Ever since 9/11, I’ve had the feeling that the U.S.’s domestic counter-terrorism efforts, including the Patriot Act, various airport security measures, and the like, have not been especially serious. They are a combination of giving law enforcement a wish list much of which is only tangentially related to terrorism (the Patriot Act), half-measures that give only an illusion of security (what’s the point of banning liquids in carry on luggage when a terrorist could tape thin plastic containers of liquid to his body undetected, given our unwillingness to use full body scanners?) and things that are just silly (why would a terrorist bother targeting, say, the Department of Labor? and if he did, would requiring him to show a photo i.d. really stop him?)
Meanwhile, the U.S. could take some obvious counter-terror measures that don’t even seem to have been seriously considered. Number one on my list would be cutting off immigration from countries where jihadist ideology is popular. Several recent arrests involving home-grown domestic terrorists involve individuals whose families immigrated to the U.S. from countries like (IIRC) Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. This should not be a big surprise. Immigrant youths and young adults often feel dislocated and alienated from their new society, and it’s not terribly surprising that some fraction of them would be attracted to extremist ideologies popular in their homelands, and readily accessible via the Internet.
Of course, most the vast majority of immigrants from these countries are perfectly law-abiding and will make fine citizens. But the question is, why take the risk regarding the small fraction that will turn out to be murderous terrorists? What’s the advantage to the U.S. of, say, taking in another ten thousand Somalians instead of, say, Salvadoreans, or Koreans, or Irish, or members of other nationalities that are far less likely to be implicated in anti-American terrorism? Assuming a finite level of overall immigration, it’s just common sense to prefer immigrants from more friendly societies.
What about, you may ask, constitutional considerations? Can the U.S. lawfully prefer certain nationalities over others? It sure can. The Supreme Court has consistently held that the federal government has essentially plenary power over immigration.
The simplest way to prevent domestic terrorists is to prevent them from entering the U.S. to begin with. And such measures require no infringements on the rights of American citizens, or even petty inconveniences like going through metal detectors at the Smithsonian(!)
The only reason I can see for NOT implementing draconian restrictions on immigration from countries that disproportionately produce anti-American terrorists is political correctness, in this case the pretense that a young immigrant from Chile is just as likely to try to blow up an Amtrak train as a young immigrant from Yemen. It’s time to get past such nonsense.
UPDATE: Various commenters below argue against my proposal, some more seriously than others. Of course, if I had more confidence in both our foreign and domestic security services, and in the latter’s ability to effectively combat terrorism without bowing too much to domestic political considerations on the one hand, or ultimately restricting the rights of innocent Americans (or, I fear, both!), I’d be less inclined to worry about who is or is not entering the country.
But the broader point is, that even if it turns out I’m wrong, isn’t it strange that we haven’t had this debate, and that, as far as I can tell, no serious consideration has been given to significantly modifying immigration policy in light of the events of the past decade?
Besides political correctness and “fairness” concerns raised by Paul Horwitz below, there’s the self-congratulatory and ultimately fallacious idea that the blandishments of American life are so great that we don’t have to worry much about “home grown” terrorism on the other.
And from another commenter:
I think David’s larger point has been overlooked in the frenzy to debate the virtues of including this or that demographic grouping: we have not, as a nation, thought seriously about ways to keep potential terrorists from entering our country, let alone implement them.
Observer says:
Wow, just…..wow.
December 29, 2009, 10:36 amWas Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab an immigrant? Do I even need to answer that question?
David Bernstein says:
Of course, I wasn’t talking about Umar Farouk Abdumutallab, and no reference to him appears in the post. And stricter travel restrictions on individuals from unfriendly countries would be number 2 on my list.
December 29, 2009, 10:37 amAnderson says:
Ever since 9/11, I’ve had the feeling that the U.S.‘s domestic counter-terrorism efforts, including the Patriot Act, various airport security measures, and the like, have not been especially serious.
Hm. Comparing our CT efforts *post*-9/11 to those in effect on 9/11 and prior, seems to me the ledger strongly favors the former.
But I’m just counting by lives lost. Doubtless there is some more cogent criterion.
December 29, 2009, 10:43 amRich says:
But, it’s all our fault so how can we stop them from coming here and delivering our just punishment. Besides all we have to do is apologize and it will be okay (/sarcasm)
December 29, 2009, 10:48 amShelbyC says:
Gawd I hate to say something that sounds PC, but how ’bout the fact that the benefit we get from having immigration from those countries outweighs the miniscule harm that terrorism causes? (A harm that consists mostly of government and popular overreaction?)
December 29, 2009, 10:49 amDavid Bernstein says:
But what benefits do we get from immigration from these countries that we couldn’t get from an equal number of immigrants from other countries?
December 29, 2009, 10:54 amCharles says:
“But the question is, why take the risk regarding the small fraction that will turn out to be murderous terrorists”
This sort of thinking I think would propel the U.S. backward. the next step would be to restrict the movement of blacks because they disproportionately commit murder. And to have the votes of women count less because they are on average less smart than men.
I think what we’ve been trying to move toward is a nation where more people are included, and that spirit of equality and justice is exported. To deny access to all people of dangerous countries prevents that spirit from being exported and it makes the people of those countries less friendly to us.
I just don’t see the point of these restrictions. how would they do better than the half measures?
December 29, 2009, 10:57 amMike McDougal says:
What’s the benefit? Are Somalians, for instance, particularly productive?
December 29, 2009, 10:59 amMike McDougal says:
Why would that be the next step?
December 29, 2009, 10:59 amPaul Horwitz says:
David, surely there is *something* in between pure consequentialism and “political correctness.” (Which, in my view, is not a helpful phrase. Of course I know generally what you mean, but it seems to me to be a phrase with more rhetorical and emotional than descriptive value. It is a “politically correct” value, for example, to favor broad free speech rights in the United States on something other than pure consequentialist grounds. I share that value, and do not think that we should, say, engage in risk-balancing with respect to every act of hate speech. I hold this belief on something other than purely consequentialist grounds. Does that make me “politically correct?”) Surely there are many people out there who do not assume that Chilean immigrants are more likely to engage in terrorist acts than Yemeni immigrants, and yet believe that the policy you suggest raises serious questions of justice and fairness, questions that you seem to concede are indeed presented here. Values may not be viewed as a matter of pure consequentialism, but that does not make them sheer fanciful sentiment. Surely they deserve better, even if we adopt largely consequentialist reasons for our actions, than to be dismissed in this manner.
But let me put to you a middle case, as Richard Riche once said. You assume that the dividing line should be one of countries whose — what? governments? people? Yemen, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or all of the above? — support unfriendly ideologies, on the grounds that even if most of the people who come from these countries are law-abiding, some will act unlawfully. Why put the dividing line here? Why assume that nations with compatible ideologies may not have significant differences of interest that may result in some actions that are detrimental to the United States? France and the United States broadly share ideological compatibility, but France is also a nation that has engaged in industrial espionage. Ireland and the United States share ideological compatibility, but some Irish immigrants have supported significant terrorist actions abroad. Israel and the United States share ideological compatibility, but it might at times be tempted to place its national security interests ahead of international comity and engage in military espionage in the United States. In each case, if I take your argument correctly, we could always substitute immigrants from some other nation — say, my birthplace of Canada — who would offer many of the same benefits and less likelihood of the harms done by a very few people. Why not cut off immigration from those countries? Is the answer purely a practical one? Do questions of justice and fairness enter in? Is it a matter of likelihood of harm — and if so, should we balance the possibility of one or more thwarted acts of terrorism against the probability of many successful acts of industrial or military espionage by immigrants or visitors from “friendly” countries? Or does “political correctness” enter into this calculus as well? Surely there are at least plausible unsentimental reasons to ban immigration from a far wider swath of countries than you are willing to propose here. Should we at least consider doing so?
Of course we can raise these questions and reach different results in different cases. But I would not be so quick to assume that talking about our values, and the potential harm to our values of different policy moves, is unimportant, sentimental, or mere “political correctness.” And I certainly would not assume — and you don’t assume it, but readers might be tempted to draw that conclusion — that the Supreme Court’s pronouncements about what Congress may or may not do in the area of immigration without judicial intervention settle any of these broader questions of justice. As many of your readers, conservative or liberal (or etc.), recognize, the fact that the Supreme Court leaves some issues to the political process does not mean that the political process itself cannot argue about what our values require of us.
December 29, 2009, 11:02 amDavid Bernstein says:
To be very, very clear, anyone who is a legal resident of the U.S. is entitled to be treated as an individual without prejudice or regard to his national background. I think a strict line can be drawn between immigration policy, which need not be egalitarian in that way, and how we treat people once they are here. In fact, precisely because I want the U.S. government to avoid any profiling, discrimination, etc., re U.S. residents, I’d prefer to have U.S. counter-terrorism policy focus on restricting who gets to come here to begin with.
