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  • 2015-12-07 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Muslims Banned from the U.S. in 1952? (en)
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  • In late 2015 a claim spreading on social media under the heading ISLAM WAS BANNED FROM THE USA IN 1952, holding that Muslims has been banned from entering or immigrating to the United States back in the early 1950s: The image sharply escalated in popularity following an unprecedented statement from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who on 7 December 2015 (in the wake of a mass shooting in San Bernardino that had occurred five days earlier) suggested the United States should bar all Muslims from entering the country until such time as lawmakers could figure out what [was] going on Simply put, the rumor maintained that Muslims as a group were ineligible for admission to the United States based upon a law that prohibited entry to any alien who belongs to an organization seeking to overthrow the government of the United States by 'force, violence, or other unconstitutional means.' The law referenced was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran–Walter Act. Its text is available in full at the U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Services (USCIS) web site, where a preface indicates that the law has been amended many times over the years but is still the basic body of immigration law. The claim typically cited Chapter 2 Section 212 of the Act, which excludes as ineligible for admission the following persons: That law, originally aimed at Communists, could be used now to exclude persons (both Muslims and non-Muslims) who have demonstrated an affiliation or sympathy with violent extremist groups professing Islamist motivations and goals (e.g., ISIS, al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram) from entering the U.S., but asserting that it enables a de facto ban on all Muslims is inaccurate. Most major religions involve basic, agreed-upon sets of tenets by which their faithful live, and no widely-accepted understanding of Islam encompasses a prohibition on following the laws of any country or advocates the overthrow of government. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was not without critics, among them President Harry S. Truman, who vetoed the bill on 25 June 1952. In a letter titled Veto of Bill to Revise the Laws Relating to Immigration, Naturalization, and Nationality and addressed to the House of Representatives, President Truman described the bill's provisions as both antithetical to American values and discriminatory: In that letter President Truman further maintained the act's provisions were out of alignment with foreign policy goals, inhibiting immigrants who needed it most from seeking safe harbor in America: Truman's words seemed exceptionally prescient when he spoke of citizens in countries that had in recent years fallen behind the Iron Curtain: In that letter, President Truman spoke specifically of immigration quotas arranged deliberately to exclude specific nationalities. A large portion of the letter directly addressed Truman's belief that the American way of life ought to be extended to those living under the same totalitarian regimes the U.S. hoped to vanquish. Truman lamented that in no other realm of our national life are we so hampered and stultified by the dead hand of the past, as we are in this field of immigration. The ISLAM WAS BANNED FROM THE USA IN 1952 claim proved popular following a period of increasing rhetoric similar to that which Truman decried as discriminatory and outdated in 1952. The basic claim hinged on the tautological assertion that adherence to Islam alone constitutes participation in an organization seeking to overthrow the government of the United States by 'force, violence, or other unconstitutional means.' (en)
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