Update: Paul Sperry writing at the New York Post a couple of days ago asks the same question, here.
As you know there are seven countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, Yemen) from which the Trump Administration is restricting immigration/entry because of terror infiltration concerns.
There are lots of countries one might question that are not on the list, but I wondered why Afghanistan isn’t an obvious choice.
Someone asked me this week whether there was an increase in ‘refugees’ being admitted from Afghanistan and I thought it seemed like there was, so I just checked.
We admitted 11,191 ‘refugees’ from Afghanistan since FY 2004 and here is what it looks like (sorry this is the best I could do with the screenshots at Wrapsnet):
There was a big uptick of refugee admissions from Afghanistan in FY2016. I checked religions as well and found that 97% were Muslims of some sort (not a surprise!).
As we have done in Iraq as well, we are bringing both sides of the Sunni vs. Shiite conflict to America. 4,106 were Shiites and 5,783 are Sunnis. So do we place them in the same communities in America?
A few of the 206 we admitted since last Friday are from Afghanistan.
Here is where those 11,191 were placed (from FY 2004 until yesterday):
So, again, why isn’t Afghanistan a nation of concern?
This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’