Refugee Crisis: Let’s Take a Deep Breath andFind the Principled Ground

Eric Vought

17 January 2016∗

AbstractIn the aftermath of the Paris Attacks, more than half of the states’ gov-

ernors have stated that they will refuse to accept Syrian refugees. Somepeople called for denying entry to the US of all Muslims after the Chat-tanooga, Tennessee shooting and the Paris attacks have only made thatsegment more outspoken. Some people claim that the issue is moot be-cause the states have no authority . Our own governor in Missouri madean equivalent statement, that he would leave the matter to the StateDepartment.

This paper explores the issues involved in the refugee crisis, rejects ex-treme positions on both sides, and points the way toward a more principleddebate, providing links and citations as a basis for further discussion.

Contents1 Preliminary Stuff 2

1.1 Legal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21.2 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2 Principled Moderation Is NOT Indecisiveness 2

3 Proposals and Ideas Which Ought Be Rejected 33.1 Fear of Terrorism As Grounds For a Rejection of Our Principles . 33.2 Temptation To Misuse Emergency Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . 43.3 Our System of Ordered Liberty Requires Respect For Rights Even

In the Face of Danger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53.4 Isolationism, Rejection of Refugees Generally . . . . . . . . . . . 63.5 Deporting Muslims Already In Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63.6 Rejection of All Muslims As a Matter of Policy . . . . . . . . . . 73.7 We Must Accept Refugees Out of Global Responsibility . . . . . 83.8 It Is Not the Governors’ Responsibility To Intervene . . . . . . . 93.9 The Refugees Are Being Vetted and Pose No Threat . . . . . . . 10

∗version 2.2

1

4 Things We Should Probably Do Anyway 114.1 (Mostly) Secure Our Borders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114.2 Deportation of Existing Illegals Given Due Process Guarantees . 114.3 Provide Resources To Correct the Immigration Court Backlogs . 124.4 Increase Public Resilience In the Face of Terrorist Threats . . . . 13

5 Controversial Things We Need To Tackle Head-On 155.1 Sever the Relationship Between Refugees and Political Quotas . 155.2 Reconsider Foreign Policy and Intervention Generally . . . . . . 175.3 Develop and Enforce Rational and Effective Immigration Policy . 205.4 Reconsider the War on Drugs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

6 Conclusion 22

References 22

1 Preliminary Stuff

1.1 LegalThis paper is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0)license.

The opinions in this paper are those of the author. They are not the opinionsof any other organization. In particular, these opinions are not those of theLawrence County Sheriff’s Auxiliary or of the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office.

Drafts of this article originally published on A Radish Saltant in Novemberand December of 2015. It’s official home is on Scribd.

1.2 AcknowledgementsI want to particularly thank Mike Moon, Gary Greene, and Tom Martz forposting interesting links on this issue to Facebook and keeping up a lively,polite, and rational debate. Such qualities are extremely rare in today’s politicallandscape and I have used that discussion to test and feel out many of thepositions below. I do not presume to represent their opinions here and allmistakes are my own.

2 Principled Moderation Is NOT IndecisivenessIn the aftermath of the Paris attacks[Mullen et al., 2015], more than halfof the states’ governors have stated that they will refuse to accept Syrianrefugees[Castillejo, 2015]. Some people called for denying entry to the US ofall Muslims after the Chattanooga, Tennessee shooting[Blake, 2015] and theParis attacks have only made that segment more outspoken. Some people claimthat the issue is moot because the states have no authority to prevent the federal

2

government from resettling refugees[e.g. Millhiser, 2015]. Our own governor inMissouri made an equivalent statement, that he would leave the matter to theState Department[News-Leader, 2015].

This paper explores the issues involved in the refugee crisis, rejects extremepositions on both sides, and points the way toward a more principled debate,providing links and citations as a basis for further discussion.

As is often the case, I find myself not on either specific ’side’, but nor amI waffling in indecision. Rather, I very decisively believe that there is a princi-pled position which demands we reject both extremes to develop and enforce arational immigration policy which we have not had in some time. Specifically,the current plan to import thousands of un-vetted refugees and spread themaround the country is foolhardy, and the counter-suggestion to bar all Muslimsor start rounding up foreigners is equally unacceptable.

I am going to begin my defense of this position by outlining the courses ofaction I believe that we should reject out of hand and then discussing what isleft, hopefully pointing in the direction of a reasonable and principled debate onour policies. I have little expectation that such a principled debate will appearin mainstream politics, but in the end, I agree with the late Ronald Dworkinthat if we cannot first agree on basic principles, debate on specific policy ispointless[2008, 18-19].

3 Proposals and Ideas Which Ought Be Rejected

3.1 Fear of Terrorism As Grounds For a Rejection of OurPrinciples

The first supposition I will tackle is a very dangerous one: the idea that fearof the terrorism threat trumps all principled debate, requires curtailment offreedoms, or requires us to set aside safeguards on public policy or governmentaction, such as the First Amendment’s freedoms of the Press, Speech, Asso-ciation, and Religion or the right to personal privacy and self-determinationinherent in the 4th Amendment and which is a bedrock of our common law.This is a common response to the idea of a "New Terrorism" which we havenever faced before and which makes our principles of self-government quaint,outmoded, and perhaps even dangerous idiocy. This is an issue much largerthan the refugee crisis or of immigration generally. The Paris attacks have al-ready been used by CIA director John Brennan to attempt to reverse recentlimitations on government surveillance. France has issued a state of emergencywhich allows the government to search without probable cause, detain withoutcharge, decree curfews, and suppress demonstrations.

While obviously terrorism exists and is a legitimate threat to our security, theidea that there is a "new" terrorism which changes the global landscape has beencapably and thoroughly debunked elsewhere by, for instance, the "mother ofmodern terrorism research", Martha Crenshaw[2009] and by Frank Furedi[2007,40-44]. In short, the proponents of "new terror" have an extremely hard time

3

defining what they even mean and, in the end, there is nothing notably "new"about the "new terror" (whatever that is) which makes it any more of an existen-tial threat than the "old terror". Many of the same things being recommendedas responses to the "new" threat are the same things which have either beentried and failed in the past (McCarthyism and the Committee on Un-AmericanActivities, the Alien and Sedition Acts, abuse of surveillance powers and theFBI against political opponents, etc) or already been rejected for good reason(such as our Constitutional guarantees of due process). No new evidence hasbeen suggested to change that debate.

If anything, we have learned that crisis requires greater protection of ourmost cherished principles. This is true for three reasons, first, that it is extremelytempting to misuse emergency measures (and we have abused measures passedout of fear throughout our history), second, respecting rights, even when it ishard, is what our system of self-government demands of us, and three, violatingrights in the name of fear makes us less safe. I will tackle these issues roughlyin order but they are often tangled tightly together, a fact that our founders, insetting up a system of limited government with separation of powers, recognized.Madison, writing as Publius in the Federalist Papers, makes the argument inFederalist #49 that separation of powers and checks-and-balances are necessarybecause otherwise people will be ruled (badly) by their passions rather than bytheir reason. Our system is designed to force deliberation and judgement in theformation of policy precisely to protect us from ourselves.

