R&P – Dangerous Logic at the Border: Religion and the Travel Ban

„The segregation of matters of religion from matters of national security fails to reflect the political or religious realities of the contemporary United States. It is not and has never been possible to disentangle religious and racial animus from practices of national security. To understand, and ultimately to challenge, the ban requires confronting the specific ways in which religion, race, and national security are entangled not only in Proclamation 9645 but in the history of American foreign and immigration policy more broadly. The law is ill equipped to address this situation because it is in part responsible for creating it. Examples of legal discrimination which relied on and reinforced various forms of racial and religious favoritism include the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended Chinese immigration for ten years and declared the Chinese ineligible for naturalization, and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. through a national origins quota that provided immigration visas to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census, and completely excluded immigrants from Asia.”

Dangerous Logic at the Border: Religion and the Travel Ban