December 29, 2009, 11:02 amCharles says:
There are patterns throughout history. The people are afraid, they create some way to prevent what they fear, only it doesn’t cure the fear, so they create a new way on top of the old way. The only way to stop it is to destroy the culture of fear, these reactions only feed it.
December 29, 2009, 11:05 amjukeboxgrad says:
db:
The plane he tried to damage was a plane he boarded in the Netherlands. Is that an unfriendly country? He is a Nigerian. Is Nigeria an “unfriendly” country?
December 29, 2009, 11:07 amcaliforniamom says:
We should at least make it extremely difficult to get a visa for people from countries like Yemen, Pakistan, and other places that are hotbeds for terrorist groups.
And immigration? Forget it. For anyone. Off topic: There’s no point struggling to conserve energy, be green, and all of that when letting in millions more people every year vitiates all those efforts to reduce US energy consumption.
December 29, 2009, 11:08 amShelbyC says:
Exposure to folks from these cultures, exposure to these culture as a whole, the ability to expose our culture to folks from these countries and have information truthfully relayed back. These are not small benefits. Hell, you pointed out in your post that the vast majority of folks from these countries are not terrorists. One of the main reasons we know that is the ability to interact with them.
December 29, 2009, 11:08 amMJH21 says:
Two points:
1. I agree with David that both immigration and travel restrictions from nations identified as home to significant terrorist ties/people traveling from those nations to the US (I assume those nations could be identified by the National Intelligence Estimate), is such a common-sense step as to need no further explanation.
2. Any act of terrorism/attempted terrorism involving mass-transit, any military target or government building, should be treated as an act of war and not as a criminal justice matter until it is conclusively determined that there are no terrorist ties, meaning the Christmas bomber, for example, should be somewhere getting interrogated for potential intelligence rather than meeting with his lawyer right now.
December 29, 2009, 11:09 amCharles says:
Given the activities of this weekend, According to your definition your idea may be little more than a half-measure tangentiality related to terrorism that may in fact be silly.
December 29, 2009, 11:14 amDavid Bernstein says:
Paul, you make reasonable points. But I’m not sure what “value” is served by treating all immigrants as equally desirable/valuable. There is no recognized “right” of anyone from any particular country to immigrate to the U.S., and the vast majority of countries do use a series of practical considerations in determining who gets to come in.
In general, I think the U.S.’s immigration policy should be much less haphazard and more focused on national interest. If a lot of French graduate students are coming here to engage in industrial espionage, that’s a good reason to be more particular about what and how many French graduate students are allowed into the U.S. If Israeli immigrants are getting jobs at high-tech companies and illicitly transferring technology secrets to the Israeli military, that’s a fine reason to be more suspicious of Israelis. More Canadian immigrants sounds like a great idea, especially since most Canadians I know who came to the U.S. came for all of what I’d consider the right reasons.
But in any event, the difference between, say, worries about Chinese or French industrial espionage on the one hand, and jihadist terrorism on the other, is that the former doesn’t seem to have the potential to (a) launch the U.S. into an endless series of expensive and destructive wars abroad; (b) disrupt day to day life as we know it; or (c) provide a pretext/rationale for a massive growth in domestic government authority and a decline in civil liberties.
The American constitutional scheme, in short, can survive a heckuva lot of industrial espionage. Can it survive a series of explosions in major shopping malls, followed by a dirty bomb in midtown Manhattan? I doubt it. Better to be seen as “unfair” to some potential immigrants (while benefiting others) than to take much greater risks.
December 29, 2009, 11:14 amShelbyC says:
Hey, maybe if you interacted with them more you’d know that they’re called Somalis. :-).
December 29, 2009, 11:15 ammjs says:
Why issue a “religious visa” to ideologies that have a track record of actions inimical to the US?
December 29, 2009, 11:16 amLarryA says:
While you have a good point about the average population of such countries, no one is really “average.” The kind of governments you speak of produce refugees who disagree with them. I know several people who have emigrated from the countries you would bar (as well as the former USSR) who have a much deeper and more personal understanding of liberty than a majority of U.S. natives.
December 29, 2009, 11:40 amresh says:
As a lurker type, I say it’s a bold thing and perhaps overdue to suggest on an academic level a non-pc approach to terrorism. Your idea is little more than excluding from the party those who might have an infectious disease. Seems a logical starting point insofar as checking i.d. at the door.
Of course, by suggesting what you have, you’ll need to prepare yourself for the obligatory slippery-slope pablum and closet racist noise. Good luck.
BTW, you might attenuate your novel immigration policy by limiting it to those under 50 or over 10. I don’t see a whole lot of jihadists above or below those respective ages anxious to actually kill themselves, bin Laden and Zawahiri, notwithstanding.
December 29, 2009, 11:48 amJohn Burgess says:
I wonder if the Brits will enjoy being banned from immigrating to the US? There are all those second- and third-generation Pakistani-Brits, after all.
To get at them, we’d have to change the criteria to one that not-surprisingly looks an awful lot like institutionalized racism…
December 29, 2009, 11:55 amSoldier of Fortune says:
Several recent arrests involving home-grown domestic terrorists involve individuals whose families immigrated to the U.S. from countries like (IIRC) Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
And Saudi Arabia, which provided the men and financing for the 9-11 attacks. I agree with banning immigration from these countries (and any other with a majority Muslim population) unless the country proved to the US that it either no Al Qaeda affiliate terrorist groups within its borders.
December 29, 2009, 11:55 amMalvolio says:
If it really is a choice between a 1-in-200-million chance of being killed by terrorist but I live in a country that locks innocent people in countries full of slavering maniacs versus a 1-in-100-million chance and life in a free, just country, it’s an easy pick for me.
And it makes the choice even easier that the plan is stupid. Perhaps 3% of the population of the US is here illegally. If an bracero with a third-grade education can sneak into California every growing season, I’m sure the college-educated son of a London banker can figure something out too.
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart.”
December 29, 2009, 11:56 am– Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Soldier of Fortune says:
All citizens, whether immigrants or visitors, should be banned from such countries. The only persons allowed would be government representatives.
December 29, 2009, 11:57 amDoningc says:
I have yet to see any concrete benefit (other than feel-goody psychobabble) that we “benefit” from interactions with immigrants. Why is a more heterogenous society better off than a more homogenous one?
December 29, 2009, 12:00 pmPeople tend to prattle on about diversity being strength; I’d like to see concrete, quantifiable evidence in support.
U.Va. Grad says:
In my anecdotal experience living in Minneapolis, yes. To be clear, Somali refugees living here have the kinds of jobs you generally expect refugees or new immigrants to have — they’re not in R&D at Medtronic working on the next leap in pacemaker technology; instead, they drive cabs, work in foodservice or janitorial positions, and, most successfully, own and operate convenience stores and the like. Perhaps that’s not what you’d consider “particularly productive,” but owning a small business or having a full-time job (or several part-time jobs) that lets you support your family seems perfectly acceptable to me, especially in comparison to native-born American citizens who are living off of government checks.
December 29, 2009, 12:02 pmTy Webb says:
Prof. Bernstein,
Despite my progressive leanings, I actually think this is a good start towards a common-sense solution. One question — would you permit an exception for asylum applications? It seems counterproductive to restrict entry to political dissidents from the very countries that harbor anti-American sentiment. After all, defection was a potent symbol during the Cold War. Your thoughts?
December 29, 2009, 12:03 pmMark Field says:
Individual immigrants are, of course, not equally desirable. However, immigration from a variety of cultural backgrounds is very desirable because it prevents any one culture from becoming dominant. It’s the same logic James Madison used about religious denominations — we’re better off with many different ones than one large one or a few large ones.
December 29, 2009, 12:04 pmMark Field says:
Malvolio, that’s one of the best uses of a quote I’ve ever seen.
December 29, 2009, 12:06 pmMark Field says:
I’ll let James Madison answer this one:
“Happily for the states, they enjoy the utmost freedom of religion. This freedom arises from that multiplicity of [denominations] which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society; for where there is such a variety of [denominations], there cannot be a majority of any one [denomination] to oppress and persecute the rest.”
