Crafting Sensible Policy

I think that Mark Krikorian has this about right:

Under current trends, the United States will admit about 1 million new Muslim-origin immigrants over the next decade, plus hundreds of thousands of Muslim guest workers and foreign students. In addition, something like 50,000 young people from Muslim immigrant families turn 18 in the United States each year. Many of these individuals are productive citizens who pose no threat to our republic. Iman the supermodel, television’s Dr. Oz, Fareed Zakaria, Coke CEO Muhtar Kent — whatever their merits or lack thereof, their Muslim origins pose no threat to us. Some are even politically conservative American patriots, such as our own Reihan Salam.

But large Muslim populations, continually refreshed by ongoing mass immigration, are a problem. Polling suggests between a quarter and a third are not attached to the principles of the Constitution, supporting things such as sharia law over U.S. law and the use of violence against those who insult Islam. Nor is this merely hypothetical; Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the U.S. population but account for about half of terrorist attacks since 9/11. That means Muslims in the United States are about 5,000 percent more likely to commit terrorist attacks than non-Muslims.

He proposes ideological screening:

The narrowest solution would be to restore the principle of “ideological exclusion” to U.S. immigration law. With the end of the Cold War — which too many imagined to be the End of History — we eliminated the legal bar to enemies of America who were not actual members of terrorist organizations or card-carrying members of totalitarian political parties. Specifically, the law says the State Department is prohibited from keeping a foreigner out “because of the alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States.” In other words, since 1990 we have applied the First Amendment to all foreigners abroad seeking admission to our country. The only exception is if the secretary of state “personally determines that the alien’s admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest” — note this exception is only for a “compelling . . . foreign policy interest,” not a domestic-policy one, like limiting the number of residents who support killing apostates. Even President Obama has paid (grudging) lip service to the ideological — as opposed to the violent — threat. In his Oval Office speech Sunday night he said “Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to . . . speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.” So why aren’t we keeping out people who adhere to such interpretations?

The Supreme Court has already ruled on this; ideological screening is permissible. It all depends on what the Congress approves or disapproves.

This is something too frequently ignored:

But large-scale immigration of non-violent Islamic supremacists also facilitates violence, by forming and sustaining neighborhoods that serve as cover and incubators for jihad attacks, however unintentionally. Muslim immigrant neighborhoods, and their mosques and other institutions, fit Mao’s observation regarding the peasantry’s role in China’s war against the Japanese: “The people are like water and the army is like fish.” DHS’s chief intelligence officer told the House Select Committee on Intelligence in 2007, “As previous attacks indicate, overseas extremists do not operate in a vacuum and are often linked with criminal and smuggling networks — usually connected with resident populations [in the U.S.] from their countries of origin (emphasis added).”

There’s another reason for ideological screening, by which I mean interviewing people under oath. Should individuals have lied and later statements and action support that conclusion, the testimony can be used at later hearings to prove that a future naturalization was fraudulent.