I looked up at the crowd of people last Sunday waving American flags in the air. We were standing outside of RDU, the gateway of the Triangle, chanting and holding signs. There were cowbells and drums and small children and old couples leaning into each other in the briskness of January. After years of Moral Mondays, the scene itself felt familiar to me. But the feeling was different. This time, people were gathered as a reaction to federal—not state—actions.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday blocking all refugees from entering the country and banning all immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan. Reince Priebus, White House Chief of Staff, even claimed that border agents had “discretionary authority” to submit American citizens who had recently traveled to any of those seven countries to extra questioning upon entering the United States. The ban caused travelers, refugees, students and legal immigrants—all of whom have already been heavily monitored for years—to be detained in airports across the nation.
Experts agree: there is next to no national security benefit to President Trump’s order. Migrants and refugees from the seven accused countries have committed a grand total of zero deadly terrorist attacks on United States soil over the past 40 years. The orchestrator of the 9/11 attack, al-Qaeda, is a militant Sunni group based in Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, nor Iran, nor any of the other countries whose people are being profiled.
Bafflingly enough, this administration plans to fight the perceived threat posed by endangered refugee populations while ignoring the dangers that actually threaten American citizens. Every year, about 13,286 Americans will die at the hands of a gun, either by accident or in a homicide. The chance that any American dies at the hands of a refugee? 0.00003 percent.
This is not to say that terrorism is not a real threat. Radical Islam perverts the true meaning of the religion, persecuting innocent people and ripping up sections of the Middle East and North Africa. But it continues to rear its ugly head primarily abroad, displacing millions of refugees who every day search for new homes. On Friday, President Trump denied them a home here in the United States. In making this move, he inspired a new generation of radicalism, both at home and abroad, who feel othered, angered, and rejected by American actions. Discrimination will only further the divide and heighten the Islamophobia that drives so many into the waiting hands of terrorist groups and lone-wolf mentalities.
In fact, this ban effects discriminatory humanitarian consequences. Not only does it violate the separation of Church and State by arbitrarily denying citizenship or entry to people from majority-Muslim states, but to make matters worse, it denies amnesty to all refugees, most of whom are running from civil war or genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria and Myanmar.
Nearly 80 years ago, Jews in Poland, Germany and France were shaken by forces beyond their control. Nazi power gripped the region, rounding up Jews and others into death camps and ghettos. Throughout the late 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt closed the “golden doors” to Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, even turning around a ship full of hopeful immigrants fleeing deathly persecution, sentencing them to death at the hands of Nazis. Red Scare fears plagued the nation, and the idea of possible communist spies infiltrating the country caused a surge of nativism much like the one we see now. If we could turn back the clock and save just a few of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, who among us would close the door again? The faces of small children, old couples, and idealistic youths who have walked for miles and floated in the cold on rafts, watching unspeakable horror, should drive our decisions in the coming years.
At the rally on Sunday, an old man and an old woman held hands behind me. They must have been over 70, wrapped in jackets and scarves. The woman wore a hijab, and she smiled at her husband while waving to a small girl swinging on her father’s shoulders. The man let a tear fall from his eye as he looked at the crowd.
This is America. Millions of people bring their own identities, stories, struggles and hopes to a nation ready to receive them with open arms. Without the ideas and innovations of immigrants and refugees, we would be without bagels, pizza and lo mein. What’s more, we would be without life-saving technology and medicine and integral entertainment and news. Distant members of my family who met their ends in the fires of Auschwitz may not have had a voice back in the 1930s. But today, our challenge is to uplift the voices of millions just like them who are running from fire and searching for a home.
Leah Abrams is a Trinity freshman. Her column, “cut the bull,” runs on alternate Fridays.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.
Leah Abrams is a Trinity senior and the Editor of the editorial section. Her column, "cut the bull," runs on alternate Fridays.