December 29, 2009, 12:12 pmDoningc says:
In response to Mark Field:
December 29, 2009, 12:17 pmYou still didn’t answer the question; you responded with an inapplicable quote from a founder so as to give it the appearence of authority. This country is overwhelmingly Christian yet I do not see much evidence of the rest being oppressed and persecuted. I wonder if such would be the case if the same percentage of Christians were replaced by Wahaabis?
yankee says:
No, it’s based on the moral view that it’s wrong to give substantially more negative treatment to people of disfavored races/ethnicities/sexes/nationalities/etc based on the behavior of a minuscule number of people. You can disagree with this view if you wish, but it’s not reasonable to conflate it with a straw man, or to pretend it doesn’t exist.
As a prudential matter, I also wonder how we’re going to determine what countries “disproportionately” produce anti-American terrorists, as we are dealing with an exceptionally small dataset. It’s not too hard for the Israelis to figure out what countries/non-national-areas are disproportionately producing anti-Israeli terrorists, but the U.S. isn’t Israel.
December 29, 2009, 12:18 pmMark Field says:
You apparently didn’t understand Madison’s point, namely that “Christian” isn’t a relevant category when they’re so divided among themselves that they can’t impose controls. As Madison understood, it was the divisions within Christianity (the “denominations”) which made religious freedom possible.
December 29, 2009, 12:25 pmShelbyC says:
The proposition on the table is that banning imigration from certain places would reduce the risk of terrorism to a degree that the benefit would outweigh any benefit from immigration. If you want to get into the quantifyin’ game, how ’bout the folks supporting the proposition quantify both sides of the equation? But personally, I don’t think quantification is the most productive approach here.
December 29, 2009, 12:28 pmCharles says:
Why make it a ban on all immigrants from certain countries. Why not just ban people who have suspected terrorist ties, regardless of what country they come from? Instead of being a half measure (it would actually pick up almost all of the terrorists the U.S so far has thought would commit a terrorist act on our soil) that is over broad ( it would be more likely to pick out bad apples while leaving the good) , wouldn’t that directly cure the ills that we fear?
December 29, 2009, 12:30 pmSara says:
In addition to other criticisms, this does not strike me a practical because it could only be limited to states you don’t care to have diplomatic, military and trade relations with, and that group would be radically under-inclusive.
December 29, 2009, 12:34 pmA. Criminal says:
The entitlement might be morally true, but legally, as well as in reality, your statement was pure BS. Treating people with overt prejudice is standard procedure: Grutter v. Bollinger, Bakke, etc. I don’t understand how you could make such a ludicrous statement.
December 29, 2009, 12:35 pmThales says:
Reserving judgment on the moral and broader policy merits for the moment, in order for Bernstein’s idea to have a hope of success in effective deterrence of terrorist acts committed by Muslim extremists (through means which Bernstein acknowledges are overinclusive and unfair in one sense), it would need to be expanded to include, for example, British citizens of Pakistani descent (e.g. the London train bombers), French citizens of Algerian descent, etc. But of course that greatly expands the universe of unfairly penalized innocents, and also would then pit the government’s plenary power over immigration on a collision course with the equal racial/national origin treatment guarantee implicit in the 14th Amendment. Unless one would want to expand it even further to say, ban all Britons from entering the States . . . you can see where this rapidly becomes a fortress America scenario and makes relations with U.S. allies in Western Europe quite difficult.
December 29, 2009, 12:35 pmChris Travers says:
Given the number of terrorist plots (including this one) which apparent ties to the UK, I would think the UK would be at the top of the list of countries to cut off immigration and travel from.
That and this little thing called diplomacy. Certainly the UK seems to be disproportionately tied to attacks against the US. Cutting off travel from the UK to the US because of that might cause a few hard feelings among those we want as our allies.
December 29, 2009, 12:38 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I have a friend who agrees with me, and has advocated this line to various liberal ACLU-types, who have responded, almost to a person, with the same non-sequitor: “But Timothy McVeigh was a very destructive terrorist, and he was an American going back many generations.” This is a non sequitor, of course, because no one is talking about doing anything to lawful American residents, but keeping out potential terrorists. If, say, Iceland was the home of a large number of Christian Identity followers who advocated bringing down the ZOG, I’d say the same for Iceland. It’s just political correctness run amok.
As for the moral issue, distinguishing between friendly and unfriendly nationalities, to the point of sometimes making war on the latter, is precisely the purpose of foreign policy.
December 29, 2009, 12:42 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I’m inclined to agree that any restriction on immigration such as I proposed will almost certainly be underinclusive. So what? The point is not to that we will keep out every potential immigrant jihadist; 80 or 90% would do nicely.
December 29, 2009, 12:45 pmEcon_Scott says:
The best way to prevent domestic terrorism is to vote the current crop of fools out of Federal and State office.
Fire them all and appoint every third person out of bowling alleys on a Saturday night and you could do no worse and probably far better.
December 29, 2009, 12:48 pmChris Travers says:
One thing you are missing though is that ideology is only one part of it. Successfully planning and carrying out a terrorist attack involves a fair bit of direction from people who have substantial training. Iirc, bin Ladin himself has an engineering degree.
I don’t think it is any accident that at least three terrorist plots against American airliners either came out of or had substantial ties to the UK. The UK has a good education system and a real problem with radical militant Muslims. From any rational perspective, the UK is a more significant node in international anti-US terrorism than is Pakistan, Syria, or Yemen.
So what would you propose in this case? Adding the UK to your list of no-immigration countries? At least dropping them from the visa waiver program? Or just pretending that because they are part of Western society that they don’t count?
December 29, 2009, 12:53 pmPaul Horwitz says:
David, I appreciated your thoughtful response to my earlier post. But I have to disagree with a couple of aspects of your latest comment. As I wrote earlier, I do think it is possible to have a sensible argument on these issues. But I think you may be missing some aspects of the arguments about fairness, values, etc., and that this is evident in your response to Yankee. I do not think it is untoward to suggest that people can have concerns about whether it is fair or just to restrict immigration by a large group of people based on the actions of some of them, *without* believing either that there is no greater likelihood of terrorist actions resulting from a Yemeni immigrant than from a Chilean immigrant. And they can believe this to be unfair regardless of some argument about Timothy McVeigh. (A sounder analogy here would be to say that because of the risk of the occasional Timothy McVeigh, we ought to suppress speech and association rights by all groups that tend to give some cover to the idea of anti-government violence. That seems consistent with your policy argument, although I appreciate you are not saying this is constitutionally possible. Buy why not? For pure consequentialist reasons, or for reasons of constitutional “values?”) Leaving aside the many practical concerns (ie., do we ban British immigrants with different countries of origins, and so on) and sticking with your earliest example, it is possible to be concerned about the fairness of treating all Yemeni immigrants and/or visitors in this fashion without making any claims about either McVeigh or Chile. Your post and your earlier response to me make clear that you do not think these questions are necessarily trivial, and I would argue that it is these concerns, rather than fanciful arguments about the equivalence between disparate groups, that might drive opposition to the broad policy you suggest. None of this strikes me as being equivalent to your argument in the post that the “ONLY” reason to object to the policy is “political correctness,” or to the idea, which in fairness you do not state but again might be inferred by careless readers, that objecting to such a policy on the grounds that it violates deeply held values is “just political correctness run amok.” That’s why I commented in the first place: not to say that your policy proposal is wrong, although I do respectfully think it is, but to suggest that it is possible to have moral objections to it without those objections being a matter of political correctness as you seem to be using the term. Finally, I would have thought that, although the word “precisely” probably does not apply to the varied purposes of foreign policy at all, if it did the distinction would be between friendly and unfriendly nations, not nationalities. Without wanting to place too much emphasis on an extreme example, it is the difference between declaring war on Japan and interning Japanese Americans.
December 29, 2009, 1:00 pmPaul Horwitz says:
For “Buy why not,” obviously, read “But why not?”
December 29, 2009, 1:02 pmSara says:
80% to 90%, David you are not making a serious proposal. Let’s review the countries:
Pakistan: we don’t want the current government to fall and we want military cooperation, so they are off the list.
Afghanistan: Given our military and diplomatic goals, they ar off the list.
Saudi Arabia: Oil. So no.
Egypt: Perhaps, but this would be a radical departure from our stance toward that country and the fall-out would seem to be worse than the problem.
Israel: No.
Yemen: Didn’t they just blow people up for us (but I’ll give you Yemen).
I’ll give you Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Cuba and North Korea, too.
But that does not get you very much.
December 29, 2009, 1:05 pmAnderson says:
meaning the Christmas bomber, for example, should be somewhere getting interrogated for potential intelligence rather than meeting with his lawyer right now
Is there any reason to suppose that he is *not* in fact being interrogated?
December 29, 2009, 1:08 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Since their own government thinks Britons are too feckless to be allowed near guns, knives, pointy sticks or rocks – all of which they’d have access to here in America – there is indeed a strong public safety case to be made for banning them en masse from visiting, let alone immigrating. ;^)
December 29, 2009, 1:13 pmyankee says:
I’d like to thank Paul Horwitz for making my point better than I did.
