We need to understand the limitations of vetting and adjust our immigration policies accordingly.
There’s an old joke about a drunk looking for his keys under a streetlight. A cop joins him in the search and asks if he’s sure this is where he lost them. The drunk says, no, he lost them in the park, “but the light is better here.”
When our leaders assure us that an immigrant has been “vetted,” they mean they checked where the light is better. Sometimes that’s all they can do, but we need to understand the limitations of vetting and adjust our immigration policies accordingly.
Whether it’s last week’s Afghan alleged murderer in D.C. and the tens of thousands of his countrymen who leapt aboard the last planes out of Kabul, or the millions of border jumpers the Biden administration released into the country, vetting is often just a superstition, like knocking on wood or carrying a rabbit’s foot — it might make you feel better, but it’s unlikely to have any effect. Running a foreigner’s name through a U.S. criminal database — which is what “vetting” usually consists of — isn’t going to tell you anything. Even checking international terrorist or criminal databases is unlikely to be of much use.
There are three reasons for this. First, many of the countries that immigrants come from are so backward or chaotic, they have no systems for recording basic information about their citizens. This is the reason for the presence of several countries on President Trump’s June travel ban. The state has essentially ceased to exist in Libya and Yemen and Haiti, and probably never really existed in the first place in Somalia.
These are places where people often don’t even know their own birthdays. A 2009 study found that fully 14 percent of refugees admitted in that year listed January 1 as their date of birth — because they didn’t know the real date, and there were no records to check.
What are our vetters supposed to do — ask about someone’s background at the DMV in Mogadishu or the Social Security office in Benghazi? A U.N. report on Afghanistan last year put the issue in understated terms: “The absence of civil documentation continues to be prevalent.” No kidding.
Second, there are countries where records exist and might be reasonably reliable but which have governments hostile to us and unwilling to cooperate with our efforts at vetting. The Biden administration unlawfully released into the country hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, assuring us that they had been subject to “rigorous vetting.” Really? Did the Maduro regime help us identify the criminals and gang members? Obviously not.
How about Cuba or Iran? Do they have any interest in cooperating with us in identifying potential bad actors from their countries? Quite the opposite: Fidel Castro in the 1980 Mariel boatlift salted the flow of people into Florida with spies, mental patients, and criminals (the backstory of the Al Pacino character in Scarface). In fact, hostile regimes regularly make use of weapons of mass migration, so helping us identify problems among potential immigrants would be like telling your enemy when and where to expect your next drone attack.
And finally, our whole concept of vetting is too narrow. Trying to weed out potential criminals and terrorists is fine as far as it goes. In fact, the Center for Immigration Studies maintains a database of national-security vetting failures, listing dozens of instances of terrorists, spies, war criminals, et al., who could have been kept out using existing tools.
But not being a rapist or jihadist sets a pretty low bar for future Americans. The requirement that immigrants be able to support themselves (the “public charge” concept) sets the bar a little higher but is still too limited — and seldom enforced, in any case.
We need to get out from under the streetlight and do what might be called “cultural vetting.” After all, we’re doing background checks on people who want to live among us, who will become our co-workers and fellow citizens and whose children will go to school with our children. Even if we had the magic ability to screen out all the rapists and jihadists and welfare cheats, what about the law-abiding and self-sufficient person from, say, Afghanistan who thinks it’s fine to rape little boys? Or who supports jihad suicide attacks, even though he’d never participate himself? Or is fine with other people throwing gays off rooftops or killing Jews or apostates? Things like this don’t happen in a vacuum; they grow out of a cultural context we should aggressively and unapologetically keep out of our country.
The difficulty in assessing someone’s inner beliefs is real — people will be coached by immigration lawyers and activists to give the preferred answers. There are ways around that: springing a rotating set of questions on applicants during in-person interviews, for instance. But even the simple fact of asking the questions would serve an important purpose, setting down markers of unacceptable — dare I say “un-American” — behavior.
None of this means we shouldn’t try to improve the vetting we do now. Sometimes the keys really are under the streetlight. The recent DHS announcement in the wake of the Afghan terror attack in Washington to tighten vetting for people from 19 high-risk countries is all to the good. Likewise, consistent background checks can help ferret out the pervasive fraud in the H-1B and foreign student programs and marriage visas, among other parts of the immigration system.
But ultimately, prudence suggests that we just need to reduce immigration. If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, the first step should be to get a smaller haystack. President Trump’s announcement that he will “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” is unlikely to be as sweeping as that suggests — will we stop admitting people from India and China and Mexico? Probably not. Instead, we need a more moderate level of immigration permanently and from all countries. That will enable us to do a better job at weeding out bad apples with the limited vetting tools at our disposal, and failures — which are inevitable — will be fewer in number.