If you look at the mass casualty incidents since 9/11, only at best ~50% of them were instigated by immigrants, let alone Muslim immigrants. A leaked DHS report apparently concludes that even most of those immigrants who did commit terrorism were radicalized post-entry, although this should have been the reasonable assumption of anyone who cast a cursory glance at the evidence.

The exclusion of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Pakistan, and now Iraq, as well as the inclusion of Iran on the list (Iran's support of terrorism is pretty much limited to proxies whose targets are limited to Middle Eastern governments (including Israel) and have no inclination to carry out attacks in the US or Europe) indicate that the set of targets is chosen less for which countries are liable to produce terrorists and more for which countries the US government doesn't like.

As I've pointed out in the past, the number of terrorists who might be stopped by a travel ban like this is probably 0 and maybe as high as 2. The number of people for whom this would be the tipping point in their radicalization is probably between 0 and 10. This may create more terrorism than it catches.

Thing is, we'll probably never know. Will that information ever be shared with the public? How many people were prevented from entering the US over the past 8 years for "ties to terrorist organizations?" I have no idea.

It happened in early 2016 to Indian students.

http://fusion.net/story/272029/indian-students-denied-entry-...

Happened in mid 2016 to Syrian refugees.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2016/08/09/substantial...

A reported 2015 rise in Muslims being denied entry

http://www.dlgvisablog.com/blog/2015/12/29/us-increasingly-d...

But without news reports or blog articles, how are we to ever know that X number of travelers were denied entry? We can say it's probably between 0-2, but there's no evidence to back that up and I don't know how we even begin to search for the evidence other than heavily redacted FOIA requests.

But I've been really giving thought to what I can do as an average citizen to make the slightest change in public policy.

Students, family members, and others following the rules are the targets. The goal is to increase hassle, expense, uncertainty and humiliation for Certain Visitors in order to have less of them.

(Edit: That's assuming OP meant terrorist incidents. MCIs are so common that immigrants would be implicated in <1% of them.)

2) Eventually people will be tired of outrage in general, at which point the executive branch can do whatever it wants.

Trump has has ended reality; words have no meaning now, and numbers doesn't have meaning either.

[1] https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7470/germany-migrants-cri...

That's a non-sequitur, as this order isn't targeted at "Muslim immigrants". Furthermore, the categories "Muslim immigrants" and "natives" both contain substructure. That means that a simple comparison between the two can be misleading.

Please note I'm merely pointing out a flaw in your argument, and not taking a side on whether the order is a good or bad idea.

Not sure whether you're acting naive to prove a point, but the countries represented aren't majority Muslim by accident - they were picked for a specific reason. Not to mention, Trump himself alluded to a "Muslim Ban" with a similar structure before, as did multiple aides. He's run on a platform of xenophobia. It's not a stretch whatsoever to make that point - everyone understands why the poster is labelling it that way.

The implication that the person that posted is injecting ideology into that comment is ironic, since willfully choosing to ignore the political context of the ban is just as bad.

> the categories "Muslim immigrants" and "natives" both contain substructure

Yes, all language does.

>not taking a side on whether the order is a good or bad idea

You're taking a side by turning a blind eye to the ideological ramifications and context of the ban. "I'm just playing devil's advocate" is always problematic because it purports that injecting something dangerous like this into the conversation "doesn't count".

The people doing this think it qualifies, and this is a case where we should probably believe them.

But he didn't...

Instead, he or his team chose to use a list of seven high-risk or non-cooperative nations drawn-up by the DHS over a year ago for the purpose of suspending Visa-waiver travel. That affected ~20% of the Word's Muslim population.

1. Trump talked a lot about banning Muslims from the US.

2. Giuliani said the first travel ban was what came out of Trump asking him to implement the "Muslim ban" legally.

3. Neither the first one nor this new one is a very effective Muslim ban.

What are we to conclude from these facts?

We could conclude that, despite the insistence of Trump that he was going to implement such a ban, and a Trump insider saying that the first order was their first attempt at it, that order was not in fact intended as a Muslim ban.

Or we could conclude that it was intended as a Muslim ban, and the people responsible either don't understand that Muslims and Arabs aren't the same thing, understand but don't care because it's pandering to their supporters, or understand and see it only a first step in a process of getting a full ban in place.

Given how everyone in this circus has behaved so far, my money is firmly on door #2.

My point was that there are 50 Muslim-majority countries. So if you want to argue against the ban, argue that visitors / immigrants from those countries commit less crime than "natives", rather than arguing that Muslim immigrants in general commit less crime than natives.

>> the categories "Muslim immigrants" and "natives" both contain substructure > Yes, all language does.

The point here being that different "native" demographic groups commit crimes at different rates; and I'm guessing it's likely that different "Muslim" immigration groups commit crimes at different rates. e.g. approximately 1% of Chechen immigrants to the USA are terrorist bombers.

These are are the countries where the US is fighting wars against ISIS, and Iran.

I don't support the ban, but I can see the point of being careful about accepting immigrants from areas with active enemy armies.

