Demonstrators in London will denounce US president Donald Trump’s new travel ban on people from six Muslim-majority countries at a protest on 18 March (noon from Portland Place, London), already planned to mark UN anti-racism day. Anti-Trump protests continue in the USA.
A listing for New York City shows 11 of them due between 7 March and 22 April, though it seems this more carefully-drafted new ban (7 March) has not yet evoked the frantic rush of new protests which the 27 January version did. The new ban has no more valid “security” rationale than the first one. It serves only to stigmatise people from certain mainly-Muslim countries, chosen to be weak enough in power politics that the ban will bring the USA few diplomatic kickbacks, and by implication all Muslims. It will hit people opposing and fleeing Islamist terror in countries where it is most dangerous, rather than Islamist terrorists themselves.
No one from the six affected countries has been implicated in a fatal terror attack in the US since 2001. Around 800,000 refugees have come to the US since then. Only three have been convicted on terrorism-related charges (two for plots against an overseas target, the third for a “barely credible” plot). Generally migrants and refugees have lower crime rates than the locally-born.
A recently-leaked official US security report finds that of 82 people the US government reckoned to have been inspired by a foreign terrorist group to carry out or try to carry out an attack in the USA, over half were US citizens born in the United States. Of the rest, the biggest group were from Pakistan (too powerful for Trump to ban it), and very few from the “banned” countries.
The 18 March demonstration should also target the fact that Britain is meaner towards refugees than the USA even under Trump, and especially the Tory government’s recent decision to ban child refugees from Syria beyond only a token few.
