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All right, introducing Alex Narasta, I hope I said that right, from the Cato Institute.
Welcome back to the show, Alex.
How are you doing?
Doing fine.
How are you doing?
I'm doing pretty good.
Did I screw up your name very badly?
No, it was great, actually.
Really impressed.
Well, I did have you on the show one time before, so I know I butchered it that time.
But anyway, all right, good.
Hey, listen, so you're all over the media and doing good work this week, adding a little bit of context to all the conversation about Donald Trump's executive order, the immigration and refugee ban, and this, that, and the other thing, how it all breaks down.
And the piece at Cato, or at least the one, there may be more, but the one that's getting all the attention here is called Guide to Trump's Executive Order to Limit Migration for National Security Reasons.
That's at the Cato Institute, cato.org slash blog, the Cato at Liberty blog.
Now, I don't know, go ahead and refer to your other footnotes if you have bigger and better studies you want us to look at here.
But in this blog entry, what you do is you break down the different parts of the executive order and put them in context.
So I guess I would ask you to do the same thing.
Should we start with the green card aspect?
Or what do you think?
I'll start with the national security, just off the bat, sort of the big picture numbers.
When you take a look, there are seven countries on Donald Trump's, on the list of the executive order, they are, that would have a ban on sending migrants or any kind of visa issuance to these countries for their foreign nationals to come to the U.S. These countries are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
And the reason that he gives, I mean, in the executive order, is specifically, quote, to protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States, unquote.
What's remarkable is when you take a look at terrorism on U.S. soil committed by foreign nationals from 1975 to the end of 2015, there have been zero murders committed in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil by foreign nationals from this country, from any of these countries.
Zero deaths in terrorist attacks.
There have been 17 convictions of folks planning a terrorist attack or trying to commit a terrorist attack or carrying one out that was unsuccessful on U.S. soil from these countries, but they have managed to kill a grand total of zero people on U.S. soil.
All right.
Now, let me ask you, because I've heard people saying this kind of thing all week, but it sort of sounds like maybe you're fighting the last war, General, because after all, the countries that you just named, at least almost all of them, are countries that George Bush and Barack Obama have been bombing, where they're very likely to create new enemies.
So even if we haven't had somebody from Libya attack us yet, it seems more likely that we would have an attack from one of them than somebody in, say, Egypt now, or I don't know.
I'm just making things up, but...
Yeah, no, that's a good point, but I want to remind you that the U.S. bombed Iraq, first off, went to war with Iraq in 1990-91.
That's a long time ago.
We still haven't seen any over the last 27 years since then.
Ronald Reagan bombed Libya in the 1980s, and Libya has been a big exporter of terrorism around the world and other places, but not into U.S. soil.
U.S. forces were involved in Somalia in the early 1990s.
We haven't had that.
U.S. forces bombed Sudan in the mid-1990s during the Clinton administration.
Well, let me stop you at Somalia for a minute here, because George Bush hired the Ethiopians to invade Somalia in 2006.
The CIA and the special forces have been working with the quote-unquote government in Mogadishu there, and with African Union forces, the Ethiopians, the Kenyans, Burundians, and whoever else, and especially in the Obama years, they've waged drone wars there.
For years on this show, I was warning that eventually we're going to have a Somali-American is going to realize that, because there have been actually I don't know, I think more than a dozen, Alex, who have gone to Somalia to join al-Shabaab to fight on their side, and it doesn't seem like it takes a genius to figure out that they could just stay here and do something here, fighting on al-Shabaab's behalf on this side of the line.
In fact, we saw a Somali-American go nuts with a butcher knife, and luckily, I guess, didn't kill anyone because he was shot to death, thankfully, before he was able to kill anybody, but he sure tried to, and that seemed to me like it was a long time coming, not that anybody deserved it, but just this is what happens, and we have been, you know, our government has been killing people in Somalia for now 11 years.
Yeah, and I think that that's a fair point.
It could be that these facts and statistics based on the last 41 years are an understatement based on what could happen going forward, but let's say that the future flow, the future number of Americans killed by refugees, let's say, because that's one of the major focuses of this executive order, there have been three Americans killed in refugee terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 1975.
That translates to a yearly chance of an American being killed of one in 3.64 billion per year.
Let's say that going forward, because of what you described of America being involved in these other countries, that it prompts more terrorism from foreign nationals from these countries on U.S. soil.
