President Trump's immigration order is a disgrace. But not for the reasons you think.

President Trump's executive order banning nationals of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States for the next 90 days is a moral travesty, but not for the reasons so many journalists, activists, and protesters appear to believe.

It isn't terrible because Jesus said to love the poor and the needy most of all. Or because a plaque at the Statute of Liberty displays a moving poem about huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Or because it's un-American to make hard decisions about who the country will accept as immigrants or refugees. The U.S. is not — and never has been — a Red Cross encampment on the edge of an active war zone with its doors held open indiscriminately to all comers.

In fact, no country can be described this way. All political communities have borders and distinguish between citizens, resident aliens, and noncitizens; all communities accept some outsiders and reject others. This has been true even for the United States, which through long stretches of its history has admitted large numbers of immigrants. It was certainly true during the just-completed presidency of Barack Obama.

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No, this executive order is abhorrent because the United States does not face a serious threat from terrorists originating in the seven singled-out countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Sudan. How do we know that? Because there have thus far been no fatal terrorist attacks committed by people from those countries. None. Not one. Which means that the executive order isn't justified. At all. Not because such an order is inherently unacceptable, but because it isn't necessary under the present circumstances.

If the United States faced a sufficiently elevated threat of terrorist attacks committed by nationals originating from these countries, the executive order might well be justified, and I might well support it. But it doesn't, and I don't.

In certain respects, the order transgresses bedrock American principles that should be considered inviolable, especially the original (now partially walked-back) inclusion in the ban of foreign nationals in possession of green cards. These are lawful permanent residents of the United States, not outsiders we may feel the need to exclude in a time of extreme national threat. They have already endured and come through an arduous, time-consuming vetting process run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (One might even describe it as "extreme vetting.")

So, why insist on originally including lawful permanent residents in the ban (as senior White House staffers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller apparently went out of their way to do)?

Leaving aside demagogic motives (which may well be at play), the inclusion of green card holders in the ban implies that even those who've been through this lengthy and rigorous screening are a threat to the nation. But if that's true, why wouldn't fully naturalized citizens who originated from those suspect countries also be considered a threat?

When that implication is combined with the President Trump's remarks about eventually giving preference to Christian refugees from the Middle East, what we appear to be left with is an order that lays the groundwork for something far more sweeping than a restriction on visas for foreigners from a select group of countries. We have the groundwork for treating American citizens who originated from those countries (or perhaps who just happen to be Muslim) as a uniquely threatening class of citizen — a class subject to special scrutiny, surveillance, and harassment. But of course, when a class of citizen is subject to special scrutiny, surveillance, and harassment, its members are no longer full citizens. They are second-class citizens, with more limited rights than all other, "normal" citizens.

To judge by the rabid reader comments attached to the article on Breitbart announcing the executive order, at least some of Trump's most passionate supporters crave precisely such an arrangement for Muslims in the United States.

Would it be un-American to relegate Muslim Americans to the category of second-class citizens? Given the long history of the U.S. treating certain classes of people as less than full citizens (African-Americans, Native Americans, Japanese Americans), it would be difficult to call such a move un-American, at least in purely empirical terms. But morally, it's a no-brainer: Treating Muslim Americans as second-class citizens would indisputably be a vicious betrayal of the nation's highest ideals and aspirations — a betrayal that the threat posed by radical Islam does not even remotely justify.

That's why the Trump administration's executive order is an outrage, and it cannot be allowed to stand.