United States President, Donald J Trump, on Friday added Nigeria and five other countries to the list of nations facing stringent travel restrictions, virtually blocking immigration from Africa’s most populous nation, in an expansion of its policy blocking travel from seven other nations. The new restrictions will take effect on February 22. Mr. Trump is known to have made disparaging comments about African nations in the past, calling them “shithole countries” and complaining that Nigerians who entered the United States on visas would never “go back to their huts.”
Immigrant visas are issued to those relocating to the United States but observers fear the ban may lead to some restrictions on the regular American visitor visas. Citizens from Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan won’t be allowed to apply for visas to immigrate to the US under the policy, which the Trump administration said was designed to tighten security for countries that don’t comply with US minimum security standards or cooperate to prevent illegal immigration.
Two other countries, Sudan and Tanzania, were barred from participating in the diversity visa lottery, which randomly awards green cards to 50,000 immigrants from underrepresented countries annually. Many of the recipients are from African countries. The new restrictions will apply only to new visa applications. Immigrants who were issued valid visas before that date will still be able to move to the US. One DHS official estimated the affected population of people barred from immigrating to the US might total 12,300 per year.
The six countries will join a list of seven nations, most of them Muslim-majority, that faced significant travel restrictions under President Trump’s original travel ban, issued in 2017. That order was the administration’s third attempt to craft a legally workable policy fleshing out one of Trump’s top campaign promises, after the first two versions were met with significant criticism and struck down by federal courts.
However, unlike five of those original countries – Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen – travelers from the newly added nations who seek to visit the US for business or pleasure will still be permitted entry. The original restrictions, which also included bans against a small number of citizens from Venezuela and North Korea, remain in place.
Immigrant advocates denounced the new restrictions ahead of their release, calling the new policy an “African Ban” and criticizing the administration for not imposing restrictions on other, larger nations that also don’t cooperate with the US. “There are bad actors in Russia, bad actors in China, and none of those places have been put on any kind of ban,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas.) whose Houston district includes the largest Nigerian community in the US. “It is pure discrimination and racism.”
Chad Wolf, acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said the new immigration restrictions were designed to address security concerns in the way the banned countries track their own citizens, share information with the US and cooperate on immigration matters. He outlined a process, which the department undertakes every six months under the president’s 2017 order, under which the US government surveyed all other countries’ security practices.
Following that process, which Mr. Wolf said ended in September; the administration opted to place immigration restrictions on the countries that don’t meet its minimum security standards. Eritrea doesn’t take back Eritrean citizens the US is seeking to deport, he said, while Myanmar doesn’t share information on its citizens’ movements and on potential terrorist activity.
Mr. Wolf said the new restrictions were meant to encourage countries to cooperate more fully with the U.S.; the countries facing more tailored bans have less ground to make up. “These countries for the most part want to be helpful, want to do the right thing. But for a variety of reasons, they failed to meet those requirements we laid out,” Wolf said. “
The announcement yesterday comes days after the third anniversary of the original travel ban Trump issued in the first week of his presidency. That executive order threw the nation’s airports into chaos, as travelers, including U.S. permanent residents, who were born in any of the countries on the list, weren’t allowed into the country.
That ban was blocked by a federal court, as was a subsequent version the administration issued in March of that year. A third version, issued in September, established a set of criteria under which countries might face bans. The administration said it used those criteria for its expansion this week. The Supreme Court ultimately allowed that form of the travel ban to take effect in June 2018, calling it a permissible form of presidential power.
Critics derided that order as a “Muslim ban,” pointing to Mr. Trump’s rhetoric during the 2016 campaign calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the country until his administration could “figure out what the hell is going on.”
The new countries don’t fit the same pattern. Several were included partly because their citizens overstay visas at high rates. In the 2018 fiscal year, 24% of Eritreans on business or visitor visas overstayed their permits, along with 15% of Nigerians and 12% of people from Sudan. Those compared with a total overstay rate in the category of 1.9%.
Wolf said the administration had been weighing travel restrictions on several other countries, including Belarus, but dropped those countries from the list because they either complied with US security demands ahead of the announcement or were taken off by other government agencies, who feared imposing bans on them would put other foreign-policy and national security goals at risk. Homeland Security and State Department officials said some immigrants would be able to obtain waivers from the restrictions”, the report said.
The administration had argued that the ban, enacted in 2017 to restrict travel from Muslim-majority countries, was necessary to ensure that countries satisfy security requirements for travel into the United States, or face restrictions until they do. The new visa restriction list is coming as the US 2020 election heats up and Trump is expected to use his travel ban, as well as his efforts to cut refugee admissions, to rally his political base as his administration contends with a Senate impeachment trial.
The New York Times report added that immigrants, citizens and students had already experienced the effect of Mr. Trump’s increased vetting at ports throughout the border. “We’re adding a couple of countries,” Mr. Trump said last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We have to be safe. Our country has to be safe. You see what’s going on in the world. Our country has to be safe.”
The administration has contended that the countries on the list have harbored terrorists, maintained outdated passport systems or failed to ensure adequate information sharing.
