Credit: Jeffrey Coolidge
On Friday evening, President Trump issued an executive order barring refugees from entering the country for 120 days — and Syrian refugees indefinitely. It also bans people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the country. The justification, allegedly, is security: The order is titled “Protecting the Nation From Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals.”
But there’s precious little evidence that immigrants and refugees actually pose a serious terrorist risk to the United States. A recent report, from Cato Institute analyst Alex Nowrasteh, is one of the most sophisticated attempts to investigate this question. What it found was striking: The risk of terrorism from immigrants is astonishingly tiny.
Cato is a libertarian think tank that has a noticeably pro-migration stance. But Nowrasteh’s research is on really solid ground: He combed through data on terrorism and immigration from nine different sources, covering 1975 through 2015. He counted any attack on US soil in which an immigrant participated as a terrorist attack by immigrants, even if some native-born Americans also helped in its […]
I’m sure the families of the people killed in Florida and San Bernardino will take great comfort from this.
Steve — You have real problem with facts. In the Orlando LGBT club massacre, Omar Mateen, was not a refugee, or even an immigrant. He was a New York-born US citizen of Afghan descent, and he had passed not one but two background checks, one in 2007 and another in 2013, and worked as an armed security guard. In the San Bernardino` massacre, One perpetrator Syed Rizwan Farook, was a U.S. citizen born in Chicago working as a county level civil servant, a food inspector for San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. Only his wife Tashfeen Malik was born outside the U.S.