3.2 Temptation To Misuse Emergency MeasuresThere is a significant temptation to misuse emergency measures to serve prej-udice and political ends as well as to make "temporary" emergency measureslong-standing practice and precedent for future abuses. As Dempsey and Coledocument at length, the threat of terrorism has existed throughout our entirehistory and we have frequently succumbed to the temptation to abuse measuresdesigned to combat it. Not only has this abuse violated our core principles, butit has often made us less safe.

To the contrary, one of the lessons of the four years since Septem-ber11, 2001, is that, even as we face new and more difficult chal-lenges, the fundamental principles that ought to govern the responseof a democratic society to terrorism remain unchanged: we shouldfocus on perpetrators of crime and those planning violent activities,avoid indulging in guilt by association and ethnic profiling, main-tain procedures designed to identify the guilty and exonerate theinnocent, insist on legal limits on surveillance authority, bar politi-cal spying, apply checks and balances to government powers, andrespect basic human rights. Departing from these principles, asthe military and intelligence agencies have done, for example, inabusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is not only wrongbut actually harms national security by fueling anti-American sen-

4

timent.[James X. Dempsey and David Cole, 2006, 14]

3.3 Our System of Ordered Liberty Requires Respect ForRights Even In the Face of Danger

Although we have real enemies both at home and abroad, those who turn toviolence are always a minority within a minority. Violating our principles andviolating minorities in order to get at those few violent offenders makes thecriminals look sympathetic and reduces respect for law, perpetuating the prob-lem. Cracking down on lawful speech/association and lawful protest removesthe escape-valve which prevents violence from being more common than it is.Dworkin therefore argues that restoring respect for law is incompatible with amore skeptical position on rights:

The institution of rights is therefore crucial, because it representsthe majority’s promise to the minority that their dignity and equalitywill be respected. When the divisions among the groups are mostviolent, then this gesture, if law is to work, must be most sincere.

... The government will not re-establish respect for law withoutgiving the law some claim to respect. It cannot do that if it neglectsthe one feature that distinguishes law from ordered brutality. If thegovernment does not take rights seriously, then it does not take lawseriously, either.[Dworkin, 1980, 204-205]

Unjust policy proves our enemies right. The actions of McVeigh, Hasan, andothers, are only criminal in the context of being a society of law, and that lawrequires respect for rights. We hear constantly "They hate us for our freedoms."Supposing that this were true, what precisely do we accomplish by throwingthose freedoms away?

The Missouri Constitution echoes the Declaration of Independence when itsays:

...that all persons are created equal and are entitled to equalrights and opportunity under the law; that to give security to thesethings is the principal office of government, and that when govern-ment does not confer this security, it fails in its chief design.[2015,Article I section 2]

There is no irreconcilable conflict between safety and securing rights: the "chiefdesign" of government is in fact to secure rights. When someone has demon-strated that they are a danger to society through actions (or attempted actions,concrete threats, etc.), we have the standards of due process and criminal law tohandle that. Temporary wartime measures such as suspension of Habeas Corpus(granted solely to Congress by the Constitution) are extremely dangerous toolswhich must be strictly controlled. Under that approach, the government is notprevented from investigating and prosecuting bona-fide violent threats:

5

...criminal intelligence can be fully compatible with the Consti-tution. The First Amendment does not require the FBI to be deafwhen someone advocates violence. The Constitution does not re-quire the government to wait until a bomb goes off or even to waituntil a bomb factory is brought to its attention—it does, however,require the FBI to focus its investigations on the interdiction of vi-olence and other criminal conduct.[James X. Dempsey and DavidCole, 2006, 289-291]

Therefore, whatever approach we take to the threat of ISIS, to the Paris attacks,and to the Syrian refugee crisis must retain respect for our principles of libertyguaranteed by the Constitution or we have already lost.

3.4 Isolationism, Rejection of Refugees GenerallyForeigners do not have a right to immigrate to the US, per se: as a sovereignnation, more or less by definition, we control our own borders. However, sensibleimmigration and naturalization are part of the right of the populace at largeto freely associate. We have a right to invite others to this country to visit,to hear them speak, to offer them shelter, and, when appropriate, to ask themto be one of us. Our promise of an open door is one of the reasons the US isoften host to speakers, to academic and humanitarian conferences, and one ofthe reasons we have many more citizens of the Soviet Union or of Nazi Germanydefect to us (often bringing valuable intelligence) than vice-versa. Being ableto hear foreign speakers and journalists from their own mouth is an invaluablepart of our 1st Amendment rights which is destroyed by a policy based on fear.Success in science, medicine, and technology requires academic freedom and aflow of ideas. It requires being able to sit down and mingle with people ofdifferent ideas and backgrounds. Having an insensible, unjust, or prejudicialpolicy toward visitors violates the rights of all citizens and leads toward makingthe US an insignificant backwater.

3.5 Deporting Muslims Already In CountryThis sounds rather similar to some of the most shameful things we have done as acountry, not the least of which include the internment of Japanese Americans inWorld War II and the Supreme Court’s failure to stop that policy in Korematsuv United States, the persecution of the "LA 8" for twenty years, none of whichwas ever found guilty of any crime, and the "Special Registration" of Arabsafter 9/11, of which most Americans are still unaware:

The federal government publicly professed to be opposed to eth-nic profiling, but conducted the most extensive nationwide campaignof ethnic profiling that this country has seen since World War II. Itcalled in 80,000 men for “special registration” with the Departmentof Homeland Security, simply because they were foreign nationals

6

from Arab and Muslim countries. Registration consisted of finger-printing, interviews, and photographs. Nearly 3,000 of those whoregistered were detained, though none of the 80,000 was chargedwith any terrorist crime. The FBI sought to interview 8,000 men,again simply because they were young and had come from Arab andMuslim countries. The government targeted its “Absconder Appre-hension Initiative” not at all immigration absconders (persons withfinal deportation orders who have not left the country) but at thoseabsconders who came from Arab and Muslim countries. And virtu-ally all of the more than 5,000 foreign nationals who were subjectedto antiterrorism preventive detention after September 11 were Arabor Muslim. Each of these initiatives was justified on the ground thatit was aimed at finding terrorists, yet not one of the thousands of in-dividuals ensnared in these programs stands convicted of a terroristcrime.

There is no question that the immediate aftermath of Septem-ber 11 called for greater urgency than the ongoing “war on drugs,” orthat the immediate threat posed to our national security was greater.But that does not answer whether ethnic profiling is a legal, muchless an effective, response. The argument that we cannot afford torely on something other than racial or ethnic proxies for suspicion,after all, is precisely the rationale used to intern 110,000 persons ofJapanese ancestry during World War II. While subjecting individu-als to closer inspection, interviews, registration, or even searches isless extreme than detaining them, the rationale—that we should relyon ethnic background as a proxy for suspicion—is the same.[JamesX. Dempsey and David Cole, 2006, 261-262]

3.6 Rejection of All Muslims As a Matter of PolicyThe idea of a religious test for entry into the country is anathema to what weare (or claim to be). Many people came to this country to get away from thesectarian conflicts of Europe: my own family on my mother’s side can be tracedto Albigensian heretics who fled first the Inquisition in Germany and then theIron Curtain in Romania. Our founders rejected religious tests for office forthis reason of principle as well as the practical one: who would you trust toset the standard and not misuse it? What would keep 50.01% of the countryfrom simply outlawing the other 49.99%? This kind of bloody see-saw betweenreligious factions, between Catholics and Protestants, was quite familiar to thefounders.

