Revised executive order bans travelers from six countries from getting new visas

Trump has has ended reality; words have no meaning now, and numbers doesn't have meaning either.

Not sure whether you're acting naive to prove a point, but the countries represented aren't majority Muslim by accident - they were picked for a specific reason. Not to mention, Trump himself alluded to a "Muslim Ban" with a similar structure before, as did multiple aides. He's run on a platform of xenophobia. It's not a stretch whatsoever to make that point - everyone understands why the poster is labelling it that way.

The implication that the person that posted is injecting ideology into that comment is ironic, since willfully choosing to ignore the political context of the ban is just as bad.

> the categories "Muslim immigrants" and "natives" both contain substructure

Yes, all language does.

>not taking a side on whether the order is a good or bad idea

You're taking a side by turning a blind eye to the ideological ramifications and context of the ban. "I'm just playing devil's advocate" is always problematic because it purports that injecting something dangerous like this into the conversation "doesn't count".

The particular language of this order may not be. But we've learned to take Trump "seriously, not literally."

In that light, the above quote is a falsehood.

But I've been really giving thought to what I can do as an average citizen to make the slightest change in public policy.

Thing is, we'll probably never know. Will that information ever be shared with the public? How many people were prevented from entering the US over the past 8 years for "ties to terrorist organizations?" I have no idea.

It happened in early 2016 to Indian students.

http://fusion.net/story/272029/indian-students-denied-entry-...

Happened in mid 2016 to Syrian refugees.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2016/08/09/substantial...

A reported 2015 rise in Muslims being denied entry

http://www.dlgvisablog.com/blog/2015/12/29/us-increasingly-d...

But without news reports or blog articles, how are we to ever know that X number of travelers were denied entry? We can say it's probably between 0-2, but there's no evidence to back that up and I don't know how we even begin to search for the evidence other than heavily redacted FOIA requests.

Politically it's another question. Advocates on immigration reform have pointed out for years that the immigration laws are both impractical and unjust, and there's majority agreement about this. but every effort at reform has been stymied by a nativist minority that is opposed to any immigration, which bloc was successfully (albeit unexpectedly) marshaled into a winning majority under the US' rather arcane Electoral College system. As we now see, the political impetus is to a highly militaristic central state, abandoning as many administrative functions as possible and dropping those into the laps of the several states where they will either be burdensome or ignored.

We seem to have lost our way being able to give and take and discuss meaningfully our goals and how America could develop a better immigration policy while trying to minimise unfairness on individuals.

Just a thought.

maybe creating secular activities for them other than mosque would help them.

She was told to fill out a form her fingerprints were taken then told there was a computer problem and she couldn't enter the US. They came back the next day and were allowed in.

But then the latest crossing attempt the border guards asked her why she was stopped in December?! It was the border guards who did it.

It's like in grade school a bully grabs your hand and pushes it into your face asking "Why are you hitting yourself?!"

Context is everything. The US is already regarded as having a well-working, effective screening process for visa and refugee applications. This means that it's hard to find any justification for drastic, emergency-sounding restrictions. Particularly since Trump was well-known for espousing a religious test ("Muslim ban") on the campaign trail, Giuliani says this is what he suggested when asked how to implement the Muslim ban, and the government hasn't offered any evidence for why the additions are necessitated for national security, it is rather easy to assume that this is an attempt to ban Muslims. And imposing a religious test runs afoul of the Constitution, even if there were good reasons for it.

On the issue of privilege vs human rights, the US is populated by immigrants and many of them who argue against bans like this see themselves in new immigrants. The Trump/Bannon/Miller argument is that since immigrants are stealing jobs and are weakening the value system of the US, we need to cut back on immigration. That sends a very strong signal to present immigrants that their presence is harming the country. The outrage against Trump stems from this kind of signalling from his administration.

> Why is driving a privilege, yet visiting the USA is seen by some as a human right for all of our species?

The comparison makes no sense. A non-non-sequitur question would be the same comparison about guns, given that guns are essential for the livelihood of far fewer people than cars, it would be comparing deadly objects to deadly objects instead of humans, and legal standards would actually match up in a slightly more sensical way that might produce an actual answer[1].

But to ignore the multiple ways it makes no sense, an answer would look something like, because piloting deadly weapons with a modicum of skill is something many people find positive, whereas travel in the abstract is considered by many people a fundamental human right.

