11/25/15 – Alex Nowrasteh – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest on the show today is Alex Narasta from the Cato Institute.
This one's called Syrian Refugees Don't Pose a Serious Security Threat.
And I guess, well, first of all, welcome to the show.
Alex, how are you?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, yeah.
Good to have you again.
Appreciate you coming on.
So you've got some gall here trying to come at beliefs with a bunch of numbers and facts and stuff like that.
You must think you're a real big shot.
But anyway, so pretend that I'm a right-wing jerk, and therefore I'm terrified of everything, especially Syrians.
And bonus, take into account that Obama and the NATO and GCC allies have, in fact, been backing the terrorists in Syria for the last four and a half years and have probably created tens of thousands of them.
And so quite possibly some of them would seek to dress up like a refugee and try to get into Europe or into the United States.
But anyway, taking that into account, pretending I'm a right-wing jerk, go ahead and convince me.
Thanks, folks.
So taking a look at the refugees we've let in so far from all over the world from the year 2001 onward, none of them have been convicted of planning a terrorist attack in the United States.
We've let in about 860,000 of them.
There have been three convictions of folks for planning terrorist attacks abroad in other countries.
So that's about one conviction for every 286,000 of these refugees who have been let into the United States since then.
The threat is extremely low.
Wow.
Wait.
You're telling me that you're telling me the FBI hasn't even entrapped one of these guys this whole time?
Well, there have been more entrapments for people who came in prior to 9-11.
Around 9-11, a lot of the security features in the refugee program were expanded significantly.
It was made a lot more difficult, a lot more onerous.
So some people from before then have been indicted on planning terrorist attacks.
But almost all of them were abroad as well, not for domestic attacks.
The best estimates we can see is that since 1975, around a dozen refugees have been convicted of planning or trying to participate in a terrorist attack over that time period, which is about one conviction for every 271,000 people admitted as refugees, or 0.00037%.
So we're talking about infinitesimal numbers, very low risk, and you have to look at it from the terrorist perspective.
If they want to come in and do harm in the United States, the refugee program is probably the hardest and most difficult way to do it.
Okay, and why is that?
Because there are...
Well, first off, you have to be a refugee.
You have to go into one of these camps and register with the United Nations and be a resident in one of these camps.
And that can take anywhere between one and six months to register.
Then you've got to be in these camps and begin the American process, get referred by UNHCR to the U.S. government for refugee resettlement, which starts, in the case of refugees, a three-year-long process with 21 different administrative steps, numerous different security checks through the FBI, through DHS, through USCIS, through the Director of National Intelligence, and they are finding a way to try to deny you access.
So they interview you, your family, anybody you say you knew, anybody from the town that you say that you were from, to see if there's some kind of fishy background information or if you're lying.
And if you are, then they reject you.
So they assume that you are guilty until you prove that you are innocent.
So through this entire process, if you are a refugee, a Syrian refugee in a camp, your chances of being resettled in the United States is about 0.04 percent, and it takes over three years.
So if you're a Syrian refugee or a Syrian terrorist posing as a refugee, there are lots of better ways to try to attack the United States than going through this really complicated process that we doubt the vast majority of people who want to come in the first place.
It's actually almost amazing when you get...
How many zeros were to the right of the decimal point there when you counted the percent, 0.00, how many, 1 percent?
So for all refugees convicted of a terrorism offense since 1975, it's 0.00037 percent.
And if you're a Syrian refugee in a camp, your chances of being approved to come to the United States is 0.04 percent.
And the chances that that guy is going to be an ISIS sleeper cell terrorist is less than nothing.
I mean, it's small.
I don't want to say zero because anything can happen, but it is so small that it's not a risk worth worrying about.
I mean, there are lots of other risks worth worrying about.
I mean, one of the things that I'm hesitant to say because people might use it to decrease individual liberty a little bit is a lot of these folks are just like these attackers in Paris could have...
A lot of them were European citizens.
They could have just hopped on a plane and come to the United States through something called the Visa Waiver Program.
Would have been a piece of cake.
But they didn't do that.
So, I mean, there's lots of...
Virtually any other way of getting to the United States is easier and less onerous than the refugee system.
Right.
Well, and that's the real trick, man, right there is that there have been thousands of Europeans who have traveled to Syria to fight and at least scores, I don't know if it's more than 100 or more than 200 or something, of Americans who have gone.
And I don't have any faith in the national police forces and intelligence agencies of the West to keep all these guys from coming home or, I mean, in fact, they don't really have the right to keep them from coming home unless they want to charge them with treason for fighting for al-Nusra or something like that.
They could arrest them once they get here.
Exactly.
And that is actually the more severe threat.
