Washington, DC. The USA has shut its doors to problematic immigrants while making token half-hearted attempts to deport some of the 12 million plus illegal immigrants walking around free inside the USA today.
While US President Donald Trump has been in office less than three months, he has already come up with two executive orders on migration. The first, signed on January 27th, sparked a wave of protests worldwide, as chaos reigned in airports and at other US border checkpoints.
The order was ultimately blocked by US courts, which considered it breached the constitution. But Trump did not give up, and signed what he thought would be a legally watertight new migration order on March 6th. The implementation of the second executive order has been put on hold by two federal courts, which found different grounds for ruling against it.
Trump’s two executive orders are very similar: both vow to protect US national security by issuing a temporary entry ban for citizens of specified countries (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen in the original order; all but Iraq in the new order); both suspend America’s refugee resettlement programme for a period of three months; and both reduce the numbers of refugees America will accept in future (from 110,000 to 50,000 in 2017.
The ‘Muslim ban’ may be morally questionable and an inefficient way to protect national security; but the ban itself will have little impact on the EU. After some initial confusion, the White House clarified that dual European citizens will not be affected by the restriction. The new order explicitly excludes dual citizens from it.
With Trump’s new policies, monthly refugee arrivals to the US are projected to fall from 9,945 in October 2016 to only 1,853 in September 2017. The US temporary suspension of the refugee resettlement programme could affect almost 68,000 refugees who have already gone through the strenuous vetting process to be admitted to the US. As America says get lost to them, many asylum seekers will look for alternative options.
The EU will be the choice without a doubt. Indeed, the European Commission estimates that the US administration’s new refugee policy will affect around 300,000 non-Syrians living in camps in Turkey. New tensions between Ankara and Brussels are threatening to bring down the EU-Turkey refugee deal, which would lead to a massive inflows of asylum seekers into Europe. The EU to make matters worse-has still not decided the fate of thousands of asylum-seekers who are stranded in refugee camps in Greece.
The executive order has largely been viewed as a ‘Muslim ban’ because it does not stem from an objective analysis of terrorist threats in the world it excludes countries with very active terrorist groups such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
The White House has had to correct its initial approach of banning dual EU citizens from entering the US, Trump could still change his mind again in the future. During his campaign, he made it clear that he thought some European countries have become terrorist havens.
If the US government were to perform an evidence-based analysis of the global terrorist threat, some European countries would inevitably feature as places of concern. Europe has become a net exporter of terrorists. So if you like your terrorists in Europe-you can keep your terrorists, because America’s doors are secured by Trump lock company…