The worst part about senior year in high school in California was waking up extra early on Tuesday mornings to attend model UN meetings. We had to be there at 7 a.m., which was grueling for a nerdy night owl like me, but I usually made it on time… barely. On one memorable Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, I was running very late and racing to get to school on time. Still, I wasn’t late enough to forget to turn on the radio. The radio hosts were frantically and nervously talking over each other about the news of a plane crash in New York City. That was the first time I heard about the 9/11 attacks. School was de facto cancelled for the rest of the day as I was glued to the television except between class periods, eating lunch, and calling my parents to tell them to turn on the news. Fox News, CNN, the radio, and newspapers dominated my time for days as they did for millions worldwide.

Watching one of the towers collapse on TV was surreal. I remember the confusion, “Did it fall?!” a classmate gasped as we all saw the buildings and thousands of people replaced by a cloud of rubble, smoke, and death. That day changed the United States forever and definitively ended The Nineties, a decade of global prosperity when the US, global capitalism, and democracy were ascendant. What followed was war, shrinking civil liberties, Islamism, bigger government, nationalism, fear, an Axis of Evil, and nativism. In a sign of the times, my father made me peel the “Don’t Steal, the Government Hates Competition” bumper sticker off my car. He thought it was unseemly in a time of war and might even attract vandalism. Many drivers put mini-American flags on their car antennas or flying off plastic clips hanging on their side windows to show patriotic fervor. An age of terrorism and a global war against it had arrived. The country was suffering, but it was a good time to be a terrorism expert.

Terrorism analysis is a vocation that attracts hysterical doomsayers who are willing to trade an almost unlimited amount of wealth and liberty for an infinitesimal reduction in the low chance of terrorism. The most rational among them call terrorist attacks “low probability and high-cost events.” That’s half right, and even that analysis gives terrorists too much credit. Terrorism is a low-probability and low-cost event, on average. The most expensive thing about terrorism is how terrorized people and countries react. They pass expensive counter terrorism laws, restrict civil liberties, start wars, demonize foreigners, and restrict immigration. Sound familiar? It’s a short history of American policy since 9/11, served with a side of freedom fries.

Most terrorist attacks don’t kill or injure anybody. It’s counterintuitive to realize that, especially to those of us who watched the Twin Towers fall on TV, saw it firsthand, or experienced the world change in response, but the facts are plain as vanilla. Terrorists aren’t very deadly. Of all of them, only some are foreign-born, like the 9/11 hijackers, but few immigrants are terrorists, and they are not coming to blow you up.

What Terrorism Means

Terrorism is the pornography of violence – we know it when we see it.^[3] But we still have to strive to define it to have any hope of rationally discussing it. Repeating from an earlier chapter: Terrorism is political violence that isn’t committed by the government. Terrorism is a specific crime defined by the motivations of the attackers, like many other crimes. A bank robber who holds tellers hostage terrifies them as he empties the vault, but his goal is to take the money and run. Terrifying hostages is not part of his normal criminal motivation to rob because it is a tactic he uses to successfully get the money. Political change is not the goal. The terrorist’s goal is to change the world by affecting politics, economics, religions, or to achieve other broader social goals like protecting the environment, changing the United States, or spreading ideologies like Islamism. Hate crimes targeting individuals based on their religion, race, or other characteristics are more difficult to distinguish from terrorism, and most experts don’t have a good way of separating the two, but we can work with that.

Governments can’t be terrorists; they must be “non-state actors,” as the experts say. Excluding governments from the definition of terrorism is odd at first blush. Still, it makes sense because terrifying people by using violence for political, economic, social, or other goals is the raison d’être of governments. By that definition, most actions by a government would be terrorism, which would make the word useless when discussing the issue widely. The term “terrorism” is useful to describe those who pursue government-like “big picture” goals from outside the government, often by pressuring it with private violence.

State-sponsored terrorism is a hybrid where the government supports terrorists via subsidy or by providing a safe haven for them, usually as they attack or plan attacks against people abroad or foreign governments. Taliban-ruled Afghanistan protected al Qaeda terrorists before the 2001 US invasion. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not shelter terrorists despite repeated claims by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and other American government officials to justify the 2003 invasion. The main argument for the invasion was that Saddam had nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and that he would give those weapons to terrorists – a handover that would be easier because Iraq was harboring them. Don’t think too hard about how illogical it would be for a dictator of a small country to want to hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists that would certainly be traced back to him if they are ever used; there’s no reason there. Most Americans ignored the absurdity of the argument at the time too.

On September 25, 2002, President Bush said, “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.”^[4] Speaking the next day on the same subject, Bush continued with, “There are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year.”^[5] On October 14, 2002, Bush said Saddam “is a man that we know has had connections with al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army.”^[6] On February 6, 2002, Bush put it all together when he said:

One of the greatest dangers we face is that weapons of mass destruction might be passed to terrorists, who would not hesitate to use those weapons. Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.^[7]

None of this turned out to be true, but the world only definitively learned that after the invasion, when the US was well on the way to sacrificing thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and many trillions of dollars for nothing. American intelligence experts and administration officials weren’t sending their best. But some, I assume, are good people.

When terrorist movements are big and well-organized enough, they become insurgents who want to take over the government, have the potential military means or organization to do so, and the desire to form their own regime. Many governments have historically begun as insurgents, others with a more remote and distant history of being terrorists, and still others as bandits, invaders, or from local communities banding together to defend against all the above. The history of the Taliban in Afghanistan follows this pattern.

They were founded in 1994 by Mullah Mohammad Omar, who led a group of mostly religious students who had been educated in Pakistani madrassas. Omar eventually let the Taliban take over most of the country by 2001. They promised to restore order, enforce Sharia in post-Soviet invasion Afghanistan, and provide a safe haven for al Qaeda. They courted Islamist Arabs who, in turn, committed terrorist attacks against the Taliban’s Afghan enemies on their behalf. The Taliban then retreated to the mountains when the US invaded in 2001, emerging as terrorists and insurgents who eventually took over the country again in 2021. Omar remained a symbolic figure during their second insurgency, only dying in hiding in 2013 from tuberculosis.

The Taliban’s multiple transitions from insurgent-terrorist to government back to insurgent-terrorist and then back to government are unusually clear and reminiscent of the revenue-maximizing stationary bandit theory of government. In that theory, bandits loot an area and then move on until one chieftain gets the wits to stay put to loot continuously. By becoming stationary, he can capture a constant stream of loot. The chieftain then wants to make sure he gets as much loot as possible, so he makes plunder regular by turning looting into taxation that he seeks to maximize. He also resolves disputes between the people he rules so they can spend more time working to pay taxes instead of fighting. He then defends the area from other barbarians so he can keep all the revenue for himself. This is called national defense. Lastly, he punishes those he rules when they don’t cooperate. The Taliban largely followed this pattern. Other governments started by pooling resources for big projects like diverting rivers for intensive irrigation by centralizing violence.^[8] Governments often send people who have many problems, and they bring those problems with them. Some, I assume, are perhaps good people.

Defining terrorism by the attackers’ motivations is another step in maintaining law and order. American Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence considers the intentions of criminals when deciding which crime to charge them with. Premeditated intentional homicide, also known as murder in the first degree, is more harshly punished than manslaughter or the accidental killing of somebody. Intentional murder in the spur of the moment is between those two extremes, more severely punished than manslaughter but less than premeditated murder. Adding terrorism on top of murder or attempted murder is an extension of motivational reasoning applied to other crimes like arson, fraud, espionage, and, in other countries, regicide. Law professors say that the criminal must commit the guilty act with a guilty mind for his actions to be a crime. Terrorism goes a step further by asking, “Why did the criminal commit that crime?” It’s the logic of hate crime legislation applied to national security.

The legal and philosophical problems with distinguishing terrorism from other crimes are obvious. If someone intends to kill people and succeeds, why does it matter more if he did it to promote a political cause rather than to get revenge for a personal insult? It’s the same compelling argument against hate crimes existing. The differences don’t matter, but greater punishments for a terroristic motivation incentivize prosecutors and investigators to spend more time trying to find those motivations. Murdering a crowd of people in a church, synagogue, or mosque for religious reasons is not different than murdering them for other, more common criminal motivations. Special terrorism laws shouldn’t exist, but the only downside of such a clean and correct decision is that we would have to rely on popular social definitions of the term that are wrong.

Nowadays, the popular social definition means that every heinous or disturbing crime is labelled terrorism. Former Attorney General William Barr said that Mexican drug cartels are “effectively terrorist organizations” when attempting to justify the use of the US military south of the border to stop drug and migrant smuggling.^[9] President Trump called the Black Lives Matter riots of mid-2020 terrorism, and FBI Director Christopher Wray called the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot against the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory terrorism.^[10] Those crimes were all heinous, but smuggling drugs and migrants, looting stores, and rioting on the steps of the Capitol don’t pass the “I know it when I see it” standard. They aren’t the pornography of political violence. British mathematician and risk analyst Gordon Woo coined the term “stochastic terrorism” in 2002, which is when a speaker uses dog whistles and other vague language to inspire terrorists to attack while maintaining plausible deniability.^[11] We’re suffering from something even more annoying: A decades-long bout of terrorism inflation.

Avoid the popular modern definition and embrace tradition. Terrorists imagine a different world and want to bring it about through violence. Osama Bin Laden wasn’t motivated by financial gain; he was the son of a wealthy Saudi entrepreneur, and he wanted for nothing material. He and his confederates were motivated to spread Islamist governments throughout the world and kill or convert non-Muslims or Muslims they didn’t think were religious enough. His motivation was religious and ideological. He and Al Qaeda were too weak to accomplish their goals by conquest; they didn’t have armored and infantry divisions, so they engaged in terrorism – the tool of weak and motivated people. Sometimes those weak people really change the world, but mostly not in the ways they intend.

Immigrant Terrorists and Their Victims

Terrorists are weak but not harmless. Their threat rises and falls with their goals, motivations, and competence of terrorists and counterterrorist law enforcement, to say nothing of the role of chance. FBI director Christopher Wray said, “We’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole ‘nother level after October 7 [Hamas’ 2023 attack on Israel],” in June 2024.^[12] Wray’s judgment relies on intelligence reports and other secret government information. Although we don’t have access to the same information as the FBI director, such information isn’t the entire story. Gauging the scale of that threat and whether it’s higher today depends on the base rate of foreign-born terrorism.

The base rate of foreign-born terrorism is the underlying chance of an attack occurring normally without considering any specific information. Looking at the base rate is the starting point of any analysis whether it’s how dangerous a new infectious disease like COVID-19 is likely to be, whether crime has risen, or the chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack. When Wray says that the threat from foreign terrorists has risen to a “whole ‘nother level,” he should explain the new, higher level relative to a lower base rate. He doesn’t mean that, but it’s the implicit way to compare how threats and risks change over time. Thus, we should all start with the base rate and then adjust upward or downward based on new evidence.

The base rate of foreign-born terrorism is startlingly low in the United States. From 1975 through the end of 2024, a total of 3,046 people were murdered in attacks on US soil committed by 237 foreign-born terrorists. About 98 percent of those deaths were the result of the 9/11 attacks – an outlier that is hundreds of times deadlier than the next deadliest foreign-born attack (more on outliers below). The annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist was about 1 in 4.6 million per year. By comparison, the annual chance of being murdered in a normal non-terrorist homicide was just less than about 1 in 14,000 per year. Foreign-born terrorists are responsible for less than one-half of one percent of all the murders that have occurred in the US since 1975.^[13] The size of the ship matters more than the motion of the ocean when evaluating the hazard of terrorism.

In an earlier chapter on crime, the homicide conviction and crime rates are presented at normal rates per 100,000 of the population. From 1975 to the end of 2024, the US homicide rate was hundreds of times higher than the chance of being murdered in a normal homicide. Comparing deaths in terrorist attacks to non-terrorist murders is most apt, but it’s also useful to compare terrorism to other everyday risks. More people died in a single month of car accidents in 2024 than in all the attacks by foreign-born terrorists since 1975.^[14] These are all different ways of saying that the base rate of foreign-born terrorism is low and you should stop worrying about it so much.

These numbers are not intended to trivialize the real harm caused by terrorists, but there’s no other reasonable way to discuss the hazard of foreign-born terrorists without pointing out how small it is. Even the most frenzied analyst wouldn’t claim the chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack is 100 percent. The most skeptical wouldn’t claim it’s zero. The actual chance is above zero, just not that far above zero. The risks are a lot closer to zero than to certainty.

Lest you think I juiced the numbers above, it’s probably an overcount of terrorists and their victims. They credit foreign-born terrorists for all deaths in attacks carried out by teams of foreign-born and native-born terrorists working together. They also credit everybody convicted for planning an attack, even in those cases where law enforcement or informants working for the FBI concocted the plots and did most of the work. This is more common than you think.

Sami Samir Hassoun told a police source that he wanted to commit a terrorist attack in Chicago. The source introduced Hassoun to two undercover FBI agents whom Hassoun thought were other terrorists. He researched, planned, and attempted an attack after repeatedly asking for money from the FBI agents and arguing that they should employ him.^[15] The undercover FBI agents agreed. Hassoun was so delusional that he “settled” for a bombing after setting aside half-baked schemes to unleash a virus on the city and poison its water supply.^[16] He fantasized that his bombing would force Mayor Daley out of office so Hassoun could “put some of our guys in.”^[17] He never mentions who his guys were, but they probably resided in his imagination like the rest of his fantastical plans. We can safely assume that none of them were good people, even if they were all imaginary.

Hassoun supplied himself with a backpack, and the FBI supplied a fake bomb that he planted before being promptly arrested by the FBI. Hassoun had no idea what he was doing, had no explosives training, and developed several weird plans that rotated between a city-wide coup, mass poisonings, and waging biological warfare. It takes two to tango, and Hassoun had the potential to be dangerous, but he did not concoct a serious terrorist plot. Nobody was in any danger from his non-functional FBI-supplied device except for Hassoun, who was sentenced to 23 years in prison.^[18]

The government tracks other plots from inception, so they never posed a hazard. The FBI arrested Pakistan-born Asif Merchant on July 12, 2024, just as he was concluding his plans to hire an assassin to kill then former President Trump in retaliation for an American drone strike that killed Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani in Iraq.^[19] Other former government employees were apparently targeted in his murder-for-hire scheme that was tracked by the FBI before he landed, thanks to an informant.^[20] The merchant was paid by the Iranian government or related Iranian quasi-governmental agencies and drew his plans on a napkin in his New York City hotel. No other cutlery was implicated in the plot.

Merchant legally entered the United States under an obscure authorization called “parole for significant public benefit.” This form of parole allows a foreigner who wouldn’t normally be able to legally enter to do so if the government thinks there is some big benefit to doing so and they couldn’t enter with another visa. The FBI thought the big public benefit of Merchant being here was to gather evidence to build an ironclad terrorism case against him and to arrest him, which they did.^[21] According to FBI sources who talked to Fox News, the bureau’s method of luring terrorist suspects here is not uncommon. Much of this substack series is critical of security agencies chasing their tails and exaggerating small threats, but this is an instance of the FBI behaving responsibly and intelligently to arrest a terrorist without putting anybody at risk.

Merchant isn’t the only example of the Iranian government showing interest in terrorism-for-hire plots. Naji Sharifi Zindashti is an Iranian drug dealer, smuggler, and criminal who contracted a hit on two Iranian defectors living in Maryland. Living in Maryland wasn’t punishment enough, apparently. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, Zindashti negotiated with Canadian Hells Angels Motorcycle Club member Damion Patrick John Ryan to carry out the hit for a $350,000 fee and $20,000 in travel expenses.^[22] Ryan then subcontracted the hit to Adam Richard Pearson, a Canadian friend of his living illegally in Minnesota. The plan never went anywhere, and Ryan and Pearson are currently in prison in Canada for unrelated charges. Zindashti never entered the United States. The Iranian government isn’t sending its best hitmen. Not all terrorists are so incompetent, though.

The nineteen 9/11 terrorists committed the deadliest attack in world history, and they escaped prior detection, but nine other potential hijackers were either stopped by immigration authorities or backed out of the plot before it was executed.^[23] Mohamed al-Kahtani tried to enter the United States in August 2001 but was turned back by a customs officer, and Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested by immigration agents after suspicious behavior at his Oklahoma flight school in the same month.^[24] Eighteen of the real hijackers entered on tourist visas, and one on a student visa.^[25] They were smarter than the average terrorist. They weren’t as delusional or crazy as others, and they succeeded in their attacks by bringing down the Twin Towers, hitting the Pentagon, crashing United Flight 93, and murdering 2,979 innocent people. The 9/11 hijackers are the exceptions that prove the rule that most of the terrorists mentioned above couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if the FBI showed them where the cows are.

Looking at the base rate in the security-enhanced post-9/11 world doesn’t show a vastly more dangerous world riven with terrorism. After 9/11, foreign-born terrorists on US soil murdered 44 people, or two per year on average. The average annual chance of being murdered in such an attack during that time was about 1 in 165 million per year. There were ten years without any deaths in foreign-born attacks on US soil from 2003 to the end of 2012. There were 119 foreign-born terrorists convicted of attacking or planning attacks on US soil during that time – only nine of them murdered anybody in their attacks, and 12 other terrorists injured people without killing them. The pre-9/11 world was mathematically safer, with 14 people murdered in foreign-born terrorist attacks on US soil, with an annual chance of being killed at about 1 in 455 million per year. That was certainly lower than the post-9/11 world, but both are close to the annual chance of being killed by a meteorite. We don’t need a global war on meteorites.

See Something, Say Something

Despite the low base rate of foreign-born terrorism, 9/11 comes to mind when I think of terrorism or read about an attack. I’m not the only one who suffers from their cognitive delusion. Everyone else thinks of 9/11 when terrorism is mentioned too. Politicians and government employees can’t stop talking about it. “Now, 9/11 was 20 years ago. But for us at the FBI, as I know it does for my colleagues here with me, it represents a danger we focus on every day. And make no mistake, the danger is real,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray in September 2021.^[26] Representative Bennie Johnson (D-MS) said, “We recognize the success we have had in preventing another 9/11-style attack, but are sobered by the challenges posed by long-standing and emerging homeland security threats.”^[27] The House Judiciary Committee mentioned 9/11 multiple times in its report on foreign-born terrorists crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, to both remind readers about those deadly attacks and because no deadly terrorists have crossed that border (more on that in a following chapter).^[28]

You can’t watch a Congressional hearing about terrorism without elected officials or witnesses invoking 9/11 to prove just about any point.^[29] Even outside of the Beltway, nary a comment about terrorism is made without reference to or thought of 9/11. Those attacks changed the world in myriad ways, but their greatest lingering psychological effect was inflating perceptions of the risks and harms of terrorism.

We all saw 9/11. We can’t stop thinking or talking about it when terrorism comes up, but it shouldn’t be that way. 9/11 was the deadliest, most destructive, and biggest terrorist attack in world history. The next deadliest attack was one-ninth as murderous. Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was brutal, targeted civilians, and was motivated by an attempt to change the world. Hamas’ attack was not normal criminal behavior, but it wasn’t a terrorist attack under the accepted definition because the government of Gaza committed it. That doesn’t diminish the brutality of the 10/7 attack nor the seriousness of Hamas’ goals because we must judge the actions of governments by the same standards that we apply to everybody else, but it’s the reason why this chapter doesn’t compare 9/11 to Hamas’ attack. The 10/7 attack has more in common with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, than with 9/11.

The scale of the 9/11 attacks is so much larger than other terrorist attacks that it can only be explained with statistics. Almost 98 percent of all people killed in terrorist attacks committed by foreign-born attackers on US soil since 1975 were killed on 9/11. For every 45 people murdered by terrorists on 9/11, 1 person was killed in another attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist. The next deadliest attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist was the 2015 San Bernardino shooting committed by Pakistani-born Tashfeen Malik and her American-born husband Syed Farook. For every person who was murdered in San Bernardino, 213 were murdered on 9/11. The 9/11 attacks dominate the study of terrorism because the scale of death and destruction is so much greater than anything else. But that also means that the 9/11 attacks are a statistical outlier that we shouldn’t use as our terrorism yardstick.

An outlier is a significantly more extreme event than the norm because it’s much bigger or smaller. In terms of terrorism, it means that 9/11 was much deadlier and more destructive than other terrorist attacks. Statisticians measure outliers by looking at the standard deviation, which tells you how spread out the number of murders across terrorist attacks is. The further away from the average a terrorist attack is, as measured by the number of standard deviations, the more likely it is to be an outlier. The more an attack’s death toll exceeds that typical range, the more of an outlier it is. However, it’s impossible to use those normal statistics here because three-quarters of the 237 foreign-born terrorists since 1975 didn’t kill anybody in their attacks. Yes, most foreign-born terrorists didn’t murder anyone in their attacks. And many failed to even commit attacks because they were arrested while plotting. It’s not the keystone cops versus the gang that couldn’t shoot straight; it’s the gang that couldn’t shoot straight because it hardly tries.

Even reorganizing the data by the deadliness of attacks and intended attacks rather than murders committed by individual terrorists shows that 83 percent of attacks committed by foreign-born terrorists didn’t result in any murders. Standard deviations are only meaningful in normally distributed data, a so-called bell curve, and deaths in terrorist attacks are not normally distributed because so many attacks have a death count of zero. The data on the deaths in terrorist attacks are “skewed,” which means that when you plot the number of deaths in terrorist attacks on a graph, most of them are on one side – zero in this case.^[30] Therefore, standard deviations are just not useful here.

Still, there are other ways to show that 9/11 is an outlier. The number of deaths at the 90^th percentile, which is for an attack that is deadlier than 90 percent of all other terrorist attacks, is a good way. The 90^th percentile deadliest attack by a foreign-born terrorist is one, and rises to two when all native-born attacks are included. The 99^th percentile deadliness for all attacks is 13 deaths. The deadliness of 9/11 is 229 times deadlier than terrorist attacks at the 99^th percentile of deadliness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term black swan to describe events with three defining characteristics.^[31] First, they are outside the realm of regular expectations and nothing in the past can convincingly point to their possibility. Second, they have a profound and extreme impact. Third, people respond to black swans by trying to explain that they were inevitable in hindsight, but this post-hoc analysis doesn’t produce any models that help predict future black swans. Taleb doesn’t have a hard and fast statistical rule about how outside of the realm of regular expectations events must be to be black swans, but 9/11 meets every definition.^[32]

The 9/11 attacks are so unlike any other attack that there is no good reason to think of them when you hear about terrorism, but you and I both do because scale is more memorable and easily recallable than other details. And most people don’t know as much about terrorism as you do after reading the previous paragraphs. The hoi polloi neglect the statistics, but you don’t, right? At least not anymore, you don’t, but don’t beat yourself up over your past mistakes. Thinking about 9/11 every time a terrorist attack happens is the result of a universal human brain defect called availability bias.

The bigger and more dramatic an event, the more memorable it becomes. If it was anything, 9/11 was big, dramatic, and, hence, memorable. When another terrorist attack happens or terrorism is mentioned in passing, we immediately think of 9/11, even though they have little in common. Since terrorism and 9/11 are linked in our brains, a new terrorist attack also triggers a reaction called mortality salience. The core idea is that we cling to our own cultural beliefs when confronted with events that remind us of death, which is terrifying, by embracing patriotism, being more willing to punish moral transgressors, boosting heroes, and favoring ingroups over outgroups. In other words, people confronted by terrorism are likely to become more xenophobic and distrustful of immigrants and other foreigners.^[33] Availability bias makes us overestimate the risks of terrorism and mortality salience boosts our xenophobia toward foreigners or immigrants.

Terrorism experts are a panicky lot who exaggerate the risks, but the most levelheaded among them tend to call terror attacks a “low probability and high-cost event.” It’s certainly rare, so terrorism is low probability, but only somebody who focuses on the 9/11 attacks could call terrorism “high-cost.” Three-quarters of terrorists don’t murder anybody in their attacks, which is one reason why 9/11 dominates the conversation. Terrorism is most expensive to the victims, but much of the cost we impose on ourselves through counter terrorism laws, restrictions on civil liberties, more wars that we lose, and immigration restrictions. The monetary cost of counterterrorism alone was $2.8 trillion through 2017, excluding the cost of reducing immigration or curtailing civil liberties.^[34]

Was that worth it? It’s difficult to compare whether monetary costs to save a life are worth it, but economists have found a plausible way to do so that is intellectually sound and offends almost everybody: the value of statistical life. You may be forgiven for thinking this is a new form of life cooked up by social scientists in a laboratory, but the intuition behind it makes sense.

