One of President Donald Trump’s acts during his first term was the so-called Muslim ban. Building on a 2015 campaign promise to enact “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” he banned all entry by seven Muslim-majority nationalities. After extensive court battles and airport chaos, the ban list shifted around and grew to include some non-Muslim adversary countries.
Trump has promised to “bring back the travel ban” in his second term and ordered the State Department to identify countries whose security situation would “warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals.” The new proposed ban list was leaked to The New York Times over the weekend. Along with classic adversaries such as Iran and North Korea, and war-torn countries such as Syria and Yemen, the list also includes the tranquil Himalayan mountain kingdom of Bhutan.
The Land of the Thunder Dragon, an isolated country of less than 800,000 people, doesn’t have any internal or external wars at the moment. It suffers from “relatively little crime,” according to the U.S. State Department’s own reports. Although there is no U.S. embassy (and almost no other foreign embassy) in Bhutan, the U.S. ambassador to neighboring India “maintains frequent and friendly communications with the Royal Bhutanese Embassy in New Delhi,” the State Department reports.
The Trump administration has not offered any explanation of why Bhutan is in its crosshairs. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The State Department referred Reason to comments by spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, who told reporters on Monday that “what people are looking at over these past several days is not a list that exists here or that is being acted on. There is a review, as we know, through the president’s executive order for us to look at the nature of what’s going to help keep America safer in dealing with the issue of visas and who’s allowed into the country.”
The Bhutanese, a local newspaper, reported after The New York Times report came out that Bhutan was moved from the immediate ban list to a probationary “yellow list.” An “official source” told The Bhutanese that Bhutan was listed because of its high U.S. visa overstay rate.
Around 43 percent of Bhutanese visitors overstayed their visas in FY 2022, including 60 percent of tourists and business travelers, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s statistics. But the percentage was high because the number of Bhutanese visitors was so small to begin with. There were 112 overstays out of 255 visitors total from Bhutan in FY 2022. The following fiscal year, there were only 72 overstays out of 371 visitors total from Bhutan. There were only 17 Bhutanese people among the 2.58 million foreigners deported in FY 2022.
Ironically, Bhutan has exactly the kind of immigration and trade policy that the Trump camp might prefer. The Bhutanese monarchy has maintained an isolationist stance to preserve the country’s nature and Buddhist culture. Trade, tourism, and migration are strictly limited; in fact, television was illegal in Bhutan until 1999. Scoffing at foreign economists, the former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck famously declared in 1972 that “gross national happiness is more important than gross domestic product.”
In 1985, the Bhutanese government declared that anyone who could not prove residence from 1958 or earlier was an illegal immigrant. Over the next few years, Bhutan faced unrest from the Nepalese-speaking Lhotshampa minority, who were largely left off the citizenship rolls. In response, the government expelled over 100,000 people, around a sixth of the population of Bhutan at the time. A vast majority of these refugees were resettled in the United States through a program that lasted until 2016.
That resettlement program may be another reason why the Trump administration is now targeting Bhutanese travelers, The Bhutanese speculated. In 2023, several Nepalese officials were arrested for a corruption scheme in which several hundred Nepalese citizens paid to be falsely listed as Lhotshampa refugees so they would get resettled abroad. But a ban on travel from Bhutan wouldn’t have stopped the scheme, which concerned people living in Nepal using Nepalese refugee documents.
The confusion and lack of transparency, of course, may be the point. The Trump administration has tried to assert nearly unlimited power over the border and deportation. Reviving the nationality ban through an arbitrary, opaque bureaucratic process is exactly the kind of measure that makes that point.
