President Donald Trump is soon expected to sign an executive order temporarily blocking people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the US with visas. Many view the move as the first step toward realizing the pledge Trump made on the campaign trail to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.
While Trump’s proposal might be cheered among his base, critiques of the executive order have been plentiful.
According to data collected by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, between 1975 and 2015 there have been zero American deaths on US soil at the hands of foreign terrorists from the seven Muslim countries listed in the leaked draft executive order.
In fact, deaths at the hands of foreign nationals on US soil are exceedingly rare. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp writes:
Virtually all the deaths from immigrant attacks (98.6 percent) came from one event: 9/11. Other than that, fatal immigrant-linked terrorist attacks in the US were vanishingly rare. The average likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in which an immigrant participated in any given year is one in 3.6 million —even including the 9/11 deaths.
Watch this video featuring Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, who explains why Trump’s proposed executive action should be the cause of concern for more than just the individuals from the seven banned nations list.
