On January 31st, the Trump administration issued a proclamation that stopped the issuance of most green cards to citizens of Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Eritrea, Myanmar, Tanzania, and Sudan. If the ban applied to these countries in 2018, it would have blocked 12,313 green cards that year.
This is the second wave of ‘travel bans’ issued by the Trump administration since the initial ban of many predominately Muslim‐majority countries in 2017. The stated justification for these bans is to protect the public from terrorist and criminal threats that could be committed by immigrants from those countries. Furthermore, they claim to target green card holders because it is more difficult to deport them than other migrants.
However, these claims are not supported by historical data about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Furthermore, because the administration fails to publicly release the criteria used to determine why these countries are banned, the public cannot truly know why these countries were chosen.
My own research shows that citizens of the new banned countries have not contributed significantly to terrorism. From 1975 through the end of 2017, 11 foreign‐born terrorists from those countries attempted or committed attacks on U.S. soil. They murdered six people in their attacks. The annual chance of being murdered by a foreign‐born terrorist from those six countries on US soil is approximately 1 in 1.9 billion per year.
Those six murders by terrorists, as tragic as they were, account for a mere 0.2 percent of the 3,037 people murdered by foreign‐born terrorists on U.S. soil during that 43‐year period. By those metrics, a ban on the listed countries would hardly curb terrorist attacks or do much of anything to protect Americans from the risk of attack.
The most perplexing part of the ban is that it targets green card holders, although they are even less likely to commit attacks on U.S. soil. Green cards are not the way terrorists attempt to enter the country. Only about 0.6 percent of all murders committed by foreign‐born terrorists on U.S.-soil were committed by those who entered with green cards.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/there-no-good-justification-new-immigration-ban
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