Crime and Terrorism are Poor Rationales for Immigration Restrictions
Dramatic recent incidents have heightened calls to impose severe restrictions on immigration in order to curb crime and terrorism. By all means we should punish violent criminals and terrorists, whatever their background. But crime and terrorism risk are bad rationales for immigration restrictions. I covered the terrorism angle in some detail in a 2022 article for the Verfassungsblog website. Virtually everything I said then still applies. To briefly summarize: 1) the risk is low, 2) restricting liberty of large numbers of people because of the wrongdoing of a small minority is deeply unjust, 3) migration restrictions cause great harm, and 4) there much better ways to reduce the risk of violence.
Here’s an excerpt:
In both Europe and the United States, fears of terrorism and violence have been exploited by anti-immigrant nationalist political movements….
The risks of terrorism by migrants are low and can potentially be mitigated further by “keyhole” solutions that address the problem by means less draconian than the complete exclusion of migrants.
The risk that an American will be killed by an immigrant terrorist in a given year is so infinitesimal that it is actually several times lower than the risk that he or she will be killed by a lightning strike during the same timeframe.1) Over a 40 year period, the number of Americans killed by terrorist entrants from any of the five majority-Muslim countries covered by Donald Trump’s 2017 “travel ban” order was zero. The risk in European countries was comparably low,2) also in the same general ballpark as common everyday dangers. Even if these risks were to increase several-fold as a result of expanded immigration, they would still be extremely small…
There are some ways in which migration restrictions can actually increase terrorism risks and undermine efforts to combat terrorist organizations. First, they may feed into the propaganda of terrorist groups, claiming that the West is hostile to Muslims, Arabs, or other groups targeted for migration restrictions. Second, allowing migrants from areas controlled by terrorist groups or hostile anti-Western regimes to come to the West reduces the amount of people and resources under those entities’ control, thereby weakening them….
Even if migration increases terrorism risks only slightly, it might be argued that is still enough to justify restricting it, at least in the case of migrants from nations that may seem to pose relatively higher risks. After all, even one terrorist attack is one too many. But this analysis implicitly assumes that migration restrictions have few or no costs….
In reality, barring migration has enormous costs, for both migrants and destination countries. The cost to the former is obvious. Barring or severely restricting migration from nations with repressive governments and powerful terrorist movements inevitably consigns hundreds of thousands of people to lives of oppression and poverty, and sometimes even to death.
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Article from Reason.com
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