The value of statistical life is based on one simple assumption: Nobody places an infinite value on their life. It considers the tradeoff rate between fatality risk and money for a person. Everyone voluntarily makes decisions that increase their chance of dying, like driving in an automobile, and weighs the tradeoffs that balance those potential costs with expected benefits, like getting to work faster. Economists take these insights to see how much people value their own lives based on their actions and then compare them to the cost of extra safety intended to reduce death. Suppose the cost of the additional safety is more than the value of the lives saved. In that case, the extra safety is a waste at best, likely resulting in more deaths at worst because the wasted safety resources could be used elsewhere to save more lives.

Analyzing public policy actions through this lens is common in health economics, labor economics, legal cases, and national security.^[35] The statistical life is valued in dollars because it’s easier to gauge tradeoffs with dollars, which are all the same, than with other units that are not the same. Assuming a value of $15 million per life, which is on the high side, at $2.8 trillion, counterterrorism spending would only be justified if it had saved nearly 200,000 lives. In reality, just 41 people were murdered in foreign-born terrorist attacks during those years.^[36] Counterterrorism spending could have saved that many lives. It is logically possible, but it is even less likely than Saddam Hussein giving weapons of mass destruction to terrorists after 9/11.

The number of lives that would have had to have been saved by counterterrorism to justify the cost is so high that we can safely dismiss the argument that the post-9/11 counterterrorism spending was worth it. A counterargument could be that the counterterrorism money spent probably saved some lives by preventing a few terrorist attacks. That may be the case, and we’ll never know for sure, but many more lives would have been saved if the money hadn’t been spent at all because the spending itself killed people. The evidence for this is pretty unassailable.

The federal government created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after 9/11 to prevent hijackers from boarding planes. We’ve all mostly stood in their lines and endured our humiliating roles as bit players in security theater by being poked, prodded, scanned, and harassed. And we have to do it all with a serious look on our faces while we take off our shoes and throw away water bottles and tubes of toothpaste because we’ll be banned from flying if we don’t. The TSA agents and their political bosses bear the most blame, but if you laugh at the absurdities in the airport security line, then you’ll earn jingoistic glares from your fellow travelers and learn why the system that makes you take off your shoes in public is so enduring.

But some people didn’t like being poked, prodded, or scanned, and others were so scared of flying because of the fear of terrorism that they chose to drive instead of flying.^[37] Driving on American roads is far more dangerous than flying. Many analysts have looked at the increase in miles driven as a response to 9/11 and to avoid the TSA and found that about 500 more people a year die in car accidents to avoid the airport hassle. If half of those chose to drive over flying because they wanted to avoid the TSA, then the TSA caused about 4,000 deaths from 2002 to 2017, more than those who died on 9/11. TSA spending is just a small fraction of all counterterrorism spending, but likely the portion with the deadliest domestic consequences. By pushing people to drive instead of fly, TSA security theater probably caused thousands of extra road deaths, more than all terrorist attacks since 1975 combined.

It’s extremely unlikely that counterterrorism spending saved enough lives to be justified and much more likely that it killed more people than it saved, but this doesn’t even consider that the money could have been spent to save lives through other ways, such as better criminal deterrence, improving road safety, subsidizing EpiPens, or paying people to live healthier lifestyles. This section isn’t arguing that the government should spend more money on those goals, but merely that counterterrorism spending is an exceedingly poor way to spend money if the goal is to save lives. Another cost is the reduction in legal immigration and tourism in response to 9/11, which has cost the US economy trillions of dollars in lost economic output. There are millions fewer immigrants in the US as a result of reductions in legal immigration and travel since 9/11, imposing a cost on would-be Americans, current Americans, and the rest of the world.^[38] American society and government changed in response to the 9/11 attacks and the fear of future potential terror attacks.

Most terrorists are insane and cognitively deficient (stupid). Judd Sanson is an extreme example of an insane, stupid person who may have been planning a terrorist attack. Sanson is a native-born American who was pulled over in New York while driving a car with forged or altered license plates. Police then found multiple weapons in his car, including a pistol, body armor, and an expandable baton with the phrase “God Forgive Me” written in Arabic. Investigators aren’t sure whether Sanson was planning a terrorist attack, but he fits the pattern. His neighbors said that Sanson was mentally ill and thought he was a ninja.^[39] He must’ve skipped the “how to be stealthy” lesson in ninja school.

Wise people have said that we shouldn’t alter our society in response to terrorism. Former American Bar Association President William Falsgraf said, “If we do, the terrorists have won.”^[40] Judging by how much we have changed our laws, started wars, reshaped society, bumped up the levels of fear in response to terrorism, and spent trillions of dollars in ways that likely killed thousands of Americans without saving many lives, it’s hard to argue that the terrorists haven’t already won.

Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X of What People Really Care About When They’re Mad About Immigration.

^[1] Shane Harris and Stuart Taylor, “Homeland Security chief looks back, and forward,” Government Executive, March 17, 2008.

^[2] “Part Two: Foreign Policy | Barack Obama: The Vox Conversation,” Vox, January 2015.

^[3] “Jacobellis V. Ohio 378 US 184 (1964),” ACLU of Ohio, latest update June 22, 1964.

^[4] “Administration Statements on Iraqi - Al Qaeda Links,” Federation of American Scientists, 2005.

^[5] “Administration Statements on Iraqi - Al Qaeda Links,” Federation of American Scientists, 2005.

^[6] “Administration Statements on Iraqi - Al Qaeda Links,” Federation of American Scientists, 2005.

^[7] “Administration Statements on Iraqi - Al Qaeda Links,” Federation of American Scientists, 2005.

^[8] Robert C. Allen, Mattia C. Bertazzini, and Leander Heldring, “The Economic Origins of Government,” American Economic Review 113, no. 10 (October 2023): 2507–45.

^[9] Tim Meads, “Bill Barr: We Need To Treat Mexican Drug Cartels ‘Like ISIS’,” The Daily Wire, July 23, 2022.

^[10] Donald Trump, “Statement by the President,” Trump White House Archives, June 1, 2020; Tim Meads, “Bill Barr: We Need To Treat Mexican Drug Cartels ‘Like ISIS’,” The Daily Wire, July 23, 2022.

^[11] “Stochastic terrorism,” Wikipedia, last modified August 23, 2025.

^[12] Christopher A. Wray, “Director Wray’s Opening Statement to the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies,” Federal Bureau of Investigation News, June 4, 2024.

^[13] Alex Nowrasteh, “Terrorism and Immigration: 50 Years of Foreign-Born Terrorism on US Soil, 1975–2024,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 991, March 10, 2025.

^[14] “NHTSA Estimates Traffic Fatalities Continued to Decline in the First Half of 2023,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, September 28, 2023.

^[15] “United States v. Hassoun,” Criminal Complaint, US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, filed September 20, 2010, affidavit by Special Agent Samuel Hartman, sworn before US Magistrate Judge Susan Cox, Investigative Project on Terrorism.

^[16] “United States v. Hassoun,” Criminal Complaint, US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, filed September 20, 2010, affidavit by Special Agent Samuel Hartman, sworn before US Magistrate Judge Susan Cox, Investigative Project on Terrorism.

^[17] “United States v. Hassoun,” Criminal Complaint, US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, filed September 20, 2010, affidavit by Special Agent Samuel Hartman, sworn before US Magistrate Judge Susan Cox, Investigative Project on Terrorism.

^[18] “Chicago Man Sentenced to 23 Years in Prison for Attempted Bombing on Crowded Street Near Wrigley Field in September 2010,” Federal Bureau of Investigation Chicago Division, May 30, 2013.

^[19] Robert Legare, Nicole Sganga, and Andres Triay, “U.S. charges Pakistani with alleged Iran ties in murder-for-hire plot against Trump, U.S. officials,” CBS News, August 7, 2024.

^[20] “United States v. Asif Merchant,” Complaint and Affidavit in Support of Application for Arrest Warrant, Docket No. F. #2024R00922, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York; Louis Casiano, Bill Melugin, and David Spunt, “Pakistani man accused of plotting political assassination admitted into US via immigration parole: sources,” Fox News, August 7, 2024.

^[21] Louis Casiano, Bill Melugin, and David Spunt, “Pakistani man accused of plotting political assassination admitted into US via immigration parole: sources,” Fox News, August 7, 2024.

^[22] Robert Legare, “Justice Dept indicts 3 in international murder-for-hire plot targeting Iranian dissident living in Maryland,” CBS News, January 29, 2024; “United States v. Naji Sharifi Zindashti, Damion Patrick John Ryan, and Adam Richard Pearson,” Indictment, United States District Court, District of Minnesota, filed December 13, 2023.

^[23] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2004), p. 235.

^[24] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2004), pp. 11, 247.

^[25] Alex Nowrasteh, “Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis, 1975–2023,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 972, April 9, 2024.

^[26] Christopher Wray, “Threats to the Homeland: Evaluating the Landscape 20 Years After 9/11,” Statement before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Washington, DC, September 21, 2021.

^[27] US Congress House Committee on Homeland Security, “Hearing: Worldwide Threats to the Homeland: 20 Years After 9/11,” 117th Cong., 1st sess., September 22, 2021.

^[28] US House Committee on the Judiciary and Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, “Terror at Our Door: How the Biden-Harris Administration’s Open-Borders Policies Undermine National Security and Endanger Americans,” Interim Staff Report, August 5, 2024.

^[29] US House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, “Hearing: Terrorist Entry Through the Southwest Border,” 118th Cong., 1st. sess., September 14, 2023.

^[30] The interquartile range is 0, so it’s impossible to use that to calculate outliers.

^[31] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2010).

^[32] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2010).

^[33] Hoi-Ting Leung, Peter K. H. Chew, and Nerina J. Caltabiano, “Mortality Salience Effects of Critical Incidents - A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda,” OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying 90, no. 1 (November 2024): 73–119.

^[34] Stimson Center, “Counterterrorism Spending: Protecting America while Promoting Efficiencies and Accountability,” May 16, 2018.

^[35] Alex Nowrasteh, “Espionage, Espionage-Related Crimes, and Immigration: A Risk Analysis, 1990–2019,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 909, February 9, 2021.

^[36] Alex Nowrasteh, “Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis, 1975–2022,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 958, August 22, 2023; Alex Nowrasteh, “Counterterrorism Spending,” Cato at Liberty (blog), May 25, 2018.

^[37] Bruce Schneier, “Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11,” Schneier on Security (blog), September 9, 2013.

^[38] David J. Bier, “The 9/11 Legacy for Immigration,” The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy 26, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 205–224.

^[39] Kala Rama and Erin Pflaumer. “Baton with ‘God Forgive Me’ written in Arabic found in ghost car in Queens: sources,” PIX11, June 13, 2024; John Miller, Michelle Watson, and Nic F. Anderson, “Man arrested in New York City with a gun, 8 loaded magazines, an NYPD vest and other weapons, police say,” CNN, June 13, 2024.

^[40] Jeanne B. Clarizio and Arthur Rovine, “At Issue: Will anti-terrorism become the McCarthyism of the 1980s?“ ABA Journal 72, no. 1 (January 1, 1986): 36, 38, 40.

I was 15 years old and in my freshman year at Adolfo Camarillo High School in California when I first heard of the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. My memory of the details is fuzzy, but I recall being in Mr. Buddhu’s English class when he interrupted and told us about the massacre. We all chatted excitedly because we were in school too, just like the victims in the shooting. But the rest of the day I picked up pieces of news from the infant internet, the car radio, and by walking slowly past the teacher’s lounge to catch a glimpse of the TV. This was 15 years before I had a smartphone, and my first instinct wasn’t to rush to the computer lab to check the news. The full extent of the carnage was only clear when I got home and turned on the news: Thirteen innocent people murdered, 24 injured, and the two shooters dead by suicide.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren’t the first mass shooters in the United States, but they had the biggest cultural impact and inspired others in this country and others. Many plotters of school shootings were obsessed with the Columbine attack according to one Secret Service study on students who planned school shootings.^[1] Several even planned to commit attacks on April 20^th to commemorate the anniversary of Columbine, which Harris and Klebold originally picked because it was Adolf Hitler’s birthday.^[2] Others wanted to exceed their death count.^[3] Harris and Klebold weren’t immigrants and their crimes had nothing to do with the border, but it brought mass shootings to the public’s attention in a way they hadn’t been before.

Mass shootings are the random killing of three or more people unrelated to other crimes like robbery or hijacking. They don’t usually start with arguments and the shooters typically target strangers or random people, even if there may be a few individual victims known to them in advance. Sometimes terrorists, like Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik from Chapter 1, carry out their attacks with guns. Those are included here, but I will discuss them more in the next chapter about terrorism.

There is a growing perception that immigrants are coming to the US to commit mass shootings. Texas Governor Greg Abbot is responsible for cultivating that fear when he used the murder of four illegal immigrants by Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres, another illegal immigrant, to highlight the immigration statuses of everyone involved to advertise his state-level immigration enforcement plan.^[4] Perez-Torres wouldn’t have murdered his neighbors if he had been permanently deported earlier, although he was deported several times and returned. But if there were better immigration enforcement, his victims would have been deported too. It’s unclear what that pyrrhic victory proves, but it’s often the case in crimes committed by immigrants because the victims are often immigrants too.

Mass shootings are unconscionable crimes regardless of where the perpetrator was born. The desire to kill multiple strangers, often women and children, who are just going to school, worshipping, or shopping, is almost unfathomable when it comes to terrorism – but at least the terrorist has an ideology, religion, or idea he’s killing for. That motivation doesn’t make his crime any less harmful, but the existence of a goal or higher purpose makes it theoretically comprehensible. But mass shooters seem just to kill for the heck of it or to be remembered through the ages.

Here are two things to remember about mass shootings. The first is that they are uncommon, despite their prominence in the media and American society. About one-tenth of one percent of homicides since 1966 were committed in mass shootings.^[5] The second is that immigrants commit very few of them. There may not be much you can do to avoid being a victim of a mass shooting, but at least you know that you likely won’t be a victim of one and neither will anybody you know.

Mass Shooters Are Angry and Crazy Losers Who Are Mostly Native-Born American Men

Herostratus wasn’t meant to be remembered. If this were a cosmically just world, nobody would know his name and you wouldn’t be reading about him now. Herostratus was a loser who lived in the Ancient Greek city of Ephesus, on the western coast of what is now Turkey. Ephesus was known for its libraries, theaters, and philosophers like Heraclitus, who said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” It was also rich with well-known craftsmen, artisans, and merchants who traded through a busy port that connected Asia Minor to Greece, Egypt, and beyond. Most importantly, Ephesus was a religious center for the Cult of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt and childbirth. Herostratus contributed nothing to the greatness of his city.

Herostratus had accomplished nothing with his life and knew he would be forgotten soon after death. Instead of trying to make a legacy through productive work, intellectual endeavors, or raising a good and loving family, he decided to burn down one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In 356 BC, he set fire to the Temple of Artemis in his hometown because he wanted to be remembered for something, even if it was a horrible crime. Better to be remembered as a criminal than not at all, so he reasoned. He stepped into the river once and his memory wasn’t washed away.

The Temple of Artemis was supposedly the first Greek temple built of marble. It was almost 400 feet long and 150 feet wide and surrounded by ornate columns. Temples had inhabited that location in Ephesus for centuries, but this was the most famous version built in 550 BC by King Croesus of Lydia, famous for his wealth. Legend has it that Alexander the Great was born that night and the temple burned because the goddess Artemis was attending the birth of Alexander in Macedonia instead of protecting it. After Herostratus was arrested and executed for his crime, the city government made it illegal to utter his name or write it down as an attempt to thwart his plans and to dissuade other losers from imitating his infamous crime. It didn’t work, and it doesn’t work today. Like his name, the temptation of Herostratus lives on and inspires mass shooters today.

Charles Whitman has the best claim to being the first modern American Herostratus. On August 1, 1966, the day after he murdered his wife and mother, Whitman climbed the University of Texas tower in Austin, Texas, barricaded the door, and shot dozens of people on campus and in the town with a hunting rifle. For 96 minutes, Whitman caused chaos as he murdered 15 innocent strangers and wounded 31 others. Whitman left a letter behind explaining his murders. His reasons read like the cliches of an angsty teenager as he did “not consider this world worth living in,” and tried to save his mother and wife from the embarrassment of dealing with his impending mass shooting by brutally murdering them.^[6] Unlike Herostratus, he didn’t appear to want infamy, although he understood that would happen. Still, it’s hard to believe the guy who climbed a tower in the middle of a city and shot 46 people didn’t want to be known. Regardless, the best evidence shows that the first modern American Herostratus was a crazy killer.

Whitman wrote about his violent urges, self-diagnosed insanity, his efforts to see a psychiatrist, and self-medication with Excedrin to alleviate his “tremendous headaches.” After Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy killed Whitman, a medical examiner autopsied him and found a pecan-sized brain tumor that could explain his madness and headaches. Herostratus wasn’t autopsied but if a Texas medical examiner may have also found a fruit-shaped tumor had looked at his brain. Or maybe he was just nuts.

Eric Harris may be the most well-known modern American Herostratus. Less than nine hours before he and Klebold attacked Columbine, Harris recorded a message on a microcassette that said, “People will die because of me. It will be a day that will be remembered forever.”^[7] Elsewhere, he wrote, “If we have figured out the art of time bombs before hand, we will set hundreds of them around houses, roads, bridges, buildings and gas stations . . . it’ll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, duke and doom all mixed together. Maybe we will even start a little rebellion of revolution to fuck things up as much as we can. I want to leave a lasting impression on the world.”^[8] It would be challenging to make Harris sound more like Herostratus. His own words paint him as a loser seeking infamy through destruction.

Still, Herostratus, Whitman, and Harris and Klebold have not inspired many. There have been 298 mass shooters in the United States beginning with Whitman and they committed hundreds of attacks.^[9] That number of shooters may seem like a lot, but it’s not many considering how large the United States is. It’s about half the size of my high school graduating class. There have been slightly over 1.1 million homicide victims in the US from 1966 through the end of 2024, and only 1,733 of them were murdered in mass shootings – just over 0.1 percent of the total. A statistician may correctly label that number a rounding error, but it’s certainly not small for the people killed or their families.

Still, the statistics should make you feel a little better. The annual chance of being murdered in a mass shooting in almost six decades is about one in 9.1 million per year (side note: the lower the number here, the higher your chance. A 1 in 1 million chance is a lot smaller than a 1 in 100 chance, for example). The chance is higher after 2020 but still accounts for about one-fifth of one percent of homicides. That’s about the same rate as hemophilia in males worldwide.

That’s no consolation to the victims or American children who endure grueling live shooter drills at school, but you should be less afraid of mass shootings. Your chance of being murdered in another type of homicide is about 667 times greater. You should be less fearful of mass shootings overall, but their randomness increases the terror rather than lessens it.

American mass shooter Jared Lee Loughner dropped out of high school, somehow got accepted at college before dropping out, couldn’t hold down a job at Quiznos, and had trouble with the law. That was the peak of his life’s accomplishments. By many accounts, Loughner’s personality changed during his life unraveling, possibly as he came down with the schizophrenia that he was later diagnosed with. On January 8, 2011, he attended a constituent meeting held by Arizona Democratic Representative Gabby Giffords, and shot her in the head, murdered six people, and injured 13 others. Giffords miraculously survived and Loughner was arrested and said, “I plead the fifth” as he was taken into custody.^[10] He eventually ended up pleading guilty to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison.

Robert ‘Bobby’ Crimo III was another native-born American high school dropout from a broken middle-class home. Both of his parents had several run-ins with the police, including child endangerment when Crimo was a child. Crimo thought he’d be a musician but failed at that and creepily made music videos featuring mass shootings. He was a loser born to losers, his life was going nowhere, and he knew it. On July 4, 2022, he murdered seven people at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, and injured 48 others. He’s going to die in prison, and nobody will remember him except those whom he hurt.

About 14 percent of mass shooters are immigrants, or 43 of them since 1966. The other 255 mass shooters were native-born Americans. Fourteen percent is about the immigrant share of the population. The annual chance of being murdered in a mass shooting committed by an immigrant is about one in 68.4 million per year. Your annual chance of dying from a bee or hornet sting is about 1 in 4.5 million per year and about 1 in 11.4 million per year from a lightning strike.^[11] If you can think that the bees aren’t coming to kill you, you can also rationally believe that immigrant mass shooters aren’t seeking to either.

Foreign-born mass shooters are almost all angry and crazy male losers, just like American mass shooters. There are just many fewer of them. Huu Can Tran checked every one of those boxes – angry, crazy, male, and a loser. Born in Vietnam, Tran was violent from a young age. As a teenager, he chopped off a person’s hand during a fight and his family sent him to Taiwan to avoid jail. In Taiwan, he dropped out of college, joined a gang, and kidnapped people for ransom – eventually moving to Hong Kong and getting disowned by his family for being a lowlife criminal.^[12] He should have been in prison instead of living in the Pearl of the Orient. Tran eventually immigrated to the US and worked low-skilled jobs like carpet cleaning and delivery driver. He was arrested for unlawfully carrying a firearm in 1990.

Then Tran seemed to get his life together. He started a business in 2001 and got married. He took up dancing as a hobby and eventually began teaching at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio. He started to look like a late bloomer. But then his life unraveled. He dissolved his company in 2004 and got divorced a year later. His behavior got weirder and weirder, controlling his students and demanding that they practice dancing daily and only with him. He sold his house in 2013, stopped dancing, and lived out of his van and, when times were better, a trailer park. On January 21, 2023, he came back to the Star Ballroom Dance Studio with a pistol during a Lunar New Years Eve party and murdered 11 people, injuring nine others.

The police arrived within three minutes of getting the 9-1-1 call, but Tran was gone by then – arriving at the Lai Lai ballroom 17 minutes later. Brandon Tsay, the son of the ballroom owners, wrestled Tran’s gun away and chased him outside – saving many lives. The police pulled over Tran the next day. Before they could arrest him, Tran committed suicide with a single gunshot wound to the head. It was the most considerate major action of his life. His murder victims were almost all foreign-born.

There are four women shooters by my count, but three of them planned and committed the shooting with a man and it’s fair to say he oversaw the crime. The only exception is Audrey Hale who murdered six people at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee on March 27, 2023. Perhaps it’s unfair to count her as a woman because she identified as a transgender man, but she was born a woman and the rules about sex and gender keep changing. Readers can adjust this paragraph by replacing the word “woman” with “man” if they so prefer, but one reason for referring to her as a woman is that there aren’t that many female mass shooters and some people think she is a woman. But it is certainly indisputable that she shot up a school and murdered six people, which is behavior far more common among men than women. In fact, the best reason to believe that she wasn’t transgender is that she undertook one of the most typically male actions: mass murder.

One of the other female mass shooters was Francine Graham who, with her boyfriend David Anderson, murdered three people in Jersey City, New Jersey in 2019. Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Farook murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California in 2015 as part of an Islamist terrorist attack. Amanda Miller and her husband Jarad Miller shot up a Walmart in Las Vegas on June 8, 2014, murdering three people. All these shooters committed suicide or were killed by the police. Unlike most of the male mass shooters, the mass shootings with a woman involved are either terrorist attacks or likely terrorist attacks because they had a political, social, or religious motivation beyond just murder. Hale may have been motivated by anti-Christian and anti-white animus, Graham hated Jews, Malik hated America and non-Muslims, and Miller loved revolution. They are now all dead because they didn’t love life.

Of the female mass shooters, only Tashfeen Malik was foreign-born. None of their male accomplices were immigrants. Out of those seven shooters, only one was an immigrant – which is about the proportion of all mass shooters who have been foreign-born. Immigrants of either sex are not coming to commit mass shootings.

The Deadliest Mass Shooters

The share of native-born American mass shooters is about equal to their population share, but they are slightly deadlier than immigrant mass shooters especially at the high body count end. The twenty deadliest mass shooters since 1966 murdered 438 people and injured 1,280. Eighteen of them are native-born Americans and they are responsible for nine out of ten of those killed about 98 percent of the injured.

Stephen Paddock is the worst. He was the son of Benjamin Paddock, a car thief, check forger, racketeer, bank robber and conman who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for eight years. He also escaped from federal prison, tried to run down an FBI agent with his car, and had numerous aliases because he was constantly on the run from the law. Benjamin had four children, one of whom was arrested for child pornography, and Stephen, who committed the worst mass shooting in American history. Whether through nature, nurture, or a combination, the Paddocks were a rotten family.

But the rottenest thing a Paddock did hasn’t been described yet. Stephen rented a hotel room on the 32^nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas on September 29, 2017. Two days later, he fired more than 1,000 rounds into a crowd below, killing 60 people and injuring 867 before killing himself. The only note he left behind contained calculations of distances from his hotel room to points in the crowd below that were intended to maximize the number of deaths.^[13] He left no evidence of any other motive except mass murder.

The only two immigrants on the top 20 deadliest shooters list are Seung-Hui Cho, who murdered 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007, and Jiverly Antares Wong, who murdered 13 in Binghampton, New York in 2009. Both were angry, unsociable, unlikable, and crazy, and they took out their frustration on innocent people. Immigrants assimilate to near-American levels of becoming mass shooters, but they do underperform when it comes to body count. This is in stark contrast to their success in business, the arts, sciences, and other endeavors respected by Americans. Foreign countries really aren’t sending their best murderers.

Two other mass shootings are noteworthy because they were committed by the U.S.-born children of immigrants. Investigating the biographies of mass shooters is a painstaking process and the results can sometimes be uncertain. I’ve spent much time doing so for this chapter, but I also relied on the work of other researchers. But as difficult as it is to find out some information on mass shooters, it’s even harder to get information about their families to see if the shooters were the children of immigrants. In at least two cases, that’s true.

Nidal Hasan was the first. He was born in 1970 in Virginia to two Palestinian Muslim immigrant parents who died young after starting several successful small family businesses in Virginia. Hasan enlisted in the military. He became increasingly religious, socially isolated, and disturbed by the violence he heard about. Eventually, he was inspired by Islamist terrorists overseas to kill 13 people and wound 32 more in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.^[14] He committed the attack less than a month before he was deployed to Afghanistan. The military sentenced Hasan to death and he’s currently awaiting execution. The most ironic part of Hasan’s career is that he was a Medical Corps psychiatrist who spent much time listening to soldiers describe the violence that they had witnessed and committed in America’s multiple 21^st century wars.

Omar Mateen was the second. He was born in New York to two Afghan immigrants who, on all counts, loved the United States.^[15] Mateen’s father even likely informed the FBI about radical Muslims he met in his community.^[16] Undoubtedly, his parents were grateful for the United States providing a home and opportunity for them after their home country was destroyed by a communist coup, a Soviet invasion, a brutal Cold War insurgency, a post-Cold War insurgency and Taliban theocracy, a US invasion, 20 years of insurgency, and the resurgence of Taliban theocracy. It really makes you appreciate American democracy, warts and all. Regardless, his parents’ patriotism didn’t stop Omar from becoming infatuated with ISIS and murdering 49 people at the Pulse nightclub, a popular gay club, in Florida on June 12, 2016.^[17] There are other second-generation mass shooters, but we don’t know the numbers. Regardless, immigrants aren’t coming to the United States to have children who will eventually grow up and commit mass murder.

Immigrants and Their Friends Who Are Targeted by Mass Shooters

Immigrants come to America to make a new life for themselves and their children. The stereotype is immigrant parents working hard in difficult jobs, scrimping every penny so their children can go to school and succeed. Your ancestors did it, mine did it, and maybe you’re doing it now. More often than not, it works. However, immigration isn’t just about the immigrants. About 85 percent of people living in the United States were born here and immigration affects them too, overwhelmingly for the positive. Immigrants bring us more economic growth, great food, scientific achievements, and enthusiasm for the American Dream that comes from having lived in foreign countries with less opportunity. But some Americans resent immigrants, others hate them, and a tiny fraction of Americans are homicidally enraged by them. A still smaller fraction actually does something about it by marking immigrants and their American friends for death.

Some mass shootings are terrorist attacks. In popular perception, “terrorism” is just a code word for a very heinous crime. That’s an understandable reaction because crime is terrifying. Street gangs fighting over turf, cartel violence, homicides, muggings, home invasions, and mass shootings really are frightening. People who survive them are usually shaken and more cautious as a result. Sometimes, people refer to governments or their militaries committing terrorist atrocities. Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Kurds, the Rwandan genocide, Joseph Stalin’s purges, and the bombing of Axis and Allied cities in World War II, and other atrocities committed by governments were often intended to instill terror and intimidate civilians. However, normal crimes and the actions of governments are not real terrorism. It’s not a fancy word that means heinous crime or a brutal military attack on civilians by a government.

I’m going to do the easy thing and handwave away an academic debate over the meaning of terrorism in favor of the legal and commonly accepted DC definition: Terrorism is a specific type of crime defined by the motivation of the criminals. Terrorists threaten or use violence to achieve political, economic, religious, or social goals as private non-governmental violent actors. A mugger wants your wallet, drug cartels want to make profits, and Stalin’s government wanted to stay in power. Terrorists want to change the world based on their beliefs. Warped as it is, terrorists think they’re making the world into a better place.

Osama Bin Laden was the son of a wealthy Saudi entrepreneur who wanted for nothing in this world. He wasn’t motivated by financial gain or luxury. He wanted a caliphate, not caviar. Bin Laden and his confederates were motivated by the religious, political, and social desire to spread Islamist governments throughout the world and reestablish their own primitive form of religiously interpreted governance. His motivation was ideological and political. He and Al Qaeda were too weak to accomplish their goals by conquest, they didn’t have armored and infantry divisions, so they engaged in terrorism.

American politicians make this mistake all the time. Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, introduced legislation for the US government to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.^[18] Drug cartels commit brutal crimes frequently. Many criminals who join drug cartels are psychopathic killers and that’s their main motivation. Los Zetas is a Mexican criminal syndicate formed initially from deserters from Mexican special forces. Zetas have killed hundreds if not thousands of Mexicans in their struggle with law enforcement and other cartels with ghastly shock and awe tactics that feature beheadings, torture, and indiscriminate murder, but they’re not doing it to spread an ideology, or a religion, or some social goal. They’re in it for the profits of selling an illegal drug in high demand.^[19]

Senator Graham and others who want to label drug cartels as terrorists are just confused. Early in his second term, President Trump used a legal definitional loophole to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations to use the US military to bomb drugs into oblivion. The same military that lost every war of my adult life may now fight a war against supply and demand.

Drug cartels would wither away and vanish if drugs were legalized. Some of them would try to shift into other criminal sectors like racketeering or protection and violence wouldn’t vanish overnight – it may even intensify as remaining cartels fight over a shrinking market or try to expand into new ones, but their most profitable reason to exist would vanish. Meanwhile, it’s legal to be Muslim and live as piously as you want but that hasn’t dissuaded Islamist terrorists who want to force the rest of us to convert and live that way too.

The small number of Americans who are homicidally enraged by immigration, pick up rifles, and attack them in mass shootings are ideologically motivated shooters, or terrorists. Patrick Crusius is just such a man. He thought immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants, were ruining the United States, hurting the environment, and replacing white Americans.^[20] Crusius was inspired by the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooting earlier that year where Brenton Harrison Tarrant murdered 51 people and injured 89.^[21] Crusius apparently channeled his own blood and soil nationalist ideology and his schizophrenia into a murder rampage that took 23 lives and injured 22 others at an El Paso, Texas Walmart in 2017.^[22] He chose El Paso because of the large immigrant and Hispanic-American population there. But nativist mass shooters haven’t just targeted immigrants or their children, they’ve also murdered native-born Americans who try to help immigrants.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was founded in 1881 in New York City to help Jewish refugees fleeing Russian pogroms.^[23] That wave of emigrants was one of the greatest in modern Jewish history, which was made possible by new persecution after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 and the recent rise in prosperity in the Russian Empire and among Jews there. The combination of new greater oppression and more prosperity allowed over 2 million Russian Jews to flee from 1881 to 1914. HIAS’s founders responded with gusto. In the generations since, HIAS has broadened its mission to help resettle refugees from around the world and of any religion who resettle in the United States. HIAS has consistently supported legal immigration throughout its history and helped lobby to maintain and expand legal immigration. This has earned HIAS wrath in addition to the baseline level of anti-Semitism that follows Jewish organizations.

Prescott Hall was an American nativist and eugenicist who cofounded the Immigration Restriction League in 1894 to do exactly what it sounds like. His goals were frustrated multiple times as Congress narrowly defeated immigration restrictions or they were vetoed by the President. Hall blamed businesses and Catholics for the political defeat, however temporary, of his ideas – but he didn’t spare his opprobrium toward HIAS and other pro-immigration Jews either. After one political defeat, Hall erupted by yelling “To hell with Jews, Jesuits, and steamships!”^[24] By “Jesuits,” he meant pro-immigration Catholics, by “steamships,” he meant the business lobby, and by “Jews,” he meant HIAS. With much variation over time, the story of American nativism from the beginning to today is closely correlated to evolving American anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiment.

Robert Bowers also blamed Jews and HIAS for bringing immigrants to the United States. He posted, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in,” on the morning of Saturday October 27, 2018.^[25] Shortly thereafter he entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with a rifle where he murdered 11 people and injured 6 before being arrested. He was recently sentenced to death.^[26]

Nativist mass shooters are few and far between, but there may be more of them as immigration continues to be a contentious political debate that attracts crazies. As brutal and despicable as they are, they’ll probably remain a tiny proportion of mass shooters. It’s hard to say, but Crusius and Bowers may have become mass killers without being able to blame immigrants or Jews for real or imagined problems. They may have found some other motivation or just succumbed to the lure of Herostratus’ infamy. But they were motivated to kill because they disliked immigrants and the Americans who decided to help them.

Mass Shooters Aren’t Coming to Kill You

Mass shootings are rare, but people pay attention when they happen because the victims are so sympathetic, the crime is inexplicable, and the killers strike so randomly. Insanity, frustration, murderous rage, the Herostratus syndrome, and sometimes terroristic motivations all influence mass shooters. Fortunately, few people have such feelings in sufficient intensity to act on them despite recent examples like Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and a list of other losers who attacked others.

There have been almost 1.2 million homicides in the United States since 1966, but only about one in every 667 was committed during a mass shooting. Immigrants are about 15 percent of the population and those few foreign-born who became mass shooters are responsible for about one in every 5,000 homicides. It’s no consolation to the victims or their families, friends, neighbors, or survivors, but mass shooters aren’t coming to kill you by crossing a border or otherwise.

Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X of What People Really Care About When They’re Mad About Immigration.

^[1] “Averting Targeted School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” National Threat Assessment Center, US Department of Homeland Security, March 2021, p. 5.

^[2] “Averting Targeted School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” National Threat Assessment Center, US Department of Homeland Security, March 2021, p. 5

^[3] Ralph W. Larkin, “The Columbine Legacy: Rampage Shootings as Political Acts,” American Behavioral Scientist 52, no. 9 (May 2009): 1309–1326.

^[4] Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX), “$50K Reward for Info on the Criminal Who Killed 5 Illegal Immigrants on Friday,” X post, April 30, 2023, 5:15 p.m.

^[5] Alex Nowrasteh, “Risk Analysis of Mass Shootings Committed by Immigrants and Native-Born Americans,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper no. 185, April 1, 2025.

^[6] Tayiabr, “Charles Whitman’s Suicide Note,” Library of Babel (blog), August 26, 2017.

^[7] Dave Cullen, Columbine (Twelve (Hachette Book Group), 2009), p. 337.

^[8] Dave Cullen, Columbine (Twelve (Hachette Book Group), 2009), p. 236.

^[9] Alex Nowrasteh, “Risk Analysis of Mass Shootings Committed by Immigrants and Native-Born Americans,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper no. 185, April 1, 2025.

^[10] “Jared Lee Loughner,” Wikipedia, last modified August 17, 2025.

^[11] “‘Lightning Strike Injuries and Deaths Vary by Region,’ under “Quick Facts,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Jiaquan Xu, “QuickStats: Number of Deaths from Hornet, Wasp, and Bee Stings* Among Males and Females — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2011–2021,” MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 72 (2023): 756.

^[12] Summer Lin, Jeong Park, and Brittny Mejia, “Can a Play Solve the Mystery of the Monterey Park Mass Shooter? Survivors Aren’t Sure,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2023.

^[13] “Stephen Paddock,” Wikipedia, last modified September 2, 2025.

^[14] “Nidal Hasan,” Wikipedia, last modified August 29, 2025.

^[15] “Omar Mateen,” Wikipedia, last modified August 30, 2025.

^[16] David Begnaud, “Seddique Mateen, father of Pulse nightclub shooter, revealed as longtime FBI informant,” CBS News, March 26, 2018.

^[17] “Pulse nightclub shooting,” Wikipedia, last modified September 1, 2025.

^[18] Ted Galen Carpenter and Jeffrey A. Singer, “We Shouldn’t Use the Military to Fight Mexico’s Drug Cartels,” Cato Institute, April 3, 2023.

^[19] Ginger Thompson, “How the US Triggered a Massacre in Mexico,” ProPublica, June 12, 2017.

^[20] Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, and Katie Benner, “Minutes Before El Paso Killing, Hate-Filled Manifesto Appears Online,”The New York Times, August 3, 2019.

^[21] “Christchurch mosque shootings,” Wikipedia, last modified August 30, 2025.

^[22] “New Zealand Mosque Shooting,” NBC News.

^[23] “HIAS,” Wikipedia, last modified August 28, 2025.

^[24] Neil Swidey, “Trump’s Anti-immigration Playbook Was Written 100 Years Ago. In Boston,” The Boston Globe, January 2017.

^[25] Michael Hill, “Synagogue Shooter Was Obsessed with Jewish Refugee Agency,” AP News, October 30, 2018.

^[26] “Pittsburgh synagogue shooting,” Wikipedia, last modified August 31, 2025.

Every murder is a tragedy, but some murders are more tragic than others. To explain, I don’t want to be murdered. It sounds bad. But it would be unimaginably worse if any of my children were murdered, so much worse that I would gladly take their place and all parents would. The public, media, and politicians care more or less based on who the victim is. Young women like Mollie Tibbets or Kate Steinle elicit the most sympathy because they did nothing wrong, were robbed of decades of life by complete strangers, and were attractive. But what about other cases, like those of Irma Vaquedano and her boyfriend Danny Rodriguez?

Rodriguez decapitated Vaquedano in Seattle in 2019. The police arrived and killed Rodriguez, a likely illegal immigrant, when he picked up the knife again. The standoff and shooting are on camera.^[i] Rodriguez’s brutal crime didn’t make the national news, wasn’t used by politicians to argue that immigrants are coming to kill you, and it escaped almost all public notice. Why? His victim, Irma Vaquedano, wasn’t as sympathetic or worthy in the minds of politicians, the media, or the public. As a result, most people thought her death was less tragic and not worth paying attention to. This is a sad fact, but it shows the larger point that the sympathetic worthiness of the victims matters and can drive a political or media frenzy over a murder. Why didn’t the country care about Vaquedano’s heinous murder? She was an illegal immigrant.

The media, the public, and political judgment aren’t fair, and evolutionary psychologists could probably cook up a just-so story about why these cases garner less attention, but that doesn’t reduce the tragedy or viciousness of the crimes, nor does it determine which punishment Rodriguez deserves had he lived. Vaquedano was murdered and that’s it. But this case tells us a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to crime and immigration. It tells us when others care about the crime – and they care most when the victim is a young adult or teenager, female, physically attractive, a good person who avoids trouble, and a native-born American. Not all victims are created equal.

Illegal Immigrant Criminals Mostly Victimize Other Illegal Immigrants

A friend of mine used to be a prosecutor in Fairfax County, Virginia. For those who don’t know, Fairfax County has had an on-again, off-again problem with a gang called MS-13. Also known as Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13 is a brutal transnational criminal gang started by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s. The US government deported many of them to El Salvador in the middle of a civil war where they took over large swaths of the country. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele recently turned a peculiar mark of MS-13 gang membership – their insane and ubiquitous facial and body tattoos – against the gang by imprisoning everybody in El Salvador with a tattoo. The policy is so well enforced that even non-Hispanic Americans are warned not to visit if they’re inked up.

Between the time that the U.S. deported the first MS-13 gang member to El Salvador and Bukele made being tatted up a crime, many returned to the United States to set up shop. One of their franchise locations was in Fairfax County, Virginia, where my friend and I live.

You can’t go long watching the local news or scanning the newspapers without reading about MS-13 or a crime committed by one of its members in the DC area. But my friend had trouble getting convictions, even for heinous crimes where MS-13 guilt really wasn’t in question. In my innocent, WASPy way, I assumed he was having trouble getting a conviction because the gang members were threatening jurors, intimidating their families, or otherwise harming those responsible for the convictions of their comrades – like a storyline from Law and Order.

His explanation was nothing so bad, but was far more interesting. “Gang members mostly murder other gang members,” my friend said. “When jurors see who the victims is, they think ‘well, I guess that evens out,’ and they’re reluctant to convict a gang member who took out the trash . . . but when a gang member kills a normal person, jurors charge the electric chair.”

Juror behavior uncovers a fact we all know to be true, even though we don’t like mentioning it: Some victims deserve more sympathy and protection than others. Jurors sympathize with the innocent bystander gunned down in a gang war, but not so much with a mobster, another gang member, or their girlfriends who are murdered in the process. Gang bangers choose to join the gang when they don’t have to, so whatever bad things happen to them are deserved.

That response is somewhat reassuring because it means we aren’t surrounded by sociopaths, but it also means that some victims matter more than others, and some people are more worthy of protection. And the impulse makes sense – if somebody isn’t going to take the obvious precautions to prevent being murdered, why should we care as much about their fate as we would care about the fate of somebody who didn’t join a gang or date a mobster?

Illegal immigrant victims of crimes committed by other illegal immigrants also don’t get much sympathy. Most of them aren’t even criminals because being unlawfully present in the US is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. Even so, breaking immigration laws is about as victimless an offense as you can get. Jaywalking produces more victims because it sometimes slows down traffic, which is an unacceptably anti-social behavior that should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Do you hear that climate ShutDownDC? I’m not saying it’s proper to run over climate protesters who block traffic but I also didn’t get the license plate, officer.

When people even hear about a crime committed by an illegal immigrant against another illegal immigrant, they sometimes think, “the victim shouldn’t have been here anyway” or “live in the black market, die in the black market.” More often, they just shrug their shoulders and read about Taylor Swift or the Epstein Files. In March 2021, an SUV accident in California killed 13 people near the border and the early news reports were that illegal immigrants were involved. Social media went insane for a few hours before everyone realized the fatalities were illegal immigrants, not native-born Americans.^[ii] The response after that was just crickets.

Florencio Felix Barron was deported in 2016 after being convicted of child abuse when he inappropriately touched a child at an elementary school in Austin, Texas.^[iii] He eventually reentered the United States illegally and tracked down his common-law wife, Veneranda Martinez-Gutierrez, who was also the mother of his three children. Barron stalked and harassed her for months, and Veneranda called the police several times with no effect. Everything’s bigger in Texas, even police indifference.

Weeks before Christmas in 2019, Barron tracked Veneranda down in the parking lot of a Valero Gas Station in Austin and murdered her in front of their children before blowing his own brains out on the spot.^[iv] “She was loved by everyone,” said Veneranda’s cousin Abelina Martinez.^[v] Hundreds of people honored her death, confirming Martinez’s judgment. Her brutal murder made the local news, but didn’t travel beyond the Hill Country because she was also an illegal immigrant. Imagine how different it would be if Veneranda were an attractive native-born American woman.

Traditional and social media are good ways to judge whether the public thinks a victim is worthy of sympathy and protection. The Republican National Committee (RNC) tweeted many times about Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered by an illegal immigrant in Georgia in 2024. Pulled at random, one of the RNC’s tweets earned over 2000 likes and more than 600 retweets.^[vi]

Within hours of the arrest of Riley’s illegal immigrant murderer, a Fox News anchor was drawing comparisons between Riley and Kate Steinle, another woman shot to death by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco in 2015. Steinle’s killing and the subsequent trial garnered enormous political attention from Trump during his first run for president and during his first administration. Steinle’s mother, Liz Sullivan, told the San Francisco Chronicle that she and her family felt politically exploited.^[vii] “For Donald Trump,” Sullivan said, “we were just what he needed—beautiful girl, San Francisco, illegal immigrant, arrested a million times.”^[viii]

Riley’s murder dominated the news in a similar way in 2024. President Joe Biden mentioned Riley’s murder in his 2024 State of the Union Address, politicians ran commercials in Georgia about the murder, and others put up billboards about it.^[ix] There was even an act of Congress named after her.^[x] After the election, Riley was a sympathetic victim murdered by an illegal immigrant.

Others killed by illegal immigrants aren’t so sympathetic. A month after the RNC tweeted about Riley’s murder, they also tweeted about an illegal immigrant who stabbed another illegal immigrant to death, and it earned just 112 likes and 71 retweets – a fraction of the attention.^[xi] From homicide to rape and everything in between, people just don’t care as much when the victim is an illegal immigrant – even when an illegal immigrant is the criminal.^[xii]

But the unworthy and unsympathetic victim trope doesn’t always hold for illegal immigrants, sometimes for bizarre reasons. Mexican illegal immigrant Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres murdered five of his neighbors on April 28, 2023, after they asked Perez-Torres to stop shooting his rifle in the backyard because it was waking up their baby.^[xiii] I’m a gun nut like most red-blooded libertarian men, but target practice in a neighborhood is as worrying as someone who says, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Minutes later, Perez-Torres shot five people at his neighbor’s house, including a 9-year-old boy.^[xiv] Four of Perez-Torres’ victims were likely illegal immigrants from Honduras.^[xv] Texas Governor Greg Abbot linked the mass murder to illegal immigration when he tweeted, “I’ve announced a $50K reward for info on the criminal who killed 5 illegal immigrants Friday. Also directed #OperationLoneStar to be on the lookout.”^[xvi]

This horrible mass murder was big news for days, and it didn’t abate after it was known that most of the victims were probably illegal immigrants, too. If anything, the news intensified because Governor Abbot’s tweet focused on the immigration status of the killer and the victims and then referenced Operation Lone Star – his state-level operation to enforce immigration laws in Texas.^[xvii] Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said, “It’s below the dignity of the governor to impugn the victims of a mass shooting about their legal status. All of the victims are Latino and so is the suspected gunman. This is a tragedy that involves another serial killing and a weapon for war that was used in the killing. That’s the issue, not the legal status of the victims.”^[xviii] The real mystery here is why Garcia thinks governors have dignity.

Regardless, the mass murder of four illegal immigrants by another illegal immigrant is the exception to the trend above. In at least one case, illegal immigrants really are viewed as sympathetic victims who are worthy of protection.

We know who the media and the public think are unsympathetic and unworthy victims – illegal immigrants (most of the time) and people who voluntarily interact with criminals. Who are the sympathetic ones worthy of protection? American-born women (and some men) who are young, attractive, and did everything right to avoid trouble. They stayed away from crime-prone areas, had hardworking and ambitious friends, didn’t date crazy men in gangs, had loving families, and had their entire lives ahead of them. They were just the victims of a random attack by a total stranger – like being struck by lightning or being struck down by E. coli. Those are the victims who deserve most of our sympathy and who are worthy of additional protection. They are the ones that immigrants are coming to kill. Or are they?

Your Friends, Families, and Neighbors Are Coming to Kill You

The homicide conviction rates from the previous chapter are hiding an important fact that should make you feel even less threatened by immigrants. People usually kill people they know – like their friends, family members, neighbors, and coworkers. It doesn’t seem like it, but that should make you feel better. If you’re a native-born American, it should relax you if you fear immigrant crime, but it probably shouldn’t if you have many crazy young men in your life.

Immigrants are mostly friends with other immigrants, are related to other immigrants, are more likely to have immigrant neighbors, date other immigrants, and work with more immigrants than native-born Americans. Data on crime victimization in the US shows that immigrants are less likely to be victims because they are also less likely to be criminals in the first place.^[xix] This is great news for those of you who are native-born Americans and worried about how immigrants are coming to kill you, but bad news because that means you’re probably friends with, related to, live next to, and work with more native-born Americans – who are much more likely to murder you.

National crime data from 2022 is typical of how murderers and their victims tend to know each other before the crime. According to the data, 79 percent of murder victims knew their murderers where the prior relationship was known by the police.^[xx] Almost half of those pre-existing relationships were familial or romantic, the other half were neighbors, friends, acquaintances, employers or employees, or had a different relationship altogether. There’s no mystery here; people often murder those they know after an argument, another squabble, or in the commission of another crime. These murders are the most tragic when they’re in the same family.

