Of immigrants and terrorists

The Center for Immigration Studies notes that the waiting times in the family categories range from 19 months to 33 years. The waits in the employment categories range from none to just over 11 years.

Note that the law allows for an unlimited number of immigrants who are the spouse, child, or parent of an adult U.S. citizen, so there is no waiting list in that category (although there is a processing time of five months for the initial petition plus additional months for the application itself to be reviewed).

More than half of the waiting list comprises about 2.5 million people who have been sponsored by a sibling who is a U.S. citizen. These applicants must wait at least 13 years for their application to be adjudicated. The largest number (30 percent) are citizens of Mexico, and the wait for them is just over 18 years.

Another 806,000 applicants are adult married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens. The wait for most applicants in this category is just over 11 years.

The employment visa waiting list is small, with about 91,000 applicants, representing about 2 percent of the total waiting list

Fact #4:
Let’s focus on only two countries: France and Belgium.

In 2014, 1,940,779 VWP visitors entering the United States were French citizens, and 309,125 were Belgian citizens. The total number of French and Belgian citizens entering the United States in 2014 under the VWP was thus 2,249,904.

Some of these visitors have overstayed their visas: 11,973 from France and 1,477 Belgians.

Fact #5:
There are thirty-eight countries which are members of the VWP.

The VWP eligibility requirements are surprisingly lax, and these requirements would not have stopped most, if not all, of the French and Belgian ISIS-inspired terrorists from entering the United States.

The relevant VWP restrictions have to do with an applicant’s criminal record. A citizen of a VWP country applying for a visa waiver must never have been convicted of, or arrested for, an offense or crime involving moral turpitude — although there is an exemption in some cases for a single offense committed before age 18, and if the crime was committed more than five years before the date of application for a visa (or if the applicant was released from a prison or correctional facility five years before the application).

There is also an exemption for a single instance of criminal behavior if the maximum possible sentence in the United States for a similar crime is one year or less in jail, and fewer than six months were served.

If the single crime committed by the applicant involved “controlled substances,” or if the applicant committed two or more crimes with a maximum aggregate sentence of five years’ imprisonment or more, there are no exemptions.

Also, citizens of a VWP country cannot gain entry into the United States if they are inadmissible on health or national security grounds. The latter means that if they are on the U.S. terror-watch list, or on a list of terrorism suspects in, say, France or Belgium — if that list has been shared with U.S. authorities — they would not be allowed into the United States.

Fact #6:
A few of the terrorists who committed the atrocities in France and Belgium since November 2015 were known to the French and Belgian security services, but most of them were not. They were not suspected of links to terrorism and were not under surveillance.

Quite a few of these French and Belgian terrorists had criminal records – but these were all petty crimes, which would not have made them ineligible for VWP entry to the United States.

Conclusions
If you were an ISIS operative in Raqqa plotting to launch a terrorist attack in the United States, and you proposed to your bosses to use the U.S. immigration system to infiltrate terrorists into the United States, they would summarily execute you for rank incompetence.

Use the U.S. immigration system, with all its vetting and with a waiting time measure in years (if you are accepted!) to launch a terrorist operation?

If you were an ISIS follower in France or Belgium and you wanted to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States – would you try to enter the United States as an immigrant, or on the VWP?

In both cases – Raqqa-directed attack or French or Belgian ISIS-inspired, locally initiated attack — using the VWP is not only quicker: It is a sure thing. You will make it into the United States in days and without a hassle — not years, as is the case with the immigration route (for which a typical young would-be terrorist may not be eligible in any event).

And remember that the 2,249,904 French and Belgian citizens came to the United States on the VWP in 2014 – more than twice the number of immigrants who arrived in the United States that year – were joined by 20,000,000 more VWP visitors from the 36 other VWP countries. These countries, too, have ISIS followers who have escaped the notice of these countries’ security services.

What, then, should we make of Trump’s proposals to tackle terrorism by limiting immigration from “countries compromised by terrorism”? As we can see, these proposals have little, if anything, to do with preventing acts of terrorism in the United States or making the United States safer. But these proposals, and the language in which they are couched, do stoke fears of and suspicion about and resentment toward “the other” – that is, people of different race, ethnicity, religion, skin color, and accent.

In 1775, Samuel Johnson said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Today, we should be equally careful in assessing the motives behind proposals purporting to keep the country secure and its people safe.

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire