Trump’s Justifications for the Latest Travel Ban Aren’t Supported by the Data on Immigration and Terrorism
The U.S. government has sophisticated methods for identifying potential threats. They include detailed documentation requirements, interviews with consular officers and clearance by national security agencies. And it rejects more than 1 in 6 visa applications, with ever-increasing procedures for detecting fraud.
The thoroughness of the visa review process is evident in the numbers.
Authorized foreign-born residents of the U.S. are far less likely than U.S.-born residents to engage in criminal activity. And unauthorized migrants are even less likely to commit crimes. Communities with more migrants – authorized and unauthorized – have similar or slightly lower crime rates than communities with fewer migrants.
If vetting were as deficient as Trump’s executive order claims, we would expect to see a significant number of terrorist plots from countries on the travel ban list. But we don’t.
Of the 4 million U.S. residents from the 2017 travel ban countries, I have documented only four who were involved in violent extremism in the past five years.
Two of them were arrested after plotting with undercover law enforcement agents. One was found to have lied on his asylum application. One was an Afghan man who killed three Pakistani Shiite Muslim immigrants in New Mexico in 2022.
Such a handful of zealots with rifles or homemade explosives can be life-altering for victims and their families, but they do not represent a threat to U.S. national security.
Degrading the Concept of National Security
Trump has been trying for years to turn immigration into a national security issue.
In his first major speech on national security in 2016, Trump focused on the “dysfunctional immigration system which does not permit us to know who we let into our country.”
His primary example was an act of terrorism by a man who was born in the U.S.
The first Trump administration’s national security strategy, issued in December 2017, prioritized jihadist terrorist organizations that “radicalize isolated individuals” as “the most dangerous threat to the Nation” – not armies, not another 9/11, but isolated individuals.
If the travel ban is not really going to improve national security or public safety, then what is it about?
Linking immigration to national security seems to serve two long-standing Trump priorities. First is his effort to make American more white, in keeping with widespread bias among his supporters against nonwhite immigrants.
Remember Trump’s insults to Mexicans and Muslims in his escalator speech announcing his presidential campaign in 2015. He has also expressed a preference for white immigrants from Norway in 2018 and South Africa in 2025.
Trump has repeatedly associated himself with nationalists who view immigration by nonwhites as a danger to white supremacy.
Second, invoking national security allows Trump to pursue this goal without the need for accountability, since Congress and the courts have traditionally deferred to the executive branch on national security issues.
Trump also claims national security justifications for tariffs and other policies that he has declared national emergencies, in a bid to avoid criticism by the public and oversight by the other branches of government.
But this oversight is necessary in a democratic system to ensure that immigration policy is based on facts.
Charles Kurzman is Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.