You see, it's not the exports from Syria that are dangerous, but it's the re-exports, right?
It's the Europeans and Americans who have gone there as fighters and then who come back more radicalized or energized or pissed off or whatever their deal is.
And those are the dangerous ones.
Yeah, better trained.
Yeah, they're trained and they have experience and they've tasted blood, so now they want to come back and have more.
That's the serious threat.
But that is a partially homegrown threat made more dangerous by exportation to Syria and then re-importation.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it turns out that the French and Belgian governments are spending most of their time tracking these folks because they know those folks are the most dangerous ones.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the thing is, too, is I think we've been really lucky when you look at the number of, for example, and again, you know, I'm a little hesitant to say this because like you, I don't want to play into the police state in any way or anything like that, but I'm just trying to be realistic about it, where you've had at least dozens of Somali Americans from Minnesota, living in Minnesota, go travel to Somalia to fight for al-Shabaab, the local now Al-Qaeda affiliate, after America turned their society upside down, of course, fighting against the American-backed government there.
And of course, any idiot, any one of them could have decided to just stay here and fight the same war, but on this side of the line, as simple as that.
And yeah, so picking on the refugees who are fleeing for their lives from the terrorist groups that America has created and nurtured, whether we're fighting against them or for them, we do nothing but make them more and more powerful, you know, day by day and year by year here.
To persecute their victims fleeing for their lives seems a little bit unfair to me, but what do I know?
It's unfair, and it's not even a good way to fight terrorism.
It's not even a good way to make us safer, because the threats are so insignificant.
And the point about the Somalis who are settled in Minnesota is a good one.
In fact, the first American who committed a suicide bombing attack was a Somali-American from Minnesota who graduated high school in 2003, who went back to Somalia and did all that.
Committed a suicide bomb or attack against a Somali, you know, the quote, legitimate government there, unquote, attack.
So those people are the most dangerous.
All right, well, I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show, here on the Liberty Radio Network.
I'm talking with Alex Narasta.
Sorry, I think I got that a little bit wrong.
Pretty close, though, right?
Narasta?
Oh, yeah, that's good enough.
Okay, cool.
He writes for Cato.
This article is called Syrian Refugees Don't Pose a Serious Security Threat.
He broke out his calculator and showed it.
Check him out there at Cato.org, and we'll be right back with more after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
Welcome to the show, the Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Alex Narasta from Cato, and he wrote this piece, Syrian refugees don't pose serious security threat.
And one thing I wanted to clarify here real quick, I'm obviously not trying to give advice to any young Somali Americans of where they ought to be attacking things, and I'm certainly not, you know, trying to agitate from below for government persecution of Somali Americans living in Minnesota or anywhere else.
My point is that the American government's got a stop bomb in Somalia.
America's been killing Somalis nonstop since 2001, and that's why it's a threat.
And they're the ones who've got to knock it off.
They're the ones who've got us into a situation where we even have to discuss this being a possible threat in the first place.
It's the foreign intervention and the blowback, and everybody knows that, but sometimes it's got to be restated.
And then the other thing, and this is a little bit, or I'm not sure if you mentioned this in your article, Alex, it's a little bit beyond the purview of the point you're making, I guess.
But it's pretty obvious, too, and it's been well written in other places, at least, that the Islamic State guys are trying to get Americans and Westerners to react.
They're trying to get American, the Western majorities to turn against the Muslims that live among them in order to sharpen, so-called, sharpen the contradictions between us, make them feel unwelcome in our countries, and want to go back so they can have their bogus war civilizations that they're trying to put over on their victims, just like the hawks on our side are trying to do.
And so our hawks, and especially on the issue of refugees, you know, innocent men, women, and children fleeing for their lives, is playing directly into the hands of our enemies, the al-Qaeda and Islamic State forces, who, this is exactly what they've been saying all along, is that Bush is right.
You're either with us or you're with them.
Can't be this...
In fact, ISIS calls it the gray zone, what we call civilization, where people tolerate and each other and get along.
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
I think that that's definitely the motivation.
And there's a couple new academic papers that have come out that have taken a look at the assimilation of Muslims in the United States in different places, based on the discrimination or the perceived threat from the government in terms of civil liberties.
And what you see is that in places where they're sort of the least molested, you have greater female participation in the labor market, more education, more people working, more people out of the home, more people out of their communities, and basically better assimilating in places where it's a more open society, which is exactly what we would expect.
And that type of assimilation, free flow of ideas and people moving around, a cosmopolitan civilization, that does decrease the risk of terrorism.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
It's the same thing as, you know, it's a different argument or, you know, different topic, but same thing basically as immigration of Hispanics from Latin America, Mexico and Central and South America, where, you know, oh, no, they're going to change our culture.
