Before you mods get itchy trigger fingers, notice how this thread is about Trump's (temporary) immigration and refugee ban, not about president Donald Trump or his policies more generally speaking. DO NOT merge this thread into the general one about Donald Trump and his presidency.
Trump's immigration ban: Does he have the legal authority to block refugees?
As the USA Today article explains, those seven countries are Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.President Trump suspended the U.S. refugee program for 120 days, banned all immigrants from seven Muslim countries for 90 days and ordered his administration to develop "extreme vetting" measures for immigrants from those countries to keep "radical Islamic terrorists" out of the United States.
Even though they are on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, for the life of me I can't think of why he decided to add Iran to this list. It's a well known fact that global Jihadism targeting the West is a Sunni religious phenomenon. Iran is majority Shia and the small amount of Sunnis who live there have not conducted terrorist acts against Westerners, from what I can remember. There was a recent concern in Iran where Iranian authorities cracked down on a group in Kermanshah province trying to recruit ethnically Kurdish (and religiously Sunni) fighters for ISIS, but I don't think that has anything to do with Trump's decision.
So what do you guys think? Do some of the countries on this list make any sense? Does it potentially block a bunch of people who shouldn't be blocked at all? Such as translators who worked closely and tirelessly with the United States military in Iraq. A similar episode happened with Afghanistan under Obama's watch, where translators whose lives were in danger so long as the Taliban could reach them needed sanctuary in the United States, but did not receive it. I bring that up just in case some people here think I'm making a partisan or polemic point against the Don himself, Donald J. Trump.
To me, it does make sense to include Libya, Syria, and Yemen, where there are ongoing insurgencies and radical movements recruiting the locals. Sudan is a bit more curious. I'm assuming he included Somalia due to the Sunni terrorist organization Al-Shabaab, but then again I don't really understand his reasoning here either. Al-Shabaab hasn't really posed a threat to the West; neither have their sub-Saharan brothers over in Nigeria, Boko Haram. The only Sunni terrorist organizations that have managed to directly attack the West in recent memory are al-Qaeda and ISIS (or if you're an old fart who has a longer memory, the Black September Palestinian terrorist group who killed athletes in the 1972 Olympics staged in Munich, Germany). As for the Shia, there hasn't been one since the 1980s when Hezbollah in Lebanon was able to kill over 200 US marines during Reagan's watch. And that didn't even occur in the West; that was in Beirut, Lebanon.