> What claim does a random foreigner have on the USA that ranks their desire to visit above the commander in chief's desire for them not to visit

The president's status as "commander in chief" means nothing in a civilian context, and I see nothing in the constitution about Presidential Whim being a meaningful legal basis - can you point to the SCOTUS case establishing "do what thou wilt shall be the the whole of the law"?

> Why are some countries allowed to control who visits them, and some are not?

I have no idea what you're talking about, or what it has to do with Muslim bans in the US. If you can point to someone of relevance making that claim in relation to the Muslim bans, please do share.

> Why is the battle almost exclusively being portrayed as it being immoral and unethical for only the USA to have any border control at all of any form

This is what a red herring looks like.

> why is only this regulation or law being targeted as opposed to NORML

I dunno, perhaps because NORML is not a sitting president currently banning Muslims? Perhaps because people see different relevance to their lives between different bad laws? Perhaps because this is happening now, we want less of it, and the best way to get less of something is to nip in in the bud? Perhaps because many people see banning people based on religion abhorrent to the character of their country in ways that bad taxation doesn't?

How about I flip that around- when there are so many other absurd laws, is this the only one you want to defend? Why aren't you throwing your rhetorical skills at some other battle?

[1] The answer, of course, is the constitution.

Driving involves heavy metallic objects moving at high speed. The US makes it harder to drive than to own and operate guns, which isn't logical either. Migration is a human right for all people.

What claim does a random foreigner have on the USA that ranks their desire to visit above the commander in chief's desire for them not to visit, in other words why is the desire of the elected president believed by some to rank lower than the desire of any random non-citizen human visitor? It seems an incredibly peculiar ranking.

Because it's a bullshit comparison, as you know. But let's get right to the core of the issue: on the one hand, the US holds itself out as the beacon of liberty and democracy, takes great pride in its ability to take people in and turn them into liberty-minded democratic Republicans, and is so proud of this that it likes to be symbolized by Lady Liberty. On the other hand, it's also a country that was founded in part on slavery, and which has a large demographic that still depends on the economic logic of slavery for commercial gain. Pick one.

Why are some countries allowed to control who visits them, and some are not? Why is the USA one of the countries that is not allowed to have any border controls? Is that, pragmatically, successful?

Quit with the talk of 'not allowed'. Many people within the US wish to change the existing system because they consider it pragmatically flawed. It's not some external agency being unfair to the US and telling it that it can't, it's a majority of the American people saying that existing policy is no good and should be reformed.

Yes, not having border controls is pragmatically successful. That's why you don't have to show a passport when traveling between US states. Do you honestly think the US economy would be as strong and resilient as it is without free movement across its internal borders? If there were passport controls and tariffs between states? No, the federal government was set up precisely to prevent that outcome.

The fact is that economic growth takes place most easily when there is relatively free movement of both capital and labor. As regards relationships with other countries, the US has made it super easy for capital to move all around the world in search of opportunities, and the same should apply to labor. Making it easy for capital and difficult for labor has led to the formation of a huge underclass, which is nothing but slavery by a new name.

Why is the battle almost exclusively being portrayed as it being immoral and unethical for only the USA to have any border control at all of any form, rather than the somewhat more likely and seemingly easier to convince specifics of this individual border control ruling being wrong?

It isn't, spare me the false-premise arguments.

If this regulation or law needs to be repealed because it can be "proven" wrong (where proving amounts to yelling really intimidatingly loud) then why is only this regulation or law being targeted as opposed to NORML or the IRS or a bazillion other laws and regulations which are both more likely to be nonsense and hurting more people?

A bullshit argument whose only rhetorical purpose is to poison the well of debate by implying bad faith on the part of your interlocutors. Actually, people are opposing all kinds of laws all the time, and there is no ranking of the different issues that says immigration is more important than ending the drug war or reforming taxation or whatever. You chose to come into a thread about immigration and ask 'why is immigration so important.' Nobody was making the argument that immigration has to be addressed before this or that other issue until you came along to punch that particular straw man.

Not only are the issues you mention, and many others, the subject of their own hot debates, they're also the site of a great deal of political activism by voters who are exercised about those issues. One significant difference with immigration from many other issues is that you have a population which can vote making life-changing decisions about another population that can't vote. Similar to penal policy and restoring the voting rights of felons, massive asymmetries in equity and political representation create incentives for abuse; having once created an underclass, some see their political benefits in the maintenance, perpetuation, and even expansion of the same. The privatization of incarceration for profit is an outstanding example of this.