AHA Today

AHA Condemns Second Draft of Executive Travel Ban

American Historical Association | Mar 13, 2017

Facing extensive criticism and litigation of his first executive order restricting entry into the United States, President Donald Trump has issued a revised executive order (#13780), this time citing historical evidence in support of the policy restricting immigration and refugee resettlement. The American Historical Association has applied the discipline’s professional standards to the revised directive and found that it does not pass historical muster. Moreover, like its predecessor EO 13769, the order “stands at odds with the values stated in our nation’s founding documents.” 

The AHA’s statement reads:


Citing “recent history,” the order notes that “hundreds of persons born abroad have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes in the United States.” A historian looks for context. The United States is home to millions of people “born abroad.” Of all the lethal terrorist acts that have been committed since September 11, 2001, and could be labeled “jihadist,” none of the 13 individuals involved were from the executive order’s six banned countries. Eight were born American citizens. Of the non-lethal jihadist attacks in the US during the same period, only three attackers entered the US from countries included in the ban. Most acts of terrorism committed or planned in the United States have involved primarily native-born, white men.

The scattered examples are equally unconvincing to scholars accustomed to the standards of our discipline. The new EO cites “two Iraqi born nationals admitted to the United States as refugees in 2009.” Each was convicted of terrorist acts committed in Iraq. The Justice Department has been clear on this: “[n]either was charged with plotting attacks within the United States.” The “native of Somalia” referenced in the EO, convicted of a plot in Oregon, came to the United States as a child and was radicalized here. He has been emphatically identified by the US attorney for that district as an instance of “homegrown” terrorism.

The EO’s sole reference to substantial numbers states that “300 persons who entered the United States as refugees are currently the subjects of counterterrorism investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” No evidence for this claim has been forthcoming; the FBI has been silent regarding the list of 300 persons. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy made a comparable accusation to which hindsight has not been kind: “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.”



President Trump’s new executive order stands at odds with the values stated in our nation’s founding documents, its proudest moments as a beacon and refuge. The new policy persists in demanding that the number of refugees accepted into the United States drop from 110,000 to 50,000, quashing the hopes of men, women, and children already in various stages of a thorough (even “extreme”) vetting process. This reduction in refugee admissions, based on a rhetoric that ties national security and well-being to ethnicity, evokes the refugee crisis of the 1930s, when the US government issued many fewer immigration visas than it could have under existing laws to Jews fleeing Nazism.


Download the statement as PDF

For a list of affiliated societies who have endorsed this statement, go to historians.org/news-and-advocacy/statements-and-resolutions-of-support-and-protest/aha-condemns-second-draft-of-executive-travel-ban

This post first appeared on AHA Today.

Tags: AHA Today Advocacy Migration/Immigration/Diaspora


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