Christine Banfield and her husband, Brendan Banfield, hired a Brazilian au pair named Juliana Peres Magalhães to help care for the couple’s four-year-old daughter. Following the storyline of a bad murder mystery, Brendan and Juliana then had an affair and likely conspired to murder Christine and another man who would be the patsy. The partners in crime set up a fake profile for Christine on a sex fetish website and tricked a local man named Joseph Ryan to come over to their house one morning as part of a rape fantasy while Brendan was supposedly at work and Juliana took the daughter to the zoo. Brandan’s plan was to burst in, kill Ryan and Christine, and make it look like Ryan had murdered her before her valiant husband tried to save her.^[xxi]

Detectives suspected foul play but became convinced when Juliana moved into the master bedroom with Brendan and the four-year-old girl started calling her “mommy.” Juliana pled guilty to manslaughter and Brendan is being tried for murder. It’s no Hallmark ending, but there may at least be some justice. Brazil really wasn’t sending its best migrants in the case of Juliana, but Brendan seems to have instigated this vicious crime against his own family.

Christine, Brendan, and Juliana all knew each other. If they didn’t, Christine would never have been murdered, but Christine didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t choose to marry a gangster or criminal. His job as an IRS agent is the only evidence that Brendan was a psychopathic killer before he was arrested for murder. On the other hand, the killer who targets a stranger or kills them while committing another crime is rare by comparison and probably more frightening because you can’t do as much to protect yourself from randomness. You can do well to avoid downtown or stop taking the metro, but sometimes downtown doesn’t want to avoid you, and your train arrives early. Danny Rodriguez was Irma Vaquedano’s boyfriend until he murdered her. In the public’s eye, she didn’t do enough to avoid him. This should make you feel less afraid if you wisely choose whom you want to date, be friends with, work with, and live next to. But it should probably make you feel less safe if you’re friends with scumbags.^[1]

The Most Unsympathetic Criminals and the Most Sympathetic Victims

“Murderers aren’t sympathetic people” is a relatively uncontroversial statement for this post, but some murderers are less sympathetic than others. The same goes for their victims. Robert Krentz was murdered on his Arizona ranch in 2010, prompting the state legislature to pass the harshest illegal immigration enforcement law up to that time. Nobody was brought to justice for Krentz’s murder, but reasonable people argue it was likely an illegal immigrant, a drug smuggler, or an illegal immigrant drug smuggler working for a cartel.

Not only was Krentz a sympathetic victim because he was an elderly rancher – he warned about the problems of illegal immigration and tried to help migrants who ended up on his property – but he was possibly and even likely murdered by drug cartels, who are some of the most brutal criminals in the world today. As unsympathetic as murderous drug smugglers are, there is a class of criminals even more despicable: cannibals.

Prominent online right-wing commentators went wild in 2024 over claims that the Biden administration was flying Haitian cannibal gangs into the interior of the United States from the border.^[xxii] To eat Americans. Because normal murder wasn’t scary enough, Americans also had to fear immigrant criminals who were coming over the border to eat them. There is not a single case of a Haitian cannibal gang operating in the United States. The only evidence are social media posts about cannibals in Haiti, but no actual stories or pictures of such.^[xxiii] One prominent rumor is that former police officer and gang leader Jimmy Cherizier, also known as Barbecue, earned his nickname by cooking people alive and eating them.^[xxiv] Silly rumor mill, he only earned the nickname by burning people alive (which he denies), not eating.^[xxv] Some immigrants are coming here to serve you dinner, not to serve you for dinner.

The Haitian cannibal gang rumor turned out to be untrue, but another rumor spread about Haitians eating cats and dogs – some of the most sympathetic victims in modern American society. Pets are so beloved in the United States that killing them usually ends careers and can result in jail time. Former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem was a leading contender to be selected by Trump to be his vice president, but her ambition unraveled when her 2024 book, No Going Back, included a story of how she killed a pet dog.^[xxvi] She described the story over several pages, and, remarkably, her dog wasn’t the only domestic animal she admitted to killing in that season. She said, “a better politician . . . wouldn’t tell the story here.”^[xxvii] That’s certainly true, as the Trump campaign reacted by not considering her for the vice presidential slot after that and instead put her in charge of enforcing immigration laws.

The rumor of Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs started in Springfield, Ohio, with a speculative Facebook post that “just exploded,” according to its author Erika Lee.^[xxviii] She wrote that her neighbor’s cat went missing and that Haitians were to blame. “I didn’t mean [it] to happen,” Lee said when the post went viral – but happen it did.^[xxix] Friends don’t let friends shitpost.

Online nativists ran with the story. Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing Malaysian internet personality, fanned the rumors by posting videos of a black American from Canton, Ohio, who was arrested for killing and potentially eating a cat.^[xxx] Canton is a 172-mile drive away from Springfield, but we can’t expect a click farmer from Malaysia to know that. There was then a picture of a black native-born American man carrying dead geese in Columbus, another Ohio town, and this was supposedly further evidence of Haitians in Springfield killing animals. Not only was the man not Haitian, he picked up the geese after they were hit and killed by a car.^[xxxi]

Presidential candidate Trump then ran with the rumor during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris in September 2024 when he said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”^[xxxii] His quotes were even turned into viral online music videos.^[xxxiii] Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, picked in part because he didn’t admit to killing pets in his famous memoir Hilly Billy Elegy, even fell for the hoax by highlighting that people in the town “have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”^[xxxiv] After falling for it, Vance claimed he didn’t fall for it and that he was really just lying the entire time. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention,” Vance said to CNN, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”

The Springfield police department said that it has received no reports of missing pets being eaten.^[xxxv] Conservative activist Christopher Rufo asked for evidence and offered a $5,000 reward – but instead received video of chickens on the grill in an apartment complex where African immigrants lived a few towns over. Africans aren’t Haitians, chickens aren’t cats, and Dayton isn’t Springfield, but otherwise his evidence was spot on.^[xxxvi] The made-up Haitian cannibal gang story wasn’t enough, so the nativist rumor mill created stories of rampant, catastrophic cat consumption to make Haitian migrants seem evil. There was no evidence of Haitians doing this in Florida, where almost all Haitian immigrants live, but you can’t expect online nativists and the conservative activists who cover for them to make sense. The more likely reason is that Florida wasn’t a swing state and didn’t even border one in 2024.

If Haitian immigrants are so bad, why do so many people have to make up fake stories about them? Real stories should abound, but there’s more evidence that heads of conservative DC think tanks and Republican politicians kill more pets than Haitian immigrants.^[xxxvii] That should tell you that Haitian migrants aren’t coming to eat you or your furry friends.

What’s the Takeaway?

We hear all the time that the media is biased. Conservatives complain about liberal bias, and liberals (hilariously) complain about conservative bias. But narrative bias transcends all others. Humans evolved to like narratives. Sitting around the campfire listening to a story told by Ugg about how he killed the woolly mammoth shares information and gives Ugg more status in his tribe. It makes him seem cooler, stronger, and better than others and more worthy of respect, admiration, the attention of women, and more food. And we all know how much humans like to feel better than others. It’s the main reason why I write (publishers don’t actually pay most writers well). But the deeper lesson here is the narrative bias.

Narratives require a good guy, a bad guy, and a story involving the two. The characters can be nuanced, and the bad guy doesn’t have to be a human but can be an animal or some other force. Heck, the good guys don’t even have to be particularly good. Narratives are fun, but you can’t explain how the world works with narratives because it’s too big and complicated. Few aspects of the modern world have a single protagonist, antagonist, or conflict that fits neatly into a story. Most of the big things that happen are of people reacting to unseen and abstract forces caused by other people whom they don’t know, but the stories are what capture our imagination and make the world come alive.

I stared at regression tables, empirical papers, legal analyses, and mathematical models to figure out what caused the 2008 financial crisis. Michael Lewis wrote a book about some short sellers that became a major movie called The Big Short ­– you may have heard of it.^[xxxviii] The Big Short probably explained the financial crisis to more people than have ever been convinced by the findings of all empirical economics papers over the history of the world because it’s a very entertaining story. It’s wrong, and Lewis’s conclusions were ludicrous, but it’s an excellent story.

We all exploit narrative bias. I’m using narrative bias in this substack to make it more readable. The elderly woman in Arizona who asked me “what do they have to hide?” was falling for a form of narrative bias by assuming there were good guys, who were the Border Patrol or a personified United States more generally that includes herself, and the bad guys who were illegal immigrants breaking those laws. They must have evil motives.

If I thought econometrics and economic models were convincing, I’d update my first book instead of writing these posts.^[xxxix] But don’t confuse narratives with big facts or models of the world. Reporters write news stories – they’re called stories, after all – because that’s what people want to read. Stories are how reporters think because they’re humans too; it’s how we evolved to think, make sense of the world, and partly to judge status. That may have worked well enough in your tribe 50,000 years ago when you all were stuck on the Savannah but it’s a poor way of reasoning today. A story is just a story.

The flippant response of academics to scientific-sounding explanations that aren’t formally modeled or empirically tested is to label them “just-so stories.” Convenient stories that are simple explanations for complex events can be correct, but they’re usually not. I criticized academics earlier for refusing to answer other people’s questions, but they’re correct that the world is complex and it’s difficult to figure out how it works. Prices at the supermarket don’t rise because farmers are greedy any more than planes sometimes crash because gravity pulls harder, but both are easier stories to tell than “excessive money creation by the Federal Reserve and aggregate demand from fiscal stimulus pushed up prices across the board.” That just doesn’t tickle our prefrontal cortexes in the same way.

Successful political propagandists and writers usually try to pick out an enemy and a victim, weaving them together in a story where specific individuals do things that others respond to. “You see,” they begin, “those evil bankers, who are mostly foreign, control the Fed and tell it to print money as part of their Globalist plot to rob you, the middle class.” Simple, entertaining, and idiotic.

Criminals and victims who are sympathetic or very unsympathetic are ripe for narrative bias. We can’t look away. But the stories throughout this substack and others don’t prove any statistical fact; you can’t compare anecdotes and reach an intelligent conclusion. They don’t help you understand the world because it’s a big and complicated place. You should use narratives to understand the big picture statistical facts – don’t memorize the numbers – but just know that legal and illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. That’s the fact that matters. The stories are the sugar that helps the statistical medicine go down. Taste the sugar, plug your nose, and swallow.

Read Part I, Part II, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X of What People Really Care About When They're Mad About Immigration.

^[1] People who hang out with scumbags don’t read many substacks, so you should be fine… statistically speaking.

^[i] Chris Dyer, “Police release footage of the moment an agitated knife-wielding suspect is shot dead by cops after ‘murdering his girlfriend by beheading her’ in a Seattle apartment, ” Daily Mail, February 18, 2019.

^[ii] Miriam Jordan and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “S.U.V. Packed With 25 Passengers Crashes Near California Border, Killing 13,” The New York Times, March 2, 2021.

^[iii] Gabriela Vida, “Memorial service honors woman killed by father of her children,” CBS Austin, December 12, 2019.

^[iv] CBS Austin, “Police: Mother died protecting her children in murder-suicide,” CBS Austin, December 8, 2019.

^[v] Gabriela Vida, “Memorial service honors woman killed by father of her children,” CBS Austin, December 12, 2019.

^[vi] RNC Research (@RNCResearch), “Murder of Laken Riley by Illegal Alien,” X post, March 6, 2024, 9:34 p.m.

^[vii] C.W. Nevius, “Steinle’s parents: ‘no room for angry’,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2015; David D. Kirkpatrick, “Will Laken Riley’s Murder Tip Georgia?” The New Yorker, October 29, 2024.

^[viii] C.W. Nevius, “Steinle’s parents: ‘no room for angry’,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2015.

^[ix] Sam Gringlas, “How a Georgia nursing student’s killing reached Biden’s State of the Union,” NPR, March 8, 2024; David D. Kirkpatrick, “Will Laken Riley’s Murder Tip Georgia?” The New Yorker, October 29, 2024.

^[x] Laken Riley Act, US Senate, 119th Cong., 1st sess., January 29, 2025.

^[xi] RNC Research (@RNCResearch), “BIDEN MIGRANT CRIME,” X post, April 19, 2024, 2:51 p.m.

^[xii] Jennie Taer, “US soldier shoots migrant during border-crosser stabbing near El Paso as rising violence continues,” New York Post, April 15, 2024; Liam Griffin, “Afghan Refugee Convicted Of Sexually Assaulting 3-Year-Old Girl At Quantico,” Patch, January 24, 2022; Illegal Alien Crimes (@ImmigrantCrimes), “Hillsborough County, FL: Yesterday, Angel Gabriel Cruz-Choc was arrested for a double murder in the stabbing death of his girlfriend and her four year old daughter,” X post, April 26, 2024, 3:03 p.m; Brandon Truitt, “Migrant charged with raping teen at Rockland hotel being used as shelter,” CBS News, March 14, 2024; Andrew R. Arthur, “Why Was Accused Guatemalan Murderer Loose in Florida?,” Center for Immigration Studies, May 2, 2024.

^[xiii] Ed Lavandera et al., “Suspect in Texas massacre had been deported 4 times after entering US illegally, ICE source says,” CNN, May 1, 2023.

^[xiv] Ed Lavandera et al., “Suspect in Texas massacre had been deported 4 times after entering US illegally, ICE source says,” CNN, May 1, 2023.

^[xv] Suzanne Gamboa, “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott slammed for calling shooting victims ‘illegal immigrants’,” NBC News, May 1, 2023.

^[xvi] Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX), “$50K Reward for Info on the Criminal Who Killed 5 Illegal Immigrants on Friday,” X post, April 30, 2023, 5:15 p.m.

^[xvii] Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX), “$50K Reward for Info on the Criminal Who Killed 5 Illegal Immigrants on Friday,” X post, April 30, 2023, 5:15 p.m.

^[xviii] Suzanne Gamboa, “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott slammed for calling shooting victims ‘illegal immigrants’,” NBC News, May 1, 2023.

^[xix] David J. Bier and Julian Salazar, “Immigrants Cut Victimization Rates, Boost Crime Reporting,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no, 1003, August 26, 2025.

^[xx] “All Expanded Homicide Offense vs. Victim Demographics,” Crime Data Explorer, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

^[xxi] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/au-pair-double-homicide-herndon/3981102/; https://www.fox5dc.com/news/virginia-au-pair-murder-trial-alleged-plot-double-homicide-latest;

^[xxii] Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacIntyre), “A gentle reminder that the border is open and there is essentially nothing preventing immigrants from bringing this madness here,” X post, March 10, 2024, 10:08 a.m; Paul A. Szypula (@Bubblebathgirl), “CNN Should Visit Cannibalistic Haiti,” X post, March 13, 2024, 8:01 a.m; Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray), “NBC News Smear Campaign against Elon Musk,” X post, March 13, 2024, 7:14 p.m; The Matt Walsh Show (@MattWalshShow), “Haiti Descends Into Chaos As Our Borders Remain Wide Open,” X post, March 11, 2024, 2:34 p.m.

^[xxiii] David Ingram, “Elon Musk and right-wing influencers use ‘cannibal’ claims to smear Haitian migrants amid crisis,” NBC News, March 13, 2024.

^[xxiv] Logan Hall (@loganclarkhall), “‘tonight, a haitian leader claims the trump administration’s plans could be catastrophic for his country. an interesting contention, as haiti is currently run by a cannibal warlord named barbecue’,” X post, January 26, 2025, 8:01 p.m.

^[xxv] “Jimmy Chérizier,” Wikipedia.com, last edited September 2, 2025.

^[xxvi] Martin Pengelly, “Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book,” The Guardian, April 26, 2024.

^[xxvii] Martin Pengelly, “Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book,” The Guardian, April 26, 2024.

^[xxviii] Alicia V. Lozano, “‘It just Exploded’: Springfield Woman Claims She Never Meant to Spark False Rumors about Haitians,” NBC News, September 13, 2024.

^[xxix] Alicia V. Lozano, “‘It just Exploded’: Springfield Woman Claims She Never Meant to Spark False Rumors about Haitians,” NBC News, September 13, 2024.

^[xxx] Daniel Di Martino (@DanielDiMartino), “I keep seeing people claim that this woman who ate a cat is a Haitian migrant. But this is FALSE,” X post, September 24, 2024, 12:28 a.m.

^[xxxi] Andrea Cavallier and James Liddell, “Explanation finally revealed for viral image of man holding geese that fueled bizarre pet-eating claims in Ohio,” The Independent, September 14, 2024.

^[xxxii] Odette Yousef, “In parroting a lie about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Trump excites extremists,” NPR, September 24, 2024; Riley Hoffman, “READ: Harris-Trump presidential debate transcript,” ABC News, September 10, 2024; MonoNeon (@MonoNeon), “They’re Eating The Dogs, They’re Eating The Cats. - Donald Trump,” X post, September 11, 2024, 9:29 a.m.

^[xxxiii] Emily (@emilylazzell), “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats! TikTok viral Trump song,” X post, September 12, 2024, 4:04 a.m.

^[xxxiv] JD Vance (@JDVance), “Haitian Illegal Immigrants Draining Social Services and Generally Causing Chaos All over Springfield, Ohio. Now They’re Eating Our Pets,” X post, September 9, 2024, 10:22 a.m.

^[xxxv] Jessica Orozco, “Springfield Police Say No Reports of Pets Stolen, Eaten, after Viral Social Media Post,” Springfield News-Sun, September 9, 2024.

^[xxxvi] Nitish Pahwa, “Why the Right-Wing Lie About Migrants Eating Pets Won’t Die,”Slate, September 25, 2024.

^[xxxvii] Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “Project 2025 Mastermind Allegedly Told Colleagues He Killed a Dog with a Shovel,” The Guardian, September 24, 2024.

^[xxxviii] Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011); Michael Grunwald. “What ‘The Big Short’ Gets Wrong,” Politico, January 16, 2016; Peter J. Wallison, “Missing the Point: Lessons from The Big Short,” American Enterprise Institute, June 30, 2010; Richard Kovacevich, “The Financial Crisis: Why the Conventional Wisdom Has It All Wrong,” Cato Journal 34, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 541–556.

^[xxxix] Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell, Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Summary

Illegal entries had already fallen before President Trump took office, and while they have fallen further, declines in legal immigration far surpass those in illegal entries. Legal entries in major categories were down about 145,000 compared to a drop in illegal entries of about 53,000. Illegal entries are overstated because we are counting all Border Patrol arrests, including those of individuals expelled immediately. The chart below tracks immigration through February 2026, the most recent month for which the State Department has published data.

Illegal Immigration Had Already Fallen by Over 80 Percent Before Trump

The number of monthly Border Patrol arrests at the southwest border fell by 81 percent from December 2024 to August 2026, but by December 2024, it had already fallen by 81 percent from its peak in December 2023. Of the decline from the peak, 84 percent occurred under President Biden as of August 2026. Prior to Trump taking office, Border Patrol releases had already dropped 96 percent from their peak. Border Patrol releases have declined further under Trump’s second term, but in absolute terms, releases fell far more before he took office. Of the decline in releases from their peak, 96 percent occurred before Trump took office.

Recorded evasions of Border Patrol—known “gotaways”—also fell about 80 percent under President Trump from December 2024 to September 2025. But again, by December 2024, evasions had fallen well before Trump took office, falling by 83 percent from their peak in November 2022. The data from 2026 is spotty and from media leaks, not from the agency directly, but it is clear that President Trump’s administration continued an earlier trend in declines in illegal immigration.

President Trump’s administration has credited the low levels of illegal immigration to an executive order that requires Border Patrol to ignore US asylum law and immediately return any crosser to their home country. In an amicus brief for a case challenging the order, I detailed some reasons to believe that this claim is likely wrong. Besides the fact that illegal immigration was already falling, I note that arrests by the one population exempt from the order—unaccompanied children—fell just as much, and just as quickly, as other arrests. Better explanations for the changes are the general fear of the Trump administration and worsening economic conditions for lower-skilled labor here. 

Immigrant Visas for Legal Permanent Residents Fell by About Half

The State Department has not published the number of immigrant visa issuances since September 2025. Since then, President Trump has banned all immigrant visas for nationals of 40 countries, including the Palestinian Territories, effective January 1, 2026. As I’ve previously described, this affected one in five immigrant visa applicants. The State Department also suspended the Diversity Visa Lottery, effective December 23, 2025. Meanwhile, in a three-sentence press release, the State Department suspended immigrant visa issuances for 75 countries (for a total of 92 banned countries) on January 21, 2026. 

As I’ve detailed before, these bans affected half of all legal immigrants from abroad, including half of all spouses and minor children of US citizens, based on 2024 immigrant visa processing data. In my original post on this subject, my estimates of this decline—based on the banned countries—understated the effect these policies would have because I assumed that more processing would shift to other countries. It didn’t because the purpose was to cut overall levels of legal immigration and because the State Department did not prepare for this new policy.

Visas for Fiancé(e)s and Spouses of US Citizens Fell by More Than Half

K visas for fiancé(e)s and spouses of US citizens were down 61 percent from February 2024 to February 2026. The 40-country ban—which started in January 2026—also affects them, excluding about 3,000 visas annually. But because the 75-country immigrant visa ban does not, it’s possible that at least some spouses will eventually try to shift from immigrant visas to K‑1 visas. This does appear to have happened, which explains why I slightly overstated the decline in K visas for February 2026.

International Student Visas Fell by Nearly Half

As of February 2026, student visa issuances were still down 42 percent compared with February 2024. The Trump administration has enacted specific policies targeting international students. In January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order that led to the cancellation of F‑1 status and the revocation of 1,700 to 4,500 student visas between January and April. The administration also arrested and placed in detention several students for their political speech. In May, the administration attempted to suspend the right of Harvard to enroll international students at all but was blocked by the courts.

In May and early June, the State Department suspended all student visa issuance for three weeks during the peak season. In June, Trump signed an executive order banning student visas from 19 countries, which affected about 10,188 students annually. In December, he expanded that ban to 40 countries, affecting about 23,000 students per year. Comparing the peak months when students typically get visas, student visas had already fallen by 40 percent, comparing the summer of 2024 to the summer of 2025.

In my initial projection for February in my earlier post, I understated the decline, presumably either because more students are simply scared to come or because visa denials have increased at consulates. Unfortunately, we have no data on denials, but it would make sense for students to be less excited about coming. This week, the Trump administration announced a $70,000 fee on work authorization for international student graduates of US universities who apply to work under the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. This may dissuade some more students from coming. Moreover, DHS has finalized a rule to limit international students’ study in the United States to generally just four years, which a judge temporarily blocked.

H‑1B Visas Have Fallen by 78 Percent

In the average month, H‑1B visa issuances in 2025 were already lower than in 2024. But in September, President Trump signed an executive order mandating a $100,000 fee to petition for a newly hired H‑1B worker outside the United States. DHS has revealed that the visa fee reduced filings by 91 percent for workers targeted by it. There were 65,000 new H‑1B approvals for workers outside the US in FY 2024, and there were  219,659 visas issued abroad, including renewals. This implies that about 30 percent of visa issuances are for workers targeted by the ban. 

Based on these facts, I had estimated in April that the fee would reduce H‑1B visa issuances by about a quarter last year because H‑1B renewals were exempt from the fee. In fact, H‑1B visas—along with H‑4 visas for their spouses and children—were down 78 percent from the February 2024 level, implying that more than just the ban is to blame. Over the summer, a district court struck down the $100,000 fee as an unconstitutional tax, but we don’t yet know how the administration has implemented that order. Moreover, the president issued a new $100,000 fee proclamation in September 2026, and DHS has proposed a new $103,000 fee via regulation, though it is not yet in effect. It has also suspended several major companies—including Microsoft, Adobe, and Infosys—from sponsoring H‑1B workers for green cards, as announced today. Given the uncertainty, many H‑1B workers may be too scared to leave to renew their visas abroad.

Refugees Entering Legally from Abroad Fell by About 90 Percent

The number of refugees—who enter legally and are granted full protection based on their fears of persecution—has also declined by nearly 90 percent. The president initially suspended the refugee program entirely before restarting it to exclusively admit white South African refugees. The drop was from 12,518 in December 2024 to 1,341 in March 2026. The cap for FY 2026 is just 7,500, so the monthly average for the rest of the year will be 500. As I’ve pointed out previously, most refugees blocked by the administration were persecuted Christians.

Asylum Seekers Entering Legally Fell 99.9 Percent

Every prior administration allowed some asylum seekers to enter legally at the southwest ports of entry. Even the first Trump administration initially encouraged the practice, but it then terminated entries during the pandemic in 2020, and the second Trump administration did so again in January 2025 by eliminating the CBP One scheduling app and banning asylum. As a result, the number of monthly southwest border legal entries by asylum seekers fell 99.9 percent from almost 40,000 in December 2024 to just 26 in February 2026. The most recent data show just 31 in August 2026.

President Trump posted on social media a version of this chart after I published my original post on this subject, confusing these legal entries with illegal entries. In June 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the government’s authority to block all legal entries by asylum seekers at ports of entry.

