Donald Trump's call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States until concerns about terrorism are fully addressed is "probably not" legal, Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz told
Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
"The Constitution provides that no religious test will ever be required for holding office," he told "Newsmax Now" hosts John Bachman and Miranda Khan. "It doesn't specifically talk about immigration, and the Supreme Court has upheld immigration restrictions based on nationality, but never on religion.
"There are many people who in a bigoted way generalize Muslims," he continued. "That's always wrong to generalize, but you cannot be constitutionally consistent with our system of tolerance that our government renounces, make decisions of exclusion based on religion.
"You just can't do it."
Dershowitz is author of the new book,
"Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas."
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The professor slammed Trump's justification for his suggestion — that Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same for Japanese Americans and others during World War II — by saying, "We learned our lesson.
"It was terrible what we did in the 1920s [with a closed immigration policy]. It resulted in probably millions of Jews dying in the Holocaust. Had the immigration laws not been changed, America would've been a place of asylum for the Jews of Europe. The same thing is true of other oppressed people.
"We have learned our lesson," Dershowitz told Newsmax. "Yes, we did detain 110,000 Japanese Americans in camps, but no Supreme Court justice would today uphold that.
"Times have changed. We've become much more sensitive to human rights and civil liberties — and we're also more concerned about terrorism.
"We may have to strike a different balance, but it can't be a balance based on generalizing about religion."
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