I also forgot to remark on this, from the OP:
I often see arguments of the form “why spend $X on program A when it would be so much better spent on program B?” as an argument against spending money on A. These arguments are consistently marred by the problem of assuming that a cut in program A will be matched by an equal and opposite increase in spending on program B. Usually it is more likely that the money will instead go to worthless programs C, D, and E.
This argument strikes me as similarly flawed in its assumption that cutting the number of Somali immigrants by 10,000 will be matched by an equal and opposite increase of 10,000 Chilean immigrants. It strikes me as far more likely that there will be no corresponding increase in the number of Chilean immigrants (or immigrants from some other nation).
December 29, 2009, 1:19 pmDilan Esper says:
1. there was a time when the mob was a huge problem and its leaders were almost all jews and italians. i am sure profesdor bernstein would have had no problem with a blanket ban on jewish immigration during that time, right?
2. it’s funny to see a free market type like professor bernstein arguing against the free market of immigrants and instead arguing to centrally plan because canadians are just as good as pakistanis. if firms in the free market are hiring pakistanis, doesn’t that suggest they know better than the central planners?
December 29, 2009, 1:24 pmie says:
Here’s what we know so far:
May 2009 provides fraudulent information on application for British visa, is banned from entering the country and placed on their watch list
July 2009 goes to study Arabic in Yemen
August 2009 calls family to say he dropped out and won’t be coming back or talking to them
(Fall 2009, sometime) father tries to tell the US & Nigerian intelligence services about his son’s radicalization
December 24th purchases ticket in Ghana, sneaks into Nigeria
Seems like May and Fall were both missed opportunities to flag this guy.
December 29, 2009, 1:27 pmSara says:
I don’t think that’s right Yankee, I suspect that the demand for immigration outstrips the current quota for Chile and most other countries. Bernstein is just extending quotas in a foolish manner but quotas and excess demand do already exist.
December 29, 2009, 1:29 pmSnaphappy says:
If its true that “recent arrests involving home-grown domestic terrorists involve individuals whose families immigrated to the U.S. from countries like . . . Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen,” then even implementing your proposal today would not reduce the number of such terrorists until 10 or 20 years from now. That is, the next two decades’ home grown terrorists are likely already here as citizens or lawful permanent residents.
And assuming that you could cut off the flow of potential home-grown terrorists by cutting off immigration, who’s to say whether that same action might increase the sense of alienation among the immigrants from the target country who are already here? The same action might reduce the pool of possible home-grown terrorists by 50% yet increase the percentage of susceptible individuals by 300%. Certainly branding an individual’s country of origin (and by implication the individual himself) as a place with people too dangerous to permit in the country isn’t likely to make the person more likely to successfully assimilate to American culture.
It might well be a better use our resources to do outreach in immigrant communities from the target countries, actively looking for and reaching out to the individuals who appear to be sliding down the road of alienation and disconnectedness.
The most recent incidents both could have been prevented if we had spent a billion dollars of stimulus money looking for lonely souls like the crotch bomber and the Texas shooter and getting them laid.
December 29, 2009, 1:32 pmCharles says:
I think that it is underinclusive as to the supsected class but over inclusive generally. Why not just deny immigration to all people who have suspected ties to terrorism? which still might be underinclusive but I don’t see how it is more underinclusive than what you propose. It has the added benefit of not being over inclusive generally.
December 29, 2009, 1:32 pmSara says:
Charles, I agree and it has almost no costs, diplomatically, militarily and commercially.
December 29, 2009, 1:45 pmDoningc says:
I must have missed all those inter-denominational wars fought in this country. Even the Shiites and Sunnis here don’t seem to go at it much.
December 29, 2009, 1:53 pmYou still didn’t address the benefits of diversity.
And you didn’t go any where near addressing the idea of what would be happening in this country if Wahabbis replaced Christians.
Redman says:
I will believe my government is serious about protecting me when I see profiling used to drastically reduce the time and hassle of air travel.
I am sick to death of seeing 80 year old grandmothers in wheel chairs being patted down by dim bulbed TSA brown shirts.
Profiling is the backbone of affirmative action, quotas and set asides. Those programs treat everyone belonging to a particular racial group as being the same, regardless of individual characteristics or abilities.
December 29, 2009, 1:54 pmCrazyTrain says:
Have you ever actually seen this? I doubt you have. I travel a lot — both domestically and internationally — and have never seen this. Ever.
December 29, 2009, 2:00 pmSouthernJew says:
Cutting off all immigration by country effectively cuts off your friends or potential friends as well as your potential attackers. It is easiest for us to count and discuss the implications when someone becomes a terrorist after spending time in the US (KSM did, for instance); from that vantage point, shutting the door seems only natural.
But US Security is also served by creating friends among those individuals from foreign countries who have spent significant time in this country and found it to be something they admire and respect. Some of our would-be friends and allies are people who come from countries that have militant Islamic movements as well.
Don’t forget that it was the Nigerian father of the would-be Christmas bomber who approached the US embassy to express concerns about his son’s potential for violent terrorism. Do we really want to cut off all access to the US by someone such as that? Absent direct and positive contact with the US, there are many people who might find their desire to cooperate and prevent terroristic violence significantly reduced.
When we shut a national door categorically by country, we substantially reduce our capacity to create friends in precisely those countries where we need the most help.
December 29, 2009, 2:07 pmbd says:
Just because some immigrants to the US from countries where prevalent ideologies include promotion of acts of terror against the US end up believing those ideologies does not mean the US does not benefit from their immigration.
As an example, let’s consider 100 young Afghani males. If those 100 Afghanis stay in Afghanistan, how many end up being terrorists? 10? 25? Pick your number.
Alternatively, those 100 Afghanis immigrate to the US. They meet Americans, see the good (and the bad) sides of our country. I’m willing to bet that, while there is no guarantee that all 100 will not become terrorists, the number of terrorists that emerge out of the 100 will be less than the 10 or 25 had those Afghanis remained in Afghanistan.
There is no better advertisement for the American people than coming to the US and seeing how good life here is. If Afghanis (or people from any other country where “terror” originates) never come to the US, there will never be any rational reason for the moderation of their ideological views. Yes, there will be some lost causes (the Timothy McVeighs of the world), but the result is fewer terrorists in the world.
Would you prefer 25 Afghani terrorists or 2 Afghani-American terrorists?
December 29, 2009, 2:08 pmSenatorMark4 says:
We MUST draw a line but it must be drawn between freedom and “other”. The others should be clearly defined so no immigration, government aid of any type, or travel comes from agencies of tyranny. But how? I believe three things make us patient with each other and our government because of the Constitution: 1) First Amendment, 2) Second Amendment, and 3) Article I, section 2 (ability to vote the tax man out EVERY two years). Without these rights delineated and enforced we should bypass those rogue cultures completely by forcing them to compete on THEIR merits and not rob the American taxpayer to keep THEIR population complacent.
December 29, 2009, 2:11 pmKen Arromdee says:
– Extreme free market people want unlimited immigration, but they also want no government-funded social services. This should reduce immigration. It’s not inconsistent to oppose implementing only one of a pair of policies that only work together.
December 29, 2009, 2:14 pm– Much terrorism is connected to governments (and this includes both governments that sponsor and encourage terrorism, and governments that are ineffectual in stopping it). Terrorism related to government polices is inherently non-free-market.
– At any rate, libertarians think the government can rightfully stop force and fraud. Terrorism counts as force. There’s no free market for terrorist immigration any more than there’s a free market for shoplifting store customers; it would be proper for a government to stop shoplifters, and absurd to say that stores should “compete in a free market” on this.
Chris Travers says:
I certainly agree that the continued practice of background checks before immigrant visas (or similar visas, like I-129F fiancee visas which are technically nonimmigrant) should continue, I do wonder what the costs actually are. I don’t know that we know. I do think that the costs are probably reasonable given the payoff.
For example, if a US citizen marries someone in a foreign country who is suspected of terrorist ties (but not necessarily directly suspected to be a terrorist), I wonder what the costs would be if:
1) The individual with the petition denied makes a big media event out of it showing how anti-family-valies immigration laws are, or
2) The individual gives up and moves to the foreign country. Maybe the spouse is not a terrorist but his/her relatives are. If they convince him that they are right, have we just created a domestic terrorist?
This isn’t an argument against such controls, just an argument against setting the threshold too low for suspicion.
