That’s the problem, no specific suggestions. The Trump administration won’t have any either. I feel confident they will fail to show a tangible improvement to the system because their moratorium is being handled so incredibly poorly and the focus is on details that are not relevant to predicting somebody is potentially a mass killer.
There are far more native-born mass killers as there are immigrant mass killers. Their motivations range from adopting an extremist version of Islam to being white nationalists to being some kid with a rifle and the desire to see how many children he could kill in a school. You can’t predict that this tiny percentage of immigrants who came as refugees or spouses is going to attempt a mass killing by knowing they are immigrants and Muslim. With this, you have to make a cost-benefit analysis which will obviously favor continued immigration.
The risk is there and any analysis of the successes in thwarting terrorist attacks as well as some of the failures will show that keeping in good contact with the various Muslim communities throughout the country is the best first step. The Trump administration just damaged our best asset with this action that is easily interpretable as mere bigotry.
On the other hand, the Iraqis were known enemy combatants and our government almost completely dropped the ball. They addressed the issue 8 years ago. I have my doubts improvements will be made. I ould love to hear about them if they exist but I am pretty sure I won’t because the cynicism in this executive order is obvious.
Worse, it’s not the same people, it’s the n00b morons who came up with this Muslim ban.
I’m not surprised that you and a lot of Democrats are confident that they won’t have any specific suggestions or show any tangible benefits. There’s quite a few of your fellow citizens that don’t share your view though. Personally, I’m willing to give them a few months to study the issue and hear what they come up with. If the end result is something that I feel is inconsistent with American values, or bigoted, I’ll join with you and your fellow Democrats, arm in arm, in opposing it. 'Til then, I’ll keep my powder dry.
Right. They’re going to come up with a method that hasn’t been tried for over 15 years now, Republican, Democrat, and otherwise, that’s magically going to identify specific terrorists like the ones you named? Come on, you can’t seriously believe that. Unless ‘extreme vetting’ includes long periods of waterboarding, but then you’d have the majority of subjects admitting to it just to end the torture. (I put nothing past the Trump administration as far as torture is concerned, btw.)
I used to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Their actually existing has about as much chance of happening as the Trumpos (and particularly them) picking the one or two out of thousands. Maybe they’ll develop a new ultraviolet ‘terrorist light’ that will show them with unerring accuracy?
When pigs fly, unicorns exist, and Trump has been out of office for a millennium.
Just to clarify: I don’t expect whatever system Trump and company devise to be perfect either. The standard ought to be: is it better than what we have today?
The standard ought to be elected officials who make evidence-based decisions based on reasoned analysis and expert advice.
Would you tolerate a loudmouth dickbag who claimed there was a massive problem with CCW permit holders, based on nothing more than a few anecdotes of bad apples, and promised to shut down issuance of CCW permits until we could “figure out what the hell is going on?” Shit no. I wouldn’t either! Because as much as I think CCW permits are silly, the data shows that CCW permit holders aren’t a massive problem. I would say, “Hey dickbag, you’re making knee-jerk decisions that are inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of people, and preventing at-risk citizens from protecting themselves, based on fear and ignorance! Why don’t you read some studies and defer to experts!”
Would the dickbag later be justified if he came up with a CCW permit system that was slightly better? No, blind squirrels finding nuts shouldn’t be the standard.
‘Better’ is a thorny term. Is it going to trample on the conception of America? And, also importantly, the perception of America?
Say, for instance, discriminatorily detaining hundreds if not thousands of travellers on no evidence other than that they happened to have been born in a specific set of overwhelmingly Muslim countries? Noncitizens have rights too, according to both Constitutional and international law.
Trump couldn’t find his ass with both hands and he’s going to improve on the current system? Maybe you should take a cue from his friend Vince McMahon’s theme song.
It’s probably one factor in my opinion, but I could give a lengthy list of things I find unjust even though they don’t directly impact me, so it’s not a prohibitive one.
