Could Anything Be More Bigoted Than Trump's Travel Bans?

[justaprogressive]

In her early nineties, my mother had emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder, which had somehow managed to flip over and begun to rot. The physician who performed the surgery—from which she recovered completely—was an Iranian immigrant.

I was reminded of this by a story in The New York Times last week about the effect that President Trump’s order to deny entry to the United States to citizens of 12 nations, including Iran, was having on hospitals. In many hospitals, the story reported, physicians complete their residencies in June, and a number of those hospitals are awaiting the arrivals of a new crop of residents, some of whom can no longer get visas due to Trump’s ban.

In theory, the bans could be lifted if those nations’ screening practices for travelers to the U.S. were tightened. In practice, though, these bans certainly appear to be a way that Trump can stop the flow of visitors, most especially aspiring immigrants, from what he’s termed “shithole countries.” Given the racial and religious composition of these nations—not just the 12 on the list unveiled on June 9, but the 36 on the subsequent list of nations that could also see their travelers denied entry—Trump’s policy could become the 21st-century version of the Johnson-Reed Act, the 1924 ban on immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe to stop the flow of Catholics and Jews into an America where a substantial share of Protestants had succumbed to xenophobic and religious bigotry. (That ban—absent which far fewer Jews would have fled to Palestine, and far fewer would have died in the Holocaust—wasn’t lifted until 1965.)

Eleven of the 12 nations to which Trump’s ban on visas has been applied— Afghanistan, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen—have populations that are either overwhelmingly Muslim or overwhelmingly Black. (The exception is civil war–torn Myanmar.) The same is true for 32 of the 36 nations listed as possibly subject to travel bans: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Ethiopia, Egypt, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, South Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The exceptions are Cambodia and the South Sea nations of Tonga and Tuvalu, which are majority Polynesian, and Vanuatu, which is majority Melanesian.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-23-trumps-bigoted-travel-bans/

[VMA131Marine]

1. I have a co-worker who's from Ghana

And I have an uncle on my wife’s side who is Egyptian.



Trump is just a racist, although I’m sure it was Stephen Miller who created this list of countries. Trump probably never heard of most of them.

Of course I am also an immigrant from the UK.

[sakabatou]

2. We've known they were bigoted since his first administration

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. trump is a racist and his travel bans are very racist