Legal Entry Cuts Were 2.7 Times Higher Than Illegal Entries

When we put together the full picture of legal and illegal immigration, we see that President Trump has indeed cut legal entries far more than illegal entries in absolute terms. The available information suggests that about 2.7 times as many legal entries are being stopped as illegal entries: 144,569 versus 53,128. Among the cuts to immigration, three-quarters (73 percent) were from legal entries, not illegal entries.

This comparison inflates illegal entries because most illegal crossers caught by Border Patrol were not being released into the United States in December 2024. These are just the major visa categories. If we included every category, the cuts would be more severe. It also does not include all the people who are already in the United States and are banned from receiving legal status or converting from temporary to permanent status.

These cuts to legal immigration are harming US citizens seeking to reunite with their spouses, fiancés, children, and other relatives. They are also undermining US prosperity and increasing the US deficit. But they also illustrate the central misconception about the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. It is not about stopping “illegal” immigration. It is a broader assault on all types of immigration. As Americans debate the path forward on immigration, that’s a reality everyone should understand.

Murder is the worst crime – there’s no coming back from it. When your friends or loved ones are murdered, they’re gone forever and usually killed in a frightening, agonizing, painful way. Auto theft, burglary, muggings, and assault are all terrible crimes that keep Americans up into the wee hours of the morning. But murder is what keeps more of us up all night long and makes the headlines in major newspapers. “Homicide Rates Jump in Many Major U.S. Cities, New Data Shows,” reported The New York Times in 2016.^[ii] “US records highest increase in nation’s homicide rate in modern history, CDC says,” reported CNN in 2021.^[iii] “Homicide rates dropped in big cities. Why has the nation’s capital seen a troubling rise?” blared a USA Today headline in 2024.^[iv] Murder headlines earn the clicks.

Kate Steinle’s tragic murder in San Francisco in 2015 isn’t the only case of an illegal immigrant committing murder. Mollie Tibbetts was a University of Iowa student murdered in 2018 by Cristhian Bahena Rivera, an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Laken Riley, another college student at the University of Georgia, was murdered by Venezuelan-born Jose Ibarra in Georgia in 2024.^[v] Others were murdered by immigrants from 2015 through 2024, but there were over 200,000 murders during that time in the United States. What matters is whether immigrants are more or less likely to commit homicide than native-born Americans. All the evidence says that they are less likely to murder you than native-born Americans.

It’s the Crime Rates, Stupid

Ken Cuccinelli is the former Attorney General of Virginia who made a name for himself by suing the Obama Administration – sometimes to defend laws passed in other states, especially anti-immigration bills like the 2010 Arizona law. President Trump appointed Cuccinelli to be the Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), but a judge ruled his appointment was illegal. That made Cuccinelli the undocumented head of an immigration agency.^[vi]

Before and after his deportation from USCIS’ executive suite, Cuccinelli has said that immigrants are coming here to kill you. And he hasn’t let inconvenient things like math get in his way, such as when he says, “Crime rates do not matter.”^[vii] No, Mr. Cuccinelli, crime rates are what matter. “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” said Cuccinelli, putting his own spin on the poem engraved at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty.^[viii] Here’s my rewording of Shakespeare’s Richard III to prove a point: “An attorney, an attorney, my kingdom for an attorney who can do math.”

Crime imposes a huge economic and psychological cost on people. The victims are those most directly hurt when criminals steal their property, assault them, or kill them. But the rest of us are psychologically and economically affected too. We may be more afraid to leave our houses at certain times, travel downtown, or interact with strangers on the streets or in dark alleyways. Crime destroys businesses, livelihoods, and lives themselves, and the fear of crime makes all our lives worse off by prompting us to change our behavior to avoid it. However, the crime rates tell us how dangerous crime is, not the number of crimes.

Crime rates adjust data based on population size, so you can compare the frequency of different crimes, which cities are the safest, and whether you should really go to Baltimore after dark. Most crime data show crimes per 100,000 residents, and the following doesn’t deviate from that style. Calculating the crime rate is straightforward but worth repeating for the benefit of any former state Attorneys General who may be reading this. First, you take the number of criminals or crimes committed. Second, you take the population you’re calculating the rate for. Third, you divide the number of crimes by the population. Lastly, you take that quotient and multiply it by 100,000 or whatever other number you want. Voila, a crime rate.

Further explanation may help, Ken. Below, there will be data on the illegal immigrant homicide conviction rates in Texas. This is calculated by dividing the number of illegal immigrants convicted of homicide by the total illegal immigrant population in Texas, multiplied by 100,000. The same math is then repeated for legal immigrants and native-born Americans with their respective numbers. Incarceration rates are calculated the same way – except they’re the number of prisoners divided by the population. It’s so easy that even former Attorneys General can do it.

Crime rates allow comparisons between crime levels in different cities, time periods, or groups—like immigrants and native-born Americans. Raw crime counts, the measure of criminality favored by Ken Cuccinelli, don’t consider population differences like the number of people in each group. The results of Cuccinelli’s preferred methods are absurd. Let’s use our imaginations.

Imagine a city with 100 murders a year. According to Cuccinelli’s naïve view, that city is twenty times more dangerous than a city with five murders. But if the city with 100 murders has a million residents and the city with five murders has only 100 residents, then the city with fewer murders is far more dangerous. How do we know? The city with one million residents and 100 murders has a homicide rate of 10 per 100,000. The city with 100 residents and five murders has a homicide rate of 5,000 per 100,000. Your odds of being murdered in the small city are 500 times greater than in the big city, even though five is a number smaller than 100. Why? Because the population is a lot bigger in the million-person city. Do I even need to ask you which city is safer?

Here’s a more tragic example: Detroit. Motor City’s population peaked at 1.8 million in 1950 and then slowly declined due to poor governance, a sclerotic American auto industry in Michigan, corrupt unions, and high taxes. Detroit’s population dropped by about a third during the 20-year mayorality of Coleman Young, whose governance style can best be summed up by the “M.F.I.C.” placard that he kept on his desk, short for “motherfucker in charge.”^[ix] And, of course, the crime. Lots of crime.

Not just ordinary crime either. Race riots and urban chaos convinced many of the city’s prosperous and middle-class residents, mostly white, to flee to the suburbs. Those who didn’t leave were targeted by high progressive income taxes and commuter taxes pushed by Young and his political cronies who weren’t paid by Young’s poorer and blacker voting base.^[x] By design, Young’s voters stayed in the city, and those who might vote against him left, while Young became politically unassailable and crime surged. Young earned the M.F. in M.F.I.C., but not the I.C. because the criminals were in charge.

From 1970 to 2023, the number of homicides in Detroit dropped from 495 to 252, a 49 percent decrease. Cucinelli – or anyone fixated on raw body counts – might call that an improvement. But it’s a numerical mirage. During that time, the homicide rate rose from 33 per 100,000 to 39 per 100,000, a 24 percent increase. The murder rate increased even though the number of murders fell because Detroit’s population declined even more from over 1.5 million in 1970 to about 640,000 in 2023, a decrease of 59 percent. Only considering murder, Detroit is a more dangerous city in 2023 than it was in 1970.^[xi] Real mirages fool only the person wandering the desert. This numerical mirage was worse because it fooled Detroit’s police brass and surely would have fooled Cuccinelli, too.^[xii]

Focusing on crime rates rather than the number of crimes is the only reasonable way to compare criminality between populations of different sizes, such as the 48 million immigrants and 287 million native-born Americans. Otherwise, there is no basis for arguing that one or the other is more criminally inclined, which is all that really matters when trying to understand whether immigrants are coming to kill us. After all, we must compare the threat from illegal immigrant murderers to something. That threat should be the chance of being killed by native-born murderers, rather than of being killed by cancer, old age, or bee stings. As an overrated economist once said, “In the long run we’re all dead.”^[xiii] But immigrants are supposedly coming to kill us now.

Additionally, we couldn’t judge whether crime differs between geographical regions or over time without looking at crime rates because the number of crimes generally goes up as the population rises. It’s trivially easy to point to crimes committed by members of any large population, no matter how one defines it, but doing so reveals little. Looking at crime rates makes my job more challenging. I could end my substack series at the end of this paragraph if I accepted Cuccinelli’s way of measuring crime. Texas has the best immigrant crime data in the United States. From 2013 to 2022, 808 immigrants were convicted of homicide in Texas. During the same time, 7,109 native-born Americans were convicted of homicide – almost nine times as many!^[xiv] It really does look like native-born Americans are coming to kill you – maybe Trump had it backward? But such a take would be dishonest and, frankly, stupid.

Immigrants commit fewer murders in Texas because there are fewer immigrants. That is a trivial fact that tells you nothing about the relative rates of immigrant and native-born criminality because there are about five native-born Americans living in Texas for every immigrant. What we really care about is the crime rate. For every 100,000 immigrants, how many are murderers? If 100,000 illegal immigrants moved to your city, would your chances of being murdered rise or fall? And what’s the rate for native-born Americans and legal immigrants? Those are the comparisons that matter.

Everything is Bigger in Texas – Except the Illegal Immigrant Homicide Rate

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter has been a citizen of the commentariat since the late 1990s. She’s mostly followed the opinions of American conservatives by publishing books on their favorite topics like how bad Bill Clinton is, how she trusts Donald Trump, and how liberals are crazy, evil, godless, demonic, treasonous, guilty of bad things, or stupid. But she was ahead of the curve and helped change conservative minds with her 2015 book about how terrible immigrants are. ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole was released just 16 days before Trump gave his first nativist speech. Her television appearance on Jorge Ramos’ Fusion show probably influenced him.^[xv] Most likely, when she said that immigrants are more dangerous than ISIS: “If you don’t want to be killed by ISIS, don’t go to Syria. If you don’t want to be killed by a Mexican, I don’t know what to tell you,” Coulter told Ramos.^[xvi]

You can’t tell the topic of a Coulter book by its cover art because it’s always a younger picture of herself – even if the book is about Bill Clinton. Other than the plastic cover art, one section of ¡Adios, America! is memorable. Coulter writes that the U.S. government doesn’t have good statistics on immigrant criminals. The government has statistics on everything from the number of pigs on farms to ham radio operators, but it doesn’t keep statistics on the number of immigrant criminals.^[xvii] Coulter fixates on individual criminals by illegal immigrants and insinuates a grand liberal conspiracy to hide the truth. She doesn’t even add Trump’s token disclaimer about how “some are good people.” In her telling, they must all be bad – why else would the government in fail to publish statistics? Did that elderly woman from Arizona speak with Coulter too?

Federal prisons have immigration data for federal crimes. In 2021, about 34 percent of those sentenced to federal prison were illegal immigrants.^[xviii] Since illegal immigrants were only about 4.4 percent of the population in that year, that implies they are incarcerated well above their share of the population. Maybe they aren’t such good people after all! But federal prisons don’t give you the full picture because only about 10 percent of all prisoners nationwide are in federal prisons. And they’re special prisoners incarcerated for only federal crimes.

Almost all illegal immigrants in federal prison are incarcerated for drug smuggling and immigration offenses, which are crimes that account for almost half of all federal prisoners.^[xix] There’s no federal crime for murder unless you commit it on federal property, kill a federal official, commit murder while crossing state lines, during a kidnapping, or as part of terrorism. Almost all murder convictions are prosecuted on the state level because that’s where the murder laws are. In 2021, only 313 people were sentenced to federal prison for murder or manslaughter – less than 1 percent of the total sentenced that year.^[xx] Digging further into the data reveals that 281 of them were U.S. citizens and 32 were non-citizens, which includes legal immigrants, lawful travelers, those extradited to the United States, and illegal immigrants.

The small number of illegal immigrants sentenced to federal prison for homicide is a problem for Ken Cuccinelli’s way of counting crimes. Using the method preferred by the former Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia, illegal immigrants don’t look so bad. A maximum of 32 homicide convictions? Time to call it a day. But we can’t fall into that innumerate trap. We must look at the relative homicide rates of immigrants and native-born Americans and include the rest of the American criminal justice system that resides in the states.

That’s a big job because, in 2021, there were about 175,600 people in state prisons for homicide and 2,426 in federal prisons.^[xxi] Barely more than 1 percent of people convicted of homicide were sent to federal prison. And we cannot just look at all immigrants and compare them to native-born Americans, we must separate out illegal immigrants and calculate their crime rates separately. And this brings us back to Coulter’s challenge – why don’t we know?

Academics can indirectly answer that question. They have this problem where they investigate the questions they’re interested in and rarely pay attention to the questions that the rest of us have. They’ve investigated immigrant crime rates for over a century and keep finding the same results: immigrants have lower crime and incarceration rates than native-born Americans.^[xxii] It doesn’t matter when or where, the result is the same in the United States. But when you say that, the response is always, “I believe that when it comes to legal immigrants, but what about illegal immigrants?” Good question.

Data from the American Community Survey (ACS), an annual government survey run by the Census Bureau, can get us close. Their survey includes prisoners incarcerated everywhere in the United States. Wardens and prison staff answer the questions themselves based on the administrative records for the prisoners. All immigrants are in the survey because it asks the prisoners where they were born and their citizenship. Native-born Americans have an incarceration rate about three times higher than that of all immigrants. Doing our best to identify the illegal immigrants incarcerated shows that they’re incarcerated at about half the rate, while legal immigrants come out squeaky clean at a fourth of natives.^[xxiii]

One complication is the black American crime rate, which is many times higher than that of any other group in the United States and could explain the much larger native-born incarceration rate by itself. If a group of people is especially short on average, they could all be normal except for Danny DeVito sneaking into the room and driving down the average. Fortunately, we analyzed the data without blacks and native-born Americans still have a much higher incarceration rate, although the numbers narrow a bit.^[xxiv]

Those are just estimates of the illegal immigrant crime rate, though. We have a better partial answer from the best state in the union: Texas.

Coulter is right that American states don’t keep data on illegal immigrant criminality, except for Texas. And who can blame her for forgetting the largest Republican-dominated state? It is the only state that records criminal convictions and arrests for legal and illegal immigrants. Better than that, Texas records the convictions and arrests separately for each crime. Every state could have this data if it wanted, but only Texas keeps it and makes it available to the public, but you must ask nicely. I was the first to ask.

It’s worth explaining how Texas keeps this data. Police check the fingerprints and identity information against all those arrested in the U.S. against federal databases. The main reason is to see whether arrestees are wanted for crimes in other states, but the federal system also indicates whether the person is a likely illegal immigrant. This is true in both sanctuary cities that don’t cooperate with federal deportation authorities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local governments that are eager to turn them over to ICE for jaywalking. Texas is different because the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) keeps the data and makes it available while other states don’t.

Texas doesn’t just stop there. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) continues to investigate the immigration statuses of offenders after they are convicted of crimes and incarcerated in state prisons. And the TDCJ focuses on those convicted of the worst crimes with the longest sentences like homicide. Texas’s data are pretty good, but like all government databases, they can be confusing. Researchers like the former Trump appointee Jason Richwine frequently get tripped up by the data and accidentally double-count some illegal immigrant criminals.^[xxv] It’s easy to count all illegal immigrant criminals identified by DPS by the time of their conviction and then count the TDCJ checks after they are sent to prison. Do you see the problem? Most illegal immigrants identified by DPS are also identified by TDCJ and vice versa. There are very few uncovered as illegal immigrants by TDCJ who weren’t also identified as illegal by DPS.

The key is to ask for illegal immigrant criminals only identified by DPS, only identified by TDCJ after further investigation, and only identified by both DPS and TDCJ. Those are three distinct buckets of criminal apples, bananas, and apple-banana mutant hybrid fruits (bapples). Richwine and others accidentally summed the apples and bananas once, and the bapples twice. That’s no way to run accounting for a grocery store or your food pantry, let alone a criminal justice system.

The other tricks are to focus on only the most serious crimes and to wait a few years.^[xxvi] TDCJ is busy, they only have the resources to focus on investigating those convicted of the most serious crimes with the longest sentences like homicide. If they identify additional illegal immigrant murdered who were missed by DPS, their long sentences guarantee that they’ll be deported after they’ve done their time. Those incarcerated for shorter periods may be released by the time TDCJ completes its investigation. Also, it takes time to run more detailed checks, so give them a few years.

There are other reasons to focus on homicide besides TDCJ spending its resources looking into those convicted of it. Homicide is not underreported, or at least not as underreported as less serious crimes, so it’s the most “complete” data we have on crime. Many people don’t report burglaries or other crimes because they figure the police can’t help anyway – and they’re often correct. Murderers have a hard time hiding bodies, people tend to notice when somebody disappears, and just about everybody calls the police when they witness a murder unless they are the murderer themselves. In that case, others call the police.

Besides being the best state in the union because of its great food, cosmopolitan and affordable cities, scarce gun laws, and no state income tax, Texas is also an ideal state to study illegal immigrant crime. We’re lucky they keep these statistics. Texas borders Mexico. More than half of all immigrants encountered by Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations along the entire Mexico-US border occurred in Texas from October 2020 to January 2024. Because it borders a developing country and has a robust economy, Texas has the second-largest illegal immigrant population, just behind California. Texas is also a politically conservative state governed by Republicans, so nobody can credibly argue that there’s a liberal conspiracy to suppress illegal immigrant crime statistics. Texas also has a reputation for strictly enforcing its criminal laws, which is one reason why it hasn’t had any sanctuary cities for some time. There’s no hiding illegal immigrant crime in Texas.

We have the best immigrant crime data in the best state to study. We’d be out of luck if a state like West Virginia were the only one to keep this data. When you separate your Texan apples, bananas, and bapples, wait a few years, and focus on the most serious crime of homicide, then the results are clear: illegal immigrants and legal immigrants commit many fewer homicides than native-born Americans at a substantially lower rate.

Illegal and Legal Immigrant Homicides in Texas – The Details

The illegal immigrant homicide conviction rate was 2.2 per 100,000 illegal immigrants during the 10-year period of 2013–2022. Legal immigrants are lower still at 1.2 and all immigrants, legal and illegal combined, clock in at about 1.6. What about native-born Americans in Texas? A whopping homicide conviction rate of 3.0.^[xxvii] For the Cuccinellis or other aspiring Attorneys General, 3.0 is bigger than 1.2, 1.6, and even 2.2.

To put that in perspective, illegal immigrants were more than a quarter less likely to be convicted of homicide than native-born Americans, and legal immigrants were two-thirds less likely. The numbers are about the same for arrests and a little lower for other crimes in Texas. Those homicide conviction rates can be confusing though, and not just for undocumented heads of immigration agencies, so let’s describe them in another way. Beware, more numbers are coming but not too many.

Over those ten years, 472 illegal immigrants, 336 legal immigrants, and 7,109 native-born Americans were convicted of homicide in Texas. Illegal immigrants were convicted of six percent of all the homicide convictions in Texas, but they were about seven and a half percent of Texas’ population. Legal immigrants were 10 percent of the population and were convicted of just over four percent of all homicides. Native-born Americans were about 83 percent of Texas’ population, and they were convicted of about 90 percent of all the homicides. The homicide rate in Mexico was 28 per 100,000 Mexicans in 2021, and it was 20 per 100,000 for the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.^[xxviii] Mexico clearly isn’t sending us its ‘worst’ – if anything, it’s sending some of its best. In fact, more than just ‘some’ of them are good people.

If the native-born American murder rate were as low as the illegal immigrant rate in Texas, there would have been about 1,861 fewer murders during the 2013-2022 period. If they murdered at the same low rate as legal immigrants, almost 2,750 fewer people would have been murdered in Texas.

The lower levels of illegal immigrant homicide convictions in Texas are no comfort to Jocelyn Nungaray or her family. Venezuelan illegal immigrants Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel and Franklin Jose Peña Ramos were charged with her murder in June 2024, and the evidence is overwhelming. As awful as her murder was at the probable hands of these vicious criminals, the illegal immigrant homicide conviction rate in the last year, for which there was reliable data, was 36 percent below that of native-born Americans.^[xxix]

People aren’t surprised when you tell them that legal immigrants are much less likely to be criminals, but they are surprised when they find out that illegal immigrants have a lower criminal conviction rate because they remember the individual murders by illegal immigrants like Nungaray’s because they are reported in the news. What could explain that lower rate? Why would somebody willing to break immigration laws, where there are no victims, and take a chance on making a new life for themselves and their family in a foreign land away from the culture they grew up in be less likely to commit crimes? Put that way, the answer is obvious.

The types of people who emigrate are different from those who stay. They’re more ambitious, think more about the future, and take calculated risks—like paying a smuggler to enter the United States to work in the black market. But they don’t tend to take risks like committing murder or other crimes, which they could do in their home countries. Crime sometimes pays, but not on average.

One reason crime doesn’t pay for illegal immigrants is that their punishment is harsher than it is for American citizens. When Americans are convicted of a crime, they do their time and are released in the United States. When illegal immigrants are convicted of crimes, they are deported at the end of their prison sentence. This is the proper thing to do – criminals should be removed from the United States – but it’s also an extra punishment. Not only do you go to prison if you’re an immigrant convicted of a violent or property crime, but then you get deported back to poverty in the country you left – and maybe even to another prison if you’re from El Salvador. That’s a greater deterrent.

The government also tries to screen out criminals when they arrive, but it doesn’t always work. Peruvian Gianfranco Torres-Navarro arrived on the U.S.-Mexico border in May 2024. Border Patrol apprehended and released him after being given a court date to appear in front of an immigration court. Two months later, the Peruvian government informed the U.S. government that Torres-Navarro was wanted for the murders of 23 people in Peru because he was the head of the “Los Killer” gang. That gang’s name appears to literally describe their primary criminal activity.

Torres-Navarro’s nickname was “Gianfranco 23.” Shortly after learning that, ICE arrested Gianfranco 23 and held him for deportation back to Peru where he’ll be tried for homicide. He didn’t become Gianfranco 24 yet in the United States, and immigration enforcement performed well here once it had sufficient information to act, but we also can’t expect perfection. Law enforcement relies on information from domestic and international sources to function well. It worked out well in this case, but Torres-Navarro should never have entered in the first place.

Illegal immigrants have a good reason to follow criminal laws even if they broke immigration laws, with some probable exceptions like Gianfranco 23. But many criminals in the United States are recidivists – they commit one crime, are incarcerated, released, and commit another crime. They spend their lives going in and out of prison. However, illegal immigrants who are deported are less likely to be recidivists for the simple reason that few of them return to the United States after being removed, commit crimes, and get convicted again. They mostly stay put in their home countries. Maybe if all illegal immigrants were allowed to stay after serving their time, their crime rate would be higher than that of native-born Americans. Is that likely?

Probably not. The rate of illegal immigrants who are first-time offenders is more than one-third less than it is for native-born Americans – they really are less likely to commit crimes even when considering recidivism.^[xxx] That means there’s less recidivism when those bad apples (bbaples?) are deported. But maybe illegal immigrants commit their crimes and flee back to their home countries or otherwise disappear before being caught. That seems plausible.

Plausible but unlikely. Police measure their effectiveness through many means, but a common one is the so-called clearance rate – which is just the percentage of reported crimes that have been resolved, or “cleared,” by an arrest, criminal charges being filed, or turning over a suspect for prosecution.^[xxxi] The higher the clearance rate, the more effective the police are – at least in theory. If illegal immigrants commit many homicides or other crimes and then disappear or return to their home countries, there should be a lower clearance rate in places with many illegal immigrants. Turns out, there’s no difference between clearance rates for homicide or other crimes in states with many illegal immigrants and those with hardly any.^[xxxii] Illegal immigrants aren’t criminal masterminds.

Americans Commit a Lot of Homicides

You’ve probably picked up on this by now, but Americans commit a lot of homicides – more than any other developed country. Our violence is the biggest reason why immigrants here seem so peaceful. In 2021, Germany had only 695 homicides and a rate of 0.8 per 100,000. In the US, there were 25,000 homicides in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – that’s a homicide rate of 8.2, or about ten times higher than in Germany. But Germany is not unter alles when it comes to homicide rates in developed countries. Singapore had seven homicides in 2021 and a rate of 0.1. American retirement homes may have a higher homicide rate than Singapore.

Our former au pair from Switzerland was astounded when she learned about American crime. In 2021, Switzerland had only 42 murders in a population of over 8.7 million for a rate of 0.42 per 100,000. In Washington, DC, the city closest to where we lived, there were 226 murders in 2021 out of a population of about 670,000 – a murder rate 70 times higher Switzerland’s.^[xxxiii] You don’t have to be a former Attorney General to see that there is a lot of murder in the United States.

