Who will be affected by Trump's new immigration order?

(Image credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

published 10 March 2017

President Trump's new executive order concerning immigration and refugee admissions suspends U.S. entrance by people from six countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — instead of the original order's seven (including Iraq). To explain who is likely to be affected by the new order, Pew Research Center has an analysis of past immigration trends from the affected nations.

The nearly 650,000 entries from these six countries accounted for 0.1 percent of legal immigration entries (a measure of entry incidents, not people, who may enter more than once) from 2006 to 2015. Crucially, the majority of entries from the affected nations were short-term visits for work, study, or pleasure purposes like tourism or visiting family members who already live here:

Nearly two-thirds (409,449) of the total legal U.S. entries from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen between fiscal 2006 and 2015 were admitted using temporary non-immigrant visas. Those on temporary visas were mostly visitors to the U.S., but could also include students, businesspeople, short-term workers and diplomats, according to an analysis of Department of Homeland Security data. [Pew]

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.