Lack of Diversity Divides U.S.

With a little over a week under his belt as the Commander in Chief of the United States, President Donald Trump has fulfilled many of his campaign promises through the signing of numerous executive orders, which range from continuing the construction on both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines to enacting a repeal of former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. While these executive orders are controversial in nature, they pale in comparison to the unconstitutional nature of Trump’s ban on immigrants traveling from seven majority Muslim countries.

Signed on Friday, Jan. 27 under the title of “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist into the United States,” the executive order bars immigrants from Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Iraq and Syria for 120 days to allow for the implementation of the investigative procedure and afterwards, will require a 90-day processing period in which the Department of Homeland Security will analyze the travel visas to determine approval into the country. Also included in the executive order is the enactment of a sort of tracking system for these individuals, which eerily calls upon Trump’s remarks in 2015 to establish a Muslim registry system. According to the executive order, “The Secretary of Homeland Security shall expedite the completion and implementation of a biometric entry-exit tracking system for all travelers to the United States, as recommended by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”

While this may seem precautionary in nature, the reality is that Trump is causing a rift within the United States that may soon become too volatile to repair. With protests erupting across the nation, especially at numerous airports in which individuals have been detained subsequently following the order becoming active, we are becoming testament to a nation that is tearing at the seams due to the egregious blindness of a morally skewed man. As best stated by the New York Times, “The order’s language makes clear that the xenophobia and Islamophobia that permeated Mr. Trump’s campaign are to stain his presidency as well. Un-American as they are, they are now American policy.”

For me, this hits close to home as it was reported by Fox 25 News that two professors from a college down the street from my house, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, were detained at Boston Logan International Airport after coming home from a conference in Paris. Though the professors have no direct relation to me, I have numerous friends who attend the university and have had these professors in class. This disheartens me that human beings can be merely thrown around in the unrealistic practice of infringing on constitutional manners, even though these individuals are legal citizens of the United States with authorized green cards.

Perhaps more troubling is the bearing this will have on refugees coming from these areas, which are predominantly under the ISIS regime. These refugees, 13,000 of which were accepted into the United States in 2016 according to the Pew Research Center, are unable to apply for travel visas to the United States due to constraints on the government with the ongoing civil war. The only solution for these individuals is to attempt to find refuge within countries such as Turkey and Greece, and in this particular case, the United States, but Trump has now made this option impossible for those seeking refuge, only because of his innate xenophobia.

Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who have both previously renounced the ban on Muslims, are the only individuals able to guide Trump into more focused international policies and yet, they sit idly by as the nation seems to fall deeper into an inescapable hole. The old adage of being spineless has taken on a new meaning as has the words etched in the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!,” which read more now as a trivial option rather than a call to action.