Homicide rates and homicide conviction rates aren’t the same. The former is the rate of actual homicides that occurred, and the latter is the rate of those who are convicted of homicide. They aren’t the same, but they’re related unless you think more homicides won’t eventually lead to more convictions. If illegal immigrants in Texas instead went to Germany, Singapore, or Switzerland and didn’t change their criminal behavior, they would have a homicide rate multiple times higher than the natives in those countries. Even relatively less homicidal legal immigrants would have a higher rate than the natives in both of those countries if they behaved the same. But it’s still worth repeating that native-born Americans would have the highest of all if they were transported to Europe and didn’t change their behavior.

It’s not an iron law of social science that immigrants must have a lower crime rate than natives – it depends on the immigrants, the natives, and other factors like the criminal justice system, economic opportunity, and how both change how people behave. There’s evidence that immigrants to European countries from outside of Europe have a higher crime rate than European natives.^[xxxiv] This isn’t so surprising, as Europe has low crime and homicide rates compared to the United States. But in the cases where the data are available, and European crime data are even worse than American data, immigrants in Europe would have a lower homicide and crime rate than native-born Americans if they instead came to the U.S. The American incarceration rate for immigrants from the Middle East, the immigrants who most worry Europeans, is only 245 per 100,000 – about double what it is in Europe and one-sixth of the native-born American incarceration rate.^[xxxv] Everything is bigger in America.

Other Crimes in Texas

Texas has the best crime data for legal and illegal immigrants, but the non-homicide data likely miscounts illegal and legal immigrant criminal convictions. Still, it’s worth showing their criminal conviction rates with that caveat. During the 10-year period of 2013–2022, the criminal conviction rate was 685 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, 551 for legal immigrants, and 1,321 for native-born Americans. In other words, illegal immigrants were 48 percent less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of a crime, and legal immigrants were 58 percent less likely.^[xxxvi] Who says America isn’t already great – at least with racking up criminal convictions?

Immigrants Aren’t Poisoning Americans with Opioids

Not long ago, I testified in front of Congress about immigrant criminality. Representative Tom Tiffany (R-WI) asked if my count of immigrant homicides included Americans who died of drug overdoses. “Of course not, drug overdoses aren’t homicides,” I replied. ^[xxxvii]The Republican members of Congress didn’t like that answer. Just goes to show you can’t trust a man whose surname is a woman’s first name.

What escaped the Congressmen is that murder victims and those who die from drug overdoses are different. Murder victims don’t want to be murdered; they are killed against their will, which is an extraordinarily odd thing to write because it is so unambiguously true despite what politicians say. On the other hand, drug users who overdose took a risk by consuming illegal and dangerous drugs and then suffered the consequences of their actions. It’s still a tragedy when a drug user overdoses, especially when he does so after consuming illegal drugs that are adulterated without his knowledge. Still, drugs are dangerous, and everybody knows that they take a risk when using harder drugs like heroin, fentanyl, or cocaine.

How dangerous are those drugs? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that almost 108,000 people overdosed in the United States in 2023, and 75 percent of them died while consuming opioids like heroin and fentanyl.^[xxxviii] The synthetic opioid fentanyl is especially dangerous because it’s extremely potent – 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine – so fentanyl users are more likely to misjudge dose, the strength of fentanyl if it is illegally manufactured, or even be unaware that they are doing so.^[xxxix] According to government surveys of drug use, about 8.9 million people misused opioids in 2023.^[xl] You should take surveys that ask about illegal and deviant behavior committed by a socially disconnected subset of the population with a grain of salt bigger than Mount Everest, but they’re most likely marginally better than guessing.^[xli] And I don’t like guessing.

Almost nine million people responded that they consumed opioids for a non-prescribed use in 2023, according to those surveys.^[xlii] However, most of them reported illicitly consuming opioids in prescription drug form. About 828,000 of them, or less than 10 percent, reported using fentanyl.^[xliii] The real number of users is probably multiple times higher, but the other wrinkle is that there’s a difference between the casual or occasional user of fentanyl and the addict. The medical jargon says a serious user of drugs suffers from Drug Use Disorder (DUD), which is close to what normal people commonly call an addict and who consume the drugs to severe, moderate, and mild extents.^[xliv] About a fifth of all people with DUD are severe users, who are the most serious addicts.^[xlv]

Assuming that a fifth of the fentanyl users and all those who overdosed are severe users, just less than half of them overdosed in 2023, which is an extreme way to look at the data. You can slice the data differently by changing the denominator. For instance, it could be that 10 percent of fentanyl users overdosed in 2023 if you divide the opioid overdoses by the 828,000 who reported using fentanyl or slightly less than 1 percent if you use the entire population that illicitly consumed opioids. The rate of overdose would be lower still if the surveys undercount drug use, which they certainly do.

The fact remains that consuming fentanyl is extremely dangerous no matter how you interpret the numbers. About 350,000 people a year skydive, and 10 lost their lives jumping out of an airplane in 2023, for a death rate of about 2.9 per 100,000.^[xlvi] The most conservative estimate of the overdose death rate for fentanyl users above for the same year is about 979 per 100,000. Using fentanyl is about 343 times as dangerous as jumping out of an airplane. It’s a safer way to get high and then low than fentanyl. This is only one way to present the risks and hazards of drug use, and it ignores the other medical problems, lost dreams, ruined ambitions, and pain caused by using drugs or jumping out of airplanes, but it is the easiest and most useful to understand. Using fentanyl is one of the most dangerous activities an American can undertake, but it’s not homicide.

Trump blamed American deaths from drug use on illegal immigration when he said:

[C]ontained within this giant flow of illegal migration to our southwest border is the movement of illicit and deadly narcotics. It’s in the southwest, most of it comes in. Nearly 100 percent of heroin in the United States enters through the southern border– think of that: 100 percent, almost, of heroin comes in through the southern border, along with roughly 90 percent of cocaine, and the majority of meth, and a substantial portion of the ultra-lethal fentanyl killing our youth. Fentanyl is killing our youth.^[xlvii]

Unlike murder, illegal drug use has a supply and demand component, where the drug users themselves want the drugs. This is unlike murder, where nobody wants to be murdered. Drug users pay extraordinary prices to engage in a risky activity that they enjoy. Some murder victims are criminals who engage in risky criminal activity that they know increases their chance of being murdered, but their behavior is fundamentally less risky than consuming drugs with a high chance of poisoning themselves. The demand side of drug use is driven by American consumers.

But what about the supply? People can demand all the drugs that they want, but they can’t use them if there’s no supply. On the flip side, a massive supply would lower drug prices, but fewer people would use them in such a world if they didn’t demand them. But who is smuggling in the supply of drugs? It’s difficult to study drug black markets because they are illegal. However, data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) provides some clues. From 2019 to 2024, 92 percent of drugs CBP seized near the border were at a port of entry or an interior checkpoint – illegal immigrants did not smuggle them in their backpacks when crossing the desert.^[xlviii] More than four out of five of those arrested for smuggling fentanyl were US citizens.^[xlix]

That means immigrants and non-citizens were slightly overrepresented among drug smugglers, but not by much, and certainly much less than claimed by Trump. Above and beyond that, the numbers don’t compare the quantity smuggled, and US citizens probably stand out even more. The largest CBP bust of fentanyl netted 234 packages of drugs that contained 4 million blue fentanyl pills in July 2024.^[l] The smuggler was a 20-year-old American citizen from Arizona who attempted to drive them into the United States through a legal port of entry. “This is an enormous amount of dangerous drugs that officers at the Port of Lukeville prevented from reaching communities throughout the United States,” said Guadalupe Ramirez, Director of Field Operations for CBP, upon the announcement of the arrest.^[li] In that year, the number of overdose deaths dropped by over a quarter. The rate of overdoses started to recede as the illegal immigrant population peaked during the last year of the Biden administration.^[lii]

American citizens are the primary drug smugglers along the border by arrests and convictions, but that probably understates their share of the total quantities of drugs smuggled. After all, it’s easier to smuggle larger quantities across the border through legal ports of entry with an American passport than pull them through a tunnel or hike them through the desert. That requires US citizens to actually be the smugglers to maximize their chances of entering legally and undetected. Drug users are responsible for their own behavior, and drug suppliers meet their demand. Still, immigrants are not the primary smugglers – they aren’t trying to poison you with fentanyl.

Illegal Immigrants Aren’t Coming to Kill You

At least in Texas, they’re not, especially when compared to native-born Americans. If your city had a homicide conviction rate of 10 per 100,000 and a population of one million, what would happen to the homicide rate if 100,000 illegal immigrants with the Texan rate of homicide conviction moved in? The homicide conviction rate would drop to 9.3. If another 100,000 legal immigrants moved in, the homicide conviction rate would fall further to 8.6. The number of homicides would rise in both cases, but the population would rise even more. Does Texas tell us anything about the United States as a whole? Probably, if the nationwide incarceration numbers are to be believed. You already have a better grasp of how crime can make your life more dangerous than the former undocumented head of an immigration agency who was also the attorney general of Virginia.

As mentioned above, Texas is a great state to study. Other states should follow Texas’s lead on keeping illegal and legal immigrant criminal conviction data, in addition to copying the state’s income tax laws, fine cuisine, and affordable cities. Perhaps other states do have different outcomes and illegal or legal immigrants commit more homicides than natives there, but probably not. The state-level factor that could change the calculus is if a state has weak criminal enforcement, poor policing, and just lets criminals run wild. In such a case, more illegal immigrants would become criminals, but so would native-born Americans – so it could even be a wash. But I don’t want to take the risk.

Furthermore, lower illegal immigrant and legal immigrant incarceration rates nationwide indicate that they are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. Their lower level of criminality can be explained by several factors. The first is self-selection. Immigrants who want to start a new life are less likely to want to commit crimes that could jeopardize their chances of achieving the American dream. Another is that the federal government also attempts to screen out criminals from coming here, which dissuades some from trying in the first place and deports those who become criminals before they can reoffend or even before their first attempt here. And the biggest and most underdiscussed reason is that huge portions of humanity are less violent and criminally inclined than Americans, so they just can’t help looking good. Immigrants are not coming to murder you, but a native-born American just might.

Read Part I, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X of What People Really Care About When They're Mad About Immigration.

^[i] “How the Border Crisis Impacts Public Safety,” United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, April 16, 2024; Hearing on How the Border Crisis Impacts Public Safety, Before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, 118th Cong. 1st Sess. (April 16, 2024) (statement of Hon. Ken Cuccinelli, Senior Fellow for Immigration and Homeland Security, Center for Renewing America).

^[ii] Eric Lichtblau and Monica Davey, “Homicide Rates Jump in Many Major U.S. Cities, New Data Shows,” The New York Times, May 13, 2016.

^[iii] Jacqueline Howard, “US records highest increase in nation’s homicide rate in modern history, CDC says,” CNN, October 6, 2021.

^[iv] Cybele Mayes-Osterman, “Homicide rates dropped in big cities. Why has the nation’s capital seen a troubling rise?,” USA Today, January 22, 2024.

^[v] Meredith Deliso, “Grand jury indicts Laken Riley murder suspect on 10 counts,” ABC News, May 8, 2024.

^[vi] James Doubek, “Judge Says Ken Cuccinelli Was Appointed Unlawfully to Top Immigration Post,” NPR, March 2, 2020.

^[vii] “How the Border Crisis Impacts Public Safety,” United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, April 16, 2024; Hearing on How the Border Crisis Impacts Public Safety, Before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, 118th Cong. 1st Sess. (April 16, 2024) (statement of Hon. Ken Cuccinelli, Senior Fellow for Immigration and Homeland Security, Center for Renewing America).

^[viii] Sasha Ingber and Rachel Martin, “Immigration Chief: ‘Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor Who Can Stand on Their Own 2 Feet’,” NPR, August 13, 2019.

^[ix] Lee DeVito, “Detroit and the word ‘motherfucker’: a brief history,” Detroit Metro Times, March 26, 2024.

^[x] Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 21, no. 1 (April 1, 2005): 1–19.

^[xi] Alex Nowrasteh, “Crime Rates, Not the Number of Crimes, Are a Better Way to Judge Immigrant Criminality,” Cato at Liberty (blog), April 17, 2024.

^[xii] George Hunter, “Detroit on pace for fewest homicides since 1966; officials credit this program,” The Detroit News, December 4, 2023.

^[xiii] John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (The Richest Man in Babylon, 2009).

^[xiv] Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrant Murderers in Texas, 2013–2022,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 977, June 26, 2024.

^[xv] Adam B. Lerner, “Ann Coulter: Immigrants are worse than ISIL,” Politico, May 26, 2015.

^[xvi] Katherine Santana, “Ann Coulter Says Americans Should Fear Immigrants More Than ISIS,” Cosmopolitan, May 27, 2015.

^[xvii] “United States hog inventory up 1%,” National Agricultural Statistics Service, US Department of Agriculture, March 28, 2024; “FCC License Counts,” The American Radio Relay League, The National Association for Amateur Radio, accessed August 14, 2024; Ann H. Coulter, ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, a division of Salem Media Group, 2016), pp.100-103.

^[xviii] “Quick facts on Non-U.S. Citizen Federal Offenders” FY 2017 through FY 2021 Datafiles, United States Sentencing Commission.

^[xix] “Quick facts on Non-U.S. Citizen Federal Offenders” FY 2017 through FY 2021 Datafiles, United States Sentencing Commission; “Offenses,” Federal Bureau of Prisons, accessed August 13, 2025.

^[xx] Charles R. Breyer et al., “2021 Annual Report and Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics,” United States Sentencing Commission, table 9.

^[xxi] E. Ann Carson, “Prisoners in 2021 – Statistical Tables,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice, December 20, 2022;

^[xxii] Alex Nowrasteh, “Immigration and Crime – What the Research Says,” Cato at Liberty (blog), July 14, 2015; Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrants and Crime – Assessing the Evidence,” Cato at Liberty (blog), March 4, 2019.

^[xxiii] Michelangelo Landgrave and Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates, 2010­–2023,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 994, April 24, 2025.

^[xxiv] Alex Nowrasteh, “Immigrants Have a Lower Incarceration Rate than Native-Born Americans, Even When Excluding Black Americans,” Cato at Liberty (blog), April 25, 2025.

^[xxv] Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrants Have a Low Homicide Conviction Rate: Setting the Record Straight on Illegal Immigrant Crime,” Cato at Liberty (blog), February 28, 2024; Glenn Kessler, “The Truth About Illegal Immigrant and Crime,” The Washington Post, February 29, 2024.

^[xxvi] Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrants Have a Low Homicide Conviction Rate: Setting the Record Straight on Illegal Immigrant Crime,” Cato at Liberty (blog), February 28, 2024.

^[xxvii] Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrant Murderers in Texas, 2013–2022,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 977, June 26, 2024.

^[xxviii] Alex Nowrasteh, “Laken Riley’s death made the news, but here’s the real story on undocumented migrants,” USA Today, March 19, 2024.

^[xxix] Alex Nowrasteh, “Police Clearance Rates Are Not Lower in States with Many Illegal Immigrants,” Cato at Liberty (blog), October 23, 2018.

^[xxx] Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew C. Forrester, “Illegal Immigrant Conviction Rates Are Low, Even When Factoring in Recidivism,” Cato at Liberty (blog), January 7, 2019.

^[xxxi] “Homicide Closure Rates,” Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, accessed August 15, 2024.

^[xxxii] Alex Nowrasteh, “Police Clearance Rates Are Not Lower in States with Many Illegal Immigrants,” Cato at Liberty (blog), October 23, 2018.

^[xxxiii] “Homicide Closure Rates,” Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, accessed August 15, 2024.

^[xxxiv] Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, “New Paper out: Public Preferences and Reality: Crime Rates among 70 Immigrant Groups in the Netherlands,” Clear Language, Clear Mind (blog), February 16, 2020; Robert Semonsen, “BKA Report: Sharp Uptick in Violent Crime Committed by Migrants against Germans,” The European Conservative, November 16, 2023.

^[xxxv] Michelangelo Landgrave and Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates, 2010­–2018,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 890, April 21, 2020, table 2 under “Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates over Time”; “Prison Statistics,” Statistics Explained, Eurostat, April 2024, under “Highlights.”

^[xxxvi] Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrant Murderers in Texas, 2013–2022,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 977, June 26, 2024.

^[xxxvii] Alex Nowrasteh, “How to Make Congress Yell at You,” Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer w/ Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier (blog), June 26, 2025.

^[xxxviii] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “U.S. Overdose Deaths Decrease in 2023, First Time Since 2018,” CDC, May 15, 2024.

^[xxxix] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, (HHS Publication No. PEP24-07-021, NSDUH Series H-59), Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024, p. 21.

^[xl] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, (HHS Publication No. PEP24-07-021, NSDUH Series H-59), Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024, p. 20.

^[xli] Birguslatro, “Survey Chicken,” Carcinisation (blog), December 11, 2020.

^[xlii] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, (HHS Publication No. PEP24-07-021, NSDUH Series H-59), Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024, p. 20.

^[xliii] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, (HHS Publication No. PEP24-07-021, NSDUH Series H-59), Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024, p. 21.

^[xliv] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, (HHS Publication No. PEP24-07-021, NSDUH Series H-59), Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024, pp. 24-31.

^[xlv] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, (HHS Publication No. PEP24-07-021, NSDUH Series H-59), Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024, p. 30.

^[xlvi] “Number of Skydiving Fatalities in the United States from 2000 to 2023,” Statista, June 13, 2024; “Safety & Our Staff,” Skydive Zion.

^[xlvii] “Remarks by President Trump on the Illegal Immigration Crisis and Border Security,” The White House Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, November 1, 2018.

^[xlviii] David J. Bier, “US Citizens Were 80.2 Percent of Crossers with Fentanyl at Ports of Entry from 2019 to 2024,” Cato at Liberty (blog), August 8, 2024.

^[xlix] David J. Bier, “US Citizens Were 80.2 Percent of Crossers with Fentanyl at Ports of Entry from 2019 to 2024,” Cato at Liberty (blog), August 8, 2024.

^[l] “CBP Officers in Arizona Seize More than Half a Ton of Fentanyl in Largest Seizure in Agency History,” Customs and Border Protection, August 1, 2024.

^[li] “CBP Officers in Arizona Seize More than Half a Ton of Fentanyl in Largest Seizure in Agency History,” Customs and Border Protection, August 1, 2024.

^[lii] “U.S. Overdose Deaths Decrease Almost 27% in 2024,” CDC National Center for Health Statistics, May 14, 2025.

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The podcast episode was entitled the “Indian Question,” and is Keeperman and Rufo’s hour-long quasi-defense of Texas Republican Bo French’s viral tweet expressing outrage at students celebrating a University of Texas football win merely because they were of Indian ethnicity. It’s worth noticing that respected figures on the political right will defend those types of tweets, but to us, it’s also noteworthy that Keeperman chose the Cato Institute as his stand-in for all those who demand reasons for his views.

Keeperman and Rufo were not previously discussing Cato scholarship. So why did he fake-apologize to Cato of all groups before saying he didn’t need any reasons to advocate centrally planning the country’s demographics?

The answer is that Cato stands for reason. Our scholars defend our principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace with rational arguments. The Cato Institute has built its reputation over the last half century on sober empirical research, Enlightenment values, and the libertarian ideas that inspired the founding of the United States of America. Rather than dismiss as bigoted all the immigration critics’ complaints, we calmly analyze the data on crime, fiscal costs, terrorism, disease, assimilation, politics, housing, littering, and much else.

Even President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have thought highly enough of the quality of our work to cite it, though they disagreed with our preferred policies. Keeperman’s “my feelings don’t care about your facts” prebuttal sabotages any intellectual and fact-based response grounded in reason.

Cato also stands for the moral principle that people should be treated as individuals, not representatives of racial, ethnic, or other groups. As soon as you adopt this libertarian and classical liberal principle, it requires reasons—explanations—to justify government hostility toward someone. It is not enough to reference their demographics or your aesthetic judgment of their appearance. This moral universe is incompatible with a collectivist racial essentialism of the kind on display in French’s tweet and defended by Keeperman and Rufo.

Keeperman and Rufo acknowledge that even based on their group-level analysis, Indian Americans are economically successful and socially assimilated in every measurable way. That’s what necessitated Keeperman’s response: “I just prefer this.”

Of course, Keeperman is free to prefer whatever he wants. He should have complete freedom to associate or dissociate with whomever he wants. But we should not want to live in a world in which people’s emotional whims—their feelings—govern policy. Our Constitution was intended to limit government to protect our diverse interests from those who would impose their individual preferences, even aesthetic preferences, on others.

In Federalist No. 10, James Madison labeled “the first object of government” the protection of “the diversity in the faculties of men.” But he warned that:

So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.

What could possibly be a more frivolous distinction than the way someone looks or their ancestor’s birthplaces? Madison’s solution to the threat of “mutual animosities” would also be unwelcome to Keeperman and Rufo: a big, diverse country. “Take in a greater variety of parties and interests [and] you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens,” he wrote.

Keeperman’s comment highlights how Cato has become synonymous with a reproach to the irrational identitarianism that now typifies large parts of the political spectrum. As this brand of feelings-over-fact politics exposes itself as a dismal failure, we can only hope that in time, we can move from fake apologies to additional real ones and a policy debate shorn of racial and ethnic infatuations.

During his campaign in 2016, President Trump repeatedly proposed an outright ban on Muslims entering the United States. He then claimed that this policy idea morphed into the travel ban to avoid potential constitutional problems. During his 2024 campaign, he said he would bring back an even stricter ban than the one in his first term. He has succeeded.

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Historic Cuts to Legal Immigration

Data from the State Department through February 2026 show that the Trump administration has cut legal immigration by nationals of 45 majority-Muslim countries by 96 percent since December 2024. Monthly immigrant visa issuances and permanent lawful refugee admissions fell from 21,096 in December 2024 to 808 in February 2026.

The graph below shows that this outcome was not the result of seasonal trends since the drop from February 2024 was nearly as significant. Immigrant visas—primarily for family members of US citizens—were down 95 percent. Meanwhile, refugee resettlement—immigrants admitted lawfully based on threats of persecution abroad—was completely ended for majority-Muslim countries, dropping from 5,157 admissions in December 2024 to 0 admissions in February 2026.

The table below shows that this decline has affected nearly every majority-Muslim nationality in the world. Afghans accounted for fully one in four (27 percent) of all the drop for majority-Muslim countries, going from 5,563 legal immigrants and refugees in December 2024 to just 9 in February 2026—a 99.8 percent decline. Pakistanis followed with a drop of 2,963, or 97.9 percent.

Only three countries—Qatar, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates—saw increases during this period. Notably, Turkey had the smallest decline of just 8 percent.

If the current pace continues, the fiscal year 2026 (which started in October) would see the fewest immigrants and refugees from majority-Muslim countries in at least 30 years. If the February 2026 levels continue for the rest of the fiscal year (and they have for refugees, but we don’t yet have data on immigrant visa issuances), then only about 40,000 immigrants and refugees from these countries will have immigrated that year. This would be down nearly 80 percent from 2024 and even about 30 percent lower than 2020, when the first Trump administration used the pandemic as an excuse to cut off legal immigration. If the 2024 level had continued, another 180,000 immigrants and refugees could have come legally in 2025 and 2026.

It is worth noting that although these are majority-Muslim countries, many of the immigrants affected are Christians, Jews, or other religions. We don’t have great numbers for the population overall, but among refugees, from 2002 to 2024, 28 percent of refugees from the 45 majority-Muslim countries were not Muslim—either Christian, Jewish, or other groups—and 21 percent were Christian. In 2025, the State Department ceased reporting on the religious makeup of refugees.

About half of the legal immigrants blocked by the new immigration restrictions are close family members of US citizens and legal permanent residents. About 3,500 spouses and minor children of US citizens are being blocked each month by the policies. But no category has escaped the restrictions. Even employment-based immigrant visas were reduced by 41 percent from December 2024 to February 2026.

The Legal Origins of These Cuts

The causes of these drastic restrictions on legal immigration are

1. a presidential proclamation that suspended refugee admissions for 120 days starting January 2025;

2. a presidential determination allocating FY 2026 refugee admissions to South Africans with only minor exceptions (FY 2027’s version is coming);

3. a presidential proclamation that indefinitely bars entry to the United States by immigrants from 40 countries, of which 10 are majority-Muslim (since December 2025);

4. a memorandum by USCIS that applies the 40-country entry ban to US citizen petitioners who are inside the United States (since December 2025);

5. a State Department “immigrant visa pause” for 75 countries announced on their website, of which 28 are majority-Muslim (since January 2026);

6. a State Department suspension of the diversity visa lottery program (since December 2025); and

7. a State Department immigrant visa interview freeze (since August 2026).

