Gotta love the playground… Obama did so why can’t I? – PB/TK
Trump says Obama banned refugees too. He’s wrong.
Updated by
Shortly after President Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning all refugees and all nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, there was a curious reaction from some members of the conservative press: President Obama had the same thing. You heard it everywhere, from the august pages of National Review to the considerably less august virtual pages of Breitbart.
Even Trump endorsed this idea in a statement Sunday afternoon.
“My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months,” he said, echoing the arguments in conservative publications almost word for word. “The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.”
This is wrong in every particular. Obama’s Iraqi visa policy in 2011 did not ban Iraqis from entering the country. Obama’s immigration policy did not treat people with passports from the seven countries as unusually dangerous terrorism threats. And Obama’s policies never approached anything like the breadth, cynicism, and incompetence of Trump’s executive order.
Continue to vox.com article: http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/31/14444862/obama-refugee-ban-2011
