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My mistake, it seems the decision was made directly by the State Department (by then, led by Hillary Clinton). However, the State Deparmnet is part of our government's executive branch, putting them under presidential authority, i.e. Obama. So, for those 6 months, Obama was likely complicit.
Furthermore, the State Deparment enacted the ban in 2011, near the end of Obama’s first term. Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to meet his campaign promise to implement strict vetting of people from, or with nationalities from, unstable countries with severe terrorism problems, barely a week after being inaugurated. He doesn't yet have Rex Tillerson to lead the State Deparment, or John Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Therefore, an executive order was, really, his only option (not that he'd avoid the backlash were they in place).
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You need to read the article again – the 2011 situation was not a ban. The updates at the end of the article set this out flatly. It was also a situation caused by necessity, as the administration at the time had to respond to an identified issue. In contrast, Trump’s ban has been put in place without good reason, was ordered
without going through appropriate planning, and has caused chaos as a result.
It may have been a campaign promise, but I’m not arguing about that – I’m arguing whether it is a good policy, and it clearly is not.
And it was far from his only option – there was absolutely no reason to make this order so soon, and he wanted to wait for when he was in a more secure position he could have done.
Even the argument that this is about combating terrorism is plainly false – between 1975 and 2016
zero Americans were killed on US soil by a foreign national from any the countries identified on Trump’s list; and the probability of being killed by an immigrant in a terrorist attack is an
astronomically low 1 in 3.6 million. Only 3 refugees have been arrested in the past 15 years for terrorist activities; only 0.00062% of refugees admitted into the country since 1975 ever attempted a terrorist act – and only 3 out of the 20 attempts were successful.
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It may seem that way if President Nieto is unwilling to negotiate, but the reality is that we hold all the cards. One thing to remember is that we don't need Mexico to literally pay us, it's just that Trump promised that Mexico will "pay for" the wall. For instance, Trump just recently asked Congress to approve a 20% import tax on Mexican goods. Other potential solutions include driving up the price of visas and forbidding Mexican immigrants from sending money back home to their families (amounts to $24 billion a year).
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The proposed tariff will not be paid for by Mexico,
it would be paid for by Americans through increased prices to compensate for the tariff. Add to it that the US buys in more import from Mexico than vice versa – $316.4 billion versus $267.2 billion. This deal would hurt America more than Mexico; that is not ‘holding all the cards’. And tracking down money sent to Mexico by immigrants
would be exceedingly difficult to manage; let’s not even get into the implications of holding hostage the money immigrant workers’ families depend on for support.
Meanwhile, Trump’s aggression is souring relations with the Mexican government, and the current wisdom is that the upcoming Mexican elections will see candidates vying to be as anti-Trump as possible to gain votes. President Nieto is already playing hardball, and it’s only going to get worse.
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Saying that it's all about immigration vs xenophobia, and nothing else, is gross oversimplification.
For starters, immigrants may take up jobs that native-born citizens also need, but there's also the issue of outsourcing. Corporations will exploit low-wage labor, and will leave areas where workers will not accept such low salaries. Look at what outsourcing has done to places like Detroit; the jobs leave, the money leaves, and infrastructure and quality of life crumbles. Yet the United States is still a lucrative market to sell goods in, so these corporations, such as car manufacturers, still sell foreign-manufactured cars in the very places they left. They make more money because they pay the foreign workers less, while the common man and woman suffer.
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You are confusing immigration and outsourcing into a single issue, but these are separate issues. Yes, manufacturing abroad is cheaper, and many businesses exploit the lower wages in countries such as China. But this is not something that can be blamed on immigrants or refugees within the country (many of whom immigrate for better wages), and it will not be solved by banning immigration or turning away refugees.
And
immigrants raise wages.
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This is no good for us, so Trump's solution is implementing a 35% tariff on American corporations who think they can outsource and get off easy by selling these foreign-made goods. At the same time, Trump plans to reduce the business tax to 15%, giving these corporations an even better reason to come back (as well as more money to give workers good salaries). You can already see it with various companies abandoning plans to build factories in Mexico, and investing in plants in Michigan.
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Do you mean companies like Ford,
where Trump falsely claimed credit for the Michigan investment (which is a fraction of the amount due to be invested in Mexico), or
where Trump took credit for saving a plant that wasn’t even going to close?
Trump has threatened to implement his tariff, but the deals he’s struck have not come from the tariff –
they’ve come from tax cuts. And any tariff
would simply be costing Americans more tax money and damage international trade.
