Trump's executive order cover permanent residents. That makes no sense.

As a permanent resident myself, I don’t expect to be handed a passport or treated like a citizen (for what it’s worth, I like Josh Marshall’s conception of “thick citizenship”). But I do expect to be treated differently than a guy who just got off a plane for the first time — and not least because the process of obtaining a green card is tough. It took me a year from application to acceptance, and the vast majority of that time was taken up by the FBI. In addition to furnishing the government with my residential history, my employment history, and my criminal record (which is clean), I had to provide details of any clubs or societies to which I have ever belonged, to promise I wasn’t a terrorist or a Nazi or a communist, and to submit my fingerprints and a government-taken photograph on top. Which is to say: I had to go through the wringer before my card was issued. Because I was spotlessly clean my application wasn’t too involved, but I have friends whose days have been taken up by details of their parking tickets or their boyhood indiscretions or their penchant for getting fired. This is a tough nut to crack.

I bring this up not because I object to these strictures. I don’t. In fact, I’m hard-line enough to think that it would make sense to include some form of civics-and-language test prior to green cards being issued. Rather, I bring it up because I can’t work out how applying Trump’s rule to the holders of green cards makes any logical sense. As I have noted, these are people who have already gone through the vetting process; people who have been granted permanent residency; people who have made their lives here on the understanding that to fail to do so will incur penalties. What possible sense can it make to temporarily restrict their travel? If Trump is arguing that the vetting process wasn’t any good then he should be proposing far more than a temporary limitation; he should be proposing a wholesale revisitation of the system. But he’s not. In three or four months, the people who are being turned away today will be let in again. And what will Trump have achieved? Certainly not the same things as declining to allow new applications will.