Let’s put aside for a second the fact that you don’t vet a country but a person. You don’t vet a country for immigration. The country isn’t immigrating here. Each individual, separate from another, is immigrating here. There are families on one application, but my point is you don’t treat people from the same country all the same simply because of their country of origin.
So which countries? Well, it’s much more complicated than people think. For example, if China were to harbor terrorists, you couldn’t just ban immigration from China for 3 months. As much as I would LOVE that, it would be bad for America. Moreover, I’m actually not upset with the Chinese people, just the CCP. So, that would hurt the Chinese people AND the CCP, but the CCP wouldn’t care about the former because they hurt their own people hourly, seemingly almost for sport.
Other countries that are far more complex: Turkey, Pakistan, UAE. Turkey has a gigantic economy, political ties with the U.S., doesn’t really have a lot of risks apart from those originated from the eastern one-fifth of the country and might be covered by the ban because many of those people have a Turkish passport, and has military issues with Greece, who owes lots of money to Russia. That last one is probably not the biggest deal, but Turkey is a crossroads country and is very important. Anyone (looking at you Bloomberg News) who suggests Turkey should be banned or even more extremely vetted is really confused. More quickly, Pakistan: they have huge economic ties with China, weakening political ties with the U.S., and its citizens hate the U.S. UAE: Well, they’re helping us in Yemen, and rather than get into a discussion of which wars we should be in, I’ll just say that positive military ties shouldn’t be messed with when thinking about domestic policy.
Therefore, it’s more complex, and it’s important to approach this and other issues academically. We’re not going to stop Trump without votes. Protesting in the streets is like having fans at a game. If the fans don’t show up, I might have as much energy to fight. However, the players on the field are thinking strategically and intelligently after watching hours and hours of film for days or weeks in order to intelligently stop their opponent, and I think that’s what we should do. As I’ve said before, maybe we need to repurpose some bars to include study areas where people can talk about these issues in order to get analytical about it and make sure we can use facts and informed conclusions any time a Congressperson says “but” or “what if” in the face of our objections.
Prediction of the next country banned: Qatar. It’s considered the major financier of the terrorists. They have close military ties with the U.S., but Trump is focusing on ISIS first and foremost and there’s already been talk about pulling one of our air bases from there.
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