It is also not at all unheard of for an enemy to pretend to be somethingthey are not in order to try to play on sympathies. Barring Muslims would notprevent someone from simply claiming to be a Christian refugee. As OlliverEllsworth, one of the drafters of the Constitution noted, religious tests wouldreadily be bypassed by the unscrupulous:

7

If they exclude any persons, it will be honest men, men of princi-ple, who will rather suffer an injury, than act contrary to the dictatesof their consciences... A test-law is the parent of hypocrisy, and theoffspring of error and the spirit of persecution. Legislatures have noright to set up an inquisition, and examine into the private opin-ions of men.[Paul Leicester Ford, ed. Essays on the Constitution ofthe United States, Published during Its Discussion by the People,1787–1788. Brooklyn: Historical Printing Club, 1892. as quoted inKurland and Lerner, 1987, Volume 4, Article 6, Clause 3, Document14]

As for the similar idea that we simply reject anyone from Syria (regardless ofreligion), it should be again pointed out that we have often gotten extraordi-nary ’rejects’ from our enemies, including, for instance, Albert Einstein, whorenounced his German citizenship in 1933 and became an American. My ownancestors came here as refugees. Sometimes we have an explicit national dutyto accept immigrants from among our enemies, such as when they are no longerwelcome at home because of aid to us, when people have been intelligence as-sets for the United States or those who served as local translators for us in Iraqand Afghanistan. A blanket ban on such immigration would be foolish anddangerous to national security.

3.7 We Must Accept Refugees Out of Global Responsibil-ity

At the same time, the idea that we have a national duty to accept all refugees(or just the refugees from the political conflict du jour) is equally ridiculous.The argument that we must accept (all) refugees out of Christian charity, forinstance, is a confusion of personal and national responsibility. As a Christian,I feel a personal obligation to help the needy and I attempt to fulfill that obli-gation. It is important to support humanitarian and relief organizations andthere are many worthy ones helping people in this and other conflicts. But thatis a very different from the question of the duty of this country as a State totake in all refugees anywhere willy-nilly (if that were even physically possible).The responsibility of the state qua state is to security and justice here, not there(some good discussion of this issue in Pastor Kevin’s Blog). The federal gov-ernment simply does not have a duty to "Christian charity". As some peoplehave rightly pointed out, we do have a national duty to the welfare of our ownveterans who are languishing in our own streets.

Even if we were required to shape US policy according to Christian charity,that is not an open and shut case, either. Saint Thomas Aquinas in the SummaTheologica, considered one of the great works of Christian moral philosophy,states that despite our duty to love everyone, our neighbors and those to whomwe owe a special relationship do have first claim on our outward affection orcharity[Aquinas, 2008, Question 26 Article 6]. Thus, it is not always loving toendanger our neighbors in favor of charity to someone from afar, neither is it

8

loving to reject the stranger: our duties must be considered carefully as a whole.

3.8 It Is Not the Governors’ Responsibility To InterveneThe federal government, Think Progress, and others have argued that this is nota matter which the states have any authority over. Some of the governors, suchas our own Jay Nixon, have even made this argument. They wish to defer tofederal authority on the matter and let that be that. Others contest the modernassumption that the federal government has plenary power over immigration asthis is not actually stated in the Constitution and the police power, includingpower over health and safety, has rested with the states since the beginning ofour country.

Federal law providing for resettlement of refugees also requires the federalagency to consult with the state and local agencies before placement and requiresthat the federal agency shall take into account the recommendations of thestate.1

The responsibility of the state governor is to the people of the state whichelected him or her to that office. Regardless of the legal questions of who hasfinal authority over matters of immigration policy, it cannot be denied that thestate governors can and should have an interest in a matter which affects thesecurity and integrity of its sovereign territory. The federal government wascreated and has a constitutional duty to secure the integrity of the states andwhen it appears to be failing in this duty, it is a matter of grave national concern.Jay Nixon’s response identifies no care for the responsibilities of his office, orthe legitimate concerns of his constituents, and, in examination, says absolutelynothing of any note. It is a statement utterly devoid of meaning or principle.

The federal government, by contrast, in responding to the concerns of thestate governors, carries a great deal of meaning. In the 17 November conferencecall where state governments requested notification on where refugees were beingsettled and that their own law enforcement be given access to threat assessments,the White House Chief of Staff responded bluntly that they saw no reason tomake any changes to the process. California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brownsays on the call that the government must change its process in light of Paris.I disagree.

The federal government’s attitude toward the states in this matter is com-pletely unacceptable whether Paris happened or not; it is just that the Parisattack has called attention to the matter. Regardless of who has ultimate legalauthority over immigration, not notifying states, coordinating with state/locallaw enforcement, and sharing information is an act of disrespect and utter con-tempt toward the sovereignty of the state and local jurisdictions and toward ourfederal (meaning "of equals") system. That much has nothing whatever to dowith the Paris attacks.

18 USC Sec 1522.

9

3.9 The Refugees Are Being Vetted and Pose No ThreatImmediately after the Paris Attacks, FBI officials stated that the US is lessvulnerable than France to attacks similar to Paris. Because the United Statesis separated by an ocean, we have had far fewer Syrian foreign fighters returnto the US who might be able to set up that level of coordination. ISIS threatsso far have been individuals sympathetic to ISIS but not coordinated from afar(domestic radicalization)CNS[2014][See also Vidino and Hughes, 2015, ix]. Thislogic, while not indicating that we are invulnerable to such attacks, makes senseand is consistent with what we know of both global and domestic ISIS activityin recent years[Jenkins, 2015]. The obvious corollary, however, is that if wethrow away the advantage of the large pond separating us from the conflict, wewill become vulnerable to such attacks.

Although the White House claims that refugees are being adequately vetted,the FBI denies that this is realistically possible. We simply have no data onthe activities of many potential refugees at all because most of them have nevercome to the attention of the United States for any reason. Many of the refugees,as they are fleeing a civil war, may have only the clothes on their backs. Forvery good reason, they may not carry documents to help us vet them, and it ishighly unlikely that Assad’s regime will help us in those efforts.

What little documentation we are likely to be given we would be foolish totrust. During the conflict, ISIS has managed to capture an intact Syrian pass-port facility, including authentic blank paper and equipment to use it. A Britishreporter managed to order a perfect Syrian passport through the black marketidentical to that carried by one of the Paris suicide-bombers using the identity ofan actual Syrian refugee who was processed through Greece. Fraudulent Syrianpassports are also readily available on the German black market for people touse to apply for asylum. Fraudulent documents made with actual Syrian officialpaper and equipment are clearly impossible to verify in the chaos of a civil war.We therefore may not depend even on the identity of asylum seekers, let alonetheir background or intentions.

