I don't agree with Mark's tone, but the substance is clear:
First of all, it’s important to underline that Congress can exclude or admit any foreigner it wants, for any reason or no reason. Non-Americans have no constitutional right to travel to the United States and no constitutional due-process rights to challenge exclusion; as the Supreme Court has written multiple times, “Whatever the procedure authorized by Congress is, it is due process as far as an alien denied entry is concerned.â€
What’s more, while the president doesn’t have the authority that Obama has claimed, to let in anyone he wants for any reason (under the guise of “paroleâ€), he does have the statutory authority to keep anyone out, for any reason he thinks best. From 8 USC §1182:
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate (emphasis added).
So in considering Trump’s statement, the question is not whether it would be lawful but whether it would be good policy. (Barring the return of American citizens from abroad simply because they’re Muslims is ridiculous and illegal, but it doesn’t seem that Trump actually said that, despite the media’s trumpeting of that point.)
As usual, Trump is playing the part of your crotchety Uncle George holding forth on politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But the reason his careless and sloppy immigration commentary resonates is that no one else in public life is willing to address issues that worry — and, at this point, frighten — people. If “respectable†politicians refuse to even talk about the real problems caused by mass Muslim immigration, then a larger and larger share of the public will turn to carnival barkers unafraid of elite disapproval.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882. It was one of the most significant restrictions on free immigration in US history, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. The act followed the Angell Treaty of 1880, a set of revisions to the US-China Burlingame Treaty of 1868 that allowed the US to suspend Chinese immigration. The act was initially intended to last for 10 years, but was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law implemented to prevent a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States. It was repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943.
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It is not well-known now, but as of 1878 (ref: American Popular Dictionary, 1879) there were 433,000,000 in China (as compared to 199,000,000 in British India, 72,000,000 in the Russian Empire, and 33,000,000 in the United States). The Chinese Exclusion Act might sound like some sort of discrimination until you realize that deciding whom to admit into your country is quite literally a question of whether you even have a country afterwards. China was a massive population, as is Islam today (1,200,000,000). Anyone who denies the obvious in favor of some fear of "discrimination against Islam" is a fool.
Mark Kriorian has always tried to play the safe middle ground that doesn’t scare the ruling class.
He’s the housebroken immigration activist that gets invited to GOPe cocktail parties. An immigration version of “conservatives” like David Brooks.