Federal judges who are blocking President’s Trump new executive order restricting migration are making a mistake, using flawed reasoning, and setting back the larger cause of immigration reform. On Wednesday night, Derrick K. Watson, the U.S. District Judge in Hawaii, penned a 43-page jeremiad in the form of a legal ruling that freezes what he and others are calling a ban on Muslims. The next morning, Judge Theodore Chuang, a federal district judge in Maryland, issued a second ruling blocking what he called “the realization of the long-envisioned Muslim ban.”
These judges are wrong, and they are going to lose on appeal.
Consider three basic facts.
Fact number one: refugees make up 10 percent of all legal immigrants. There are many immigration categories: refugees, asylees, guest workers of a hundred varieties, and permanent residents (green-card holders), not to mention the 180 million tourists and business travelers who come from abroad every year. Yet in a typical year, just 70,000 to 100,000 refugees are admitted to the United States.
Fact number two: A real Muslim ban would affect Muslims from all countries, not people of all types from “a few terror-plagued countries” as Byron York correctly describes them. If it were “effectively” a Muslim ban, it would list all 49 Muslim-majority countries, not six.
The six affected countries have a total population of 176 million. By comparison, Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country with 205 million citizens alone. Pakistan is second largest with 178 million. Then come India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, none of which are touched by the executive order. All told, there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. It would be far more accurate for us to recognize that Trump has made a failed-state ban. We are talking about Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. True, Iran is not a failed state. It was just the leading state-sponsor of terror in 2016, according to the State Department.
Simply put, the two judges have said that a restriction on travel of one-tenth of the Muslims in the world is a religious test. That is akin to saying that banning the one-tenth of automobile drivers on a Saturday night who are drunk is effectively a ban on driving. Nonsense.
The third basic fact—the one that exposes the hypocrisy of politicians making this into a wedge issue—is that very few refugees from these six countries were welcome for the past eight years. In 2015, the United States admitted just over 15,000 refugees originally from the six banned countries, or 22 percent of all refugees that year (if we don’t include Cubans), or slightly more than 2 percent of all immigrants.
In 2013, the Obama administration admitted just 36 Syrian refugees. Thirty-six! And that was more than during the years before. To put this in context, the U.N. Refugee Agency says that since 2011, “Fifty Syrian families have been displaced every hour of every day.” The stark reality is the nearly 11 to 13 million people have been displaced by the Syrian civil war. We’re talking about uncertainty involving plus or minus millions of humans. Trump could double Obama’s Syrian refugee admittances and it would still be a token amount. This is symbolic political posturing at its worst, and it matters little in the grand scheme of the root causes of chaos and violence in the Middle East.
Every president must prioritize. For Obama, the priority countries were Burma, Iraq, and Bhutan. Trump may well prioritize refugees from Venezuela and Congo. Why the Obama administration downplayed the Syria and Libyan refugee crises for so long is likely indicative of their own hand in causing them, but leave that aside. The executive branch has sole authority on refugees, and Judges Watson and Chuang are way out of line.
Here’s the smart play for the White House: Increase the total numbers of people given refuge in the United States to a level notably higher than Obama. At the same time, Trump could limit the scope of his refugee program to the Western hemisphere. Next, make sure that students and tourists and businessmen from peaceful Muslim-majority countries like Kuwait, Indonesia, Turkey, and Jordan are especially welcome. Those are allies.
For anyone who supports immigration in America, the liberal strategy of scorched-earth opposition to all things Trump is a huge disappointment. Most conservatives, indeed most conservative economists, believe immigrants at all skill levels are vital to economic growth and our cultural heritage. So do most Americans. Give us some credit.
Tim Kane is the JP Conte Fellow in Immigration Studies at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is a veteran Air Force intelligence officer. His most recent book is “Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America” (Simon and Schuster), co-authored with Glenn Hubbard.