Seth Jones’ recent testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Subcom-mittee on Immigration and Border Security underscores the unique securityrisks posed by Syrian refugees and why they are different from that posed byother refugees:

But risks associated with refugees from Syria may be higher to-day for several reasons. Syria and neighboring Iraq have the high-est numbers of foreign fighters on any modern jihadist battlefield,and there has already been an exodus of some fighters to the West.Da’ish [an alternative term for ISIS] has also been active in someSyrian refugee camps in the Middle East. There is some evidencethat at least one of the Paris terrorists who killed more than 120 peo-ple may have come in the current wave of Syrian war refugees. Morethan 4 million refugees have come to Europe since Syrian govern-ment forces and rebels started fighting. Finally, the U.S. intelligencecommunity’s understanding of extremists in Syria is not as good as

10

in many other jihadist battlefields, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, be-cause of more limited intelligence collection capabilities.[Jones, 2015]

Seth Jones is a counterterrorism expert who is well known in the academiccommunity for co-authoring a ground-breaking and frequently-cited study withLibicki entitled "How Terrorist Groups End". In his testimony, Jones providesdetails on previous threats by refugees, including the screening error whichallowed two known terrorists to be resettled in Bowling Green, Kentucky due toa screening error where they proceeded to attempt to buy Stinger missiles. Jonesthen details the Syrian refugee vetting process and his suggestions for correctingits shortfalls. Those suggestions and their consequences will be discussed laterin this paper, but the key take-away here is that the necessary improvementswill slow down the process, which the administration in its threat to veto thebill passed in the US House has already stated is politically unacceptable.

We always take a risk in accepting any refugee. That risk is simply a factof life. The specific threat of ISIS and the sheer impossibility of vetting manyrefugees to any degree, however, makes the risk of bulk relocation to dispersedlocations within the mainland United States foolhardy. Perhaps the risk can bemitigated, but the idea that there is no risk, or that the concerns of state/locallaw enforcement are imaginary is utterly without merit.

4 Things We Should Probably Do AnywayNo matter what the solution to the refugee crisis and no matter the aftermathof the Paris attacks, there are actions we should be taking regardless whichwould help reduce the potential threat from ISIS or any other foreign enemyattempting to infiltrate the United States. The Paris attacks did not create anyof these necessities, but they should focus attention on their urgency.

4.1 (Mostly) Secure Our BordersOur borders, particularly our southern one, are a security problem anyway.ISIS may try to exploit that situation, as the five Syrians with fake passportswho were apprehended in Honduras were attempting to do, but that threat isnot unique to ISIS. We do not need to turn the United States into a fortress,precisely; the border does not have to be 100% secure. Some illicit traffic caneven be a safety valve by allowing persecuted individuals to cross in eitherdirection. We have to make illicit passage difficult, however, or other attemptsat security, at airports, for instance, are useless. France temporarily closed itsborders after the attacks in Paris; we have no ability to do so at all.

4.2 Deportation of Existing Illegals Given Due ProcessGuarantees

People who are here in violation of our laws, by definition, do not belong here.We need to stop avoiding that issue. In the end, there is no way to successfully

11

deport some 11 million illegal aliens because in some cases, things are so screwedup that it will be impossible to determine who belongs and who does not. We donot need 100% success, we just need to make serious headway and then declarevictory. This does not really require a ’pathway to citizenship’, either. Once weget the problem under control, especially in dealing with illegal aliens who havealso committed other crimes, the remaining illegals will cease being aliens in ageneration.

Rounding up and deporting absolutely all of the illegals would require anation-wide door-to-door search, raise all kinds of Constitutional problems,cause injustice to people who ’look foreign’, violate the rights of all citizensby instituting a "papers please" environment which would then be a mask forcorruption, tyranny, and abuse. It would likely end in a bloodbath. We can dobetter than that.

But right now, an ISIS member using a fake document to masquerade asa refugee can simply disappear once in country. They have access to a readyblack market in alternate identity documents, businesses who regularly employillegals and are unlikely to ask questions, and even sanctuary cities who do notcooperate with what federal enforcement there is. If our borders are secure,we make headway at dealing with the illegals already here along with the largecorporations who are complicit in maintaining an illegal work force, the securitysituation will become more manageable.

However, if we are to do this while complying with our legal framework ofrights, people accused of being here illegally (among them those who may beacting in good faith trying to comply with our utterly Byzantine, conflicting,and incomprehensible immigration laws and procedures), must have due process.If they are to have due process, we must solve the immigration court backlog.

4.3 Provide Resources To Correct the Immigration CourtBacklogs

One of the aspects missing from the debate over deportation of existing illegalsis the fact that there is, as of September 2015, a three-year wait for an immi-gration hearing and a backlog of nearly half-a-million casesTRAC [2015]. Thoseaccused must sometimes spend that time in jail, months or years incarcerated,even if they are eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. That is not acceptable,and clearly would not be made better by adding more cases to the system.

Correcting this backlog will require more judges, more courts, and morefunding. As a strong fiscal conservative, I am deeply suspicious of governmentrequests to throw more money at a problem, but if we are serious about dealingwith illegal aliens already in-country (and we should be), then having a fair,timely, and just process to adjudicate the issue is not optional.

12

4.4 Increase Public Resilience In the Face of TerroristThreats

The Academic Consensus Definition of Terrorism (ACDT 2011) has as a criticalcomponent that terrorism is an indirect tactic. The casualties of the attack arenot the intended victims. Rather, the victims are the people who are terrorizedby the violence and who, it is hoped, will act in favor of the terrorist’s politicalaims:

Terrorism refers on the one hand to a doctrine about the pre-sumed effectiveness of a special form or tactic of fear-generating,coercive political violence...

7. The direct victims are not the ultimate target (as in a classicalassassination, where victim and target coincide) but serve as messagegenerators, more or less unwittingly helped by the news values ofthe mass media, to reach various audiences and conflict parties thatidentify either with the victims’ plight or the terrorists’ professedcause.[Schmid, 2011, 86-87]

Simply put, if a community is resilient in the face of crisis, they are less sus-ceptible to being terrorized, and the political utility of terrorism is reduced.According to Furedi[2007, 180-181], this resilience requires that the public havean active role in its own protection and recovery, and that it feel competent inits own ability to deal with a crisis. Furedi warns that the typical policy makerapproach to deciding what resilience means and imposing it on the communitythrough policy is counterproductive: resilience is an innate quality of ’commu-nity’ itself, not something which can be tacked on the outside. In order to feel’competent in its own ability’, community must actively own its capacity torespond and must participate directly in its own response and recovery. Whenthe public is active in this capacity, they are less likely to panic in the crisis,more likely to heal, and much less likely to be coerced by violence.

