Washington : US President Donald Trump’s ‘extreme vetting’ executive order to bar entry to the US to refugees and immigrants from certain Muslim-majority countries has evoked widespread condemnation, including from Nobel Peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
[alert type=”e.g. warning, danger, success, info” title=””] The extreme vetting order will suspend the entry of immigrants and non-immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days, whereas refugees from Syria were indefinitely banned.[/alert]
The extreme vetting order will suspend the entry of immigrants and non-immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days, whereas refugees from Syria were indefinitely banned. It added all refugee admissions to be suspended for 120 days, and refugee numbers would be cut down to a maximum of 50,000 in 2017 (less than half the previous year’s figure of 117,000), and prioritise Christians refugees.
According the Guardian newspaper, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Friday said it will file a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the order “because its apparent purpose and underlying motive is to ban people of the Islamic faith from Muslim-majority countries from entering the US”.
“There is no evidence that refugees — the most thoroughly vetted of all people entering our nation — are a threat to national security,” said CAIR’s Lena F. Masri. “This is an order that is based on bigotry, not reality.”
World’s youngest Nobel Peace prize winner Malala said she was “heartbroken” that America was “turning its back on a proud history of welcoming refugees and immigrants – the people who helped build your country, ready to work hard in exchange for a fair chance at a new life”.
She said: “I am heartbroken that Syrian refugee children, who have suffered through six years of war by no fault of their own, are singled out for discrimination.”
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he was “concerned about the impact of the recent executive orders signed by Trump”.
Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, said his great-grandparents came to the US from Germany, Austria and Poland and his wife’s parents were refugees from China and Vietnam.
“The US is a nation of immigrants, and we should be proud of that,” he said.
Zuckerberg expressed a hope that Trump would not reverse former President Barack Obama’s decision to allow undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children to work in the US.
Khizr Khan, whose son Humayun Khan died saving his unit from an Iraqi suicide bomb and was a focus of attacks by Trump earlier this year, said the President’s “race to violate constitutional principles and fundamental American values by targeting Muslims and immigrants is of tremendous concern”.–IANS
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