December 29, 2009, 2:18 pmChris Travers says:
I would also note that I am hardly a non-interested party. My wife is from Indonesia which might well be on the list of countries Prof. Bernstein would prefer to cut off immigration from.
Also consider that Indonesian law is set to revert to only recognizing citizenship of the father, so children of male American citizens in Indonesia are either stateless or US citizens depending on if eligible for citizenship. Many other Islamic nations have similar laws.
December 29, 2009, 2:19 pmDoningc says:
To Crazytrain:
December 29, 2009, 2:24 pmI have actually seem 80 year old grandmothers pulled out for “extra screening”i.e a patdown.
If you travel as much a syou say and were paying attention you would have seen this and other “security theater” absurdities as well. Havw you evr gotten a boarding pass (randomly gernerated) with SSSS across the bottom. If you hit that particular lottery you get pulled out of line for the “extra” security as well. And lots of senior citizens travel. It happens every day.
David Bernstein says:
Yes, Paul, you are correct, concerns about perceived fairness are another reason people would oppose the immigration restrictions I propose, though I’d still add these fairness considerations are often intertwined with various other considerations (and I would not that the government already “discriminates” in various ways, e.g., refugee aid, student visas, ability of refugees to come to the U.S., and more, based on nationality, and this raises relatively few hackles.)
December 29, 2009, 2:24 pmChris Travers says:
Do we discriminate against US citizens who marry people from Muslim-majority countries which have substantial Jihadist factions? Do we say “no family values for you?”
December 29, 2009, 2:29 pmDilan Esper says:
At any rate, libertarians think the government can rightfully stop force and fraud. Terrorism counts as force. There’s no free market for terrorist immigration any more than there’s a free market for shoplifting store customers; it would be proper for a government to stop shoplifters, and absurd to say that stores should “compete in a free market” on this.
You missed the irony I was pointing out. Bernstein’s argument is that there’s no cost to banning Pakistanis, because Canadians are every bit as good, even though the free market may right now be hiring Pakistanis. In other words, he is centrally planning the market for IMMIGRANTS, not the market for terrorists.
December 29, 2009, 2:30 pmA faceless bureaucrat named Bill says:
I think David’s larger point has been overlooked in the frenzy to debate the virtues of including this or that demographic grouping: we have not, as a nation, thought seriously about ways to keep potential terrorists from entering our country, let alone implement them. As other wags have put it: the nation is not at war – the Army is at war, and the rest of us are on vacation. What will it take for us to wake up and start acting like someone is trying to kill us?
December 29, 2009, 2:52 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Getting Serious About Terrorism -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Eugene Volokh, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: Getting Serious About Terrorism: Ever since 9/11, I’ve had the feeling that the U.S.‘s domestic counter-terrori.. http://bit.ly/696V9M [...]
December 29, 2009, 3:00 pmMalvolio says:
Perhaps you should come visit the United States. Populated almost exclusively by immigrants from every crap-hole on Earth and their descendants and yet, does pretty well.
Now 12 and 1.
December 29, 2009, 3:04 pmDavid Nieporent says:
Only if we have a good, reliable way of distinguishing, e.g., the “good” Saudis from the bad ones. Obviously if we have specific intelligence about a Belgian, we ought to ban him, sure. But on a percentage basis, there are a lot more Yemenis that are problematic than Belgians, so if we’re playing the odds, take the Belgian.
December 29, 2009, 3:08 pmAndrew F says:
I wonder what Mr. Bernstein has to say about the long-standing policy of the United States and its allies throughout the Cold War of welcoming political asylees and refugees from the Soviet bloc. Surely the risk of letting in one Soviet spy or sleeper agent would, under Bernstein’s analysis, have counseled against such programs.
These sorts of ethnoglobalizations masquerading as “getting serious” are as historically tone-deaf as they are myopic.
December 29, 2009, 3:11 pmjukeboxgrad says:
observer:
No, but he is rich. Does that remind you of anyone? So is OBL. So if we were really “getting serious about terrorism,” we would subject all rich people to a body-cavity search.
And speaking of OBL, he and most of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi. Which obviously means that Saudis should be treated as “unfriendly,” and be subject to “stricter travel restrictions.” Even though that might put a damper on scenes like this.
==================
californiamom:
It’s lucky for you that the people who got here before you (and before your ancestors) didn’t apply your philosophy. (I’m assuming you’re not Native American. Let me know if I’m wrong.)
==================
ShelbyC:
Indeed. And to the extent that we treat non-terrorists like terrorists (something we’ve already done plenty of), we encourage the former to become the latter. Which is actually a good thing, from the perspective of those who profit from perpetual war (link, link).
As Snaphappy said: “branding an individual’s country of origin (and by implication the individual himself) as a place with people too dangerous to permit in the country isn’t likely to make the person more likely to successfully assimilate to American culture.”
And as SouthernJew said: “when we shut a national door categorically by country, we substantially reduce our capacity to create friends in precisely those countries where we need the most help.”
==================
MJH21:
So that would apply to Timothy McVeigh, right? And also the wheelchair guy at the post office, right?
==================
db:
In the Civil War, roughly 2% of Americans were killed (the equivalent casualty figure today would be six million). Nevertheless, “the American constitutional scheme” survived. Those who nominally support “the American constitutional scheme” should have more respect for its durability.
By the way, “a dirty bomb is unlikely to cause many deaths” (link).
A greater threat to “the American constitutional scheme” is posed by fear-mongering bed-wetters and war profiteers. But that too will pass.
==================
mjs:
Are you aware of the strong connection between Jews and Communism? You realize that Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky were Jews, right? And that there were many Jews in the original Communist leadership? Presumably you’ve heard of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? Noam Chomsky? Abbie Hoffman? Jerry Rubin? William Kunstler? George Soros? Barney Frank? Barbara Boxer? Dianne Feinstein? Russ Feingold? Carl Levin? Charles Schumer? Bernie Sanders? Rahm Emanuel? David Axelrod? Isn’t this a group with “a track record of actions inimical to the US?” Surely you know that Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and vote D, right?
Why not restrict immigration of Jews? After all, we used to do just that. Maybe those were the good old days.
==================
faceless:
There have always been people trying to kill us, and there will always be people trying to kill us. As long as we are a rich and powerful country, this goes with the territory. What will it take for us to wake up and realize that we self-inflict greater harm when we overreact? What will it take for us to wake up and realize that provoking us to overreact is precisely the enemy’s core objective? What will it take for us to wake up and realize that certain elements in our society profit greatly when our enemy succeeds in provoking us into endless war?
If the last eight years didn’t teach us these lessons, then nothing will.
December 29, 2009, 3:12 pmChris Travers says:
It’s not a war because:
1) we don’t know exactly who the enemy is and
2) we don’t have any idea of a victory condition.
If we treat it as a war, it will simply remove our liberties permanently. We could go back to the McCarthy years and implement them, repeal the first amendment, etc. We should be looking at terrorist organizations as criminal syndicates, not targets of war. The former category is much closer to significant threats we have faced in the past.
December 29, 2009, 3:12 pmDoningc says:
Hey Malvolio:
December 29, 2009, 3:17 pmOr should I call you Private Winger. That was clever and amusing btw. But also, btw I was born in the Bronx and lived in New York all my life. I am tired of hearing the (now) useless argument that we are a nation of immigrants blah blah. We needed immigrants to populate the vast expanses of our country in the past before we could maintain a stable population. Such is no longer the case and we have a serious threat facing us in a statistically significant part due to the danger from radicalized immigrants or potential sleeper terrorists.
And I STILL haven’t seen anyone give me a true benefit of diversity other than many of you think it’s “nice”. Or that we get some other amorphous and nebulous benefit from it.
Anderson says:
I have actually seem 80 year old grandmothers pulled out for “extra screening“i.e a patdown.
Would it really do for the terrorists to figure out that we won’t search an 80-year-old woman? What would their next step be, I wonder?
December 29, 2009, 3:20 pmAnderson says:
We needed immigrants to populate the vast expanses of our country in the past before we could maintain a stable population.
Did you not just say that you were from NYC? Where are you under the impression that immigrants ended up — Montana?
December 29, 2009, 3:26 pmPassing By says:
Maybe we should ban immigration from countries whose citizens have been convicted of espionage within the U.S.
I mean, the vast majority of immigrants from these countries are perfectly law-abiding and will make fine citizens. But the question is, why take the risk regarding the small fraction that will turn out to be spies and traitors?
December 29, 2009, 3:29 pmDoningc says:
Anderson,
December 29, 2009, 3:29 pmSo you think that this absurd practice is better than profiling persons with a greater probability of being a terrorist.
