On December 16, President Trump imposed entry restrictions on 20 additional countries, bringing the total number of countries with full or nearly full bans to 35. The government is giving the same reasons it did in June, but those national security justifications are a thin veil poorly masking the president’s true targets — Muslims and Africans.
The bans target legal immigration, penalizing immigrants, U.S. citizens, and U.S. employers who are trying to follow the rules. They harm American families and employers and are bad for the economy.
In addition to expanding the list of restricted countries, the new bans are much broader in scope. Now U.S. citizens will no longer be able to sponsor even their closest relatives — spouses, parents, and minor children from the countries on the list — keeping immediate family members separated indefinitely.
The government gives three primary justifications for targeting specific countries: high rates of visa overstays, vetting limitations in the country of origin, and the nonacceptance of deportees. For the same reasons we discussed after the president issued the June ban, these justifications are pretextual and will not actually make the nation safer.
First, the government continues to rely on an invalid visa overstay rate metric, so that nationals of countries with high numbers of overstays — mostly in Europe and Latin America — are not affected, whereas nationals of countries with very low numbers of overstays — mostly Muslim and African countries — are banned. For example, the government bans temporary visas from countries such as Burundi (which had 148 overstays in 2023) and Togo (397) but not the United Kingdom (16,170) or Canada (22,298).
And the concern that people are staying in the United States after their visas expire doesn’t explain why the administration is banning green card applicants. Those immigrants are permanent residents; by definition, they can’t overstay their visas.
Second, as we wrote in our prior analysis, the bans are not necessary to keep the United States safe. Even the newest justifications — that there are acts of terrorism or armed conflict in a country or that citizens of a country can acquire citizenship through monetary investment — do not support excluding nationals of those countries. Visa applicants submit fingerprints and detailed background information that is checked against Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and other federal, state, local, and foreign law enforcement databases for negative information. This vast vetting apparatus is one of the most sophisticated in the world, and the government does not rely on other nations’ weak security structures to make visa application decisions.
Third, the government’s data reveals that it can and has deported individuals from the banned countries, undermining the rationale that those countries won’t accept their citizens back. In addition, the government is increasingly deporting people to third countries with no connections to their countries of origin, undermining the argument that they are not deportable.
Just this month, the president referred to countries such as Afghanistan, Haiti, and Somalia, which are on the restricted list, as “hellholes” and doubled down on his 2018 characterization of majority non-white countries like Haiti and Somalia as “shithole countries.” These comments make it even more clear that the bans are the result of racial and anti-Muslim animus, not neutral policy choices.
The bans are part of a series of drastic actions taken in recent months to restrict legal immigration. In November, the administration announced it would review the cases of the 200,000 refugees granted status during the Biden administration and would stop green card approvals for all refugees who came to the United States during President Biden’s term. And in December, after the tragic shooting of two National Guard soldiers by an Afghan immigrant, the administration took more steps to curtail legal immigration, including shutting down all asylum processing at the Department of Homeland Security, halting all immigration applications for Afghan nationals, canceling citizenship ceremonies, and reopening past grants of immigration status, including green cards already granted to people from the 19 countries in the June entry ban.
The cumulative effect of these actions for U.S. businesses and families is enormous. Americans will continue to live apart from their loved ones, and businesses will struggle to hire staff to perform critical functions. The U.S. economy also will take a hit. According to the American Immigration Council, immigrants wielded $1.7 trillion of spending power in 2023 and contributed $652 billion in taxes. Approximately 25 percent of workers in critical industries like agriculture and construction are immigrants. These are steep prices to pay, for no benefit. And these attacks undermine one of the United States’ fundamental values — that we are a nation of immigrants.
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