Donald Trump wrong to say Kuwait followed his lead on visa ban

President Donald Trump's favorite social media tool is Twitter. But Trump turned to Facebook recently to defend his executive order on visas and travel from seven countries.

Trump’s Facebook post seemed to rally supporters around the wisdom of his executive order, which suspended entry for most foreign travelers from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen for 120 days.

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Another key point is that the immigration systems of the United States and Kuwait are akin to “apples and oranges,” said David Andrew Weinberg, a Gulf specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Kuwait, unlike the United States, is not a multiethnic democracy,” Weinberg said. “It is a family-ruled monarchy and ethnically-based nation that does not offer a route to citizenship to immigrants. In fact, Kuwait doesn’t even grant citizenship to enormous numbers of ‘bedoon’ individuals who have been there for generations but aren’t recognized as ‘Kuwaiti’ by the state.”

Estimates put the number of expatriates in Kuwait at more than 2 million, accounting for about two-thirds of the country’s population and much of its workforce.

In other words, Weinberg said, Kuwait, unlike the United States, doesn’t have an immigration system for people to come and stay and become citizens. So any movement toward a stricter immigration policy would have much bigger consequences in the United States than in Kuwait.

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