Travel ban versus humanity

Last weekend the White House issued an Executive Order (EO) entitled “Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Entry into the United States.”  The EO addresses standards for immigrant, nonimmigrant, and refugee entry into the United States.  Since that time there has been a political and humanitarian tug-of-war over the legitimacy of some or all of this EO.  The EO, per President Trump, is a work-in-progress and the list of countries impacted and the sternness of the travel restrictions were both subject to evolve.  Curiously yesterday, the President tweeted about this topic, more than a handful of times(!), but basically and defensively covering the same argument in different ways.  It still is unclear why some countries, such as Saudi Arabia or some non-Middle Eastern terrorist capitals, are not included in the ban.  That lack of transparency is highly unfortunate (and gives the perception something well-meaning is instead total crackpot), but so was the status quo when he came to office.

As shown in these articles (here, here, here), over the decades, terrorists have flown into this country and planned and committed their mayhems.  These terrorists have almost always had some uncomfortable commonalities that don’t sit well with politically-correct folks (such as nationality, religion, age, gender, values, etc.)  And yet while we have had this vetting in place to screen-out the highest risk individuals, many hundreds of bad people still pass through this imperfect security system and come into our country to at sometime commit evil.  No system is perfect, and there are edge-cases and our legal system that adds to the fault. 

A fair question to ask though is this: what if our security process -which President Trump inherited- is as good as it gets, and there is nothing more we can do to probabilistically and logically screen out the medium-risk individuals (other than an all-out travel ban?) 

In other words, using the diagram below to make a basic point (the annual statistics are purposefully not precise as they are with previous articles but they are there shown to follow the illustrative point, but the actual lifetime odds are >100x what is shown below with each act killing many Americans at a time), what if we know tens of thousands of medium-risk people will pass through our rigorous security system and ONE will commit a heinous act?  Is that acceptable for most Americans?  Is it humane to the >99% of Muslim travelers to be banned, on account of what a stranger sharing their religion and other risk factors has traditionally done in the U.S. (or around the world?)

Our personal view has always been that the ban is highly imperfect.  Terrorists come from more than just the 7 forbidden countries that the Trump Administration has highlighted.  More social interrogation questions should be performed on riskier passengers.  Some Muslims obviously hide the vicious intentions of others and should feel comfortable sharing that information with authorities, while not feeling unprotected and that they will be expelled from the U.S.  But at the same time, a restrictive ban EO beyond that overly reprimands the good Muslims who should be able to come and be freely successful in the U.S., just like anyone else.  And right now this group, generally speaking, is unhappy.  We could also say that in the illustration above, there are many passengers who are not at high-risk from a terrorism perspective.  Those 90% or so are colored in green, will have a small fraction (a hundred of the million passengers) who will anyway commit their own violence on Americans.  We know this based on historical events, and the moral here is that we do not as a result place a travel ban on these vast number of other visitors.