Crime and Terrorism are Poor Rationales for Immigration Restrictions

The risk of migrant terrorism is low, immigrants generally have lower crime rates than natives, and migration restrictions are both unjust and less effective than other strategies for reducing violence.

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Dramatic recent incidents have heightened calls to impose severe restrictions on immigration in order to curb crime and terrorism. By all means we should punish violent criminals and terrorists, whatever their background. But crime and terrorism risk are bad rationales for immigration restrictions. I covered the terrorism angle in some detail in a 2022 article for the Verfassungsblog website. Virtually everything I said then still applies. To briefly summarize: 1) the risk is low, 2) restricting liberty of large numbers of people because of the wrongdoing of a small minority is deeply unjust, 3) migration restrictions cause great harm, and 4) there much better ways to reduce the risk of violence.

Here's an excerpt:

In both Europe and the United States, fears of terrorism and violence have been exploited by anti-immigrant nationalist political movements….

The risks of terrorism by migrants are low and can potentially be mitigated further by "keyhole" solutions that address the problem by means less draconian than the complete exclusion of migrants.

The risk that an American will be killed by an immigrant terrorist in a given year is so infinitesimal that it is actually several times lower than the risk that he or she will be killed by a lightning strike during the same timeframe.¹⁾ Over a 40 year period, the number of Americans killed by terrorist entrants from any of the five majority-Muslim countries covered by Donald Trump's 2017 "travel ban" order was zero. The risk in European countries was comparably low,²⁾ also in the same general ballpark as common everyday dangers. Even if these risks were to increase several-fold as a result of expanded immigration, they would still be extremely small…

There are some ways in which migration restrictions can actually increase terrorism risks and undermine efforts to combat terrorist organizations. First, they may feed into the propaganda of terrorist groups, claiming that the West is hostile to Muslims, Arabs, or other groups targeted for migration restrictions. Second, allowing migrants from areas controlled by terrorist groups or hostile anti-Western regimes to come to the West reduces the amount of people and resources under those entities' control, thereby weakening them….

Even if migration increases terrorism risks only slightly, it might be argued that is still enough to justify restricting it, at least in the case of migrants from nations that may seem to pose relatively higher risks. After all, even one terrorist attack is one too many. But this analysis implicitly assumes that migration restrictions have few or no costs….

In reality, barring migration has enormous costs, for both migrants and destination countries. The cost to the former is obvious. Barring or severely restricting migration from nations with repressive governments and powerful terrorist movements inevitably consigns hundreds of thousands of people to lives of oppression and poverty, and sometimes even to death.

There are also large costs to destination countries. Among other things, immigrants – including those from poor and oppressed nations – make disproportionate contributions to scientific innovation, and are also disproportionately likely to become entrepreneurs….

Restricting migration to prevent small increases in terrorism is also unjust for reasons that go beyond consequentialist considerations. Imagine that migrants from Nation A have higher terrorism rates than natives Nation B, but the vast majority of residents of both are not terrorists. Perhaps 1 in 100,000 migrants from A is a terrorist, which is true of only 1 in 1 million residents of B…. Still, barring all or most migration from A into B means imposing severe restrictions on the liberty of many thousands of people merely because they happened to be born to the wrong parents, in the wrong place.

We readily see the injustice of such measures in the domestic context. I live in the state of Virginia, which borders on West Virginia, a significantly poorer state with a much higher crime rate than our own. But virtually everyone agrees that it would be unjust to bar migration from West Virginia to Virginia, merely because migrants from the former may be more likely to commit violent crimes than native-born residents of the latter.

Similarly, in the US, young black males, on average, have higher crime rates than members of many other ethnic groups. White males, in turn, are disproportionately likely to become domestic terrorists…. It does not follow, however, that we would be justified in imposing severe restrictions on the freedom of movement of either black males or white males as a group. In both cases, it would be deeply unjust to restrict the freedom of large numbers of people merely because they happen to be members of the same racial or ethnic group as others who have committed various crimes and misdeeds. The same point applies to potential immigrant groups singled out for exclusion merely because others born in the same place have a disproportionate propensity to commit acts of terrorism…..

What is true of terrorism is also true of crime. In the US, migrants - including illegal ones - actually have much lower crime rates than native-born citizens. Moreover, as noted in my Verfassungbslog article, there are much better ways to reduce the risk of terrorism and violent crime, generally:

The case for terrorism-based immigration restrictions is further weakened by the availability of alternative ways to reduce the danger. Because terrorism risks from migration are already so low, it may be very difficult to reduce them still further. However, tapping the vast new wealth created by immigration can potentially pay for extensive new security and counterterrorism operations, if necessary. In Chapter 6 of Free to Move, I describe how shifting the resources currently devoted to enforcing American immigration restrictions could easily pay for many thousands of additional police officers. Social science research indicates that increasing the number of cops on the streets can significantly reduce violent and property crime, whether perpetrated by immigrants or natives, thereby greatly improving public safety…. If necessary, we can also use some of the funds saved on immigration enforcement and wealth generated by increased migration to finance additional counter-terrorism operations.

In the Verfassungblog article, and elsewhere, I have also noted ways in which migration restrictions actually increase crime and terrorism, such as by creating a black market that organized crime will almost inevitably exploit.

I also noted, in the article, there is some evidence that migration sometimes leads to acts of terrorism by anti-immigrant right-wingers. The recent awful attack in Magdeburg, Germay may have been example of this phenomenon, as the perpetrator - though himself a migrant from Saudi Arabia - was anti-Muslim activist and a supporter of the neo-fascist anti-immigrant AFD party. When such things happen, the right approach is to crack down on terrorists, not give in to them. As in the case of hostage deals, yielding to terrorists incentivizes more terrorism. Governments can target terrorists - whether their ideology be right, left, or radical Islamist - without in the process punishing innocent people whose only sin is fleeing poverty and oppression.