Let's say that there are 100 times as deadly per terrorist on U.S. soil than they were in the previous.
Well, that means that your annual chance goes up to one in 36.4 million per year chance of dying.
Now, there's a lot of assumptions baked into that, and you can quibble with each one of those, but to be 100 times more deadly than the past going forward only increases your chance of dying from one in 3.64 billion to one in 36.4 million per year.
That's still a very small risk that we're talking about here.
Sure.
Well, and of course, if Harry Brown was here, he'd be saying, just stop bombing the Somalis, and then you can quit worrying about it.
Well, I think that we should do that policy regardless of the potential terrorism benefits on U.S. soil.
All right.
Now, so somebody like Steve Bannon, I think, could understand this.
I'm sorry, this goes a little bit outside the purview of your article, but we'll get back to your work here in a second, but it's all the same important topic.
I don't think Trump has the insight to even be able to think about this in any kind of real terms.
Somebody like Bannon, I think, could, but probably would just make the wrong decision or just refuse to really see it this way.
But they're really doing Osama's work here.
And what especially the Islamic State has been saying the last couple of years is, see fellow Muslims, the Westerners, the Christians and the Jews, they hate us, they will always hate us, they will always hate all of us.
We have no place in the West.
And, you know, in other words, pushing for that clash of civilizations that they need because war is the health of the state, the Islamic State in this case.
And so instead of arguing that, oh, yeah, well, we believe in the Enlightenment and freedom of religion and all of these kinds of things and kind of highlighting the fact that that's just not true, that Muslims absolutely have a place in our society, plenty of places in our society, and they're perfectly welcome here.
Instead, this new policy specifically, along with, you know, the last 16 years of bombings in the Muslim world, but this policy really plays into the hands of those on the other side, who would say that, you know, what we need to do is eliminate this, what they call this gray zone, in other words, civilization where people can get along so that we can have a better and, you know, worse war going forward.
I've heard that argument made many times.
It's above my pay grade in terms of just all of the national security implications of being involved in these foreign countries around the world and this silly idea of a clash of civilizations.
I mean, this is a clash of civilizations, the most peaceful clash in human history, not to diminish the death toll on either side or the tragedy of each individual death and unnecessary war or terrorism, but if this is a clash of civilizations, this is a pretty small death toll, all things considering, given the previous, you know, fighting, for instance, in the Islamic conquest of the Middle East in the 600s and 700s, you know, huge death tolls, death toll in the Crusades, the death toll in the European conquest of the Americas or in the subjugation of different parts of Africa or the war, the Japanese killing Chinese and Koreans and Asians all over Asia, during World War II.
I mean, this is a fairly, I mean, in context of history and of what could happen from a clash of civilizations or what could have happened in the clash between the Soviet Union and the United States back during the Cold War, I think we should count our lucky stars that this is a fairly small, fairly undeadly one and that we're talking about risks that are super small.
We're talking about risks about one in 3.64 billion or one in 3.6 million.
We're talking about chances of that killing people, not in terms of like civilizations or being wiped out.
Right.
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You know, I always like to point out there's plenty of sources for this kind of thing, but there's a great book called Who Really Speaks for Islam that was put out by the Gallup Poll, and they went and did real on-the-ground surveys in all the Muslim countries from Morocco to the Philippines, other than Iraq, maybe, because it was right in 2006 or something like that.
But they really did on-the-ground surveys all over the place, and everywhere people went, everywhere they went, people said they admired America and they admired our values and religious liberty and all these things.
It was just the foreign policy that they hated so much.
So they didn't see themselves in a clash of civilizations with the middle part of North America at all.
They sort of felt like the victim of one, but not compelled on their own side.
And what's even more remarkable, if you look at the Gallup Polls, but also the polls done by Pew and done by other organizations of American Muslims and Muslims overseas, the opinions on things like, you know, violence, religious violence, you know, socially liberal values that we think are important, religious tolerance, you know, things like gender equality, things like this, Muslims in the United States are very close to Americans in their opinion, while overseas they're very different.
So what's happening is probably a combination of a lot of things, but those who want to come to the United States are fairly Western-minded in a lot of these ideas to begin with, and two, when they get here, they become even more open-minded and open to our way of life.
On average, they assimilate fairly well and adopt our values pretty well, because our values are worthy of being adopted.
They appeal to a lot of people.
