More importantly for President Trump’s temporary ban on immigration, the Washington Times reports that 72 individuals from those very countries that would be affected by the ban have been convicted in the U.S. of terrorist activities.
It only makes sense to limit immigrants from those countries to those that have worked with or for the U.S. in their fight against ISIS. We can not trust that others, no matter how innocent they may look, are not coming here to kill and maim as many of us as they can.
President Trump has not banned all Muslims from coming to this country, regardless of what the media and the left persist in saying. This is not a ban against Muslims. (Although, we might remember that there have been no terrorist attacks in the United States committed by radical Christian extremists or radical Jewish extremists in the name of God!) Had the President intended to ban all Muslims from the U.S. he would also have included Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, India and countless other countries with large Muslim populations in the ban. He did not.
The final misconception that fuels the rage of the left and the uninformed young is the idea that our constitution protects us from discrimination on the basis of religion. Yes, it does, but the constitution only applies here to American citizens. It is our constitution and it governs our rights, not the rights of visitors, legal or illegal, to this country. Thus it remains, as it has always been, the right and duty of the President and the Congress to deny entry into this country to anyone that they may perceive as presenting potential harm to our citizens.
President Trump is well within his rights to issue a temporary ban. And we will be safer because of it!