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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Snarky misconstrued labelling aside: Yes. Targeted countries chosen (and approved by prior President!) due to previously-acknowledged problems with the vetting process. Timeframe for the "ban" was limited & short. "Muslim" was not specified in any way.

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And the timeframe of the ban was based on the ability of those nations to bring their vetting process into compliance. 6/7 of those nations were failed states, meaning there is no assurance of government/legal accountability, and 1 (Iran) is the world's largest source of funding for terrorist organizations. No it was not about Muslims, as nations with 1.1B Muslims were not affected and only nations with 200M Muslims were.

Sounds like you didn't hear about people being asked about their religious affiliation, or POTUS himself noting on a radio show that Christians would get preferential treatment.

Religious persecution is a thing. If you're a normal adherent to the state-sponsored by-far-majority religion of a country, claiming refugee status via "violent religious persecution" is a stretch. If you're a rare adherent of a state-persecuted tiny-minority religion being violently exterminated with the tacit (if not declared) approval of the government, then you are exactly what refugee status via "violent religious persecution" is legally recognized for. Kind of hard to discern the difference without asking someone their religious affiliation.

ETA: Legitimate refugees, people actually being violently persecuted by the state for some aspect of their minority status, are unlikely to get proper vetting regardless of the quality of the vetting process, and 'tis quite humanitarian to take them in if they can be reasonably identified as such. Those not so persecuted are in the best position for their state to provide proper vetting, which if their state can't/won't provide proper vetting then we need to halt their immigration until reasonable vetting can be established. This has NOTHING to do with religion per se, especially when the allegedly discriminated-against group has over 5x as many members in other countries who can apply for properly-vetted visas without any difficulty.

So it's a Muslim ban, because the majority of potential immigrants from the targeted countries are Muslim.

But you have to admit that it got quite outrageous once they started removing LPRs and dual-citizens of foreign countries from inbound flights.

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