I point this out strictly as a response to your reading of the GP's post, not as support of the travel ban.

The particular language of this order may not be. But we've learned to take Trump "seriously, not literally."

In that light, the above quote is a falsehood.

Substitute "black" for Muslim and this is the basis of a great deal of racist beliefs and policies in the US. The important question isn't who is in prison, and who is committing crimes, but why. Being Muslim (or Black) doesn't naturally incline someone to be a criminal. Something in the society at large is leading to either higher rates of conviction for the same crimes (the case in the US, harsher punishments for black offenders than whites for the same crimes), or an economic situation that leaves criminal activity as the only apparent or more economically beneficial choice for members of these groups.

And crime IS mostly an economic phenomenon, poor expected outcomes in life lead to high crime rates. But there is a link to high migration rates as well (if the economy can't absorb the new workforce quick enough, it leads to problems).

The problem is, the moral dilemma ceases to matter when a majority of the population (you can call them dumb, racist, whatever, but they're part of society) votes in someone to 'solve' the problem. There is a point where feelings and morality don't matter as much as practicality.

How do you know this? It might. I'd bet being Muslim inclines somebody to not be a criminal for some types of crimes, in fact, so I wouldn't categorically dismiss the idea that religion affects criminality.

Also as has been well-discussed here, crime rate differences are still present in non-economic crimes and your attempts to explain the situation fall flat. It's a story you're making up, badly, and to talk about this stuff with that kind of certainty is a bad look. The truth is, we don't know.

And based on an "it might" it's fine to just assign blame and pass judgement?

> I'd bet being Muslim inclines somebody to not be a criminal for some types of crimes, in fact, so I wouldn't categorically dismiss the idea that religion affects criminality.

In fact? By what facts?

What on Earth are you talking about?

> In fact? By what facts?

The fact there is regarding the question of what bet I'd make. "In fact" is a common figure of speech.

It's the same in the U.S. if you have a "Black" sounding name, you are less likely to be called in for an interview. I never understood why Black parents would give their children "ethnic" names knowing that it makes it harder in society. Even if their were only a 10% difference, why handicap your children?

And yes I'm Black.

To put it bluntly, a country doesn't get to colonize other other countries and then complain if people from those countries take the claims of civilizational superiority at face value and come to experience it for themselves. Colonization drastically and permanently altered the destiny of those countries, and unwillingness to accommodate people from those places displays a lack of responsibility.

The fact is, integrating immigrants IS an economic issue, there IS a limit, and if we fail, there WILL be backlash.

Anyhow, there's a plethora of studies that have been done on the economic impacts of migration, expected outcomes to immigrants measuring different factors (wages, employment, and subjective measures of assimilation), and so on. It's basically an entire field in itself.

What is the real 'limit'? The answer is when the negative societal effects become greater than the positive ones, and the host population decides to limit immigration.

The rest of your post was a moral argument, which again, doesn't matter when the population has decided they're at the 'limit'.

'a fairly closed culture' in this case being a racist framework that says they're not French enough and chooses to lean on archaic work rules and so on to enforce that barrier.

The quality of immigrants that US and Europe attract are vastly different. US attracts mostly high quality skilled labor (doctors, tech workers etc.) On the other hand, EU countries often attract the worst sort (people attracted to EU welfare, unsorted refugees, unskilled labor etc.) Naturally, the lower class folk are unlikelier to adjust to life in a new country, and so they commit more crime. This does NOT happen in the US. It is therefore unreasonable to compare US immigration to EU immigration.

Case in point: immigration from Pakistan. Pakistanis in the UK (as an example of a European country) tend to be poor and are highly represented in crime. Pakistanis in the US, on the other hand, have an average income $10000 HIGHER than the average US income. There is also no evidence to suggest they are involved in crime at a rate remotely comparable to the general population.

Unreasonable, but it doesn't matter when society and politicians use European problems to justify policies at home.

I can't find a non-paywalled link ATM (the ridiculous politicization of this issue has made it nearly impossible to get signal out of the noise), but I've seen studies that show that if you control for poverty, the link essentially disappears.

Can you guarantee that a large, rapid influx of immigrants won't lead to a poor underclass? Because that's as much of an issue as wherever they came from...

In no way is that a "large, rapid" influx. This whole issue is just political football and scare-mongering.

You're right, the US has a low rate of immigration and should be able to handle it, but that's not necessarily the case.

Also, 0.3% per year amounts to nearly 8% over one generation, not including differences in fertility between immigrant groups and born Americans.

And you're right about the 8%, but since only about 10% of immigrants to the US are Muslim, really we're talking about 0.8%, over something like 25 to 30 years. That is so completely disproportionate to the hysteria over immigration (literally the number one issue for Trump voters, IIRC) I can't help but conclude that it's a purposeful scare campaign.

Also, it's not often that any immigrant group is the boogeyman for more than a generation. It used to be the Irish, then the Polish, then the Puerto Ricans, and so on. A huge fuss is raised, and then they assimilate, at least in the US.