Trump’s warning: Pakistan visa applicants to face ‘extreme vetting’

President says it is going to be very hard to enter the US

US President Donald Trump in his first televised sit-down interview as US president has said Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia are not among countries that will face a visa ban to enter the country; however, citizens of these countries will face “extreme vetting”.

In an interview with ABC News, the US president was asked: “Why are we (America) going to allow people (from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) to come into this country...”

To this, Trump answered, “We’re going to have extreme vetting in all cases. And I mean extreme. And we’re not letting people in if we think there’s even a little chance of some problem.”

“We are excluding certain countries. But for other countries, we’re gonna have extreme vetting. It’s going to be very hard to come in. Right now it’s very easy to come in. It’s gonna be very, very hard. I don’t want terror in this country,” he added.

The interview, broadcast on Thursday, was Trump’s first to a television channel since he took oath as President on January 20, and covered a wide range of subjects, from Obamacare to immigration to war against terrorists.

Trump said his plan to limit the entry of people from several Muslim countries was necessary because the world was “a total mess”. He denied that it was a ban on Muslims. “No, it’s not the Muslim ban, but it’s countries that have tremendous terror,” Trump said.

“And it’s countries that people are going to come in and cause us tremendous problems. Our country has enough problems without allowing people to come in, who in many cases or in some cases, are looking to do tremendous destruction.”

Trump refused to be pinned down on which countries he was talking about, but did say that he believed that Europe “made a tremendous mistake by allowing these millions of people to go into Germany and various other countries”.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2017.