“My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months,” he said, echoing the arguments in conservative publications almost word for word. “The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.”
This is wrong in every particular. Obama’s Iraqi visa policy in 2011 did not ban Iraqis from entering the country. Obama’s immigration policy did not treat people with passports from the seven countries as unusually dangerous terrorism threats. And Obama’s policies never approached anything like the breadth, cynicism, and incompetence of Trump’s executive order.
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“While the flow of Iraqi refugees slowed significantly during the Obama administration’s review, refugees continued to be admitted to the United States during that time, and there was not a single month in which no Iraqis arrived here,” Jon Finer, an Obama administration official who worked on national security, writes at Foreign Policy.
Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s top foreign policy aides, took a similar line.
“There was no ban on Iraqis in 2011,” Rhodes tweeted. “Anyone pushing that line is hiding behind a lie because they can't defend the EO.”
Finer and Rhodes’s account is backed up by two fact-checkers who looked into the issue, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiely. Both concluded, in lengthy investigations that I encourage you to read, that Obama’s policy was not a six-month ban on Iraqi refugees.
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