The Trump administration is right to treat the threat as a global one, but characteristically fact-resistant in its imagining that visa-seeking nationals of the “particular concern” countries listed above are the most likely perpetrators of slaughter in the name of the Islamic State. A global threat is a global threat, and Europeans and Americans are still part of planet Earth. If the Islamic State intends to kill Americans by sending an Iraqi or Syrian to get a visa, they are doing it the hard way. Most of the attackers will blow themselves up out of frustration with the American immigration bureaucracy before they can ever reach American shores to blow themselves up near their intended targets.

Compare the tedious process of applying for a visa to the ease with which a citizen of a visa-waiver country can buy a ticket on Air France or British Airways—or just stay home and rent a truck, or buy a kitchen knife or a jerrycan of gas and a matchbook. The whole process can be conceived and executed with a credit card, in less than a day. According to Seamus Hughes of George Washington University, slightly fewer than 120 Americans have been caught on the road to jihad, and another 52 are known to have made it to Syria. One assumes there are more waiting for their moment. Add to that number the thousands who follow ISIS in Europe, Australia, and friendly countries in the Middle East. For ISIS to choose a Syrian or Yemeni to attack a Western target is not inconceivable, but it would present needless obstacles—and ISIS wants easy wins, rather than complicated plots with high risk of failure.

Meanwhile, the losers in this process are the citizens of the suspect countries whose plans to come to United States for business, study, family reunification, and refuge are now suspended. None of these people has a right to come to the United States (although asylum-seekers do have a right not to be repatriated to a place of likely persecution), and the president is within his rights to implement this policy. But it is coldhearted folly. Whatever dangers visitors to the United States bring—and by any standard they should be minimal—will be outweighed by the benefits.

The draft executive order sounds compassionate notes. They are often off-key. It commands the State Department to revamp the refugee program to prioritize immigration “on the basis of religious-based persecution,” with the stipulation that the religion be a minority religion in one's home country. The obvious purpose of this order is to welcome non-Muslims victimized by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, such as the Chaldean Catholics of the Nineveh Plain, or Armenian Orthodox Syrians, or the Yezidis. But I await the first applications from Muslim minorities who allege persecution in their home countries. Would Sunnism qualify as a persecuted minority religion in Shia-dominated Iraq? Could radical Shia claim persecution by the Sunni monarchy of Bahrain? Can Ahmadi Muslims, mistreated by majorities all over the Muslim world, now cut to the front of the immigration line?