At GOP Debate, Trump the Only Candidate Willing to Pause Muslim Immigration

Trump in Debate Makes Aside onstage Timothy A. Clary Getty
Timothy A. Clary/Getty

At Thursday’s Fox Business debate, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump was the only presidential candidate willing to pause Muslim immigration.

The U.S. has admitted 1.5 million immigrants from the Muslim world since 9/11. As Muslim immigration steadily increases the burden on federal terrorism investigators and adds new voters to the Democrat voters rolls, only one candidate on the debate stage said he was willing to hit the pause button.

After Trump reaffirmed his support for a Muslim immigration pause, debate moderator Maria Bartiromo put the question to all candidates:

According to Pew Research, the U.S. admits more than 100,000 Muslim immigrants every single year on a permanent lifetime basis. I want to ask the rest of you to comment on this. Do you agree that we should pause Muslim immigration until we get a better handle on our Homeland Security situation, as Mr. Trump has said?

Pew’s figure measures lifetime Muslim immigrants. Including all forms of visas, such as temporary workers and students, the U.S. will issue nearly 300,000 visas to Muslim migrants in the next year alone. As a comparison, there are about 180,000 active members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. That means that this year the U.S. will admit more Muslim migrants than there are Daughters of the American Revolution.

Not one single candidate – Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, John Kasich, Chris Chrsitie or Ted Cruz–said they were willing to support a pause to the enormous annual inflow of Muslim immigrants on visas.

If visa issuances are not curbed, in the next five years the U.S. will permanently resettle more Muslim migrants on green cards–which allow recipients to eventually apply for voting privileges–than the number of South Carolina Republican primary voters who voted in the 2012 election.

According to Pew Research, only 11 percent of Muslim Americans identify as Republican or leaning-Republican, making them one of the most reliable Democrat voting blocs in the country.

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