Quote:
Originally Posted by cbinker
More misrepresentation, ISIS has vowed to infiltrate refugees, already happening in Europe. He said to TEMPORARILY ban the refugees until there is a better vetting process.
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Here's the thing. This is one of those areas that's incredibly easy to debunk if one just walks through what's actually happening, does some number-crunching, and also realizes that nothing in the real world reduces risk to zero.
The US admitted 78 million visitors from other countries in 2015.
http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2015-I-001/index.html
18 Million from Mexico, 20 Million from Canada, and an additional 38 million from any other location on the planet. These are all folks that filled out those I-94 forms on the way in; let's put aside our concerns that there may be X million more, and keep it at that known #. 99+% of these 78 million individuals had *way* less vetting than what is necessary for the refugees to gain asylum in the US. From a risk standpoint, we'd
hope that ISIS and any other group is using the refugee process to try and get evildoers into the country. We'd be way more likely to identify any bad actors that way, compared to any normal tourist visa or other traditional entry to the country.
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link to current refugee process)
All of the numbers thrown around in the most recent debate talking about these huge percentage increases, it's the tiniest rounding error. Whether it's 5,000 refugees, 50,000, or even 250,000; that is still such a tiny fraction of people coming to the country (a fraction of 1 percent), that using that as a target to reduce risk just wouldn't work. Whether it's quintupled tomorrow, or cut to zero immediately, it still does nothing to make the US any safer, by any reasonable measure.