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Trump’s Travel Restrictions and Refugee Ban Create Uncertainty

Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection. 2017.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Gale, a Cengage Company

Full Text:

Article Commentary

“The Trumpian twist is in stopping people entering who have legitimate visas, like me, or green cards, which allow
them to work.”

Ismail Einashe is a freelance journalist, a columnist for The International Business Times, a 2017 Dart Centre Ochberg Fellow at
Columbia University Journalism School, and an associate at the Cambridge University Migration Research Network. In the
following viewpoint, Einashe speculates about the potential personal impact of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13769.
The executive order places temporary restrictions on travel to the United States from individuals from seven Muslim-majority
countries, including Somalia, where Einashe was born. He worries that the executive order casts doubt on his legal status and
may be used to restrict his travel. He argues that the executive order is unique among immigration restrictions and previous bans
on refugees because it imposes restrictions on people who have already obtained travel visas. He also contends that the executive
order reflects an anti-Muslim agenda present in both US and UK politics.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. What examples does the author provide to demonstrate how the executive order created confusion?
2. What does the author mean when he uses the phrase “the beginning of de-facto repatriation” to describe the executive
order? Do you agree with his assessment?
3. If you were in a similar situation as the author, would you risk traveling to see your family in the UK if there was a chance
you may not be allowed to return to the US? Why or why not?

As I write this, I’m stuck in limbo in New York City, afraid to travel to the UK for fear of not being able to return to the United States.
I’m on a fellowship at Columbia University and have a multiple entry 10-year visa on my UK passport. But there is chaos following
President Donald Trump’s executive order banning entry to the US from seven mainly Muslim countries. One of them is Somalia,
where I was born.

I have never been issued with a Somali passport. I was forced to flee that war-torn country when I was nine years old. I spent time as
a refugee in Ethiopia before finally arriving in Britain. I am now a naturalised UK citizen working as a journalist. I had thought that my
years of worrying at airports about my immigration status were over. But along with many others—including Somali-born, British
Olympic gold medal winner Mo Farah, and Iraqi-born Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi—the Trump order abruptly cast my status into doubt.

Confusion has reigned since the beginning. A couple of days after the order was issued, the UK government breezily told us not to
worry: as long as we are travelling from Britain, and not Somalia, there shouldn’t be an issue. But a day or two later, the US
Embassy in London contradicted this advice on its website. Following pressure from the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the
embassy refined its advice. In the days since, an American court in Seattle suspended the order, and the president took to Twitter to
rage at the “so-called judge,” before appealing and losing again.

The latest court ruling sounds reassuring, but there is no way to be sure about the next appeal. Likewise, Johnson can charm the US
embassy into cooling things down, but that provides no guarantees. How can I be sure if I return to London to see my family that I will
then get back in to the US? Thickening the haze was the inconsistent way in which the ban was being implemented before it was
suspended by a federal judge. Where you happened to land could be all-important—as could which border official you happened to
meet.

These officials are hardly a bleeding-heart species at the best of times, and now they have effectively been encouraged by Trump to
take the law into their own hands. At one point at Dulles Airport, Virginia, four Democratic congressmen insisted that border officials
implement a Virginia court order halting the deportation of individuals with valid visas, but they refused. If I’m in an interview room
with a US border guard and I show him Johnson’s statement, is he just going to say, “Oh, if the UK government says so, then
you’re good to go”?

Bans on refugees are always cruel, but the US has seen them before. The Trumpian twist is in stopping people entering who have
legitimate visas, like me, or green cards, which allow them to work. This is the beginning of de-facto repatriation, which threatens up
to half a million people living in the US. This may not, technically, be the Muslim ban promised during Trump’s campaign. But his
ghoulish advisor, Rudy Giuliani, let slip on Fox News that Trump had responded to the obvious legal objections by asking him to
“show me the right way to do it legally.” And the anti-Muslim agenda remained undisguised when the ban was announced: Israel
was assured that Iraqi-born Jews weren’t affected; non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries will be given priority when—and
if—refugee programmes restart.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Under Barack Obama, I lost my right to travel to the US under the standard UK visa-waiver
programme. At home in the UK, citizenship has increasingly become a weapon of counter-terrorism—as Home Secretary, Theresa
May stripped 33 people of British citizenship on security grounds. But there is no rational basis for the Trump ban, which does nothing
to protect against home-grown jihadis or those, like the 9/11 hijackers, who hail from US allies in the Gulf. And yet a swirl of stories
show its consequences: the elderly Iraqi woman who suffered after being stopped from travelling for medical treatment; the Iranian
filmmaker Asghar Farhadi nominated for an Oscar but who will not attend the ceremony; the Syrian Christian family who had spent
their life savings on travelling, only to have their visas scored out and written over with “Cancelled by Presidential Executive Order
13769.”

The government seems intent on offering Trump a state visit—more interested in buttering him up for a trade deal than defending its
own citizens. On her trip to Washington, the prime minister learned something about the Muslim ban before it was made public, but
kept her counsel. For me there is no hiding from the anxiety: it has been a horrendous few days. I walk in the crisp sunlit air of the
Upper West Side of Manhattan and all seems normal; yet somehow the fear always returns.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Einashe, Ismail. "Trump’s Travel Restrictions and Refugee Ban Create Uncertainty." Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale,
2018. Opposing Viewpoints In Context,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/TLIERW669282149/OVIC?u=omah46832&sid=OVIC&xid=5d81b04d. Accessed 6 May 2018.
Originally published as "Trump travel ban: I am now stuck in limbo," Prospect Magazine, 1 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|TLIERW669282149