Let’s discuss the most obvious and pressing (not to mention dangerous) threat first: terrorism. The question is, is it possible that if we accept Syrian refugees into the country, ISIS terrorists will sneak in with them and blow us up? All we need to ask about is the mere
possibility of one terrorist, for that is all it takes. An inquiry about
likelihood or
probability may be interesting, but when life and freedom are at stake, we cannot take chances, right?
So is it possible? Absolutely.
But be consistent with this. Is it
possible that the same terrorist will get in even if we don’t accept refugees? Again, the answer is “absolutely.”
So then the only difference is the likelihood. Is a terrorist more likely to get in if we
do or if we
don’t accept refugees? It seems intuitive that with a wave of thousands of Syrians, it would be more likely that the terrorist would sneak in. Such a wave would greatly burden any system of vetting, lowering the standards by which each individual gets screened.
But this hypothetical is not really well thought out. There is no threshold of degree in the level of screening any given individual that would make or break the decision to let them in. The tools by which people are rejected are objective, black and white. The red flag goes up or it doesn’t. If they would get through in a stream of a thousand Syrians, they would get through if they came among the standard stream of international arrivals.
The bottom line here is this: if a terrorist is motivated enough commit an act of terror, they will find a way to get here no matter what.
So what would be the requisite motivations to commit such an act of terror?
ISIS and other terrorists are not motivated to strike non-Muslim targets merely because that’s what Muslims do. The resources available to terrorists for such attacks are limited and strikes in distant countries must therefore be strategic. And we know they have been. They have targeted those nations involved most directly and most prominently in occupying or bombing the Middle East. The main cause of terror strikes is western military occupation and war in the Middle East.
(The war in Iraq is what created the power vacuum in which ISIS was able to arise to begin with.)
The Paris bombers were not wandering ISIS jihadis out looking for a random western target. They were Belgian and French nationals. They did not sneak in with refugees. The lived there. They attacked France for its role in attacking Syria and Iraq.
It’s ironic to me that when a Russian airliner was brought down by what was clearly a terrorist plot, American news called it “blowback” for Russia’s involvement in Syria; yet when terrorists strike the other main countries that have occupied or bombed Iraq or Syria for some time, any mention of blowback is met with a chorus of “you blame America first.” How clearly we see it, though, when it happens to Russia.
It is not receiving refugees that increases our likelihood of suffering terrorism. I do not believe it would increase the likelihood one bit, because that is not the root cause of terror strikes against the US, nor would it facilitate it. The factors that motivate and that would allow a terrorist through are separate from those associated with the refugee question.
As Gary North
wrote nearly thirty years ago (before even the first war in Iraq),
Christians should not become advocates of closed borders to those who are coming here to work. Obviously, revolutionaries may accompany the immigrants, but trained revolutionaries are going to get into a free nation anyway. The borders are not that tight, and they cannot be made that tight. We are not Communist nations.
To close borders is simply to treat everyone as potentially guilty and thus to destroy a free society, while not really ending the threat it purports to end. It replaces the specter of the
possibility of terror with the certainty of another terror—that of certain tyranny and on a pervasive, inescapable scale. We cannot tighten the borders enough to stop a motivated terrorist, and the more we tighten, the more we destroy freedom for everyone else. Meanwhile, by not addressing the root motivation that makes America a strategic target for terrorists, we keep the possibility of such a strike as high as it possibly could be. This trade-off is hardly desirable or helpful. If the goal of the terrorists is to destroy western freedom, then they’ve won. We’re no longer free, and we’re still afraid.
Instead, if we want to minimize the likelihood of a terrorist strike on US soil, we should examine the blowback from our foreign policy.
Likewise, if we are so concerned that a few bad apples may spread violence in America, Christians and conservatives ought to train their attention more upon police reform than terrorism. By multiple accounts, you are several times more likely to suffer at the hands of a police officer than from a terrorist attack. Multiple such comparisons could be made to a wide variety of phenomena—not the least of which is that most deadly of choices: driving a car. The threat from terrorism has distracted us from more deadly threats that are already in our midst.
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