Councilman Ravi Bhalla submitted the following resolution as seen below for the Hoboken City Council meeting this evening. The resolution addresses the presidential executive order in place excluding visas from seven counties where the central governments are inert, suspect or complicit in working with jihadist groups.

Councilman Bhalla, who has relatives in Iran has declared the 90 day travel ban moratorium discriminatory, immoral and compares the EO to the Holocaust. The complete resolution follows:

Selective protest? When almost 100 Cuban refugees were forced back to that Communist gulag island in one of the last cynical acts taken by President Obama mere days before the inauguration last month, not a single cry or protest was  heard from the in the tank media or protestors.

Talking Ed Note: MSV disagrees with much of the hysteria and conflation of national security and the right of sovereign nations to manage a legal immigration process with travel visas which fall under the Constitutional authority of the President.


Numerous US Presidents have wielded this authority, often repeatedly in seeking to address national security concerns. All recent presidents including President Trump have made efforts to accept refugees in similar numbers. Religious persecution is a factor in the process, more now than in the recent past.


When Barack Obama was President, he ordered a six month travel ban on Iraq in 2011. This even with many Iraqis who risked their lives and the lives of their families in the war.  Prior to him, President Bush wielded similar executive authority and so did President Jimmy Carter who slapped a travel ban on Iran when it raided and took over the US Embassy in Tehran taking more than 60 embassy staff hostage. In addition, Carter ejected Iranian nationals, among them foreign students. Other US presidents have taken similar action as is their Constitutional authority under US law.


This is an emotional issue and personal for many people. MSV would however note, there was not a single outcry, not from the media and not from the public with any protest after close to 100 Cuban refugees who escaped that island gulag were stopped from entering the United States last month. Similarly, a CNN Town Hall yesterday let slip a woman who asked what American lives should be put at risk as her son was tortured, set on fire and murdered at the hands of an illegal alien.


Who decides which and how many American lives are expendable on US shores? 


In one of the finals acts of his presidency, Barack Obama signed an Executive Order preventing fleeing Cubans from entry into the US reversing a decades long policy where Cuban refugees risking life and limb to escape the communist controlled island were given shelter and protected status on arrival. Many Cubans have risked their lives and that of their families in attempting an escape. Many have drowned and lost their lives in the shark infested waters between Cuba and Florida making the attempt.


When the Executive Order by President Trump was announced Friday, a similar amount of travelers, roughly 100 of more than 325,000 traveling to the US that day were impacted with heightened screening and vetting. This was met immediately with George Soros backed protests and allegations from numerous groups from the Left and the Lamestream media of an alleged “Muslim Ban.”


The national security measures actually pinpoint seven failed or hostile nation states where terrorism is neither controlled if not openly backed. Visas issued from these failed states are certainly suspect and can not be considered properly vetted. Those seven nation states are NOT named in the President Trump Executive Order; they were selected through the efforts of the prior Barack Obama Administration.


MSV, as a first generation American citizen of immigrants strongly opposes this ceremonial resolution castigating a temporary travel ban from these Muslim dominated countries. It does not even constitute 15% of the population of 50 other mostly Islamic nations. The propaganda and misinformation, the gas lighting of Americans has been non-stop since Friday. Iran especially has historically seen numerous religious minorities among its 70 million majority Shia Islamic population. Historically, those religious minorities including people of the Jewish faith were not persecuted. Today, under the authoritarian mullahs, those minorities face imprisonment or worse if they attempt or are seen practicing their faith openly. 


In addition, Christians are among the most persecuted in the Middle East among other religious minorities such as the Yazidis. For the last two years, more Christians worldwide are persecuted for their faith than any other, back to Nero in the times of the Roman Empire. Was there a single media backed protest for any of it? Any sympathy or action led by the US government? On the whole, they like other religious minorities have been relatively ignored.


President Trump plans to accept approximately 50,000 refugees this year in line with previous US norms in most prior years. In addition to exceptions allowed on a case by case basis, an additional review of foreign nationals who aided the US military in the field will see approval for themselves and their families in short order under Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.


The actual facts on the temporary travel ban are being widely misreported: intentionally and conflated with legal immigration, illegal immigration and earlier refugees fleeing the Jewish Shoah. This is wrong on so many levels but the utter disregard for the will and national security of the American people is nothing short of outrageous. To equate any refugees in decades past to the national security risk today is either willfully ignorant or blatantly political. None of those refugees posed a terrorist risk to the United States.


Historically, national security has not been politicized but since the shock to many of the uprising of the American people with the election results last November, that too is no longer a bridge too far. Sad times these.