Cooper: Banning Muslims not in the DNA of America

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he'd like to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he'd like to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.

Curbing overall immigration and tightening travel restrictions to the United States have much more merit during an uptick in terrorism than Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's idea to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S. for a period of time.

If the country, instead, were to restrict all legal and illegal immigration for a period of time and concentrate on processing the people who are in the country legally and want to stay, the chances of terrorism would be reduced.

In the meantime, a bill backed by the U.S. House and the White House was expected to pass with bipartisan support Tuesday that would tighten the rules for visa-free travel to the U.S. It would deny visa-free travel for anyone who has been in Iraq and Syria in the past five years, would force countries in the visa waiver program to share counterterrorism information with the U.S. in order to stay in the program, would require participating countries to issue "e-passports" with biometric information (facial, fingerprint or iris recognition, for instance), would check all passengers against Interpol databases and would require U.S. security agencies to make more frequent checks of visa waiver countries to assess their risk.

Trump's proposal, however, stands against the very reason people came to America in the first place - to have religious freedom. Over the years, that freedom has stood the U.S. apart in a positive way as a place where people of all religions could live together safely and freely and practice the religion of their choice.

Because we now have to take more general care in immigration doesn't mean we should begin to use religion as a criterion for who can and can't come in.

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