And so that is what's remarkable, because you hear people say, like, oh, if you poll people in Pakistan, you know, some large percentage of them, very large percentage will say that apostate, somebody who was born Muslim but gives it up, should be executed, as it says under a lot of different codes in Islamic law.
But when you poll the people here in the United States like that, it's like a fraction, it's a small, small fraction, small, small percentage in the low single digits of people who believe something like that.
So it's not like a random grab bag of foreign Muslims are the ones who are dropped into the United States by immigration.
Those people overseas who self-select to come over here are the ones who are more likely to have the values that we have and adopt those values over time.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, meaning that if we are in a larger conflict or war of civilizations here, then that's the best way to fight it is invite them to all come here to go to college and then go home.
That's true.
My colleague David Beer has written a little bit about that as well.
You know, I do believe that America is an exceptional country and our values are pretty important, at least how they were originally conceived of.
And I think one of the best ways to spread that around the world is not through conquest or anything like that or through military action, but through trade, peaceful exchange, and through immigration.
Yeah, there you go.
And turn them all into a bunch of PC social justice warriors.
We bring them to college here now.
I don't know, maybe teach them engineering.
That would have a cost, but I would prefer PC social justice warriors over a bunch of people who believe it's okay to kill apostates.
Yeah, fair enough.
You know what?
Political correctness was a reaction to something that was even worse back when it came about.
All right.
So yeah, now let's get back to your numbers here.
And well, let's get back to this executive order.
I think a major point that you make in this article here, Alex, is that it's based quite apparently on the work of Jeff Sessions, Senator Jeff Sessions, who's too been confirmed to be the Attorney General apparently, and that he's just wrong.
Yeah, Jeff Sessions takes a look at basically all the terrorism, quote, terrorism-related convictions, unquote, since 9-11 in the United States.
And he puts out this list going like, hey, look at how dangerous terrorism is.
But when you dig down into these lists and you see what these people were actually convicted of in these, quote, terrorism-related offenses, unquote, it turns out that of those, 241 of those 580, they were not even convicted for a terrorism offense.
They were convicted for something else.
So my favorite example of this are the Abu Ali brothers' convictions.
What happened was the FBI got a tip that these guys are trying to buy a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in North Carolina, which, you know, is pretty serious.
So they investigated that.
They found zero evidence of anything like that, any kind of, like, major weaponry or anything like that being bought, any kind of planning of terrorist operations, none of that.
What they did find, however, is that these three brothers had received a few truckloads of stolen cereal, stolen cereal, and they were selling that illegally.
Not Frosted Flakes.
Yeah, it was like Frosted Flakes or Corn Flakes or something.
And they were selling this stuff illegally.
So they convicted them, you know, rightfully of receiving stolen goods and selling and making a profit.
That's a crime.
It should be a crime.
But it's counted as a terrorism-related offense.
And Jeff Sessions breaking down of these, and that accounts for 42 percent, 42 percent of the names and convictions that he listed.
And now of the others, I don't suppose that you broke down the difference between those who actually really were up to no good versus those who were just the slowest kid down at the Islamic bookstore that got entrapped by the FBI informant into saying he loved Osama into a tape recorder or something.
Yeah, it's hard.
It's hard to sort of sort that out.
A lot of these were definitely FBI things like that.
But not every FBI thing is an inappropriate one, either.
No doubt some of those people are dangerous.
It's a good thing that they're convicted.
But as far as I could tell, only 40 out of those 580 folks on Jeff Sessions' list were planning or actually carried out a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
The rest, you know, they wanted to join al-Shabaab overseas.
They wanted to send money overseas.
They wanted to plan an attack in another country, but they weren't planning an attack on U.S. soil.
So this is framed as sort of a defense of the homeland.
And 40 out of 580, I think you can make that case.
That's about 6.8 percent of them.
But in terms of the other 93.2 percent, you can't really make that claim.
You can't really make that case.
And it's important to realize terrorism is a threat to the United States, but it's a fairly small threat.
And it's a fairly manageable one, given all these facts.
Yeah.
Well, except when a really big one gets through and then we have another real problem again.
We do.
We do.
But the one thing we need to recognize is, you know, when we think of terrorism, we think of 9-11, obviously.
I mean, that is the terrorist attack that will define the future and basically all discussions of terrorism, probably for future history.
The thing to realize, though, is that 9-11 was the deadliest terrorist attack in world history by an order of magnitude.
It was 10 times as great as the next deadliest terrorist attack.
It is an extreme outlier, an extremely unlikely event.