What definition of American values includes keeping American citizens from seeing their families and allowing people to have the goals they’ve worked hard for put on hold for an indefinite amount of time all in the name of something kind of vague?
I mean you are the strongest supporter of the 7-countries-of-mostly-Muslims-ban in this thread and you don’t know what’s specifically lacking in the vetting process nor do you have any idea the proposals to fix these deficiencies.
Yes, you’ve linked to examples of problems with the various processes in place, but your links show they were handled by the Obama administration in a targeted manner and without this bizarre blanket ban that has hurt thousands of people.
There is a lot of denial in this thread. I appreciate the sentiment but let’s face facts:
The terrorists won a huge battle of the mind. Half of all Americans (among others) now associate muslims with terrorists, which is exactly what they wanted. Us vs them.
This poll only confirms all the anecdotal evidence I’ve encountered since 9/11. A depressing number of americans think all muslim/arab countries are full of Isis or in the midst of civil war and are too dangerous to visit. No distinction between Morocco and Syria, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Yemen and Jordan.
I’m not sure what can be done to remedy this because it is quite depressing
Any such evaluation needs to take into account the policy’s total impact on terrorist violence within the US, not just Islamist-extremist attacks committed by recent immigrants.
Most domestic terror attacks in the US are committed by native-born white non-Muslim right-wing extremists. Several of Islamist-extremist terrorists who committed attacks on US soil were also native-born US citizens, and others were long-term residents. So we know that overall, we have more to worry about from the people (both Muslim and non-Muslim) already here than we do from carefully-screened immigrants.
So we need to make sure—or rather, the Administration does, since they’re the ones calling the shots, although I have little faith in their ability and/or will to assess the threats intelligently—that whatever new policy is adopted is one that will reduce the net threat from all terrorism, not just from newly-arrived Islamist-extremist terrorists.
Preventing, say, three would-be jihadists from entering the country is no bargain if it entails overlooking, say, thirty native-born terrorists of whatever ideological stripe.
I can see how the Administration’s own narrow interests are best served by focusing exclusively on Islamist-extremist terrorism, since to a large swathe of Trump supporters, only attacks by Muslims on non-Muslim white people really count as terrorism. Attacks by white non-Muslim terrorists are downplayed as incidents of isolated lunacy, and the deaths of Muslims at the hands of Islamophobic fanatics hardly count as murders at all in their perspective.
But the rest of us need to hold anti-terrorism efforts to a higher and fairer standard. It’s not enough just to ask at the end of 90 days (or 120, or whatever it turns out to be) whether we’ve got a system that’s better than it used to be at keeping out foreign jihadists. We need to ask whether we’ve got a system that’s better at reducing terrorism overall.
“Supporter” may be too strong a word for my feelings on the matter. I’m largely indifferent. If Trump had not put this moratorium in place while they tried to rework their vetting process, I wouldn’t have minded or complained. On the flip side, I’m not going to get my panties in a twist over some inconvenience for a few hundred / thousand people. Given my largely-indifferent feelings on the matter, I’m perfectly willing to wait and see what they come up with. It’s not like they’ve asked me for suggestions on the matter, so I don’t see how it would be an effective use of my time to try to dig into the details of it and devise my own solution, which would almost certainly be ignored by everyone who matters.
My original goal on the topic (it was actually a different thread) was to correct the ignorance that no refugee had ever committed a terrorist attack in the US, which - with some minor variations - seemed to be the starting point for the knowledge of some Dopers on the subject.
Didn’t Obama freeze out all Iraqi refugees for 6 months in 2011 (in response to the aforementioned Bowling Green plot)?
Sure, I largely agree with your post, but a couple of points:
This particular review is specifically focused on the immigration vetting system. I don’t see how changing any of the rules related to it would affect our rate of domestic terrorism one way or the other. There’s a whole other government agency (the FBI) charged with preventing domestic terrorists. They shouldn’t be neglected or curtailed in those efforts by Trump, for sure, but I assume their work will largely carry on unhindered, regardless of what happens with immigration.
