President Drumpfuck is such an embarrassment. “Bad Dudes” have not been rushing to our country at all for the last sixteen years from the nations he’s blacklisted.
Furthermore, the process for refugees to be admitted takes months and years, not weeks and days. A few weeks to implement his changes, so that people aren’t detained because the spastic four-year old signed an Executive Order while they were in the air, wouldn’t have put us at any noticeable risk.
Furthermore, people who have already received legal permission to be here, including children of immegrants and those with green cards and properly issued visas, wouldn’t be left hanging if more time had been allowed.
Plus, of course, we’re still at the part where Donald is pretending that he had a good reason to fixate on this random list of countries prepared years ago by people he’s denigrated.
I’m not clear on all the specifics of the executive order. Would it have kept Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the underwear bomber) from boarding his infamous flight to Detroit because he spent time in Yemen?
Way out of bounds. In all the years since 9/11, no leader has felt it necessary to take the steps Trump has. Not even Bush. Many, many other steps were taken to vet refugees and immigrants, but never this. Please explain what changed effective January 20, 2017, besides the one who sits in the Oval Office, that justifies such changes.
running coach makes good points. I’ll tell ya, if I was going to enter this country as a terrorist, I sure wouldn’t do it as a refugee. The vetting process is already extreme. Refugees from the countries of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and others (I can’t recall now, been awhile since I researched this) must come from a UN Refugee camp. They must endure the vetting process which is, as was already pointed out to you, a lengthy process lasting up to 3 years. No refugee gets to designate the country to which they will immigrate – meaning they may end up in Australia or England and not the USA. Not a very efficient way to fulfill one’s terrorist dreams.
Besides San Bernardino (the only bona fide case of someone from a Middle Eastern country migrating here on a fiance visa who actually carried out a successful terrorist attack), what other incidents of successful terrorist attacks can you point to since 9/11 that originated with an actual refugee or immigrant that entered this country legally?
But you somehow think that the steps Trump has taken that will assuredly radicalize Muslim American citizens are more effective than carrying on what we’ve been doing for the past 16 years?
You know what is an efficient way to enter this country to carry out terrorist acts? Tourist visas. The same tourist visas we’ve had in place for the 16 years since 9/11. Got news for you. The ones that are here have been here already for years, long before Trump.
So explain again, please, the legal basis for these new, completely unconstitutional executive orders? You act like we’ve endured hundreds of such attacks, and it hasn’t even been dozens.
I’m doing this in reverse order. Sorry, but that’s the way it made sense to me.
I’m not “acting like” anything that you claim. I never claimed we’d endured hundreds (or even dozens) of “such attacks”. You’re arguing against claims I haven’t made. As such, carry on I guess, but don’t expect me to defend whatever straw men you’ve created in your own mind.
I suspect there’s a good chance that whatever vetting Trump and company settle on after the several-month pause will be a good bit more effective at keeping would-be terrorists out, yes. 'Course, we don’t know what exactly that will be yet, so this is more of a hunch than anything else. It won’t surprise me, and I don’t feel it necessary for you to tell me, if your hunch goes the other way. That’s fine, we’re both entitled to our opinions.
Hey, if you think we need to freeze tourist visas from these seven countries of concern for a few months while we sort out a better way to vet tourists from there too, I won’t argue with you.
Do you not see how ridiculously-weak your argument gets when you have to parse it like this? Is including “successful” and excluding “failed” terrorist attacks really an accurate measure of how good a job we were doing at vetting immigrants? ‘Hey, look at us, our vetting is so good we only let the incompetent ones through’. Is that really the measure of success you want to hang your hat on? That’s what you’re going to tell the American people? ‘Ignore all those failed attempts at terrorism, our vetting was so good that we haven’t had a single “successful” or “fatal” or “major” terrorist attack on Thursdays in Maryland the whole time Obama was in charge’ . To me, the need to parse your phrasing so carefully demonstrates the self-evident weakness of your point better than anything else I can think of to add to it.
I hope you’re right. I hope there are no more terrorist attacks in America (or elsewhere, but that’s not really the current line of discussion). I think our odds are better the more carefully we screen immigrants. YMMV.
New President gets to set a new direction for the country, and focus on priorities that are important to him. He campaigned on “extreme vetting” and won. That’s the “justification”.
The combination of demonization of Muslims and administration support for white nationalist/white supremacist views, in addition to very permissive gun regulation, seems to me like a recipe for the sort of terrorist attack that just took place in Quebec. While CBP is carefully scrutinizing every elementary-school report card of Muslim visa applicants, who’s watching the homegrown terrorists?
While I take your point, and pretty much agree with you, Kimstu, those numbers are out of date as they don’t include the 50 killings in Orlando at the Pulse bar last year.
I’ve got some nit-picky gripes with New America’s numbers, but like John Mace said, that NYT article from 2015 is out of date. I’m pretty sure that jihadists are way ahead on the kill count now, both in America and the rest of the world. Assuming we all agree on that point, doesn’t it make more sense to focus funds and attention on the statistically-larger threat of jihadist terrorism?
The FBI. We have multiple federal agencies, each with their own areas of responsibility.
The vetting of refugees is a difficult and time consuming job. One of the troubling difficulties is the prevalence of fraudulent documents used in efforts to support refugee applications, or to travel directly and make asylum claims.
The Wall Street Journal reports that an estimated 1-5% of Syrians arriving in Europe did so using falsified passports. Once on European soil they present Syrian ID cards and ask for asylum. One man interviewed for the story admits flushing his fake Swedish passport down the airplane toilet while enroute to the UK.
He was one of many Syrians using forged documents. For the first half of 2015 Syrians topped the list of nationalities of those caught using forged documents to enter the Schengen Zone.
Fake passports, fake school diplomas, and fake marriage certificates are readily available in Syria and abroad. Greek authorities have made arrests in a document forging case where a criminal gang was selling forged documents to refugees, including forged asylum applications.
Unfortunately these are some of the same sorts of documents used to support a genuine refugee application. The prevalence of such false documents makes it harder to vet genuine applications due to efforts needed to substantiate the documents submitted in support of a claim of refugee status.
And, of course, some regions may not have reliable official government documents which might be used in filing a refugee claim. Who do you turn to for a birth certificate or police clearance if there is not a functional government in your home country?
But as already noted, how many of the terror attack deaths in the US since 9/11/01 would have been stopped if these measures had been put in place back then? None.