Quick takes // By Ben FrankelOf immigrants and terrorists (updated)
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? Any competent terrorist would choose the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) to enter the United States: There are enough ISIS followers in the thirty-eight VWP countries, and using the VWP is not only quicker: It is a sure thing. You will make it into the United States in hours or 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).
On 18 August 2016 we published this comment on a speech Donald Trump made on Monday, 15 August, in Youngstown, Ohio.
In a speech on Monday at Youngstown State University in Ohio, Donald Trump continued to modify his approach to immigration: Rather than bar all Muslims from entering the United States, or bar Muslims from conflict-saturated regions of the world, he said he would bar immigration from countries “compromised” by terrorism. These proposals, however, have little, if anything, to do with preventing acts of terrorism in the United States or making the United States safer.
As has been the case with other Trump’s teleprompter-read speeches billed as “policy speeches,” the Youngstown speech was long on invectives and misstatements of facts, but short on details.
These proposals, in any event, have little, if anything, to do with preventing acts of terrorism in the United States or making the United States safer.
One example: Germany, France, and Belgium have been “compromised by terrorism” — should the United States bar immigration from these three countries?
The speech also made the headlines because Trump called for “extreme vetting” of immigrants, which would include requiring them to respond to a questionnaire with an “ideological test.”
Constitutional and logistical issues regarding ideological tests aside, Trump’s view of terrorism through the prism of immigration makes his proposals irrelevant to preventing terrorism in the United States.
Let’s look at a few facts.
Fact #1:
A question: What do all the ISIS-inspired terrorists who struck France and Belgium between November 2015 (Paris attacks) and July 2016 (Nice Bastille Day attack) — with the Brussels airport attack and other attacks around France in between — have in common?
1. They were all citizens of France and Belgium
2. France and Belgium are members of the Visa Waiver Program (VWP)
Fact #2:
From 2010 to 2014, the annual average number of legal immigrants arriving in the United States was 1,028,700. In 2014, the number was 1,016,518.
During the same period (2010-2014), the number of VWP visitors entering the United States every year averaged a little above 21,000,000. In 2014, the total number of VWP visitors entering the United States was 22,305,757.