The professionalization of emergency response, in particular, hurts this pro-cess by furthering a culture of helplessness. This overall concept and the roleof local volunteer organizations in it is discussed in greater depth in Vought[2015b]. For our purposes, it should be noted that a community which is re-silient in this way can more readily accept refugees. Given a strong communitysupport structure, refugees can be assimilated and become a resource more ef-ficiently at the same time that the threats which individual refugees may poseare more readily dealt with and the culture is less likely to become unstableor be successfully coerced by violence from terrorists who do infiltrate. Unfor-tunately, the majority of our communities are not resilient in this particularfashion and that needs to improve not only because of the threat of terrorismbut of disasters and calamities of all kinds.

13

Enlist Immigrant Communities To Help Us Identify ThreatsThe difficulty of identifying the threats within immigrant communities is ex-tremely difficult to solve from the outside. Such communities are often closeknit, there are cultural barriers to interacting with its members, and, as theyoften flee violence, oppression, and corruption, they are naturally distrustful ofauthority. The best and most accurate resource for identifying potential threats,however, is not high-tech surveillance or databases, it is the membership of thecommunity itself. The immigrants must be directly enlisted in intelligence-gathering, not from the perspective of selling-each other out, but of mutualprotection and safety within their new community. This requires the buildingof trust, not suspicion.

Unfortunately, as Human Rights Watch points out in its report "Illusion ofJustice":

Meanwhile, the law enforcement practices described in this reporthave alienated the very communities the government relies on mostto report possible terrorist threats and diverted resources from other,more effective ways, of responding to the threat of terrorism. Itsproclaimed success in convicting alleged terrorist conspirators hascome with serious and unnecessary costs to the rights of many ofthose prosecuted and convicted, to their families and communities,to the public, and to the rule of law. Ultimately, these costs threatento undermine the goal of preventing and effectively prosecuting andsanctioning terrorism crimes.Human Rights Watch [2014]

Many of the actions we have taken after 9-11 and activities which were routinebefore 9-11 but of which most citizens were unaware prior to the publicity asso-ciated with the PATRIOT acts, have made it much harder to gather intelligencein this way and therefore made the threat of a small number of terrorists hiddenin a stream of refugees considerably harder to mitigate. These actions includethe special registration and indefinite detentions, the use of paid or otherwiseself-interested informants, and violations of civil liberties mentioned above, aswell as vigilante violence against Muslims and people who simply "look Mus-lim", including the mass-murder of Sikhs, who are not Muslim, in Milwaukeepost-9-11. The result has been to make many of these communities close ranksand be less forthcoming with what they know.

As Dempsey and Cole note in their discussion of cultural or ethnic profiling,it both violates civil liberties and makes a poor law enforcement tool:

Profiling undermines effective law enforcement in still anotherway. It is virtually certain to alienate members of the targeted com-munities. Studies of policing have shown that it is far more effectiveto work with communities than against them. Where a communitytrusts law enforcement, people are more likely to obey the law, andmore likely to cooperate with the police in identifying and bringingto justice wrongdoers in their midst...[James X. Dempsey and DavidCole, 2006, 263]

14

Cynthia Lee’s observations on the general dysfunction of our search and seizuredoctrine and the resulting reduction of civic participation by minority groupsalso apply to intelligence efforts in the terrorism context[2012]. The enlistmentof immigrant communities in threat identification is intimately connected to thepreservation of civil rights in the face of violent attacks on our society. In orderto keep ourselves safe from the threats which will inevitably hide within thesecommunities, we must gain the trust and respect of these very communities.That effort will require political will, time, effort, and patience, none of whichare in ready supply within the current refugee crisis, but if it is not done, thelong term terror threat will persist and likely grow.

5 Controversial Things We Need To Tackle Head-On

5.1 Sever the Relationship Between Refugees and Politi-cal Quotas

On one side in this debate we have those arguing that the current screeningprocess is inadequate; on the other is the argument that the screening processis already long and complex. The fact is that both are true. Understandinghow this can be and potential solutions requires understanding of the vettingprocess and the realities of the war in Syria.

Seth Jones’ testimony[2015, 7] cites a US News article by TheresaWelsh[2015]to explain the existing process and why it is so long, including the fact it in-volves interaction between multiple agencies/departments, the turn around timefor tuberculosis tests (8 weeks), personal interviews, etc. Welsh explains thatthe current process is so long that it is unlikely to be able to process even theinitial influx of 10,000 refugees in the time allotted:

Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigrationand Naturalization Service, says the U.S. is out of practice whenit comes to responding to a massive refugee crisis. The last timeit dealt with a large number of resettlements was in the early ’90s,when the country took in refugees arriving by boat from both Cubaand Haiti.

But much has changed since then....Meissner said the U.S. is a key part of the global response, and

that resettlement is an important part of the traditionally strongAmerican reaction to global crises. She said the government mustlook at ways to speed up the vetting process if it is going to success-fully resettle 10,000 Syrians.[Welsh, 2015]

It is well worth reading the entirety of Welsh’s piece and the context of Meiss-ner’s statements. Seth Jones then builds on her statement in his testimony

15

given the reality that the screening process is already too slow and necessaryincreases in screening will likely slow it still further:

The U.S. decision in September to accept 10,000 Syrians duringthe next fiscal year could introduce pressure on the federal govern-ment to move more quickly in processing applications. 13 If newsecurity checks are introduced, it may be necessary to examine howtime can be saved at another point in the process, without sacrificingthe quality of the reviews.[Jones, 2015, 7]

Jones, in particular, cites changes made after the Bowling Green incident whereknown terrorists were allowed into the country as refugees because biometricdata gathered by one agency had not yet been procesessed into the system andmade available to the agency doing the screening. Changes to the process havebeen made since that incident, but, echoing the concerns of the FBI, he questionswhether the screening and data collection are yet adequate and outlines hissuggestions for changes[Jones, 2015, 7-8]. So, then we have the situation where:

1. the current screening process is already too long and we need to look foropportunities to streamline it[Welsh, 2015];

2. the screening process still needs improvement, which improvements willprobably lengthen the process still furtherJones [2015];

3. the underlying data gathering is likely still inadequate, even after thepost-Bowling Green changes [Jones, 2015, and the FBI], some of it due toinescapable conditions of the Syrian civil war;

4. we have made a political commitment to accept a rapidly increasing num-ber of refugees, the largest we have attempted in many decades[Welsh,2015];

This sets up a dangerous conflict of interest between the needs of security toaccept only the refugees who can be properly vetted (understanding that we cannever be 100% certain) at no more than the rate at which they can move throughthat process (which is understood to be too slow even without more/betterscreening), and a purely arbitrary political commitment. When push comes toshove and the vetting process cannot move refugees through quickly enough,which concerns will give way, politics or security? Anyone with experience inlarge organizations knows the answer to that question.

