Monday, January 30, 2017

Details of Trump's 120 day ban on 7 countries

Michael Patrick Leahy writes in Breitbart,
Eighty-seven percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are not affected by President Donald Trump’s Friday decision to temporarily withhold visas from citizens of seven Middle Eastern countries.

...The Muslim population in each of these seven countries, estimated by Pew Research as of 2010, is: Iran (74 million), Sudan (33.6 million), Iraq (31.7 million), Yemen (24 million), Syria (20.4 million), Somalia (9.3 million), and Libya (6.4 million).

The 90-day temporary block on new visas does not apply to citizens of the six countries with the largest Muslim populations, as determined by Pew Research— Indonesia (209 million), India (176 million), Pakistan (167 million), Bangladesh (134 million), Nigeria (77 million), and Egypt (76 million).

None of the seven countries on which a temporary visa ban has been placed were listed by name in Friday’s, executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States.”

Instead, the order referenced previous laws and findings that designated three of these countries “state sponsors of terrorism” (Iran, Sudan, and Syria) and four of them (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen) as “countries of concern” who are ineligible to participate in the Visa Waiver Program, according to the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Improvement Act of 2015.

The 2015 bill was made law once it was signed by President Barack Obama.

Six of the seven countries to which the temporary visa issuance block applies were designated as “state sponsors of terrorism” or “countries of concern” by previous Democrat administrations. Only one — Iran in 1984 — was designated by a Republican administration.
Read more here.

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