Well, maybe if we treat them like individuals, they'll appreciate the individualism in our society and they'll want to preserve that.
The same thing we want to preserve.
How about that?
But instead, we treat them like they're all a collective and have no minds or ideas or planned behaviors of their own.
And why?
What would they have about America that we're trying to preserve that they would want to identify with at that point?
What's remarkable, though, is even despite those attitudes and despite a large number of Hispanics being unlawful or illegal immigrants from Central and South America, they and their kids are assimilating at an incredible rate, a little bit better or similar to the way that Italian-Americans assimilated about a hundred years ago, so a similar trend, you know, learning English, identifying as Americans, becoming educated, climbing up those income ladders.
It's going fantastically well, much better than anybody ever anticipated, because the strength of those ideas, those notions, the opportunity, the economic opportunity from being here is so powerful that it even overwhelms a lot of these nasty people saying mean things about them.
It makes them still want to be American.
That's remarkable.
That's the remarkable thing to me.
Yeah, that's a great point.
And well, let me challenge you a little bit.
I presume you have some numbers to back up what you're claiming there.
Yeah.
So there's a remarkable new report by the National Academy of Sciences, where they took a look at all of the papers written about assimilation in the last 10 or 15 years, and they combined them and did their own work, and it takes a look at 17 different features of assimilation.
So everything from self-identifying as an American by generation, religiosity, income, education, where you move and live in the United States, and all that, and it shows it's fairly remarkable, especially when you do it right, remarkable rates of assimilation.
Because one of the problems is, assimilation can take generations, so one of the problems is you have second or third or fourth generation descendants of Hispanic immigrants, but many of them don't even self-identify as Hispanic because they're still assimilated.
So when you take account of those people and try to find who those people are and measure their success in the United States, it's a remarkable pace of assimilation.
Especially by the third generation, that is the grandkids of the immigrants themselves, they are indistinguishable from other Americans.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
They think of Hispanic as a nationality rather than a race, which is really more accurate anyway, right?
And so they identify American as a race, too, in that sense, or confuse those notions in that sense.
Well, the funny thing is, Hispanic is actually invented, that word and identification was invented by the U.S. government in the 60s to have sort of a census category to try to track these people from Central and South America as sort of one big block of people.
So we've seen the first generation people, of course, who come here mostly identify as the country where they come from, like Mexico or Honduras or whatever, and then in the second generation, there's sort of more of a pan-Hispanic, pan-Latino sort of identity, with Americans starting to creep in as sort of a significant self-identifier.
And then by the third generation, it's basically split between Hispanic and American, and by the fourth, it's just American dominates, totally dominates in terms of that.
And that's not really odd, by the third generation, lots of Americans who have been here forever identify as Irish or other identifiers in terms of, you know, who they are as Americans.
Like, it doesn't...
Just because you identify as like Irish or Catholic or Muslim or some other sort of identifier prior to saying you're an American doesn't mean you're less of an American.
There's been a lot of research on that, saying that people who say that they're Hispanic-American are less patriotic than other Americans, and they're just as likely to say on surveys, you know, America's the best country in the world and stuff like that.
Right.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, and that's an important point to make.
It's not like you're saying, so that's why we should let them come here.
It's just, look, even all your worst fears are debunked.
It's really okay.
You know, whether they really were or not, they still got a right to go where they want and do what they want, which is a separate question, but...
Absolutely.
Like, there's this great quote by Adam Smith after the British lost the Battle of Yorktown in 1781.
This student came up to him and said, oh, that's it, the British Empire is ruined, England is ruined.
And Smith's response was, there's a lot of ruin in a nation.
And so the institution, like, it's really hard to ruin what's here, because so much of it is still built up over centuries through our culture and everything else.
It takes more than a couple of defeats or more than a few generations of bad government policy to destroy that, and our ability to assimilate these people to make our civilization welcoming just on the social and individual level is so great that it overwhelms all these bad policies.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
And hey, listen up, too, everybody, I want to recommend to you this article at McClatchy D.C. where they quote Alex in here, too.
The article is, Refugees Settle Quickly and Grow the Economy.
They don't all come here and get on welfare.
They come here and open up ethnic restaurants so that we have tasty food to eat instead of just the same old hamburgers.
So yeah, imagine that freedom working out.
It's just amazing.
But it tends to.
Listen, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time again on the show, Alex.
It's really my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
All right, y'all.
That is Alex Narasta.
He is at the Cato Institute.
The one at Cato is called Syrian Refugees Don't Pose a Serious Security Threat.
And he shows his work there with mathematical, numerical proofs.
And then also this great piece again at McClatchy is Refugees Settle Quickly and Grow the Economy.
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