Immigration & terrorismNew research on immigration, terrorism, and ideology

Last week the Cato Institute released my latest policy analysis entitled Terrorists by Immigration Status and Nationality: A Risk Analysis, 1975-2017. Much of it is an update and expansion of my original policy analysis on this topic from 2016. I added two more years of data, estimates of the number of people injured, and a handful of non-deadly foreign-born terrorists whom I had failed to include in my original paper. The annual risk of being murdered in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist by visa category is very similar to my original study as there were only a handful of victims from attacks perpetrated by foreign-born terrorists in 2016 and 2017. 

Overall, the chance of being murdered by a foreign-born terrorist was about 1 in 3.8 million per year during the 43-year period in which 3,037 people were murdered. Foreign-born terrorists who entered on tourist visas were the most deadly, responsible for over 96 percent of those deaths – largely because 18 out of the 19 9/11 hijackers entered on tourist visas.

The changes to this analysis mentioned above are small, but there are two major additions that you should pay attention to. The first is that I included all 788 native-born terrorists during this time by applying the same exclusion criteria that I applied to foreign-born terrorists. It took years and reading tens of thousands of pages of government documents, news stories, dissertations, reports by non-profits, and more biographies of sketchy people than I care to remember. Just for the record, there are a lot of Nazis who have been killed in shootouts with the police but most of them are not terrorists. All 788 native-born terrorists are listed in the appendix. If you think I missed somebody or included somebody I shouldn’t have, please let me know.