Trump’s Massively Cruel New Travel Ban
In a major expansion of his assault on legal immigration, Donald Trump today announced a massive new travel ban. It goes beyond those instituted in his first term. My Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh – a leading immigration policy expert – has a helpful summary of the travel ban, and why it’s utterly unjustified:
President Trump announced that he’s banning almost all travel and immigration from Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen for “terrorism-related and public-safety risks.” There are some exceptions for adoptions, immediate family members of US citizens, and a handful of other visas. A single terrorist from those countries murdered one person in an attack on US soil: Emanuel Kidega Samson from Sudan, who committed an attack motivated by anti-white animus in 2017. The annual chance of being murdered by a terrorist from one of the banned countries from 1975 to the end of 2024 was about 1 in 13.9 billion per year….
Trump also restricted travel from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela, albeit less severely than from the dozen countries above. Terrorists from those countries murdered five people in attacks on US soil since 1975, the last one in 1980. Cuban terrorists were the only perpetrators of attackers during that period who murdered people in their attacks.
The threat of foreign-born terrorism on US soil is above zero but also small and manageable without further government interventions. The government spends much more on anti-terrorism activities than would pass a cost-benefit test. The last person murdered in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist was in 2019 when Saudi-born Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani murdered three in a shooting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. He was here on a visa training with the US military. Zero Americans were murdered in attacks on US soil committed when President Biden was in office, the first administration in my data set not to have a single American die in such an attack.
As Alex explains, immigrants from the affected countries also have lower crime rates than native-born Americans. Barring them will not improve public safety:
Trump also justified
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