A rational approach to life cannot eliminate all risk – and trying to creates its own dangers – a reality many Americans forgot post-9/11 and that runs counter to President Trump’s Muslim-targeting entry ban, as Arnold R. Isaacs describes.
By Arnold R. Isaacs
How frightened should Americans be of refugees, and how much safer will they be under President Trump’s more restrictive refugee policy? If Americans are concerned about actual attacks involving committed terrorists sneaking through the vetting process with the intent to kill or maim Americans, the answer – based on statistics developed by Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions – appears, for all practical purposes, to be virtually zero.
Alabama Sen. (now Attorney General) Jeff Sessions donning one of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” caps.
Of course, Sessions doesn’t frame his statistics that way. He agrees with Trump that existing screening procedures are inadequate and don’t do enough to keep terrorists from posing as refugees. But the evidence he has offered to support that position — and remember, this is from a vehement supporter of Trump’s immigration views, not a critic or a neutral researcher — showed exactly the opposite.
Sessions’s analysis of refugee-terrorism links was in a statement he issued last August, when he was still a senator from Alabama. In the statement, titled “Refugee Terrorism Increases While Obama Administration Increases Flow,” Sessions alleged that “top officials” had admitted “their inability to properly vet refugees,” and called for “analyzing the immigration histories of recent terrorists so that we can more effectively safeguard our immigration system from being infiltrated.”
Offering just such an analysis, Sessions presented a list of 20 refugees who were “convicted for, or implicated in, terrorism or terrorism-related offenses” after being admitted to the United States.
Here are some of the facts about those 20 cases:
— No American was killed or injured by any of those subjects. Not one of the 20 was charged for a violent act of any kind in the United States, or had any concrete or credible plan for…