Anyone with experience in security knows that one cannot simultaneouslyincrease the thoroughness of vetting and commit to increases in throughput asequal priorities. One must be given clear priority over the other. When both aregiven an equal do-or-die organizational priority, the result is at best dysfunctionand at worst significant security lapses. A vetting process, by definition, mustbe free to reject applicants who do not meet the established criteria, even if thatresults in an inability to meet quotas. Otherwise, the overwhelming temptationwill be to short-circuit even the current, inadequate, screening process in orderto meet the promised output.

16

Applying this common sense approach to vetting refugees by divorcing se-curity from quotas would result in the following organizational priorities:

1. make the suggested improvements in the vetting process to improve theaccuracy of screening;

2. attempt to streamline the process, particularly the interagency interactionto remove unnecessary bottlenecks and improve the number of simultane-ous applications which can be processed, consistent with priority #1;

3. accept refugees at no more than the rate at which they can reasonablywork through this pipeline with no politically motivated quota;

4. assume that because of the inadequacy in screening data, we will miss ISISterorrotists who have no record in our databases which can be reliably tiedto them; based on an estimate of this risk, cap the number of refugees atsome number where our domestic law enforcement (federal, state, local)can reliably follow up even if this number ends up below the output ofpriority #3;

5.2 Reconsider Foreign Policy and Intervention GenerallyOur first response to the Paris attacks followed that of France: drop more bombs.Did we suddenly have more identified targets than we did the day before? Didwe have a better plan than we did the day before? Or was this more a matterof the Administration trying to look busy because the public was upset?

For those of us in the public who were cheered the new bombing raids andthe pictures of exploding buildings on the nightly news, did we stop to ask whowas being bombed? Whether these were the people responsible for the attacksin Paris? How many women and children (or men trying to keep their headdown and survive) were blown up along with whoever was the target? Did wewonder about the pictures of broken and charred bodies of relatives and lovedones, of women screaming while holding their dead children, doubtless beingcirculated over there? Did we stop to wonder how many relatives of those killedwould vow vengeance on the United States? Did we do the mental calculus ofhow many new refugees might be created? Did we consider the psychological ourpilots carry back to base which will (or should) become our burden when theyreturn to civilian life?

Or did we just think “Good. Those people deserve it,” or “Wow. Look atthe fireball!”?

It should be noted that I am hardly a pacifist. I have no objection to theUnited States, or any country, defending itself from unjust attack. I am agun owner and a law enforcement volunteer who will defend my family andcommunity at need. But when it is necessary to use force, it is rather criticalthat it be used justly and effectively, not to shore up flagging support in thepolls and not just because we are angry and need a convenient target. Are weproperly identifying those targets? Are we minimizing collateral damage (recall

17

that ISIS is occupying territory by force)? Are our strikes part of a coherent planwith an end strategy which leads, somewhere, to a potential end to hostilities?to a point where the stream of refugees might be able to return home? Are weconsidering the downstream cost of paying our debt to the soldiers who deliverviolence on our behalf to whom we promise benefits, care, and support?

Having worked in the DOD, I have, one thing taken with another, a greatstore of faith in the competence of our military, as I would in a sharp, well-tempered sword. We should not expect miracles from them, as even a goodsword will break when misused, but for the most part, when we have expectedmiracles, they have delivered. What I have considerably less faith in is theleadership, particularly the civilian leadership, the contractors and defense in-dustrial complex that sees dollar signs every time we drop a bomb, and in thevoting public who is often complicit.

I recall a letter I received from one of my US senators which announceda great victory for the Missouri taxpayer because she was able to prevent thecancellation of a defense project in this state— a project which the militaryitself professed to no longer want. She extolled the job-creating virtues andthe federal dollars it would continue to bring into the state. Somewhere alongthe way, she forgot that Missouri taxpayers also pay federal taxes, but, moreimportantly, should we decide how to arm and equip our soldiers based on thefederal money it brings into our state rather than by how much safer it makesMissourians? I pick on this specific senator, a prominent Democrat, not becauseit is an unusual example (I remember many such examples from my time in thePentagon) but to emphasize that it is a pervaisve, bipartisan problem.

So why discuss any of this here? What does this have to do with Syrianrefugees? It matters to the current discussion in two ways, the first is the singlebest argument for those in favor of bringing in as many refugees as we can take:our policies directly lead to the creation of ISIS and to the current civil warin Syria. I reject above that the United States has a duty to Christian charityto accept refugees. It is much harder to reject the idea that we need to acceptrefugees as a nation because we owe them as a nation. Oddly enough, thoughthis would be a good argument, it is seldom heard. At the very least, our overallforeign policy matters in a second way: only by having a frank public discussionof what lead to this refugee crisis do we have a hope of planning a responsewhich does not simply make things much worse.

An analysis of the policies which lead to the current Syrian situation wouldrequire a paper in itself, but I will present here a brief overview, along withsources for further exploration. The bottom line is that we intentionally ex-panded opposition Assad’s regime in Syria[Ahmed, 2015], a regime, while farfrom ideal, was largely secular and more or less tolerant of other faiths (e.g. Syr-ian Christians). This was necessarily so because Assad himself was a minorityin Syria (an Alawite Shia) and could not keep power without paying lip-serviceto secularism. For the same reason, the opposition we supported was largelysectarian opposition (Sunni extremists).

Our deposition of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (another more-or-less secular dic-tator who tolerated Christians) also created a power vacuum. The insurgency

18

against the United States occupation made the populace highly sympatheticto Al Qaeda whcih was then working across the Syria/Iraq border. In a shorttime, Al Qaeda In Iraq (AQI) dominated the insurgency and initiated a seriesof purges across Iraq, with out military making little headway at surpressingit. It was local opposition to the extreme sectarian policies of AQI, renamedthe Islamic State of Iraq (IS or ISI) which lead the Sheiks and Mullahs to turnagainst it in the Anbar Awakening. The Awakening, for the first time, gave usthe local support and critical intelligence to make headway against AQI[Jonesand Libicki, 2008, 91-97]:

Aided by the recoil of sheikhs, Sheikh Sattar organized 25 ofthe 31 tribes in al Anbar to join the Anbar Salvation Council inSeptember 2006. Through the awakening movement, the sheikhs setthemselves up as public enemies of AQI. Their primary strategy wasto persuade young tribesmen to join the police forces of Ramadi andother al Anbar towns to help take back the province in return for pro-tection by U.S. military forces. It took several months for the allianceto build its critical strength. As promised, the sheikhs persuadedtribal members to join the local police in large numbers.[Jones andLibicki, 2008, 91]

When the troop surge and the Anbar Salvation Council pushed AQI/IS outof Iraw, it quite naturally retreated to Syria and joined forces with the Daeshinsurgency against Assad, becoming the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS.

It should be noted that the existence of Al Qaeda itself along with the modernpopularity of Wahhabi Islam is in some sense our fault. The extreme Wahhabisect has existed for centuries, but did not gain much traction until the warin Afghanistan. Under US support, the Mujaheddin (literally, ’jihadist’) foughtagainst the Soviet occupation. Of particular importance was the Wahhabi cleric,Sheik Abdullah Azzam:

Azzam was a key figure in the recruitment efforts and organisa-tion of foreign fighters. In 1984, he set up the Maktab al-Khadamat(MAK, the Afghan Services) that was responsible for coordinatingall the money, men and weapons in the struggle against the Sovi-ets. Teaming up with his pupil Osama Bin Laden, Azzam mobilisedthousands of foreign fighters that flocked to the conflict during the1980s. — [van Zuijdewijn and Bakker, 2014, pp 4]

Osama bin Ladin, initially trained and funded by us, went on to be the leadingproponent of extremist Islam.