A thought experiment for you. There is definitely a passenger boarding a plane with a bomb. There are only 2 passengers left who need to be screened. The bomb is NOT yet on the plane. You may now only search ONE of the remaining passengers. Passenger One is 80 yr old wheelchair bound Bonnie O’leary from Tulsa Oklahoma. Passenger two is 23 year old Abdul Salaam from Yemen whose passport indicates he has travelled to Pakistan and Somalia.
Who do you decide to search?
Doningc says:
Anderson,
December 29, 2009, 3:32 pmFunny you should mention Montana. I have a ski house in Whitefish. The point is that we no longer need to populate our country from sources other than our own birth rate.
You seem to like the false choice. Should I adopt the same tactic and assume based upon your comments that you are for completely open borders and unlimited immigration.
pot meet kettle says:
even granting the rather tenuous claim that this was david’s main point, what makes it seem like we haven’t thought seriously about ways to keep potential terrorists from entering our country? have any of you been through the immigration process in this country? moreso from “suspicious” countries?
I just don’t understand this. On the one hand, there are complaints of TSA always fighting the last war. On the other hand, there are complaints about grandmas and kids. Are grandmas and kids any less capable of setting off explosives? Why should they be exempt from checking? Doesn’t the history of the use of women and children teach us anything?
December 29, 2009, 3:33 pmpot meet kettle says:
jukeboxgrad, pertinently, they were both engineers.
December 29, 2009, 3:34 pmAnderson says:
Don in GC, you still haven’t answered my question.
Anyone forgotten John Walker Lindh? How much trouble would he have, if we’re looking for dark-skinned foreigners?
You create a profile, you create incentives to work around the profile.
December 29, 2009, 3:35 pmMark Field says:
No, but you’re continuing to miss Madison’s point. It’s the very diversity of religious beliefs which allows all believers to live peacefully together. If there were one religion/denomination here, it would be a tyranny. If there were 2 it would be a bloodbath. Because there are many, we live in peace.
December 29, 2009, 3:35 pmCharles says:
I think you are missing what I am saying. I’m saying you use the intel we have on anyone with suspected ties. a net wide enough to catch christmas bomber, whether he came from Belgium or Yemen or Nigeria.
Why choose between and Belgian with suspected ties to terrorist activities and a Yemeni under the same suspicion?
December 29, 2009, 3:36 pmDoningc says:
Pot:
December 29, 2009, 3:37 pmNo one is aying we should ignore children and grandmothers. But is it not productive when TSA “must” subject one for extra screening when there is also in line a person more likely to fit the profile of a terrorist. But that has to be ignored. Speak to some TSA agents who will tell you they will be subject to discipline if they have 2 persons on middle eastern descent out for screening at the same time. We need to profile and we need to be smart.
Mark Field says:
It’s clear that some people haven’t thought seriously about it, but there’s no reason for the “we” in that sentence (you didn’t do that, others did). People have thought seriously about it — they just disagree.
December 29, 2009, 3:38 pmDoningc says:
Mark Field:
December 29, 2009, 3:40 pmWe have zero historical evidence to support the notion in this country that sectarian violence has only been avoided due to a plethora of Christian churches.
David Nieporent says:
…and…
Except for the people who come here and decide the opposite. Both of you should google Sayyid Qutb, often called the founder of modern Islamism, who spent time in the U.S., was disgusted by what he saw — the 1950s were too sexual for him — and was radicalized as a result.
December 29, 2009, 3:40 pmpot meet kettle says:
which gets back to… whom do we need to profile? the brits?
apparently not, on at least a few of the flights i’ve been on. i’ve seen simultaneous “random” checks on multiple people of “middle eastern descent”.
December 29, 2009, 3:41 pmpot meet kettle says:
your example is only of people who “must not” be subject to extra screening, not about whom the TSA “must” subject to extra screening. or are you implying the grandmothers are collateral damage as screening slot fillers because there are so many people of “middle eastern descent” getting on our planes that TSA agents cannot but avoid having to screen 2 such people at the same time?
December 29, 2009, 3:59 pmKen Arromdee says:
You missed my other points. First of all, government-provided social services make immigration more attractive than it would otherwise be, distorting the “free market” for immigrants. Second, even if it’s a market for immigrants, that’s a market where foreign governments get to control the quality of the “goods” (by encouraging or not stopping terrorism). If a government controls how likely you are to get rotten apples, you don’t have a free market in apples.
I’d also add that immigrants immigrate for reasons that often are directly affected by government policies. It would be fair for a free market supporter to reject immigration from countries that have poor governments–it’s not free market when a government dumps their country’s poverty on another country.
December 29, 2009, 4:14 pmMark Field says:
What we have is a great deal of historical evidence that having a single church leads to tyranny and repression (Saudi Arabia today, Spain formerly) and that having 2 leads to bloodshed (Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq). Oddly enough, religious freedom (like most other freedom) has NOT led to those outcomes. Strange, huh?
But if you’re so convinced by the evidence that a single ethnic or cultural group is superior, perhaps you have some evidence. For example, you could point to all those people leaving the US to find such places.
December 29, 2009, 4:16 pmLeo Marvin says:
Says you. In fact just last night some clip joint chanteuse took me for a mark and tried to flimflam me out of twenty Somalians.
December 29, 2009, 4:27 pmDoningc says:
Mark Field:
Ireland was political strife more than religious. The other examples you cite all seem to involve conflict with Muslims….imagine that.
As to a superior cultural group it is the American culture. Which is why people generally want to come here. But there are millions out there who would do our superior culture harm and they must be defended against. And any dilution brought to excess changes the character of that which is being diluted. and that is a danger we are facing as well.
December 29, 2009, 4:29 pmt1 says:
Two things: I assume by “cutting off immigration” you are just being sloppy and actually meant to say, “cutting off visas and barring entry”. A terrorist doesn’t need to “immigrate” to the US to do damage.
Second, you do recall that almost all of the 9/11 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia, right?
December 29, 2009, 4:30 pmDavid Nieporent says:
I think a couple of data points don’t exactly prove much. I mean, can’t I cite India or Lebanon for the same proposition as you’re citing Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Iraq? (And how are the Balkans “2″, anyway? Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox.)
December 29, 2009, 4:33 pmDilan Esper says:
You missed my other points. First of all, government-provided social services make immigration more attractive than it would otherwise be, distorting the “free market” for immigrants. Second, even if it’s a market for immigrants, that’s a market where foreign governments get to control the quality of the “goods” (by encouraging or not stopping terrorism). If a government controls how likely you are to get rotten apples, you don’t have a free market in apples.
None of that has any effect on whether a willing purchaser of labor services wishes to buy the services of a Pakistani laborer.
Look, there’s a lot of folks on the right who like to claim a principled opposition to civil rights laws on the ground that they interfere with freedom of contract. But then when it comes to letting brown people into the country, they balk and distinguish and make make-weight arguments.
That’s what’s going on here. And the consistency between the two positions is in both instances the dark-skinned folks lose out.
December 29, 2009, 4:33 pmandrew graham says:
Profiling is generally thought of in America as something that is bad and something that is wrong. We don’t like it when domestic police forces profile, or when public-school administrators profile, et cetera, et cetera.
I don’t doubt that rampantly profiling immigrants based on their respective nationalities would result in fewer would-be terrorists walking around on airplanes. But then society would need to extend the same convenience — the ability to unapologetically profile — to other arms of the law, and on other conditions such as religion. If we’re going to profile, let’s at least be honest with ourselves.
Now the idea sounds pretty ridiculous.
Ours is a society that is better than that. The easiest ways to fight terrorism are rarely the wisest, and profiling strikes me as a rather lazy procedural decision.
December 29, 2009, 4:33 pmRailroad Gin says:
Assuming there is a rational reason for firms to hire Pakistanis over say Salvadorans, or Americans for that matter, then there must something about Pakistanis that makes them better workers for that firm. However, if Pakistanis are somehow different in that regard it is also fair to ask whether there is something about Pakistanis that makes them less suitable to be immigrants for the society as a whole. On the other hand if it is wholly irrational or bigoted to ask whether Pakistani’s are different for immigration purposes then why isn’t the firm irrational or bigoted for preferring Pakistanis?
Staunch free market advocates don’t think that a firm should be able to put strychnine in baby food. By the same token one can be a staunch free market advocate and think that threat of terrorism is grave enough danger to justify some intrusion into the free market. Thus one might oppose an immigration policy if intended to protect jobs or raise wages while supporting that same policy if intended to prevent another 9/11 (or worse).
In answer to Professor Bernstein’s question, I think its pretty well-established that prior to the 60s our immigration policy favored immigration from countries similar to our own. Partly this was to preserve a certain racial balance but it also ensured that immigrants were more likely to share common ground in terms of culture, legal structures and so forth. In the 60s this paradigm was rejected.