And if you read the 9-11 commission report, you read all these documents that put it together.
I mean, it's like, from a terrorist perspective, it's like lucky, lucky, you know, a chain of lucky events.
And then from the government perspective of the law enforcement and anti-terrorism operations, it's like stupidity, stupidity, stupidity, incompetence, incompetence, incompetence.
So it's like, you know, the gang that couldn't shoot straight versus the Keystone Cops.
And, you know, what happened is the gang that couldn't shoot straight got super lucky.
And as a result, you have this enormous terrorist attack as a result, which has been just unparalleled throughout world history.
In fact, if you take a look at all the deaths caused by immigrant terrorists on U.S. soil from 1975 to the end of 2015, 98.6 percent of them occurred on 9-11.
98.6 percent.
Yeah.
Well, maybe even look at Orlando, where the cops, and this is in their own after action reports and whatever now that the press kind of went away, the cops basically let him stay in there.
They had cops inside who were ready to confront Omar Mateen, the shooter, and try to kill him.
And they were ordered to withdraw.
And the cops just sat around outside for three hours while people were bleeding out in there and that kind of thing.
So that was, even other cops said, hey, this was, they completely botched that operation on the level of Columbine.
Yeah.
I mean, that was another way in which the cops sort of botched it because they let those kids have free reign in Columbine for hours before they really went in.
One of the, one of the, one of the interests me about this Omar Mateen guy in Orlando, though, is that he was born in the United States.
His parents were immigrants, but he himself was born in the United States.
So I'll hear from people like Rich Lowry at National Review will say like, oh, well, you got to count the kids of immigrants as part of the immigration policy.
And I'll say, okay, sure.
What about counting the grandkids or the great grandkids or the great, great grandkids of immigrants?
Like you could draw a line somewhere between what terrorism is caused by immigrants and what terrorism is not caused by immigrants.
And if you're going to say, well, we should count the descendants of immigrants, then like every terrorist attack in the United States is caused by immigrants because we're all like the descendants of immigrants.
So I don't, I don't see the point of that like kind of reasoning.
Now I have those lists and names and numbers in my data for a point of comparison, but that's a sort of way of gaming the numbers and gaming the system to get an outcome that looks particularly anti-immigrant.
All right now, so the art of the deal, right?
This is the Donald Trumpian dialectic.
He always has a real hard sell at first and then backs off a little bit, right?
So they went for the green cards and then they went, oh no, we're going to back off of the green card thing.
But that means that they're going to get all the rest of it, right?
Likely, likely.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is like when the executive order was issued, it says in there that it's temporary, a temporary ban on these countries, a permanent ban on Syrians in the refugee program.
But it's a temporary ban in these countries, but it says explicitly in the order, like we have the option to extend this and make it permanent for this, for these countries and to also expand it to other countries on this list.
So I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
We're going to see more countries banned on the banned list and through future executive orders.
And we're going to see an extension of the bans for a lot of these countries.
All right.
Now there's a couple other interesting things here I want to talk with you about.
Terrorism related organizations.
Was that from the Sessions memo?
Or that's from the executive order itself.
But you're saying that you looked in the law and you can't find that designation.
This is sort of a brand new, you know, just regular term in English, not a term of legality at all.
Yeah, it seems exactly like, well, what does that even mean?
It's sort of like, you know, and the thing is like, terror-related convictions, that's the term that I said earlier that Jeff Sessions sort of used to obscure the facts with his terrorism report.
That's not in the law either.
So it seems like, you know, terrorism-related organizations, terrorism-related convictions, you're going to hear these terms used a lot more and they have no real definition.
And that's why you're going to hear them a lot more.
Sort of like the surge worked.
Nevermind the benchmarks that measured the surge and whether it was working.
Let's just repeat the slogan a bunch of times.
Yeah.
And then it's going to have this whole meaning and it'll mean whatever the people who are saying it wanted to mean to justify whatever policy they wanted to justify.
So that's pretty dangerous, I think, in terms of government creep and overreach in the national security sphere is that you're going to have, you know, like, I mean, what is a terrorist-related organization?
Could it be an organization where like one of the members in it is also the member of a real terrorist organization, but because he's in two different ones and one of them is terrorism and one is not a terrorist organization, that other one is like terrorism-related now?
I mean, it could be anything.
I mean, I work with a bunch of lawyers here at Cato and I'm sure they could find lots of creative justifications if they wanted to on behalf of the government to justify whatever definition they wanted to use for enforcement in the future.