Terrorism researcher Robert Pape, author of Dying To Win: The StrategicLogic of Suicide Terrorism, presents a theory of how our military presence inthe Middle East has affected the use of suicide terrorism in the modern age. Hisideas are discussed in Vought [2015a], introducing two of Pape’s video lecturesand a selection of readings on suicide terrorism research.

At each stage, our interventions create new monsters and the necessity forlater interventions. At each stage, we pay in blood and treasure to stop what

19

we ourselves unleashed. Would some of these things have happened without ourintervention? It is difficult to tell: there is evil in the world and certainly notall of it is our fault, but by taking action, we also assume responsibility whichmight not otherwise be ours. It behooves us to take the best action that wecan (which is sometimes nothing). Certainly, going forward, we must heed thelessons and missteps of the past.

5.3 Develop and Enforce Rational and Effective Immigra-tion Policy

One of the reasons our policy on refugees makes no sense is that our immigrationpolicy as a whole makes no sense. For the most part, few people on any side ofthe debate, whether for more or less immigration, believe that our policy doesmake sense. Whether generally for more immigration or less immigration, thestaggering number of illegal immigrants underlines the fact that our policy isnot working: if for less immigration, why make it harder for people to immigratelegally if they can walk in or overstay a visa? If for more immigration, what sensedoes it make to have a pile of expensive, complex, and obtuse laws which arenot being followed anyway? If a (legal) immigrant, how is it fair that you waitedin line and worked all the way through our awful system but someone else doesnot have to? How do we maintain national security or keep out people who arethreats (if we could even agree on who is threatening) if we have no idea who iscoming or going in the first place? How does it make sense to push for improvedsecurity in the refugee process if an agent of ISIS can apparently provide a falseaddress on a K-1 visa application and not get caught in a homeland securitybackground check?[Serrano and Bennett, 2015]

Our current policy is a patchwork of changes on top of the Immigration andNaturalization Act of 1965 which was formulated during both the Cold Warand the Civil Rights Movement, showing conflicted influences of both. Overthe intervening time, it has been changed both to expand immigration in or-der to meet corporate demands for guest workers and to updated Cold War-eraguilt-by-association, secret evidence, and general paranoia about immigrantsto the fears of the day (in, for instance, the 1996 AEDPA and the PATRIOTActs[James X. Dempsey and David Cole, 2006, 236]). It has been changed tomake deportation easier, to reduce judicial review of deportations and to pre-vent those at risk of deportation from actually leaving the country. Deportationfigures are at historic highs and yet, changes in the way that illegal border cross-ings are handled, begun under the Bush Administration and expanded underObama, make those figures confusing and misleading. The immigration courtbacklogs mentioned above (section 4.3) leave cases in limbo for years. Our secu-rity checks for entry into the country are at once overly-complex, cumbersome,chronically backlogged, and ineffective.

For the most part, neither the public, people attempting to legally immi-grate, nor even the courts seem to have a solid grasp on how immigration law isactually supposed to work or when the courts are supposed to review proceed-ings. A bewildering array of categories, quotas, agencies, and lists keep even

20

the most intrepid citizen from understanding what current policy actually is,let alone how to fix it. As George Borjas, himself a refugee from Cuba and nowa US citizen, puts it:

Part of the problem is that the immigration debate, like mostdebates over social policy, frames the issues in black and white: onemust be in favor either of wide-open borders or of highly restric-tive immigration policies. Because the political lines are so clearlydelineated, many of the participants in the policy debate quickly as-sociate new evidence or new arguments with one of the two opposingcamps. However, as with most things in life, there is a large rangeof policy options in varying shades of gray.

... [I]mmigration imparts both benefits and costs on the UnitedStates. As a result, the evidence does not support either of the twoextremes in the immigration debate.[Borjas, 2011, 10]

Given that immigration policy is an issue that all soveriegn nations have to face,that some degree of immigration is desirable, but that the potential supply ofimmigrants is staggeringly large, the first step in the debate must be at leastbasic agreement on the goals of immigration policy:

And there, in a nutshell, is what the immigration debate is allabout. How many people should the United States admit? And,since there are many more persons who will want to migrate to theUnited States than the country is willing to admit, which of the visaapplicants should the country accept?[Borjas, 2011, 25]

This brings us back to the discussion of Dworkin at the beginning of this piece:if we cannot agree on basic principles, the goals of US immigration policy itself,more detailed policy debate is pointless. This includes the realization that thegoals which we will likely not agree on need to be set aside in favor of thosewhich we do potentially share, for which we can come up with clear, fair, andenforceable policies.

One such goal I would submit is that a primary goal of immigration policyshould be to promote the entry of new citizens who will partake of all the benefitsof citizens in much the same way that a guarantee of our founding was that allnew states would enter the union on the same footing as the original ThirteenColonies (we were not to become a colonial power in the way that Britain was tothe Americas). By that same principle, we should not be creating a permanentunderclass of people— slavery-lite— to do our menial labor or who simply savelarge corporations over the cost of hiring native workers while having little powerto negotiate the terms of their contracts. Nor should we have large numbersof illegal aliens in a semi-permanent legal limbo.2 In the case of refugees, allthings being equal, we should not be bringing people into the country who wethen have to keep in a state of suspicion, under surveillance and threat of later

2The danger to immigrants of Foucalt’s ’bio-power’, or Agamben’s concept of ’bare life’, alegal limbo making someone effectively less-than-human, discussed in Arnold [2011, 66].

21

deportation, with a lesser and unjust standard of review; it is better in that senseto promise hospitality and protection to fewer than to promise and potentiallyrenege.

5.4 Reconsider the War on DrugsOne cannot discuss the problems with immigration policy and terrorist infiltra-tion without also giving a nod to the difficulties caused by the War On Drugs.Not only does the drug trade drive illegal border traffic in the obvious way anddoes the smuggling aparatus and international narcotics gang traffic provideready-made illicit conduits which potential terrorists can exploit to enter thecountry, but the collateral damage of the Drug War drives substantial amountsof illegal immigration in a refugee stream from South America[Planas, 2015,Gray, 2015]. Once again, we face the conundrum that attempting to correctsecurity problems with legal refugee resettlement makes little sense in the faceof a flow of illegal refugees and organized criminal gangs driven by our ownpolicies.

6 ConclusionThe debate over Syrian refugees has become corrosive and divisive with bothsides dehumanizing their opponents. There are legitimate security concernsraised by refugees, the states have a clear duty and interest in examining federalrefugee policy, and the current screening process is problematic. At the sametime, the more reactionary anti-refugee rhetoric is unjustified and refugee policyis just one part of much larger policy issues we would often prefer to ignore.

