We’ve all heard about last week’s executive order regarding refugees.  The order bans people from 7 countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Yemen) from entering the U.S. for 90 days.  Predictably, there was an avalanche of outrage and despair after the announcement, accompanied by an overflow of different perspectives regarding the legitimacy of the order.  There are law suits and counter law suits and tweets all over the place.  To my mind, the ban is alarming on a basic level.  There are many layers to this executive order, but at its core it is unjust.

No one objects to an executive order that positively protects Americans from terrorism.  There is disagreement regarding the means, not the end.

The sum population of the 7 banned countries is over 180 million people. The only way even a temporary ban of so many people can be defended as policy, is with indisputable evidence that the majority of these citizens pose a real danger to American citizens. There is no such evidence, because it is impossible to fairly catalogue millions of people.  They only ever have one thing in common; their humanity.

The executive order penalizes people for where they were born, not for objectionable action.  Americans understand and celebrate (sometimes) the fact that a nation is comprised of individuals who think their own thoughts and hold a multitude of views on every topic under the sun.  The Refugee ban in effect treats entire nations of people as a breathing mass of oneness; with the same motives and beliefs.  While it must be convenient to paint an entire group of people with the same brush, it strikes me as sloppy and inefficient as a way of formulating policy.

We are a humanitarian nation.  We must treat the citizens of every nation as individuals.  It is the individual, who must be properly and thoroughly vetted before being denied or accepted into the U.S., not the religion, ethnicity, or race.  The wholesale nature of the Refugee ban as it currently stands, is causing undue hardship.   At its core, it appears to be an attempt to superficially fulfill a campaign promise without properly assessing how it will achieve the stated objective of keeping Americans safe.

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