President Donald Trump recently banned travel and immigration to the United States for nationals of a dozen countries, insisting that this would protect the U.S. from terrorists and criminals.
The ban applies to Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. (It allows minor exceptions for immediate family members of U.S. citizens and adoptions, as well as a few other limited categories.)
Trump’s proclamation states that the restriction is intended to “protect [Americans] from terrorist attacks and other national security or public-safety threats.” Those countries’ “vetting and screening information is so deficient,” the administration insists, that such procedures can’t help U.S. officials identify and deny entry to terrorists and criminals.
But we already know that people from those countries do not pose a substantial risk to the United States.
The president is probably correct that many of those countries’ regimes either can’t or won’t properly identify terrorists and criminals, or are unwilling to share that information with the United States. That still doesn’t make his travel ban necessary.
If the lack of information sharing by those countries posed a significant terrorism risk, we should have seen evidence already. Considering all immigrants or visitors from those dozen banned countries over the past 50 years, one terrorist attack occurred on U.S. soil, killing one U.S. citizen. It was committed by a single individual, Emanuel Kidega Samson from Sudan. (He committed a shooting at a Tennessee church in 2017, killing one victim and wounding seven others.)
Put another way, your annual risk of being killed, in the U.S., by a terrorist from one of those dozen countries was approximately one in 13.9 billion over the past 50 years. To put this risk in perspective the annual chance of being killed by lightning (one in 1.6 million) is approximately 8,700 times higher.
The risk of being killed in a terrorist attack by anyone in the U.S. is incredibly low. Over the last 50 years, including 9/11, the risk of dying from a terrorist attack is only one in 4.5 million. (Dying in a lightning strike is almost three times more likely.)
Travelers and immigrants from the named countries don’t pose a disproportionate criminal risk of any sort. The 2023 national incarceration rate for travelers and immigrants, aged 18 to 54, from those countries is 37 per 10,000. That’s approximately 70 percent below the incarceration rate of native-born Americans.
While the risks to Americans from letting in people from those countries are minimal, the travel and migration benefits to the targeted people are massive. Those countries have autocratic, socialist, totalitarian, theocratic, or otherwise dysfunctional governments. Allowing people to escape them, even temporarily, can and does increase prosperity and help spread ideas for reform.
An immigrant from Yemen, for example, earns more than 15 times as much in the U.S. as in his home country; the average Haitian immigrant earns 10 times more in the U.S. than in Haiti. Furthermore, as people flee those regimes, there is evidence that salutary pressure is created for more political and economic freedom in the origin countries.
Instead of banning them, the U.S. should welcome immigrants and travelers who flee oppressive governments. It poses little security risk to the U.S., can massively help those who escape, and may even promote freedom in in the countries they flee.
