United States President Donald Trump’s ban on travel into the US by citizens from six Muslim-majority nations is grossly mistaken in conception.
It is wrong to base a law on the assumption that all passport carriers from any of these nations share values or experience, or to assume that any one nation will produce citizens that are all dangerous immigrants. Some individuals from any of these countries (as from any other country in the world) may well be dangerous to the US, and these people should be picked up and denied entry by well-established security procedures that have existed for decades. But other citizens from these countries may have lived in exile for decades, and have perfectly respectable careers in their host countries, and should not be caught up in this confused exercise of Islamophobia.
Therefore, it was political aberration when the US Supreme Court issued a temporary ruling that a limited form of the ban could go ahead. But the Court is required to look at cases brought to it from a legal and constitutional position, and it ruled that the ban is legal when applied to foreigners from the six nations “who lack any bone fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”.
It is disturbing that the dissenters were not judges who thought that the ban should be stopped entirely, but three right-wing judges who wanted to apply it in full immediately. So the political pressure from the administration, and the legal direction of the Supreme Court, is in favour of the ban in full whenever the Court gets around to making a decision.
The Court has also opened up a minefield of confusion by making the key requirement to be a bone fide relationship with a person or entity. It is easy to argue that any tourist has a bone fide relationship with the hotel where he or she is staying, defined clearly in a contract.
There will be a myriad of court cases challenging the immigration authorities’ decisions, all of which will add to the uncertainty of what individuals trying to enter the US, and their would-be employers, colleges, or families might expect.
The right way forward is to abandon this anti-Muslim ban and work hard to improve the security and intelligence procedures that will catch people with genuine ill-intent and allow through the innocent and good-willed.
