Muslim Ban Policy

My opponent ignored the fallacious reasoning I presented was just a restatement of his own to show it was a weak argument. I will respond to his points and then provide more reasons to support my policy. 1 Several legal experts believe it would not be a violation of constitutional rights. I agree with their reading of the law, and there are good reasons to leave this question to the discretion of the people. I think the phrasing that the founding fathers "respected all faiths" is misleading. If read a certain way, one might think they admired all the faiths, which I seriously doubt. There"s a clear difference between allowing people religious freedom and completely ignoring religion as a factor with immigration policy. Regardless of your opinion of the Muslim religion, it goes against common sense to ignore a person"s beliefs when determining their right to enter the country. Once again my opponent gives a slippery slope argument by an analogy to Germany under Hitler. Just because something has happened before does not make it inevitable to happen in the future. The context is clearly different here on all sides of the issue. My opponent tries to muddy the water with a common tactic of the left when it comes to discussing anything related to Trump: associate him with Hitler and the Nazis. Not only are we talking about completely different circumstances, but his example referred to completely different actions: Arresting, deporting, or sending people off to be murdered at death camps are obviously different than simply putting a halt on immigration. Here it seems you are relying more on emotion than facts and reasoning. As I stated in the last round, the slippery slope you imagined where the U.S. starts banning Hindus, Buddhists, and agnostics are all different issues and I will not be addressing them here other than to say today they seem ludicrous. It isn"t surprising a study from a university in blue California blames Trump for an increase in hate crime. Even the study you quoted points to another factor that could explain the increase in hate crime: Terrorist attacks across the world. I don"t deny this is something that can occur where a religious group declares themselves the enemy of a nation, people, ideology, etc. It"s easy to see how this can become a problem for others who might be innocent but who seem associated with them. My goal is to reduce crime, not increase it. For this point, the relevant question becomes: Would the ban prevent more crimes than it would cause? It is difficult to say, but a closer look at the data is needed to weigh the costs versus the benefits. From stats I"ve seen, the number of alleged hate crimes against Muslims in 2015 was 257. Going from that number, it would be useful to know the types of crime committed. My opponent assume basing the ban on geography will avoid this problem. That seems unlikely, especially considering 9 out of the 13 danger countries he listed had populations of 90%+ Muslim. People committing hate crimes probably weren"t asking which country their victims came from. With my opponent"s reasoning, country specific bans would lead to increased crimes against people who were, or appeared to be from, those countries. And since in most of the countries they were almost entirely Muslim, I expect the number of hate crimes caused by either his plan or mine would be nearly the same. 2 My statements were based on the sources I cited. I simply haven"t seen polls of Muslims from those countries, but my opponent tries to spin that to suggest I am ignoring data that "would reflect poorly on my policy". Making that claim suggests that my opponent has seen polling data from Muslims in those countries. If that"s true, he should cite it. Otherwise, he is making claims based on nothing but his own opinion and assumptions while trying to pass them off as verified facts. There are stats from other countries that are also worrying. This includes polls in the US, France, Spain, Germany, England, and others. And yes, even in Denmark where a 2015 study found that 77% of Muslims believe the Quran"s instructions should be "fully applied" and only 53% thought that Danish law should be based on the constitution instead of the Quran. I plan to go into the statistics a bit more in the last round of the debate. My opponent suggests that my policy could cause 2% of the world"s Muslims to become terrorists. This number and consideration seems to be pulled from nothing but his own guess. If this guess is accurate, it would indeed be a disaster to be sure. I really think that would be a fact that reflects worse on those 2% of Muslims than on the actual policy, but that would be little comfort if suddenly 32 million people became extremists. What if those 2% of Muslims felt as strongly about preventing the legalization of gay marriage? Or about Christians having equal rights? Or about a cartoonist drawing their prophet? Those might be a stretch. However, the Muslim population is so large, as soon as you pick a % and say x action will cause them to become terrorists, it is a disaster. The conclusion of my my opponent puts people on the verge of becoming violent psychopaths in charge of our government. Worse still, it forces us to open our country to them. It is a difficult issue to address, though my opponent"s policy likely suffers the same problems. He argues that most of the potential extremists are from dangerous countries he listed, yet imagines that banning a bunch of almost entirely Muslim countries won"t be seen as the West vs Islam to those hypothetical people on the fence. 5 A person trying to actively hide their religion might be difficult to catch. Perhaps a lie detector test, or using other forms of evidence. But this criticism applies to your counterplan: What if they lie about their country of origin/have a fake passport or no passport? You take all reasonable steps to enforce it, and accept that no policy is likely to be flawless. 6 My opponent makes a number of far-reaching suggestions of concessions that will be required to implement a ban on Muslim immigration. I"m not going to address each individual scenario since my opponent has just held up a conspiracy theory as his proof that his conclusions are true. Once again you"ve stated a problem that most likely applies to both plans, though I don"t believe Trump will be forced to concede a war (or multiple wars) to implement either policy. To say I agreed with "many of your points" would be better phrased as: I acknowledged potential costs of the policy based on facts and reasonable expectations. Both policies, as I have shown, share similar problems. Hopefully, the viewers recognize this and use facts and sound guide their judgment.