Op-ed: The well-vetted immigrants

By Aleks Hunter

Last summer, I was a guest of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, N.H., as a cardiac patient. I was initially examined by a doctor from China, then treated by a team led by a doctor from Germany, with one one from Pakistan, one from Turkey and a resident from India.

My followup care was by a Jewish cardiologist on a fellowship from New York. They worked together seamlessly. And it was diligence by that international team that led them to find the very obscure cause of my illness that had my previous doctors baffled.

Over the past weekend, many well-vetted holders of permanent visas were detained by a presidential order, even after a federal court told authorities to stop doing so.

President Trump’s executive order targeting people from “Muslim dominant” countries did not include Saudi Arabia, a totalitarian, hereditary dictatorship notorious for human rights atrocities and the home country of most of the 9/11 attackers, and Pakistan, birthplace of the Taliban, two countries where the president has business interests.

Does it make sense to block intelligentsia from some countries and refugees who over the last half century have inflicted virtually no harm on the United States, while simultaneously adding no restrictions on countries whose citizens have come here and murdered thousands of our people?

The words spoken by the president about Saudi Arabia are very telling: “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

Where are the priorities? A postdoctoral researcher working at Stanford who holds a PhD in nuclear physics from Yale was detained at San Francisco Airport as a result of an order by a president who appointed a man with an animal husbandry degree from Texas A&M to head the Department of Energy.

It was only after his appointment that Gov. Rick Perry learned, by his own admission, that the main business of the DoE is oversight, supervision and stewardship of this nation’s civilian and military nuclear reactors and the world’s largest nuclear weapons arsenal.

This travel ban was politically and financially motivated, arbitrary and ineffective. As a result, we are no safer than we were last week, other than the fact that on a daily basis people are learning just how dangerous it is to have an inexperienced man at the helm of the U.S. government. We must not forget that the president of the United States is not our ruler; he is our employee.

Aleks Hunter has served in the U.S. Navy as an interior communications electrician, nuclear field. He and his wife live in Chester, where they operate The Old Town Farm Inn.