Rep Carson: Trump Singling Out Muslims Will Set a Precedent for a Downturn in America

Thursday on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront,” while discussing President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed extreme vetting for immigrants from certain nations with terrorist activity, Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN), the second Muslim to be elected to the U.S. Congress, said singling out Muslims would be “setting a precedent for a downturn in this country.”

Carson said, “I think it’s unfortunate. I think if you look at the program from 9-11-2001, it has not yielded much benefit. The program and concept is simply un-American. It’s unpatriotic. What we don’t want to do is single out Muslims in particular. It will effectively discourage a lot of talent from coming to our country. A lot of folks who have, during our economic downturn, have started businesses—very prosperous businesses—hired Americans and helped to make our country the great country that it is. And so my concern is that we will fuel the flames of Islamophobia with this kind of approach.”

“It was a horrible tragedy for us and it was bad on our image when we did it with the Japanese interment camps,” he continued. “And it’s difficult to target someone’s faith because people convert, people drop out of the faith. So it’s very difficult to determine. It’s one thing to do it based on race, which is still unacceptable, to base it on a person’s belief, we know that there are billions of Muslims that who are black, white, Arab, South Asian, African, European. They span the range. Where do you stop with this? So I think we’re setting a precedent for a downturn in this country unfortunately.”

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