As a result of the 75-country visa suspension and the 40-country entry ban, 34 of the 45 majority-Muslim countries were specifically barred. The eleven countries not subject to a specific entry ban or visa suspension are Bahrain, Brunei, Djibouti, Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Nonetheless, as previously shown, seven of these eleven still saw immigrant visa issuances decline—six by 50 percent or more.

Over the summer, courts have found several of these policies to be illegal. In response, the State Department implemented an immigrant visa interview freeze in August to thwart the orders, but the administration has failed to comply with any of them. Now, courts are considering whether to hold the administration in contempt.

Although these policies have affected immigrants from most countries in the world, the cuts for majority-Muslim countries have been far more severe, falling 96 percent compared to 36 percent for other countries. They accounted for 33 percent of legal immigration in December 2024 but 57 percent of the total reduction in legal immigration in February 2026.

Effects of These New Immigration Cuts

The Trump administration has provided various excuses for these blanket restrictions, including security and welfare concerns. The entry ban on 40 countries (including 10 majority Muslim countries) was justified based on security, but only two of the ten majority Muslim countries on that list have ever carried out a deadly terrorist attack in the United States. Even if we look at all majority-Muslim countries, not a single national from most of these countries has ever conducted a deadly terrorist attack in the United States, and based on the 2024 American Community Survey (ACS), five-year sample, they are 84 percent less likely to commit crimes for which they are incarcerated in the United States.

Immigrants from these countries are not an economic drain. For one thing, immigrants from these countries are concentrated in their working years, so they are more likely to be working, with 57 percent being employed versus only 46 percent for the US-born. This implies that the ban has likely already kept out about 103,000 workers.

They are also much more highly educated than the US-born. According to the ACS, nearly half of immigrants from these countries held a bachelor’s degree or higher, 14 percentage points higher than US-born individuals. More than one in five (22 percent) had an advanced degree—8.5 percentage points higher than the US-born.

Our analysis of the immigrants’ recent effects on government budgets showed that immigrants overall reduced federal, state, and local deficits by $14.5 trillion from 1994 to 2023, and $11.7 trillion of those savings came from college graduates. Using that same model for only majority-Muslim countries shows that these immigrants reduced federal, state, and local deficits collectively by $1.1 trillion in 2024 dollars over 30 years. Moreover, their net fiscal effect during this time was much higher on a per-capita basis than the average immigrant: $510,391 versus $385,060 for the average immigrant from other countries.

Not surprisingly, given their high levels of education, immigrants from majority-Muslim countries are overrepresented in many high-skilled fields, including health care, engineering, science, education, and computer-related jobs. Based on this distribution and their employment rate, the block on legal immigration from these countries has likely already stopped about 13,000 immigrants in health care and health care support fields.

Conclusion

The Trump administration has slashed legal immigration across the board, actually reducing legal immigration far more in absolute terms than illegal immigration. But the administration has shown particular contempt for immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. In December 2025, speaking about Somalis and unnamed “other countries,” President Trump said, “We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

Of course, there are immigrants who don’t work and commit crimes. But they are the minority. The vast majority of immigrants—including those from majority-Muslim countries—want to contribute to the United States, and they have contributed to it. In 1965, Congress explicitly prohibited discrimination based on national origin in issuing immigrant visas, but it should go further to protect Americans’ right to associate freely with people born in other countries, regardless of their countries of origin.

Now, as Cato prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2027, we are hunting for the next great essays on liberty through the Cato Vision for Liberty Award.

The top prize is $50,000, with a second-place prize of $25,000, and a third-place prize of $12,500 awarded to the best essays that answer this prompt in 1,500 words or fewer:

Write an article in support of libertarianism, analyze the world through a libertarian lens, propose an innovative libertarian policy proposal, or pen an article with a distinct libertarian theme.

That is the whole prompt. There is no assigned topic, required discipline, or preferred format. A philosophical argument, an empirical analysis, a policy proposal, satire, and an essay that defies category will all compete on equal terms. The best entries will say something true and important about liberty that is original, or say something familiar so well that it reads like a discovery. You may argue your point with philosophy, social science, psychology, economics, empirical evidence, mathematics, your wits, or any other intellectual tools at your disposal. Further details are here.

Anyone is welcome to apply, whether you are a student, professional, scientist, researcher, business owner, or casually interested reader. The Award is open to anyone 18 or older in the 50 states and Washington, DC. Entrants do not need a policy background, an academic title, or a famous name.

Cato’s 50^th anniversary is an opportunity to look back at our work and achievements, but the more important goal is to look to what we still must accomplish. The Vision for Liberty Award aims to uncover new arguments and policy ideas to advance individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace—and new people to make those arguments. Many of the most talented libertarians of the next 50 years do not yet work in public policy. They write software, run businesses, teach, manage a checkout line at the local grocery store, or see how government fails up close on Capitol Hill. Few of them may have thought of writing for a think tank, but they should. The Award is built for them, for all our benefit.

The prompt is public now, and submissions open on March 1, 2027. Readers can sign up for an email reminder on the award page and read the contest details. Submissions close on July 4, 2027.

Trenchard and Gordon’s 144 essays changed the world once. It only takes one more. Is it yours?

Read Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X of What People Really Care About When They’re Mad About Immigration.

The biggest mistake a speaker can make is assuming a knowledgeable audience. This happens one-on-one all the time, which you’ve noticed if you don’t know anything about car repair and are stuck talking with an auto mechanic about why your jalopy won’t start. When customers reward them with blank stares or cringe-worthy questions like “Can you top off my brake light fluid?”, mechanics know to adjust their statements. “Brake lights don’t have fluid,” they must remind their customers. It can be embarrassing or funny in one-on-one conversations, but easy to correct once you observe the befuddlement. However, the befuddled response is harder to read in an audience and so it can lead to disaster. I caused one in 2013 in Arizona.

At that time, I’d been working on immigration policy for more than five years. Researching, writing, talking with policymakers, going on TV and the radio, and traveling around the country speaking to audiences on a growing and contentious topic. By then, I’d read over 1,000 dry academic articles full of detailed mathematical models, statistics, econometrics (complicated statistics for economists), and dull prose on the economics of immigration. Dog-eared narrative and academic histories of immigration crammed my bookshelves. Dry sociology, government reports, legal tomes, and budget data were piled high on my desk and filled with my notes. I’d been yelled at and corrected by bureaucrats, Congressional staffers, and experts, and even done some of my own yelling and correcting. I was in a bubble of know-it-all immigration experts, you know, normal people.

Arizona was ground zero for the immigration debate at the time. Even if the people riding the bus with me in the morning didn’t know everything about immigration, surely Arizonans did because the immigration issue had dominated the news for years there. Beginning in about 2004, more and more illegal immigrants were entering Arizona from Mexico. Most were going elsewhere, but many settled in Phoenix and other cities – working mainly in the construction or services industry. The state government passed laws in 2007 and 2010 to marshal state resources to force them out. My friend Todd, who lived in Arizona and was involved in state politics, invited me to come from Washington, DC, to talk with Arizonans, listen to their concerns, and give speeches about immigration. Arizona is where I created my own speaking disaster.

Todd arranged for me to speak to a group of mostly conservative Arizonans about immigration. My speech was about what I knew best: How immigration affected the economy, mostly for the better. “Immigrants,” I said, “were workers, entrepreneurs, investors, and consumers. They expand the supply and demand sides of the economy while using less welfare than native-born Americans.” The audience seemed engaged and interested from my lofty podium perch, but there was a problem when I stopped speaking. Nobody raised their hand to ask a question. I expected at least a few, maybe even a hostile rant directed at me but intended for the audience. Airborne fruit was also possible. But I met silence until an elderly woman raised her hand and asked, “Why don’t illegal immigrants just go to the Post Office to get a green card and become legal? What do they have to hide?”

At that moment, I realized my error. I’d been learning about immigration law, economics, social science, crime, history, and every topic related to immigration for years. Scores of books, hundreds of academic articles, thousands of conversations, and tens of thousands of news stories had crossed my desk. But at that moment, speaking in public, I realized that few in the audience knew that almost all immigrants couldn’t legally come to the United States and couldn’t just get a green card at the Post Office. Now, I begin speeches with a simple legal diagram of how to immigrate to the United States legally.

Source: Bier, David J. “Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible: US Legal Immigration Rules Explained,” Policy Analysis no. 950, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, June 13, 2023.^[iii]

Correcting my speeches after that was simple: show a diagram of the legal immigration system and briefly explain it. Those who gaze upon that Sovietesque legal confusion get it immediately: Illegal immigrants come illegally because they can’t use the legal system. Immigrants move here for economic opportunity and safety. Homicide rates and violence in the United States are a fraction of what they are in Latin America.^[iv] Mexican men who move here can raise their wages by almost threefold, including the cost of living. Vietnamese men can expect more than a sixfold increase in income. Those from Yemen? Wages are over fifteen times as great in the US as in their home country.^[v]

I’d move across the country, take my kids out of school, and tell them to make new friends for threefold higher wages. My life would be better. I’d drive a nicer car, have a bigger house, give more to charity, and probably take nicer vacations. But for a Yemeni immigrant, that 15-fold increase in wages is the difference between watching some of their children die from malnutrition or illness and all of them becoming accountants in Peoria. It’s the difference between having a gas range oven and cooking your food over burning dung. But there is no legal way for the vast majority of them to come here legally because the law stands in the way. Explained that way, most people understand why immigrants come illegally – even if they don’t condone it and want high border walls to stop it.

But her second question was more important: “What do they have to hide?” That’s a good question if you think it’s easy for immigrants to enter the United States legally. Most illegal immigrants have nothing to hide except themselves because immigration enforcement would either stop them from coming in the first place or deport them. The United States is a great country – the best in the world by my estimation – but there is no legal path here for almost all immigrants who want to become Americans. The first lesson is that I need to be clear that the law was the source of chaotic illegal immigration. But I missed the other lesson.

Two years after my disastrous speech in Arizona, I was taught that the debate over immigration policy wasn’t about economics or cultural assimilation or American values; it was about chaos and violence. It was about immigrants who are coming over the border to kill you. My teacher was Donald J. Trump, who announced he was running for President with a speech on June 16, 2015, that included this section:

The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.

It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.

Islamic terrorism is eating up large portions of the Middle East.^[vi]

Drugs. Crime. Rape. Murder. Terrorism. My, look at all the ways that immigrants are trying to kill you. Immigration reporter Dara Lind listened to just about every speech Trump ever gave on the topic and wrote that “‘Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you’ is the only speech Trump knows how to give.”^[vii] Of the billions of words written about Donald Trump’s political career, Lind’s are the most concise and accurate observations of the content of his speeches. “Illegal immigrants are coming over the border to kill you” is the topic that most energized his supporters, convinced others to support his plans for reducing even legal immigration, steered the policy debate for going on a decade now, and launched thousands of lies, misunderstandings, and incorrect statements about immigrants and their supposed danger to Americans.

Trump was answering the question posed by that elderly woman in Arizona and millions like her when she asked, “What do they have to hide?” In essence, Trump said that immigrants are hiding a murderous and criminal intent to kill you, your family, and everybody else you care about. And events seemed to confirm Trump’s warnings.

Kate Steinle was walking with her father and a friend along Pier 14 in San Francisco on July 1, 2015, when she was shot in the back by José Inez García Zárate – an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Steinle died hours later and Zárate was charged with murder. Zárate had previously been deported five times and had seven non-violent felony convictions in different states. He was only in San Francisco that day because he had been sent there by the Federal Bureau of Prisons for a 20-year-old marijuana charge – a crime that wasn’t even prosecuted by the city anymore.^[viii] San Francisco released Zárate, and he somehow acquired a gun that had been stolen from a ranger at the Bureau of Land Management and fired it. The bullet ricocheted off the ground and flew 90 feet into Steinle’s back, killing her just hours later.

Five months later and 7 hours south, Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in an Islamist terrorist attack in San Bernardino. Farook was born in the United States. Malik legally immigrated in early 2014 on a K-1 fiancée visa to marry Farook.^[ix] On the morning of December 2, 2015, they left their six-month-old daughter with Farook’s mother in Redlands and then attacked his coworkers at the Inland Regional Center right as their holiday party was starting. They murdered 14 people and injured 24 others before being killed by the police after a car chase and shootout. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 at that point.

Steinle’s murder by an illegal immigrant and the San Bernardino terrorist attack convinced many Americans that Trump was right about immigrants. Larry Kudlow, an economic commentator who previously supported expanding legal immigration for economic reasons, wrote, “I have come to believe there should be no immigration or visa waivers until the US adopts a completely new system to stop radical Islamic terrorists from entering the country. This calls for a wartime lockdown and a big change in my thinking.”^[x] He wasn’t the only one convinced that immigrants are coming to kill us.

When Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President a third time in 2024, his comments about immigrants were again about them coming over the border to kill you – this time as an invasion. He talked about Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin – all tragically murdered by illegal immigrants.^[xi]

The murder victims lost everything. Kate Steinle was robbed of decades of life, her family and loved ones hurt in ways that few of us can imagine. The 14 people shot to death by Malik and Farook are gone forever, living on in the memories of the people who knew them. The 17 people they injured and the dozens of others at that holiday party-turned-slaughterhouse will never forget the terror. Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin were cut down by vicious criminals. Is this an invasion?

No, this is crime and terrorism caused by a handful of sick individuals. Most immigrants in the United States come here to work and raise families. Malik immigrated legally after she was sponsored by her American-born husband, but Zárate immigrated illegally several times after being repeatedly kicked out. But even so, illegal immigration is not an invasion. The Nazi’s attack on France in 1940 isn’t called an invasion because the German army broke French immigration laws; it is an invasion because it was a foreign army that entered France to attack and conquer it. There’s no similarity between the Nazis going to Paris in 1940 and illegal immigrants coming here for jobs or to flee violence in their home country, even if a small number of them end up committing violent and property crimes here. Russian soldiers didn’t invade Ukraine in 2022 looking for jobs, they crossed Ukraine’s border as an army to conquer the country. Politicians like Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who also calls illegal immigration an invasion, do so because it’s lurid rhetoric and because they would have more government power if it actually were an invasion.^[xii]

Abbott said, “The only thing that we’re not doing [to stop illegal immigration] is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”^[xiii] They wouldn’t be charged with murder if it were an invasion, and the thought wouldn’t have even crossed his mind. The federal government is obligated to defend states from invasion, and state governments are empowered to defend themselves if invaded.^[xiv] Invasions are violent and require violence to counter, violence like shooting soldiers, bombing ships, mobilizing armies, and deploying other intensive military hardware. Illegal immigration causes problems, but different problems on a scale so insignificant by comparison that it’s hard to compare it to an invasion with a straight face. The closest link between immigration and an actual invasion is terrorism, but even here, the threat is so small that it’s statistically irrelevant.

In 2015, the year of Steinle’s killing and the San Bernardino attack, there were about 42 million immigrants living in the United States.^[xv] In that year, 17,525 people were murdered in America – many fewer than would have been killed if the 42 million immigrants were here to kill us. Twelve percent of them lived in Texas and committed 74 homicides out of the 707 homicide convictions in the Lone Star State that year. The other 633 murders were committed by native-born Americans. And yet, nobody says that native-born Americans or Texans are coming to kill us. In 2022, the most recent year with available data, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate for homicide was 36 percent below that of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants were even less crime-prone, with a homicide conviction rate 63 percent below that of natives.^[xvi] Homicides committed by illegal and legal immigrants are less common than Trump’s speeches would have led you to believe.

Terrorism is the other main concern. A total of 230 foreign-born terrorists were responsible for 3,046 murders on US soil from 1975 through the end of 2024. During that time, a million people were murdered in other ways in the United States. Foreign-born terrorists like Malik and the 9/11 hijackers were responsible for less than 1 percent of all the murders – about 3 in 1,000, to be exact. That’s a poor showing for a group of people who are supposedly coming here to kill us.

Exaggerating small threats and ignoring counterevidence is a form of lying. It’s dishonest, but less malicious than telling an outright falsehood. Many of the lies about immigrant criminality, terrorism, and danger are exaggerations or rely on ignoring counterevidence. Others, like Trump’s complete fabrication that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “Eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” during his third run for President in 2024, are simple lies.^[xvii] There was no reported instance of Haitians eating cats and dogs, but conservatives masquerading as journalists came out of the woodwork to support his lies with a video of chickens being grilled in a neighboring town where African immigrants live with live cats walking around. Seriously.^[xviii]

The first mistake I made when speaking in Arizona over a decade ago was assuming that the audience had the background knowledge about immigration as I did. My second mistake was assuming why they were skeptical of immigration to begin with. I focused on economics, my lifelong intellectual obsession. Instead, I should have been focusing on chaos and safety – on murder, terrorism, and invasions. That elderly woman in Arizona told me so, I should have listened earlier, and I eventually did after Donald Trump confirmed what she said. The result of finally opening my ears is this substack series.

It was obvious in retrospect. A second Arizona law to more vigorously enforce immigration laws was passed by the state legislature in 2010 in response to the murder of a prominent rancher named Robert Krentz. He had been warning about illegal immigration and drug smuggling for almost 20 years before being shot dead on his ranch. By all accounts, Krentz was a standup guy. In an interview about illegal immigration, he said, “And you know, if they come in and ask for water, I’ll still give them water. I –you know, that’s just my nature.”^[xix] Nobody knows whether he was murdered by an illegal immigrant, a drug smuggler, or somebody else, but the state legislature acted by passing the harshest state-level crackdown on illegal immigration in decades. Fear over competition for jobs or cultural drift or welfare consumption didn’t prompt the legal change, fear over immigrants coming to kill Arizonans did it.

Those other issues matter, but they are counterbalanced by the economic opportunity that comes with immigrants, the cultural vibrancy, and our proud history of welcoming and assimilating the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Fear of violence, death, and chaos terrifies people more than the difficult-to-find stories of immigrants taking their jobs or barely learning to speak English. If immigrants really were coming to kill us, that would be a good reason to close the borders. Even the most diehard pro-immigration intellectuals and activists support screening out violent and property criminals, terrorists, and others who mean to do us harm.

Murder committed by anyone is horrific, no matter the circumstances. Being killed by a murderer in a botched robbery, being shot in a mass shooting, or being blown up in a terrorist attack are no laughing matters. But the exaggeration of those threats by commentators, the public, politicians, journalists, writers, analysts, and others who are not the victims deserves our derision and a chuckle. Their lies, when they lie, deserve our scorn. Those fearful observers are almost always disproportionately more scared than the actual risks and hazards justify, often by orders of magnitude, and we should laugh at their innumerate fears. Perhaps even guffaw when they propose multi-trillion-dollar government responses to infrequent and manageable risks. And cackle when they lie.

We should all laugh at extreme exaggerations and greet such statements of impending doom with a reality-informed smile when critics of immigration make wild claims about how they are coming to kill you. It’s time to vanquish the taboo of treating absurd exaggerations of risk with respect, while also acknowledging that immigrants sometimes commit crimes, just like lightning sometimes strikes. When a thunderstorm rolls through town, the prudent thing to do is get out of the swimming pool, not to ban swimming.

Donald Trump fueled an entire political movement with outrageous lies of immigrant violence that drove him into the White House twice. In his second term, he has so far declared an invasion, illegally sent non-criminal illegal and legal immigrants to a foreign prison in El Salvador, ignored the courts by deporting people under legal protection, rounded up US citizens, unleashed masked deportation agents on American streets, and activated the Alien Enemies Act and more all because he and his supporters lie about immigrant violence. This series is about why this is a lie.

Years of research, number crunching, and news story gathering went into this substack series. It begins with a focus on immigrant criminals with a specific focus on murderers, then shifts to dissecting the differences between sympathetic and less sympathetic victims of immigrant crime. After that, the chapters sequentially dive into myths and the facts about mass shootings, terrorism, terrorism committed by illegal immigrants, and foreign-born spies.

There are over 50 million immigrants in the United States today. Some of them are killers, some are drug smugglers, and some of them may even become terrorists. But almost all of them are not killers, do not smuggle drugs, and will not become terrorists. Chaos theory is when the disorder caused by illegal immigrants crossing the border, which is linked to crime and terrorism in the minds of millions of Americans, convinces them to oppose immigration generally. But by just about every measure, immigrants are less likely to kill you than native-born Americans and even make you safer. The bulk of them are good people despite Trump’s lies. Immigrants are not coming here to kill you.

Read Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X of What People Really Care About When They're Mad About Immigration.

^[1] Dara Lind, “‘Immigrants Are Coming over the Border to Kill You’ Is the Only Speech Trump Knows How to Give,” Vox, January 9, 2019.

^[ii] https://web.archive.org/web/20040519070713/http://www.barking-moonbat.com/God_in_the_Dock.html.

^[iii] David J. Bier, “Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 950, June 13, 2023.

^[iv] World Bank, “Intentional homicides (per 100,000 people) - Latin America & Caribbean, United States,” International Homicide Statistics database, UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

^[v] Michael A. Clemens, Claudio E. Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett, “The Place Premium: Bounding the Price Equivalent of Migration Barriers,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 101, no. 2 (May 1, 2019): 201–213.

^[vi] TIME Staff, “Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” Time, June 16, 2015.

^[vii] Dara Lind, “‘Immigrants Are Coming over the Border to Kill You’ Is the Only Speech Trump Knows How to Give,” Vox, January 9, 2019.

^[viii] David J. Bier, “Kate Steinle and San Francisco’s ‘Sanctuary City’ Policy,” Cato at Liberty (blog), April 27, 2017.

^[ix] Julia Preston, “From Fiancé Visa to Green Card,” The New York Times, December 3, 2015.

^[x] Lawrence Kudlow, “I’ve Changed. This Is War. Seal the Borders. Stop the Visas,” RealClearPolitics, December 12, 2015.

^[xi] Donald Trump, “WATCH: Former President Trump FULL SPEECH at the 2024 RNC | LiveNOW FOX,” LiveNOW from FOX, streamed live on July 18, 2024, YouTube video; Court TV, “Alleged killer of Maryland mother of 5 Rachel Morin gets trial date, facing life sentence,” KJRH 2 News Oklahoma, July 18, 2024; “Judge sets $10m bond for second Venezuelan man accused of killing a 12-year-old Houston girl,” AP News, June 26, 2024; and FOX 5 Atlanta Digital Team, “DA not seeking death penalty for accused Laken Riley killer Jose Ibarra,” FOX 5 Atlanta, May 31, 2024.

^[xii] Alex Nowrasteh, “Explaining the Border Standoff between Texas and the Federal Government,” Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer w/ Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier (blog), January 27, 2024.

^[xiii] Bess Levin, “Greg Abbott Says the Only Thing Stopping Texas from Shooting Migrants Is the Headache of Potential Murder Charges,” Vanity Fair, January 12, 2024.

^[xiv] US Const., art. IV, § 4.

^[xv] American Community Survey, Selected Characteristics of the Native and Foreign-Born, S0501, 2015 5-year Sample.

^[xvi] Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrant Murderers in Texas, 2013–2022,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 977, June 26, 2024.

^[xvii] Merlyn Thomas and Mike Wendling, “Trump repeats baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets,” BBC News, September 15, 2024.

^[xviii] Justin Rohrlich, “‘Clearly chicken you weirdo’: People respond to JD Vance sharing video he claims shows migrants grilling cats,” The Independent, September 15, 2024.

^[xix] “Illegal Immigrants and the Church,” Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, November 26, 1999.

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In 2018, the Cato Institute published my original research documenting terrorism visa-vetting failures from 1987 to 2016. The report demonstrated for the first time that visa vetting failures became much less common in the years following 9/11—despite the US government’s even more aggressive foreign policy and far more legal immigration and travel than before 9/11.

As defined in the report, a visa vetting failure occurs when someone goes on to commit a terrorism offense after entering the United States with views supporting terrorism, regardless of whether they were manifested in any public way. I used this broad definition because, theoretically, the visa vetting process could uncover even privately held views.

Of the 531 individuals killed while committing a terrorist attack or convicted of a terrorism offense—including sending money to groups abroad—from 2002 to 2016, 13 (2.45 percent) were in the United States as a result of post-9/11 visa vetting failures. This compares to 52 pre-9/11 vetting failures. The vetting system permitted the entry of one radicalized terrorist for every 29 million visa or status approvals—a rate 84 percent below the pre-9/11 rate.