Yeah.
And that's terrifying.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and this next one is terrifying, too.
This is just smacks of right-wing collectivism in a way that really bothers me.
You got to prove now that you are to be a contributing member of society in order to what?
To get a visa?
To get a green card?
To get citizenship now?
Or for what is this?
Yeah, to get a visa to come to the United States.
But seeing it like in the work here...
So wait, even if they just want to come to Disney World, they're supposed to do that?
So it's unclear in the executive order.
It's unclear what that means.
But I'm going to assume it means like to get, you know, or to live here permanently, like on a green card.
What's interesting is that's actually redundant.
Like our terrible immigration law already basically has...
You can't come to the U.S. legally unless the government says you can and you fit into a narrow category that they already make for a visa.
That's unfortunately the way the law is right now.
So you already have to prove you're going to be a contributing member.
You already have to prove you're not going to be like, or provide evidence you're not going to be like a terrorist or a criminal and that you have a job and you're not going to use welfare and all this other stuff.
So this is just at best redundant.
At worst, it's going to make these requirements even more onerous and more restrictive of liberty.
But we don't really know what the criteria could be.
In other words, you're saying right now you have to prove that you're not a bad person and that at least, you know, as you're saying, you can get work or I guess you have family who have work and they can take care of you at least, like if we're talking about somebody's grandparents, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But now you're going to have to prove the positive that, well, what I'm going to do in order to serve the economy is going to be, you know, X, Y, Z. I plan on getting work in this or that industry or something.
You're going to have to come up with more to prove the something.
Maybe or maybe what it'll do is give government customs agents more power to selectively and capriciously and arbitrarily deny people based on what they think the national interest is.
So it just opens up the way to more sort of arbitrary government, I think.
And we saw that with the executive orders when they were put in place this weekend.
I went to a protest at Dulles airport to see what was going on.
And, you know, customs agents had no idea what they were doing because these executive orders were so arbitrary and random and poorly defined.
They were detaining green card holders.
They were detaining people who already had visas who have gone through all these checks just because they were from these countries because nobody knew what was going on.
Now, if that's like a permanent situation, then that's going to cause mass confusion and basically arbitrary government.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there was a report out of Detroit of an Iraqi who had come here in the 1990s, 20 years ago with his family.
He had citizenship.
The rest of his family had green cards.
He figured it was cool because they're with him and he's been here for 20 years.
They've been here for 20 years, but they went home to Iraq to visit.
And then when they tried to come back, his family wasn't allowed on the plane, or at least his mother wasn't allowed on the plane, his elderly mother.
And then she died the next day.
Whereas, you know, in other words, they needed to come back here for medical treatment.
And in Iraq, it wasn't available.
Yeah.
And this guy had volunteered to work with American forces in Iraq as a translator.
He was actually wounded in combat.
He was shot while he was aiding American forces.
Um, so this is a guy who's, well, it's not really a question, right?
I mean, he sort of made a lot of sacrifices, showed his loyalty to the government, showed his loyalty to the United States, I think, in ways that most of us have not, uh, and will not do.
Um, yet he was treated this way and his mother died.
So it's likely that this, this ban on immigrants from these countries has already killed more people like this woman, uh, than would have been saved.
Yeah.
And again, you know, not to beat a dead horse, but why not?
America has been bombing Iraq for 25 years.
America destroyed Iraq.
Hell, America backed Saddam's war against Iran for 10 years before that.
Yeah.
So there's a question of why would anyone want to flee Iraq?
Well, geez, I don't know.
Maybe it's the heavy metal poisoning.
Maybe it's all of the rest of his family are dead or there's no way to make any money because the economy has been completely destroyed.
Like under Mao Zedong in China, you know, um, that's why they're fleeing is because our society completely and totally destroyed their society, raised it all the way to the ground for decades on end now.
So yeah, kinda somebody owes him.
I don't know.
Maybe they should let this guy go stay at John McCain's house.
Yeah, maybe.
All right.
Anyway.
Uh, hey, thanks very much for coming on the show.
It's very important work that you're doing.
You're welcome.
Thanks a lot for having me in for giving me an opportunity to chat about it.
All right, y'all.
That is Alex Narasta.
He is at the Cato Institute.
Check this out at Cato dot org slash blog guide to Trump's executive order to limit migration for national security reasons.
Cato dot org slash blog.
And that's the Scott Horton show.
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