Since then a constant refrain of some people (paleocons) is that the influx of third world immigrants is undermining our common heritage, laws, etc. One area that has united liberals, libertarians, and establishment conservatives is in rejecting this cultural argument against current immigration policy. Even opponents of our weak immigration laws generally frame their arguments in economic rather than cultural terms. (Although at the grass-roots level, the cultural arguments are heard more often).
Discussing ideas like the one Professor Bernstein is proposing would reopen a debate that a lot of people don’t want reopened. That is why this isn’t discussed.
December 29, 2009, 4:40 pmShelbyC says:
:-). heh. And I wouldn’t want to do an injustice to that great musical number, “Somalian Pirates We”.
December 29, 2009, 4:40 pmDavid Bernstein says:
No, you and many other commenters are conflating two separate issues. The first is keeping out terrorists who plan to do harm to the U.S. Here, it pays to keep national origin in mind, but it’s primarily a question of intelligence and property security screening. The second issue is people who come here without terrorist inclinations, with, say, two boys, 10 and 12. The parents work many hours, and they and their children have trouble adjusting to America, topped off with typical teenage angst. The children meet some older radical types who hang out in the neighborhood, who introduce them to a local radical cleric, and to some radical internet sites based in their home country. Next thing you know, they are planning to blow up a train, or go to Yemen or Afghanistan for terrorist training, or whatnot. This is very hard to prevent, and the most obvious way to do so, by having spies and informants in particular immigrant communities and houses of worship, is vigorously objected to by civil liberties groups and the immigrants themselves.
December 29, 2009, 4:42 pmChris Travers says:
Sayyid Qutb was the one who advocated overthrowing moderate regimes in the Middle East as the first step to attacking Western interests, right?
To what extent is this different from the Salafist movement?
December 29, 2009, 4:44 pmShelbyC says:
I’m not sure folks on the right make such arguments, it’s more libertarian folks. But if you buy into the notion that the government has the right to keep people out of the country for whatever reason they want, than them doing so wouldn’t violate freedom of contract any more than, say, keeping people in prison would, would it?
December 29, 2009, 4:55 pmDilan Esper says:
In answer to Professor Bernstein’s question, I think its pretty well-established that prior to the 60s our immigration policy favored immigration from countries similar to our own. Partly this was to preserve a certain racial balance but it also ensured that immigrants were more likely to share common ground in terms of culture, legal structures and so forth. In the 60s this paradigm was rejected.
You know, conservatives say this all the time but it’s amazingly ahistorical. WHEN THOSE FOLKS WERE COMING IN, Americans certainly DID NOT believe they shared culture and background with them. Rather, people thought that Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans, Poles, etc., were very different, not assimilating, and generally fouling things up. (To say nothing of what folks thought of immigrants with different skin color, e.g., Chinese and Japanese.)
Indeed, the immigrant communities of the past were A LOT more segregated and less assimilated. Ever seen “Gangs of New York”? “The Godfather”? Ever wonder about why that law was passed banning the instruction of schoolchildren in German that went to the Supreme Court during the Lochner era? Ever wonder why just about every major city has a “Chinatown”?
Really, it may look all rose-colored looking back at it, but there’s no way one who is historically informed can claim that the earlier waves of immigration just happily and quickly assimilated whereas modern immigrants don’t.
December 29, 2009, 4:55 pmThe River Temoc, In Winter says:
But what benefits do we get from immigration from these countries that we couldn’t get from an equal number of immigrants from other countries?
For one thing, skilled professionals from those countries come here and engage in productive work, rather than being forced into (say) working on weapons research to put food on the table.
For another, the immigrants can seed positive images of America among their friends and relatives back home, thus providing a counterweight to jihadist ideology. This is surely the rationale for our policy of immediately welcoming any Cuban refugees who set foot on American soil, for instance.
December 29, 2009, 5:00 pmShelbyC says:
And from what I understand, we strongly favored immigration from Africa for quite a while, without regard to how well those folks would assimilate.
December 29, 2009, 5:04 pmMalvolio says:
Well, maybe you could Google for some evidence. Oh, wait, you can’t: Google was started by an immigrant from Russia.
In fact, Donny, you better not be using any kind of Intel-based computer at all, like a Mac or PC, since Intel was started by one of them immigrants too (Hungarian this time).
Ditto with PayPal (Ukraine and Israel), eBay (Iran!), and dozens of other high-tech firms. Even those companies started by Americans, like Microsoft and Amazon, depend on foreign-born staff in huge numbers.
Don’t like high-tech? What fraction of agriculture is performed by immigrants, of food service and the hospitality industry? 70% of the doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodians. A big fraction of dry cleaners on both coasts are Koreans. Most of the independent hoteliers are Indian.
This country is and always has been a nation of immigrants. That’s a fact, Jack.
December 29, 2009, 5:11 pmMark Field says:
They weren’t intended as anything other than examples for illustration.
I used the Balkans as an example of “2″ because each instance in the 90s involved a 1v1 situation, first Orthodox v. Catholics, then Orthodox v. Muslims.
This is, to put it gently, entirely without any factual foundation.
Huh? The Spanish Inquisition was Muslim? The civil war in the Balkans didn’t involve the Serbs (Orthodox) and Croats (Catholics)?
Hey, I think American culture is pretty damn good too. I just happen to think that it’s so good because our ancestors came from many different cultures and added them together in a way that’s distinctive and important. That’s a process we need to continue if we want to remain a great nation.
December 29, 2009, 5:13 pmShelbyC says:
Why isn’t that enough? A simple preference for being exposed to folks from other cultures, to acquire knowelege about other cultures?
December 29, 2009, 5:39 pmS.W. says:
I’m pretty certain that you are not asking in good faith, as you have already concluded that there can be no “true” benefit.
December 29, 2009, 5:53 pmRailroad Gin says:
I think that misreads history. Americans certainly thought that Italians, etc. were very different, but nonethelesss actively worked to assimilate them by, e.g. passing laws to forbid teaching children in their native language. The issue was whether, given the goal of assimilation, it’s easer to assimilate an Italian or a Pakistani. Clearly, while Italians were different from WASPs, they were not as different as Pakistanis. That is why there was a Chinese Exclusion Act but never a Jewish or Polish Exclusion Act. At the margins, it was thought that Chinese were even harder to assimlate than Europeans. The entire point of the 1965 Immigration Act was to remove previously existing rules that favored Europeans over non-Europeans. Whether those rules were wise or effective can be debated. What cannot be debated is that INS regulations explicitly favored immigration from Europe prior to 1965. And it is clear that part of the rationale behind those rules was that it was felt Europeans were easier to assimilate; albeit, not as fast as some might have preferred.
Today of course, we have abandoned the goal of assimilation which I believe is a far bigger problem than the actual immigration laws. But that’s not really germane to the question of what to do with countries with large populations who are overtly hostile to the U.S.
December 29, 2009, 6:05 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Nonsense. My wife and her family are as “brown” as, say, the average Saudi Arabian. In fact, my brother-in-law just discovered that his kids’ day care teacher though he was an Arab Muslim, and that’s why he wasn’t celebrating Christmas.
December 29, 2009, 6:13 pmt1 says:
Perhaps you should try to be more precise.
Are you actually suggesting that the US needs to curtail immigration from certain countries because of the potential threat that might arise years later from the children of the immigrants?
If so, could you support your argument by pointing to anytime that this has happened in the US?
And then, if you do in fact manage to dig up a couple of incidents, perhaps you could then discuss the wisdom of basing immigration policies on 1 or 2 data points.
December 29, 2009, 6:35 pmDilan Esper says:
Nonsense. My wife and her family are as “brown” as, say, the average Saudi Arabian. In fact, my brother-in-law just discovered that his kids’ day care teacher though he was an Arab Muslim, and that’s why he wasn’t celebrating Christmas.
Professor, I pointed out how despite being an avid advocate of the free market, you were essentially making the central planner’s argument (i.e., the government knows better than employers making their hiring decisions as to whom should come to this country, and that a Canadian is just as good as a Pakistani even if the employers want to hire the Pakistani). It isn’t just that you want to restrict immigration– it’s specifically that you make arguments with respect to restricting immigration that you would never make with respect to other areas of economic life.
After all, an advocate of anti-discrimination laws imposed on private businesses can certainly tell an employer “a black is as good as a white”. (Indeed, I think that’s a very good argument– but then, I don’t oppose civil rights laws.) Broadening this out, a lot of central planning is based on the idea that the government’s decision is just as good as whatever decision the private sector would make.
