Donald Trump’s approach to immigration, the central issue of his campaign, has frequently been thoughtless. But he is right to ask whether America’s immigration policy is promoting American security, and key elements of his immigration-focused speech on Monday afternoon, responding to Sunday’s terrorist attack in Orlando, should be common sense for American policymakers.
Over the past year, 68 people have been killed by Islamic terrorists on American soil. Two of the killers were immigrants, two were the children of immigrants. When Trump says we are “importing radical Islamic terrorism,” he is right. That is a product of security failures and sheer numbers. Every year, the United States admits approximately 100,000 Muslim immigrants (double the number we accepted in 1992) through normal legal channels, including tens of thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. As Trump noted, Muslim immigrants have a tendency to form enclaves that facilitate radicalization — for example, the Somali enclave in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, which is home to dozens of young men and women who have traveled overseas to join the Islamic State, al-Shabaab, and other terrorist outfits.
The large numbers of Middle Eastern immigrants have strained what was already a struggling immigration apparatus. The president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ union, has called America’s immigration system the world’s “visa clearinghouse”; applications are processed with an emphasis on speed, not accuracy or security. Tashfeen Malik, one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino attack, entered the U.S. on a K-1 fiancé visa. Trump is right to note these serious failures.
His prescriptions for these problems, though, are wanting. He continues to rely on some version of his Muslim ban, which in its original formulation was ill considered and unworkable. In this speech, he seemed to present a slightly tempered version, calling for “suspend[ing] immigration . . . from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies.” Regardless, any ban of this scope would be better passed through Congress than enacted by executive authority. Meanwhile, Trump’s tendency to flip-flop on major immigration-policy questions — it’s worth recalling that he was for taking Syrian refugees, before he was against it — is reason to greet his proposals cautiously.
#share#There are, however, intelligent paths we can take to address the problems Trump has recognized. Reducing overall levels of legal immigration, ending the visa lottery, and revising our chain-migration policies would be a good start, as would reconsidering the volume of refugees we accept. We should also apply real scrutiny to potential immigrants’ ideological loyalties. Cold War–era immigrants had to provide assurances of fidelity to the Constitution; there is no reason immigrants today should not have to do the same. None of these policies would end the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, but they would reduce it — and without seeming to vilify a whole group of people.
In conjunction with these changes, it is necessary that the U.S. rebuild its devastated intelligence-gathering capacities. On this point, too, Trump is correct. Our ability to monitor individuals with dubious contacts overseas has been undermined by the Obama administration’s decision to scale down the NSA’s surveillance program. This is especially important given the way political correctness has hamstrung law-enforcement efforts. In both San Bernardino and Orlando, signs of the attackers’ intent were reportedly ignored because of the individuals’ religion.
Trump is right to note the administration’s serious failures on immigration policy, but his prescriptions are wanting.
Trump has exhibited no faintheartedness in this regard. He may go too far, but his willingness to identify the problem — radical Islam — is more than Hillary Clinton will usually do, and while he is often reckless and ill informed, he at least expresses a sense of urgency about the threat of Islamic terror, unlike President Obama, who seems to find Islamic terror an annoyance distracting him from more pressing problems. This is to Trump’s credit.
And so is his ability to grasp a simple, related fact: Most Americans believe — rightly — that American immigration policy should promote American security, American interests, and American principles. This is nothing more than common sense. Likewise, it is common sense that radical Islam is not compatible with American security, interests, or principles. Hillary Clinton, though, seems just as eager to lecture Americans about “Islamophobia” as to acknowledge the dangers of Islamic terror.
All of this said, immigration policy is not the entirety of national-security policy. The threats the U.S. faces are many and diverse, and most of them cannot be solved with a border wall. How will he address Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria? How will he counteract terrorist outfits’ massively successful propaganda? How will he address the growing threat of cyberattacks? To these and other questions he has provided no substantive answers. Immigration is an important issue, but it’s not the only issue.
Still, Trump’s approach to reforming our immigration policy is a corrective to the gauzy sentimentality of the current consensus, and it should be taken up by more-responsible leaders.