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Actually, walls remain a very practical means of controlling movement of people. For instance, look at the results of Hungary's border wall.
![](https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQefjY2xXx5psdg41b0yQ3NpfnVADLoyg0KQobJeca3LNzlFCOvEw)
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In Hungary’s case, the fact is that refugees can take other routes around this border – so building the wall has simply redirected those people, not blocked them; they will seek the past of lesser resistance. For Trump and Mexico, the scenario is different – the size of the border is much larger, and there are no other routes around, so people would be more determined to find a way in.
But I am not concerned about the
effectiveness of a hypothetical wall – of course putting a wall up will stop people. What worries me is the implication behind these walls; the ideology they represent. Let alone the prohibitive financial cost of such a wall would be quite possibly the largest waste of federal money on a vanity project the US has ever seen.
Hungary’s wall represents one part of the rising anti-refugee sentiment in Europe. Let’s recap: refugees are people fleeing war, seeking asylum, fleeing from terror. They risk life and limb abandoning their homes to travel across the world to find safety; but now instead they are finding themselves blocked, turned away, or penned in to despicable holding camps. The European Union is failing to support people desperately in need of help – is that the example the US wants to follow?
Hungary stands accused breaking Geneva Conventions by “escorting” refugees who cross the wall back to the other side; and Hungarian police are alleged to have used excessive force, while those who make it into the country are described by Amnesty International as being “treated like animals” in detention. It has not reduced refugee numbers; it has simply made life harder for them.
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And if you question whether illegal aliens bring violent crime (which, in turn, a barrier to migration would indirectly stop), look no further than Israel's border fence.
![](http://www.factsofisrael.com/en/images/articles/securityfence.gif)
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I don’t even know where to begin with this claim. Israel’s border fence is designed to hem in Palestinians; it has spent decades
illegally encroaching further and further into Palestinian territory, building illegal settlements and driving the Palestinians out.
Thousands of Palestinians have been murdered by the Israeli government. Israel’s border control is
little more than apartheid oppression; much like Trump’s racist wall, it is built on the back of hatred and xenophobia. Illegal aliens do not bring crime – violent oppression ensures retaliation.
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It's mostly because it was a campaign promise.
I'm guessing public opinion is about 50-50 right now.
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Trump’s approval rating has plummeted faster than any other US President in history, if that’s any indication of popularity.
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How does that matter? Would it work differently for a left-leaning government building a wall? Can you give me an example of such a case?
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A left-leaning government would not build a wall. Sybil’s point is that the walls you cited are by-products of dangerous xenophobia – conservative anti-refugee Hungary and oppressive Israeli occupation. These are not examples that the supposed “land of the free” should follow; not if it wishes to be seen as a nation fit to lead the world on humanitarian issues.
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He could very well have not done anything to alleviate these concerns in the first place.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55...b002d5c078b44c
Handing his businesses down to his children is very much an "anything." We can't just expect him to sell what he's spent his whole life to make in a fruitless gesture to appease people who will never cut him an inch of slack regardless. He knows a terrible deal when he sees one.
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Trump has done as good as nothing – his proposals to leave his businesses in the hands of his children
are not enough to satisfy the Office of Government Ethics, and they do not constitute a blind trust. And yes, we
should expect Trump to divest – regardless of the work he put in building those assets, the fact of the matter is that the most powerful government position in the free world should be free of any conflict of interest, and every other. We have already seen
Ivanka Trump’s jewelry promoted on the White House website, and the
Trump Organization pressuring foreign diplomats to stay at his hotels. There are many more ways in which trump stands to abuse his power and influence to personally enrich himself and his family, and that is unacceptable.
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The whole idea of propagating fight with fake news (the list, to little surprise, included platforms of other opinions, that were not really fake news) was being pushed by the far left during the election in order to get Hilary elected.
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Yet now Trump brands any news story critical of him as fake news –
we have his press secretary making up ‘facts’ to berate reporters with. Is that OK?
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@UnderTheSun, I'm pretty sure Manco didn't mean Trump has to immediately get rid of his business.
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He does.
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@Manco, Where's the hipocrisy, exactly? Does the new solutions he presents have his business listed as an exception?
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The hypocrisy comes from his businesses outsourcing abroad, with him then turning around and proclaiming that businesses outsourcing abroad are a problem,
without doing anything to change his own business practices. Has he stopped his businesses from outsourcing? Has he
implemented any actual policy about this yet? It is far from the only hypocritical thing he has done.