It would be tempting to bow to pressure to reduce or eliminate refugee reset-tlement programs without fixing these underlying issues of a broken screeningprocess, a broken immigration policy, and the collateral damage of intervention-ist foreign policies, tempting, but quite dangerous. At some point, there is noway to avoid confronting the fundamental matters of principle that divide us,of which this one issue is merely a recent symptom. Dramatic reductions inimmigration in response to security concerns would therefore only be useful asa tool to force the larger issue of overall policy reform.

In the narrower realm of refugee screening, real security concerns must bedivorced from the political ego involved in committing to specific quotas. In thispaper, problems in the screening process are discussed and more rational prior-ities for addressing them are presented. The states must be directly involved inthe resettlement process. This necessarily includes directly addressing concernsof state and local law enforcement, not as obnoxious supplicants begging fordata from federal agencies, but as officials discharging a legal and moral dutyto the safety of their own citizens.

22

ReferencesThe Constitution of the State of Missouri, 2015. URL http://www.moga.mo.gov/mostatutes/moconstn.html.

Nafeez Ahmed. Pentagon report predicted West’s sup-port for Islamist rebels would create ISIS, 2015.URL https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-west-saw-isis-as-strategic-asset-b99ad7a29092.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. New Advent, online edition, 2008. URLhttp://www.newadvent.org/summa/.

Kathleen Arnold. American Immigration After 1996:The Shifting Ground of Political Inclusion. PSUPress,2011. URL https://www.scribd.com/book/272862228/American-Immigration-After-1996-The-Shifting-Ground-of-Political-Inclusion.

Andrew Blake. Franklin Graham: ’We should stop all immigration of Muslimsto the U.S.’, jul 2015. URL http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/20/franklin-graham-we-should-stop-all-immigration-mus/.

George J. Borjas. Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Econ-omy. Princeton University Press, 2011. URL http://www.scribd.com/book/232954589.

Esther Castillejo. Growing Number of States Refuse to Accept SyrianRefugees in Wake of Paris Attacks - ABC News, nov 2015. URL http://abcnews.go.com/US/states-refuse-accept-syrian-refugees-wake/story?id=35231800.

Center on National Security at Fordham Law (CNS). By the Numbers: ISISCases in the United States. Technical report, Center on National Security atFordham Law, 2014. URL http://centeronnationalsecurity.org/sites/default/files/BYTHENUMBERS-ISISCASESINTHEUS.pdf.

Martha Crenshaw. The Debate over "New" vs. "Old" Terrorism. Val-ues and Violence, pages 1–34, 2009. ISSN 1871-0409. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4020-8660-1\_8. URL http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-8660-1_8.pdf.

Ronald Dworkin. Taking Rights Seriously. Harvard University Press, Cam-bridge, MA, 1980. ISBN 0-674-86711-4.

Ronald Dworkin. Is Democracy Possible Here?: Principles for a New PoliticalDebate. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008. ISBN 978-0-691-13872-5.

Frank Furedi. Invitation To Terror: the Expanding Empire of the Unknown.Continuum Books, 2007. ISBN 9780826499578.

23

James P Gray. Commentary: War on drugs is driving immi-grant children north, aug 2015. URL http://www.latimes.com/tn-dpt-me-0817-commentary3-20140815-story.html.

Human Rights Watch. Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terror-ism Prosecutions. Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, 2014. ISBN9781623131555. URL http://www.hrw.org/node/126101.

James X. Dempsey and David Cole. Terrorism and the Constitution: Sac-rificing Civil Liberties In The Name Of National Security. The NewPress, 3rd edition, 2006. URL https://www.scribd.com/book/251562727/Terrorism-and-the-Constitution-Sacrificing-Civil-Liberties-In-The-Name-Of-National-Security.

Brian Michael Jenkins. The Implications of the Paris Terrorist Attack forAmerican Strategy in Syria and Homeland Security: Testimony submittedbefore the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committeeon November 19, 2015. Technical report, RAND Corporation, 2015.

Seth G. Jones. The Syrian Refugee Crisis and U . S . National Security: Testi-mony given before the Committee on Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigra-tion and Border Security, United States House of Representatives November19, 2015. Technical report, RAND Corporation, 2015.

Seth G. Jones and Martin C. Libicki. How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons ForCountering al Qa’ida. Rand Corporation, 2008. ISBN 9780833045645. URLhttp://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9539.html.

Phillip B Kurland and Ralph Lerner, editors. The Founder’s Constitution.University of Chicago Press, web edition, 1987. URL http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/.

Cynthia Lee. Reasonableness With Teeth : the Future of Fourth Amend-ment Reasonableness Analysis. Miss. L.J., 81(1133):51, 2012. URL http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/800/.

Ian Millhiser. No, State Governors Can’t Refuse To Accept Syrian Refugees,2015. URL http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/11/16/3722628/no-state-governors-cant-refuse-to-accept-syrian-refugees/.

Jethro Mullen, Don Melvin, and Paul Armstrong. Terror in Paris: What weknow so far, nov 2015. URL http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/europe/paris-attacks-at-a-glance/.

News-Leader. Nixon: Syrian refugees are federal responsibility, nov2015. URL http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/11/16/gov-nixon-releases-statement-on-refugees/75890664/.

Roque Planas. Want To Reduce Illegal Immigration? End the DrugWar, aug 2015. URL http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/want-to-reduce-illegal-immigration-end-the-drug-war_55e0b5f7e4b0c818f617d3d1.

24

Alex P. Schmid, editor. The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research. Rout-ledge, New York, NY, 2011. ISBN 0-203-82873-9.

Richard A Serrano and Brian Bennett. San Bernardino shoot-ers began plotting attack before their marriage, FBI chiefsays, dec 2015. URL http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-san-bernardino-shooters-preplanning-20151209-story.html.

TRAC. News From TRAC: Current Average Wait for an Immigration CourtHearing is Nearly Three Years, 2015. URL http://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.150921.html.

Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn and Edwin Bakker. ReturningWestern foreign fighters : The case of Afghanistan , Bosniaand Somalia. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism –The Hague, 5(2):12, 2014. URL http://icct.nl/publication/returning-western-foreign-fighters-the-case-of-afghanistan-bosnia-and-somalia/.

Lorenzo Vidino and Seamus Hughes. ISIS In America: From Retweets To Raqqa.Technical report, Program On Extremism, George Washington University,2015.

Eric Vought. Dying To Win: Video Introductions To Suicide Terrorism Studiesand Further Reading, 2015a. URL http://radishsaltant.blogspot.com/2015/12/dying-to-win-video-introductions-to.html.

Eric Vought. Volunteerism and a culture of resilience takes the "terror" out ofTerrorism, 2015b. URL http://lcmoauxiliary.org/CMS/node/311.

Teresa Welsh. Why the U.S. Can’t Immediately Resettle Syrian Refugees,sep 2015. URL http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/09/15/why-the-us-cant-immediately-resettle-syrian-refugees.

25