Your post stated “Most domestic terror attacks in the US are committed by native-born white non-Muslim right-wing extremists.” I haven’t actually checked the #'s of incidents for each group, so you may be accurate, but I felt it worth mentioning here that left-wing terrorism (Weather Underground, environmentalists, animal rights activists, etc) has a fairly long and rich history in this country too.
I’d hope that any evaluation that anyone does on the effects of the proposed changes, whatever they end up being, is holistic. Even moreso than your “total impact on terrorism” view. I’d consider other factors beyond how it might affect our rate of terrorism. Does it violate the Constitution? Does it harm our standing in the world community? If so, by how much? Does it do something inhumane to people (someone mentioned water-boarding every immigrant, for an extreme example)? Does it harm our interests in some other way (e.g. economic)? If so, by how much? etc.
And a handful of intelligence agencies, NSA and CIA primarily, TSA not so much, DHS theoretically too but I have no info on their involvement.
…
A couple of other questions: does it violate international law? (It’d be an interesting case of justice turning on Trump if the US was slapped with sanctions…)
I was the one who mentioned waterboarding, though Trump would have to have his own brownshirts do it because the intel agencies have refused. That was more of a hypothetical, although, as I said, I put nothing past Trump on that score. But it begs the question, what exactly is ‘extreme vetting’ other than linguistic pandering to his base? KGB-style interrogations? (Got your bright lights and stereo systems ready?) A decade-long background check? Will it basically make it so difficult to get a visa that it effectively shuts down immigration except for FotD (Friends of the Donald)?
The ban is practically guaranteed to hit us economically. Nations aren’t going to sit by and let Trump ride roughshod over their interests. The US isn’t so much of the markets that it’s necessary to do business with us. There’s plenty of international banking done in London, Geneva, and Riyadh, for instance, all of which, I’m certain, would welcome more business. And then there’s a plethora of indirect effects…job losses, exacerbated trade imbalances, depressed stock markets, inflation, continued globalization without even the slightest care about threatened tariffs (since only the consumer is hurt). This isn’t alarmism. It’s where we’re headed if Il Douche continues on this path. How much is likely dependent on how much of a hardass he tries to be, which pretty much means we’re screwed.
Also, how many intelligence assets is he going to chase away who now feel the US doesn’t have their backs, illustrated in high relief by the Iraqi translators hit by the ban? With Iran ready and even more willing to step into the vacuum.
And that’s just a sampling. I can’t stress enough just how incredibly stupid and ignorant this whole thing is. In the name of (theoretically) ‘tightening up’ the immigration system but that in practical terms is nothing but a soundbite for his supporters, with no real prospect of success in its stated goal. But hey, ‘somebody’s taking a look at it.’
You really think so? I’d be surprised if it had much of an effect at all, economically. It’s not like any of the “banned” countries is a major trading partner, or a significant economic power.
It’s not just those folks, though – it’s anyone in almost any country with dual citizenship for any of those countries – that’s probably millions of Europeans, Oceanians, and (obviously) Middle Easterners and Africans who will not consider the US as a vacation spot any time soon. Even a few percentage points lost in tourism dollars is a lot of money.
I’ve learned not to believe polls anymore. Especially ones that can never be confirmed by an actual vote. If a poll says people agree with Trump’s moves it means nothing to me. If it says they disagree, also nothing. Why should you even care? Are people such sheep that they change their opinion based on some poll? If you argue that the will of the people should be followed, that’s why we have elections. Nothing in the Constitution says our Representatives should vote based upon polling. This may shock some people but pollsters can have biases also and some may even think running numbers certain ways is good for the country, so its OK. This idea about quoting polls like they’re facts carved in stone to make arguments is really getting out of hand.
