Aidoghie Paulinus, Abuja
United States President Donald Trump, has finally placed a visa ban on Nigeria and five other countries.
Also affected in the new ban, according to The Wall Street Journal, are Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan including Sudan and Tanzania. .
The Wall Street Journal reported Chad Wolf, the United States Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to have said that the new immigration restrictions were designed to address security concerns in the way the banned countries track their own citizens, share information with the U.S. and cooperate on immigration matters.
Wolf listed a process which the department goes through every six months under the president’s 2017 order in which the U.S. government surveyed all other countries’ security practices.
“The Trump administration is banning immigration from Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, and three other countries in an expansion of its policy blocking travel from seven other nations.
“Citizens from Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan won’t be allowed to apply for visas to immigrate to the U.S. under the policy, which the Trump administration said was designed to tighten security for countries that don’t comply with the U.S. minimum security standards or cooperate to prevent illegal immigration.
“Two other countries, Sudan and Tanzania, will be barred from participating in the diversity visa lottery, which randomly awards green cards to 50,000 immigrants from underrepresented countries annually. Many of the recipients are from African countries.
“The new restrictions are set to take effect on Feb. 21 and will apply only to new visa applications. Immigrants who were issued valid visas before that date will still be able to move to the U.S,” the Wall Street Journal wrote.
Recall that the visa ban is making it the third time that the Trump administration is attempting to come up with a legal policy to back one of his major campaign promises.
Wolf added that the new restrictions were geared towards encouraging countries to cooperate more fully with the U.S, even as he said the countries facing more tailored bans have less ground to make up.
“These countries for the most part want to be helpful, want to do the right thing.
“But for a variety of reasons, they failed to meet those requirements we laid out,” Wolf said.
“The new countries don’t fit the same pattern. Several were included partly because their citizens overstay visas at high rates. In the 2018 fiscal year, 24 percent of Eritreans on business or visitor visas overstayed their permits, along with 15 percent of Nigerians and 12 percent of people from Sudan. Those compared with a total overstay rate in the category of 1.9 percent,” the Wall Street Journal also reported.
Wolf further said the administration had been considering travel restrictions on several other countries, including Belarus.
He added that the US dropped those countries from the list because they either complied with U.S. security demands ahead of the announcement or were taken off by other government agencies, who feared imposing bans on them would put other foreign-policy and national security goals at risk.
