Discontinued Muslim Ban Slashed Immigration From Countries Affected

Between the fiscal years of 2016 and 2019, the Trump administration's so-called Muslim ban or travel ban majorly reduced new U.S. residents from the places affected. It came into effect at the beginning of President Donald Trump's first term in early 2017 and was repealed in its final form when successor Joe Biden came into office in January 2021.

While the ban was changed several times (and unheld in its form at the time in 2018 by the U.S. Supreme Court), the five countries displayed were banned from U.S. travel throughout the first Trump administration. With the resurrgence of the travel ban in 2025, residents of Iran, Yemen, Libya and Somalia will once again be banned from visiting the United States, while Syria was not included this time.

New residents from Yemen were a lot fewer – their numbers were reduced by 72 percent between 2016 and 2019. While in FY 2016, almost 13,000 Yemenis took up residence in the United States, that number was reduced to around 3,500 in FY 2019 after having reached a low of 1,600 in FY 2018. The number of new residents from Somalia shrunk by a comparable extend, while new residents from Iran and Syria were 55 percent and almost 60 percent fewer over the same time frame.

The ban starting Monday will also be extended to citizens of Afghanistan, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea and Myanmar, with the latter four countries also having experienced shorter travel bans between the years of 2017 and 2021.

The analysis of DHS data excludes refugees and asylees from the count since they are often in the United States years before officially taking up residence because of slow asylum proceedings and a considerable backlog.