Pew: Trump's EO Affects Only a Small Percent of the World's Muslims

Brittany M. Hughes | February 1, 2017
DONATE
Font Size

Providing further proof that President Donald Trump’s executive order pausing refugee admissions from seven Middle Eastern countries isn’t the much-maligned “Muslim ban” it's been made out to be, data from Pew Research show the order affects only about 12 percent of the world’s Muslim population – leaving 88 percent of all Muslims completely unaffected by Trump's new temporary policy.

In fact, not only does Trump's EO not apply to the vast majority of Muslims, it doesn't even affect nine out of the world's top 10 most heavily Muslim-populated countries, Pew noted.

Pew reports:

President Donald Trump’s recent executive order temporarily freezing immigration from seven predominantly Islamic countries would affect only about 12% of the world’s Muslims, according to estimates from a 2015 Pew Research Center report on the current and projected size of religious groups. In fact, of the seven countries named in the new immigration ban – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – only one, Iran, is among the 10 countries with the largest Muslim populations.

Indeed Pew’s 2015 report shows that the geographic region with the largest share of the world’s Muslims isn’t the Middle East at all – it’s Asia and the Pacific. Nearly 1 billion Muslims live in the region, which includes countries like China, India and Indonesia. 

Pew estimates there are more than 1.5 billion Muslims living across all seven continents. That number is expected to skyrocket 73 percent by 2050, outpacing the growth of Christianity by a factor of 2 to 1.

Trump has received widespread criticism over the past few days after signing an executive order that placed a temporary ban on all refugee admissions from certain countries, including Syria, Iran and Iraq. While the poorly implemented rollout of the new policy only affected about 0.3 percent of all international arrivals over the weekend, thousands of anti-Trump protesters and liberal pundits slammed Trump for his allegedly “anti-Muslim” travel ban – a wild mischaracterization that certainly isn’t backed up by Pew’s data.

donate