Eileen Truax - We Built the Wall

Ann Donnellys name echoed all over social media the night of January 28, 2017. Donnelly had been a federal district court judge for just over a year when a ruling from her court in Brooklyn, New York, made her the first judge to block an executive order by President Donald Trump.

The executive order, signed by Trump the day before on Friday, January 27, was announced as a temporary cancellation of permission to enter the United States for citizens of seven countries: Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, with the alleged aim of protecting the country from terrorism. Although the order defined those barred from entering by their nationality, it was widely known as the Muslim ban, a phrase popularized by Trump himself during his presidential campaign, because Islam was the predominant religion in the seven countries cited.

Of the twenty-three executive orders signed by Trump during his first twelve weeks in office, this was the most polemic, stirring the strongest reaction from U.S. citizens. Within just a few hours, large crowds descended on the biggest airports in the country to protest the measure and to show support for people being detained upon arrival, including permanent U.S. residents who had temporarily traveled to their country of origin. Syrian refugees scheduled to arrive in the United States that weekend were detained; an infant girl from Iran traveling to the United States for life-saving heart surgery was not allowed to enter the country. Within a few days, federal courts in other cities had also blocked the order. For the first time in many years, the United States took a hard look at itself and its policies of accepting and excluding refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and people from other countries in general.

It was probably about time. For decades, the United States has promoted itself to the rest of the world as a democratic country, with an open-arms policy that affirms diversity, which has very little to do with how the nation actually shapes its policies around immigration, refuge, and asylum.

In spite of being the country with the largest number of immigrants in the worldalmost 50 million people living in U.S. territory were not born therethe United States has a smaller percentage of immigrants in relation to the general population than other countries. Immigrants comprise 14 percent of the U.S. population, compared with 22 percent in Canada and 28 percent in Australia; countries that have openly acknowledged their need for foreign labor have reached figures as high as 75 percent in Qatar and 88 percent in the United Arab Emirates. Even in Spain, a country experiencing large-scale immigration only recently, 13 percent of the population are immigrants, just one percentage point less than the United States.

Another image the United States sells to the world is the melting pot, referring to its ethnic diversity. Compared with other countries, however, it is not a leader in that sense either. In terms of diversity, once again other countries such as Canada, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have higher indices. In the United States, one of every four immigrants comes from a single country, Mexico. In other destination countries popular with immigrants, mainly in Europe, migration comes from a wider, more diverse range of countries.