Closing America's doors to refugees will have a deleterious effect on national security, "inviting the very instability we seek to protect ourselves against," Angelina Jolie wrote in a column for The New York Times.
The actress and filmmaker, who has six children all adopted from foreign countries, says our country's efforts to secure our borders "should be based on facts, not fear."
"If we send a message that it is acceptable to close the door to refugees, or to discriminate among them on the basis of religion, we are playing with fire," Jolie wrote. "We are lighting a fuse that will burn across continents, inviting the very instability we seek to protect ourselves against."
Jolie, who is the special envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, never mentions President Donald Trump by name, but does reference Ronald Reagan, 9/11 and ISIS in making her case that restricting our borders in the name of security will have the opposite effect.
"If we create a tier of second-class refugees, implying Muslims are less worthy of protection, we fuel extremism abroad," Jolie writes.
"The lesson of the years we have spent fighting terrorism since Sept. 11 is that every time we depart from our values we worsen the very problem we are trying to contain."
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