As President Trump tries to ban refugees, he looks poised to create more of them.

The structural logic should be familiar by now — and Iraq is just one example. America and its partners help lay waste to a Muslim majority country and enable the proliferation of armed groups, some of whom terrorize the local population. The military industrial complex gets richer. The targeted society loses its means of reproduction: infrastructure is decimated, social services cease functioning, jobs vanish, prices rise, security dissipates, homes are obliterated, and the death toll swells. Millions of refugees flee, a small portion of them to the West. Meanwhile there are periodic terror attacks in Europe and North America with a tangential relationship to insurgents in places the West attacked and the refugees face racism and legal barriers when seeking new lives in the countries that ruined their old ones.

These systemic patterns have culminated in Trump attempting to prohibit refugees for 120 days and placing longer-term restrictions on people from seven Muslim-majority countries at the same moment that the new administration readies for more war against Muslim-majority countries.