Excluding Muslims

Donald Trump commented that, in order to somehow secure American safety, he would prevent any and all Muslim immigration to our nation. This provoked the typical knee-jerk reactions from both sides, with the left vigorously altering Hitler photos to give him a hilarious haircut. The right quickly responded by pointing out that President Carter, the closest thing to a saint the left seems to have at the moment, had blocked all kinds of immigration from the Middle East during the end of his term. This, I thought, merited a refresher course.

Jimmy Carter, in response to the Iranian government's unwillingness to take custody and care of the fifty Americans held hostage in their country for six months, issued a set of orders concerning diplomatic relations with Iran and the disposition of her citizens. Specifically:

1. The severing of all diplomatic relations, the closing of all embassies, and the declaration of persona non grata for all consular officials.
2. Export sanctions.
3. Seizure of Iranian assets to provide financial remuneration to American creditors and hostages.
4. Invalidation of all Iranian visas and a hold on all new issuances, barring any humanitarian or American interest.

This fourth point has been seized upon by some of the more ahistorically enthusiastic among us to attempt a demonstration of established precedent in support of nouveau dauphin Trump's NIMBY approach to immigration, often quite loudly and with poor spelling and punctuation. These pundits, awe-inspiring though they are, miss a salient point entirely. The target of Carter's sanctions was not, in fact, Iranian Muslims. It's wasn't even the Shia portion of the Muslim population that made up Khomeini's Republican party, but Iranians as a whole. People holding the passport of one particular country, with no other stipulation.

The idea of using religion as a litmus test for immigration is little more than laughable. Regardless of how English colonists behaved, once this land was out from under the monarchy it was also relieved of the onerous yoke of archaic religious nationalism. There are serious, and perhaps unanswerable, questions concerning realistic and enforceable immigration law now that we're confronting issues the majority of the globe has been dealing with for decades. Trying to force a religious template on top of the already overburdened and flawed system will do nothing to address these problems.

The faction calling for a short-term hold on all immigration of the same secular and pragmatic stripe that Carter intended have an argument based on sound, if incredibly selfish, reasoning. Their opponents have an equally solid and compelling Constitutional argument, the numerous and rather emotional patriotic ones notwithstanding. Unfettered or loosely-regulated immigration poses many dilemmas, being a hostage to fortune insofar as imported religious zealots among the more serious. A complete lockdown of our borders would not only fail at preventing domestic attacks or immigration, nothing could be more antithetical to American ideals.