So, there’s an intellectual inconsistency in your argumentation. However, your argument is perfectly consistent if you look at it from the standpoint that disfavored racial minorities end up on the short end of the stick in both cases.
Look, I’m not going to give you a real hard time about this, because I actually have a lot of respect for you and think that you add plenty of value to this website. But really, you need to think about your skepticism of central planning and how it should affect your approach to the immigration issue.
December 29, 2009, 6:38 pmShelbyC says:
But the government and private employers have different interests. If I want to hire a serial killer who’s in jail, and I ask the government to let him out, that may well be the correct choice for me. But the governemnt probably knows better that me who should be in jail, that’s why we have a government, to decide who should be in jail, not to decide who I should hire. And if you believe the government should decide who can come into the country, the same principal applies.
So yes, the central planner’s argument works well for the things we think should be centrally planned (who should be in jail, and maybe who should be in the country) but not for individual choices (who I should hire).
December 29, 2009, 7:03 pmShelbyC says:
Dylan, you could also make the argument that when someone argues that they should decide what sex person they should marry, not the government, they are making the “free marketer’s argument”. I’d be interested to hear your take on why who should be allowed into the country should be decided by contracts between individuals and not the government.
December 29, 2009, 7:12 pmGaryC says:
A significant fraction of the Somali taxi drivers in Minneapolis insist on the right to refuse to provide service to blind people with seeing eye dogs, women traveling without a male escort, and any person carrying alcohol.
Some of the Somalis working in foodservice refuse to handle any pork product, no matter how it is wrapped, or alcohol.
In my opinion, the cab drivers and foodservice workers in question are failing to provide the service for which they are being paid, and in some cases violating the law, and deserve to be fired if they persist in their refusal.
December 29, 2009, 7:14 pmGaryC says:
There is a new report that the CIA was aware of a Nigerian who was in Yemen coordinating with Al Qaeda terrrorist trainers, but did not connect that report with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, even when his father reported to the US ambassador to Nigeria that his son had become a jihadi and was now in Yemen.
By the way, there was another report that mentioned in passing that Abdulmutallab’s mother was from Yemen. His pictures do not make that mixed heritage obvious, so it is possible that this report is in error.
December 29, 2009, 7:22 pmGaryC says:
The two most ridiculous examples of security theater that I have read about in the aftermath of 9/11 are these:
In the Seattle-Tacoma airport, a National Guardsman reporting for guard duty with his M16 rifle and M92 handgun was holding one in each hand while a security officer “wanded” him for weapons.
In the Phoenix airport, the local head of the DEA had the proper paperwork and was allowed to carry his government-issued handgun onto an aircraft to D.C., but had his fingernail clippers confiscated as a possible weapon.
December 29, 2009, 7:31 pmGaryC says:
If you have the resources to do a secondary search of 5% of the passengers, and there is a group that is vastly over-represented in recent terrorists and constitute about 2% of all travelers, then you search all of that group and then randomly search 3% of the rest. Including a few of the 80-year-old grandmothers. You do not allow people who match the terrorist profile to walk on the plane while grandmothers are being searched. And you do not have a limit on the number of people from a suspect group that can be searched per plane, as was apparently the case pre-9/11.
December 29, 2009, 7:43 pmGaryC says:
And he was in that hotbed of sin, Greeley, Colorado, where he actually heard somebody singing “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” That was more than he could take.
December 29, 2009, 7:49 pmArthurKirkland says:
I might like this idea of targeted immigration. I would start by offering every Israeli the opportunity to move to western Texas or West Virginia. It would improve two backward regions overnight, be much cheaper than the chronic subsidization of each Israeli in the current location, and could have several other beneficial effects.
On the other hand, anyone from Eastern European, Italian, Irish, African American, Puerto Rican, or Asian stock (and at least a dozen other groups, prominently including Jews of any nationality) who doesn’t wince at the idea of judging persons by race or nationality doesn’t know much American history.
Then again, making discrimination against some people a national policy might complicate efforts to defuse anti-Americanism that appears to be generating substantial problems for the United States.
This might take some thought.
December 29, 2009, 8:21 pmKen Arromdee says:
That’s not security theater. That’s because it’s not a good idea to write rules which say “except when the TSA agent decides the rule is not really needed”. The inconvenience to DEA agents is far outweighed by the inability of the TSA agent to get socially engineered into letting a terrorist through.
December 29, 2009, 8:33 pmDilan Esper says:
Dylan, you could also make the argument that when someone argues that they should decide what sex person they should marry, not the government, they are making the “free marketer’s argument”. I’d be interested to hear your take on why who should be allowed into the country should be decided by contracts between individuals and not the government.
As a general rule, because I tend to think that people with a job and a stake in society are less likely to be dangerous, I think that if there is a willing buyer of services and a willing seller, they should be able to consummate a transaction.
On the other hand, I don’t deny that the sovereign has the prerogative to override the choices of the market and decide this one. Occasionally (though much less often than anti-immigrant types would suggest), it is even a good idea to go ahead and do this. But one should have no illusions that when the government exercises this prerogative, the government is overriding the preferences of the free market. I don’t happen to think that is a huge deal, but it should be a huge deal for libertarians and conservatives.
December 29, 2009, 8:46 pmDavid Bernstein says:
“So, there’s an intellectual inconsistency in your argumentation.”
No, there would be if I were making a half-assed argument about why immigration from, say, Yemen, is economically a bad thing. I wasn’t making an economic argument, I was making a national security argument. If Intel wants to export supercomputers to North Korea, but I object on national security grounds, this hardly undermines a general pro-free trade argument. Moreover, immigration to the U.S. is not dictated by economic supply and demand. Some huge fraction of immigrants are here under “family reunification,” i.e., because they already have relatives in the U.S., not because there is some specific demand for their talents from employers.
December 29, 2009, 9:27 pmDilan Esper says:
professor:
1. you presumably want to ban work permits for individuals from these countries too, so the fact that some folks get in under family reunification doesn’t mean you aren’t interfering with the free market.
2. presumably firms take precautions against hiring terrorists. thus, the government is overriding their judgment that these folks they are hiring are not terrorists.
3. i can certainly see a libertarian taking the position that an actual national security threat might justify central planning. but al qaeda doesn’t actually threaten the existence of our nation. they are just murderers / criminals. we could justify all sorts of central planning to prevent crime; i suspect that you would not approve of a lot of it. for instance, i suspect you probably are suspicious about gun registration and record keeping laws. and yet you are prepared to let the central planners loose on muslims who don’t kill nearly as many americans.
December 30, 2009, 3:48 amShelbyC says:
Maybe the question that needs to be asked is, why get serious about terrorism? At the current level of terrorism, flying is already a gazillion times safer than driving or many other things we do every day. Aren’t we way below the level of acceptable risk? People are willing to get in the car and drive to, say, a Nigerian restaurant, even though they are way more likely to get killed by doing that than they are by letting the guy who runs the restaurant into the country, so what’s the problem?
December 30, 2009, 10:59 amDilan Esper says:
ShelbyC, that’s exactly right.
To choose an example near and dear to Professor Bernstein’s heart, I basically agree with just about any precaution that Israel chooses to take against rocket attacks and suicide bombings (for instance, I agreed with the construction of the security fence, even though I am very concerned about it being a “fact on the ground” that may result in expropriation of land that should be part of a Palestinian state). The frequency and severity of such attacks makes it, if not quite a national security threat, certainly a huge threat, especially for Israelis living near the borders. And it could very easily turn into a national security threat in the future if the terrorists get ahold of more sophisticated weapons or ramp up their attacks.
But Al Qaeda and its affiliated enterprises don’t present that sort of a threat to the US. Yes, their attacks are bad, but viewed in the context of other causes of death (or even other causes of VIOLENT death) in America, they are a pretty small number and pretty infrequent.
So there’s a real question about whether we should be getting our collective knickers in a twist every time an Al Qaeda attack occurs (let alone every time a FAILED or THWARTED one occurs).
December 30, 2009, 3:12 pmbrad says:
Maybe we should just keep out the 18-30 year old male engineers.
December 30, 2009, 9:03 pmTGGP says:
Ron Paul proposed a law to restrict immigration from terrorist producing countries.
January 2, 2010, 2:59 amLoquai says:
Terrorism is like a disease. If any person is cut, they bleed. Most people need a reason to become violent and unstable. If a person is included in terrorism than we can lock them up an give them brain altering medicine and treatment to brainwash them to be placid citizens. Paranoia is the best fighting tool to terrorism. Just say that another country would use a nuclear device against you, then you could use the same against them. It prevents competition, for competition is a sin.
July 15, 2010, 4:39 pm