This means that improved visa vetting would have had no effect on 97.5 percent of terrorism offenders since 9/11 because they entered before the 9/11 improvements, were born in the United States, or were immigrants who were not vetting failures, according to government sources. Most of these immigrants entered as children or otherwise radicalized after entry, while others were extradited here or deliberately lured here as part of sting operations. Of the 13 post-9/11 vetting failures, only one (Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino) killed anyone, compared to the 27 deadly failures before 9/11, meaning that deadly visa vetting failures were reduced by 96 percent.

Malik and her American accomplice killed 14 people. If we attribute all 14 to Malik, the chance of a US resident (American or immigrant) being killed in an attack committed by a terrorist who entered as a result of a vetting failure from 2002 to 2016 was about 1 in 328 million per year. This rate was 99.99 percent lower than the risk of normal homicides (1 in 20,000 per year). It was also 99.5 percent lower than the risk of being killed as a result of visa vetting failure before 9/11.

My colleague Alex Nowrasteh has published research about how the risk of foreign-born terrorism generally—from vetting failures or from post-entry radicalization—was also much lower than in the period from 1975 to 2001, including 9/11 itself. For the full period from 1975 to 2024, the chance of being killed by a foreign-born terrorist in the United States was just 1 in 4.6 million per year, but since 9/11, the risk was just one in 165 million.

Using Nowrasteh’s research, only one additional deadly attacker since 2016 would qualify as a vetting failure: Saudi-born Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani who entered in 2017 and murdered three people in Florida in 2019. His case is unique in that the Pentagon sponsored him to come to the United States to train as a pilot, so that he could fly planes that the United States sold the Saudi government as part of an arms deal. This means that the only deadly visa vetting failure in the last decade occurred thanks in part to the Trump administration’s sponsorship.

In the report, I discuss the many ways in which the vetting system improved to reduce the rate of terrorism vetting failure. Among other things, officials at ports of entry and consular posts received better training; surveillance of foreign terrorist groups increased; foreign countries entered into surveillance-sharing agreements; and government databases were better integrated into the legal immigration vetting process.

This research doesn’t mean that there will never be another failure, nor does it suggest that the government should not be concerned about preventing terrorism travel, but it does show that its targeted efforts since 9/11 have worked. There is no need for blanket bans like those the current administration is imposing today.

The case for broad-based immigration restrictions based on terrorism is the weakest that it has ever been. Terrorism generally, including foreign-born terrorism specifically, is a very small risk to the public, but legal immigrants generally and legal immigrants from Middle Eastern countries specifically are about 75 percent less likely to commit crimes for which they are incarcerated in the United States. By lowering the rate of crime, these immigrants overall improve public safety from the far more common violent crimes. Immigrant terrorists—including those on 9/11—accounted for just 0.3 percent of US murders from 1975 to 2024, so lowering the overall rate of violence is much more important.

Unfortunately, as I detailed in a paper for The Independent Review, the most lasting immigration legacy of 9/11 is how it derailed bipartisan efforts to improve the legal immigration system for peaceful, productive immigrants, students, and travelers. As the rest of the world became more open to legal immigration, the United States stood alone in resisting any efforts to update its flailing processes to let more vetted immigrants come to the United States—from anywhere.

No, not even close. For the costs of CT spending to equal the benefits of the value of lives saved, it would have to have saved between 390,000 and 442,000 lives, or between 15,600 and 17,680 per year since 9/11. From September 12, 2001, through September 10, 2026, I estimate that 347 total people were murdered on US soil by all terrorists of all ideological motivations and locations of birth. That includes some victims in attacks since that analysis was published. Thus, all CT spending would have to have saved 1,124 to 1,274 times as many lives as were taken by terrorists in attacks on US soil for the benefits of CT spending to equal the costs in terms of lives saved. To put that in perspective, the number of lives that would have had to have been saved for CT just to break even, never mind producing a positive return, would have had to have been roughly equal to every murder committed on US soil since 9/11. That large number of lives was not saved by post-9/11 CT spending and foreign wars to stop terrorists.

This matters because scarce resources that funded CT could be used to save lives elsewhere, such as better road safety, improved policing, or the innumerable other ways that people make their lives safer when they’re richer. Much of the actual CT spending is worse than just the opportunity cost of diverted safety resources implies, because the actions that caused the spending directly or indirectly killed Americans. Around 7,000 Americans died in Iraq and Afghanistan, not including the hundreds of thousands of locals. The requirement to screen all checked baggage after 9/11 reduced flight passenger volume by about 6 percent, with some travelers opting for more dangerous road travel. Some of the marginal drivers were spooked by terrorism instead of the extra cost of security, and the authors cannot separate the two, so the extra cost of security explains some unmeasured share of the as many as 2,300 road deaths they attribute to the attacks.

Regardless of the high cost in lives of the US CT strategy after 9/11, which should make all Americans skeptical of the social utility of CT actions, let’s look at whether the spending and economic costs could plausibly have saved lives. The methods for estimating the costs herein include the fiscal costs and an economic estimate. They do not include the losses from diminished civil liberties, psychological costs, or state or local costs. The accounting of fiscal costs here follows the 2018 Stimson Center study’s definitions. It includes federal homeland security budgets, spending from the Department of Defense (DOD) emergency and overseas contingency operations (OCO), war-related Department of State and USAID, and spending on foreign CT operations. The OCO designation ended in FY2022 after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Thus, the FY2018–FY2026 flows are estimated from DOD enacted appropriations and the BBA 2019 targets and the State Department and USAID component comes from the $8 billion annually designated as OCO from FY2019. OMB’s government-wide homeland security report, the series Stimson used, was discontinued after FY2017, so the homeland security component for FY2018 onward scales the DHS gross discretionary budget authority to the last government-wide total. Nominal flows are deflated to constant July 2026 dollars using monthly CPI-U index levels from the BLS historical series and summed. Interest on war borrowing, war-attributable growth in the DOD base budget, and veterans’ medical and disability obligations are excluded merely because that would require more steps to avoid double-counting than a back-of-the-envelope calculation could justify.

Controversially, this analysis assumes that real GDP in 2026 is 0.1 percent below the counterfactual level of no increase in CT spending after 9/11, with the gap widening linearly from zero in FY2002. Because a permanent level shift generates a flow loss in every period, the annual output gaps are summed and deflated to the same base. Truncating the output-gap sum at FY2026 treats a permanent level effect as terminating, so the output term is a lower bound. It is unsound to think that wars, immigration restrictions, and the resulting regime uncertainty didn’t lower GDP by a conservative 0.1 percent.

The last and most important step is estimating the value of a statistical human life to compare with the cost of CT spending. This is an emotional and methodologically fraught way to measure human life. As a father and a husband, I understand this emotional reaction well. Still, the fact remains that if the government spends more to save a life through enhanced CT than it is worth, then that means that other people died because of neglected safety in other areas. As a necessary preamble, it’s necessary to state that the value of a human life is not infinite. You don’t even think that about your own life because, if you did, you wouldn’t do anything to increase the chance of dying, such as drive in an automobile when it’s not a life-or-death situation, because that increases your chance of dying. My method of avoiding this problem is to pick a high number, even though an error in that direction is just as dire as an underestimate.

As a hypothetical, suppose the value of a statistical life is $15 million. If the government spends $30 million to save one life, then at least one person died who otherwise would not have died if that money had been spent where it would save more lives. Thus, spending that amount of money to reduce risk results in more deaths than otherwise would have occurred. Although emotional and hard to calculate, estimating the statistical value of life can help policymakers save more lives. The death of human beings is the highest and most significant cost of terrorism, but not the only one, as other forms of destruction are also costly but relatively minor compared to death. For simplicity, I will focus on the cost in terms of human life and assume a $15 million value. You can substitute your own statistical value of life in the table below to recalculate.

Table 1 shows low- and high-end fiscal and economic cost estimates from CT policies after 9/11. The federal government’s CT costs are spread across many agencies, programs, and decades, so they must be estimated to some extent. Most economists who read this will think the $15 million value of statistical life is too high, and they would balk at the inefficiencies that would result from informing policy on that basis. However, non-economists will probably think that’s too low. Picking an outrageous number like $100 million per life doesn’t save the analysis, though, because that merely means CT spending would have to save 58,500 to 66,300 people to break even.

Table 1 doesn’t quite capture how disproportionate the costs of CT were compared to the possible benefits. Figure 1 shows how much higher the number of people killed in terrorist attacks after 9/11 would have had to be, relative to the number of people actually killed, to justify the level of CT spending. It’s calculated by multiplying the number of people murdered in such attacks by 1,124 each year, the minimum ratio of the deaths required to break even with CT costs to the actual number of deaths, spread proportionally over each year by the number of real victims. The number of actual murdered people in terrorist attacks is a flat line by comparison to this counterfactual that would justify the spending.

My colleague John Mueller and his coauthor, Mark G. Stewart, answered this question decisively over a decade ago, and I contributed modestly to answering it over the years. The cost numbers above are merely an update. Mueller and Stewart also looked for the attacks that CT spending averted and found almost none. My estimate of 347 people killed in terrorist attacks after 9/11 is likely high because it includes some victims of attacks that were likely not terrorists, out of an abundance of caution that is prejudiced in favor of security hawks, a bias that should be familiar to anyone who watched how CT money was spent after 9/11.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were a crime of shocking proportions that deserved a proportionate response, but the costs of those attacks were multiplied by the government’s grossly disproportionate response. None of that matters to the people who were killed or their loved ones, nor should it. Some CT spending, increased law enforcement actions, and perhaps even military actions were justified after the attacks, but what the government actually did was wasteful and destructive to a degree that’s difficult to comprehend. There are several lessons from 9/11, but the biggest one is “don’t overreact.”

In November 2025, the Trump administration began rejecting some visa applicants based on health problems, asking if applicants and their children have “disabilities, chronic medical conditions, or other special needs.” On Tuesday this week, the State Department ordered a pause on all immigrant visa appointments worldwide to better train consular officers on more restrictive guidance, enforcing these rules as well as others intended to exclude immigrants likely to use public benefits.

Although some immigrants do become disabled, this analysis finds that immigrants, legal and illegal, were 24 percent less likely to be disabled than the US-born population in 2024, and were less likely to be disabled at nearly every age regardless of immigration status. Their lower disability rate led to significantly less use of disability benefits, but even disabled immigrants draw on those benefits less than disabled US-born citizens.

Regulations Regarding Immigrants’ Health

This concern about immigrants’ disability status has a long history. The first general immigration law of 1882 targeted people with (perceived) learning disabilities and mental illnesses, and the 1891 act created the first physical examinations of immigrant arrivals. As Prescott Hall, the notorious eugenicist leader of the Immigration Restriction League, said in 1907, the immigration law’s goal was to “protect the country from those who tend to lower the average of health and intelligence.”

Today, the law still requires physical exams for “diseases or mental or physical defects or disabilities,” though not all “defects” can lead to exclusion. By statute, immigrants can be excluded only for having a dangerous communicable disease, certain addictions, or a threatening “physical or mental disorder.” Having children who are “helpless from sickness, mental or physical disability, or infancy” can also trigger a denial.

However, the hook for the Trump administration’s new rules is the provision excluding those likely to become a “public charge”—or welfare dependent—because the statute requires accounting for an immigrant’s health. The new rules permit denials for a broad range of health concerns, including but not limited to obesity, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, cancers, diabetes, metabolic diseases, neurological diseases, and mental health conditions.

Immigrant Disability Rates

To estimate disability prevalence by immigration status, we analyzed the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey and 2025 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) 1‑year samples from IPUMS. The ASEC reports on the 2024 calendar year. Disability types include cognitive, ambulatory, vision, hearing, independent living, and self-care difficulties. These categories may not capture all health conditions, but they provide a broad sense of immigrant health status.

To identify likely illegal immigrants, we used a modified residual method developed by economist Christian Gunadi. In addition to several other proxies for legal status, our method includes carve-outs for state-specific Medicaid and CHIP eligibility changes throughout the last decade, as well as assumptions for certain occupations that require citizenship or licensing. We also employ a larger undercount population adjustment that decays the longer an immigrant has resided in the US. Legal immigrants identified by this method include those who hold non-immigrant work visas and immigrants who have become naturalized citizens.

Immigrants are less than 12 percent of the US disabled population, despite making up roughly 15 percent of the total US population. In 2024, 11.1 percent of immigrants, legal and illegal, were disabled. Illegal immigrants reported the lowest rate of any group—just 5.34 percent—compared to 13.0 percent among legal immigrants and 14.6 percent among US-born citizens.

These gaps have remained consistent over the past decade, even as public-charge rules, welfare eligibility restrictions, and enforcement priorities have shifted. This is not the result of any single administration’s policies, but rather the fact that undocumented immigrants report lower disability rates regardless of public-charge enforcement.

Figure 2 shows that this gap is not simply because immigrants are younger, as the gap persists even after accounting for age. US-born citizens have the highest disability rate at nearly all ages, and the gap widens through working age into retirement. This reflects the pattern that migration tends to self-select for healthier individuals who are already capable of undertaking both the physical and financial burdens of relocating.

Veterans

In 2024, veterans made up a modest share of both native-born and legal immigrant populations (roughly 15,000,000 native-born citizens and 782,000 legal immigrants). Disability rates among veterans are higher than those of the civilian population, due to both older average age and service-related conditions. However, the disability gap remains in this group: 26 percent of legal immigrant veterans are disabled, compared to 32.5 percent of US-born veterans.

Disability Income

Since they are less likely to be disabled, immigrants are also less likely to receive disability benefits. However, even among those who report having a disability, immigrants are still less likely to receive assistance in the forms of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), or other disability income (DI).

We use the American Community Survey (ACS) to estimate disability rates by nativity because its larger annual sample size supports more precise estimates for small subgroups such as illegal immigrants. For the benefit receipt analysis, we switch to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC), as it is the only major survey that allows us to isolate disability-related benefit receipts.

Our analyses include pretax disability income from SSDI, SSI, and DI. DI reflects sources such as workers’ compensation, US military retirement disability, and private disability insurance. We do not include payments from the Department of Veterans Affairs or income received on behalf of children in the following calculations, which would inflate the differences between immigrants and the US-born.

In 2024, immigrants were nearly half as likely to receive any disability income from the government. 2.61 percent of immigrants received disability income in any form, compared to 5.11 percent of US-born citizens.

Within each disability income source, immigrants are less likely to receive benefits, even among those who report having a disability. Among the disabled population, 21.4 percent of US-born citizens receive welfare income based on their disability. Immigrants were 26 percent less likely to receive disability income, legal immigrants 19 percent less likely, and illegal immigrants 98 percent less likely. This isn’t a story only about immigrants simply being healthier, but also one of immigrants being less costly even after becoming disabled.

A portion of this gap reflects law, as illegal immigrants are generally ineligible for SSI, SSDI, and other federal assistance. However, legal immigrants still receive disability benefits at lower rates than US-born citizens, which suggests that the gap is about more than just who is allowed to apply.

Disability Benefit Consumption

Immigrants consume less than half the disability benefits, in dollar terms, that US-born citizens do. In 2024, per capita disability income among immigrants totaled $411.42. Illegal immigrants accounted for almost none of this spending. Most cases in our dataset come from a small number of respondents concentrated in only a few states, such as California, Texas, New York, and Colorado.

The fact that immigrants are less likely to be disabled and receive less disability income should come as little surprise when considering other research showing that immigrants are generally much healthier overall than the US-born population. They report lower rates of chronic disease, obesity, substance use, and mental illness, and higher life expectancy overall. Even immigrants from countries with lower life expectancies demonstrate elevated health outcomes in the United States.

Given that immigrants and their children make up an increasing share of the US population, the immigrant health advantage carries significant economic effects. Immigrants put less strain on the health care systems and disability programs. Consequently, they also participate at higher rates in the labor force despite having less access to health care. While mechanisms behind the immigrant health advantage are debated, the evidence here is clear: Immigrants are far from burdensome to systems designed to help the disabled. This analysis suggests that the State Department’s public charge rules are an unwarranted addition to America’s immigration system.

This post was coauthored with Carol Xu for the Cato Institute.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a new proposed regulation today, requiring employers to pay a $103,265 fee—or more accurately, tax—merely for the right to file a petition requesting an H‑1B foreign worker. The H‑1B visa program is the most common way for employers to hire or retain high-skilled foreign workers in the United States because the green card caps are so low and the wait times are so prohibitively long.

It is not a fee because it is not a charge for a service. Rather, it is an attempt to reduce the hiring of H‑1B workers. The new fee-tax will crush the H‑1B program, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of talented workers. This mass exodus will trigger a series of devastating effects for the US economy: disinvestment from the US economy, offshoring of US jobs, a decline in innovation and entrepreneurship, and an enormous blow to the US Treasury.

The New Fee-Tax Comes on Top of the Other Illegal $100K Fee-Tax

This fee comes on top of the $100,000 fee-tax that President Trump imposed via Presidential Proclamation 10973 on H‑1B employers last year. On its face, that fee-tax applied to any H‑1B worker who tried to enter the country—even if they were already approved and had temporarily traveled abroad. Ultimately, DHS limited the presidential proclamation to petitions for new H‑1B workers (set aside whether an agency can legally limit a presidential proclamation).

The new fee would apply to any cap-subject H‑1B visa petition whether on behalf of a worker inside or outside the United States. Cap-subject H‑1B petitions include all petitions except renewals and those by universities, affiliated nonprofits (such as hospitals), or research organizations at nonprofits or government positions. Here is a comparison of the two fees.

The First Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a district court stay of the presidential proclamation on the grounds that it is an unconstitutional tax. Citing Skinner v. Mid-America Pipeline Co., the court said that Congress has to have “spoke[n] ‘clearly’ in conferring ‘discretionary authority to recover administrative costs not inuring directly to the benefit of regulated parties by imposing additional financial burdens, whether characterized as ‘fees’ or ‘taxes,’ on those parties.’” It found that Congress had not.

The New Fee-Tax Is Also Likely Illegal

Therefore, the first fee is not currently in effect. Nevertheless, DHS persists with a new legal basis. Presidential Proclamation 10973 used the president’s authority to limit entry of nonimmigrants to require the $100,000 payment for the worker to obtain entry. The new proposed $103,265 fee is instead based on a statute that states: “Fees for providing adjudication and naturalization services may be set at a level that will ensure recovery of the full costs of providing all such services.”

The fee has two legal deficiencies: It is neither intended “for adjudication and naturalization services” nor will it “ensure recovery of the full costs of providing all such services.” On the one hand, the rulemaking states that fee revenue will go toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigations and compliance activities, biometric screening at ports of entry, and actions of the immigration courts as well as components of the Department of Labor and State Department.

Equally fatal to the rule, however, is that DHS has already admitted in court that the first H‑1B fee under the presidential proclamation was “arguably prohibitive” and “does not raise revenue.” Indeed, its own analysis found that from September 21, 2025, to February 15, 2026, the H‑1B proclamation fee lost the US government $28 million in revenue after accounting for the revenue raised from the few employers that elected to pay the fee.

The New H‑1B Fee-Tax Would Nearly End the H‑1B Program

The decline in revenue occurred because the fee led to an approximately 87 percent decline in petitions subject to the fee. After the initial visa fee, despite the exemptions for H‑1B visa renewals, the total number of visa issuances to H‑1B workers and their families abroad fell by 77 percent.

This additional fee would be the death blow to the entire H‑1B visa program. Even if an employer is currently exempt, how can they trust the administration not to suddenly impose a new fee just like it is doing now?

The table below lists the different types of H‑1B visa fees, showing that the process was already extraordinarily expensive before the presidential proclamation and the new proposed rule. Fees often cost over $10,000 for a single employee even before hiring an attorney to file the petition. If both the presidential proclamation and the pending rule come into effect, some employers would owe over $214,000 to hire a single employee.

Why Employers Won’t Pay the New Fee-Tax

The administration’s argument for employers’ willingness to pay is preposterous. DHS relies on a paper by economist George Borjas to assert that employers will pay the fee because, as Borjas claims, employers underpay H‑1B workers, so they are saving so much money that they’d be willing to pay the fee. DHS is claiming that it will be raising revenue based on the systematic underpayment of H‑1B workers, which is bizarre. But the experiment with the first fee-tax has already disproven Borjas’ assertion of willingness to pay, so the only question to ask is: Why was he wrong?

Economists Michael Clemens and Adam Ozimek have already raised serious doubts about Borjas’ underlying calculations of underpayment. Most other analyses find no underpayment for temporary foreign workers in the United States, and as I’ve pointed out, any “underpayment” that exists comes from the way in which the visa system prevents H‑1B workers from entering the labor market as quickly as US workers—not exploitation.

But even if Borjas’ calculations are correct, both $100,000 fees only apply to initial H‑1B petitions. This means that DHS is claiming that employers are paying the fee-tax to hire H‑1B workers explicitly so that they can underpay them. But then H‑1B workers can immediately change jobs—as 1.1 million have over the last 20 years—to receive the market wage from any employer without paying the fee. It’s even worse with this new fee-tax because the first one at least offered a refund if the petition was denied. In this case, employers are paying $103,265 just for the chance to get a decision, not even an approval.

Conclusion

The H‑1B fee will undermine American innovation, competitiveness, fiscal security, and ultimately prosperity. H‑1B workers are among the highest-skilled workers in the US economy, earning wages in the top 10 percent of workers. According to my analysis of government budgets, skilled foreign workers have reduced the deficit by more than $11.7 trillion over the last 30 years. As my colleague Alex Nowrasteh noted when the first Trump administration enacted a temporary H‑1B ban, these workers have also contributed disproportionately to innovation and patenting.

Moreover, the H‑1B visa is the entry point for workers who go on to start businesses. Cato adjunct scholar Stuart Anderson found in a paper for the National Foundation for American Policy that 59 percent (455 of 775) of America’s billion-dollar start-ups were founded or cofounded by immigrants. He writes that 234 of these founders came as international students who likely stayed after “gaining H‑1B status and/​or an employment-based green card.” Without the H‑1B, hundreds of thousands of skilled workers will go to other countries where they will not only compete with Americans but also be less productive and less innovative, undermining the prosperity of not just America but the world.

If the courts fail to block this new draconian tax on innovation and competitiveness, Congress should intervene to ensure that America remains the most vibrant economy on Earth. Unfortunately, the administration is already moving forward with yet another $100,000 fee to hire international students after they graduate, so Congress should act now to send the message that America truly does want to stay competitive.

After the Supreme Court struck down his first order restricting birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, President Trump signed a new order on August 6. At first blush, the new order seems like only a blatant attempt to ignore the Supreme Court. That might be true, but there’s an alternative reading that is more bizarre and potentially frightening: The president might believe he can unilaterally decide whether US law applies to any particular person or groups of people.

The entire order rests on the assertion that presidents can decide who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and, therefore, US law. In a way, this is a far more dangerous claim. For instance, diplomats receive immunity not only from federal but also from state and local prosecution. If the president can suspend the laws—not just the enforcement of them but the laws themselves—the order would not only strip citizenship from many Americans, it would also create a massive new power for presidents to abuse.

The strange new order is already being challenged in court, but we still don’t know how the government will defend it.

Comparing the Two Orders

Here is a quick rundown of the order:

• Narrower: The order removes the children of illegal immigrants and temporary residents as explicit targets, and instead produces a new list of narrower parental categories (terrorists, foreign government employees, visa fraudsters, anyone traveling to the US for birth, and a few people in territories).

• Vaguer: The new list is less clearly defined, so there is greater uncertainty about some groups subject to it.

• Not exhaustive: The old order applied to two specific categories. The new order explicitly states that its list is representative, not “exhaustive.”

• Retroactive: The old order applied only to future births. This order has no such limit, potentially opening up the citizenship claims of current US citizens.

• Loss of citizenship: Strangely, the order requires denying any applicant for a citizenship document whose parent currently falls into an excluded category, regardless of their parent’s situation at birth (e.g., “parent is…a foreign government employee”). This is also unconstitutional.

• Applies to legal permanent residents: It denies citizenship for children of legal permanent residents if their parent fits into one of the categories.

• Applies to either parent: It covers children if either parent falls into the covered category, not just one, unless a parent is a citizen.

The New Legal Justification

The Fourteenth Amendment states that anyone born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a US citizen. The president’s first order asserted—without any supporting legal analysis—that immigrants without permanent lawful status in the United States were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. The Justice Department’s legal defense was that “jurisdiction” meant only political jurisdiction, meaning primary or sole “allegiance,” and allegiance was required only of citizens or individuals legally and permanently domiciled in the United States.

The Supreme Court rejected this interpretation. As Ilya Somin notes, the Court found that jurisdiction just refers to “the ‘[p]ower of governing or legislating.’” Under this rubric, the two groups today that could be exempt from US governance are foreign invaders that actually controlled territory, like “a castle or fort,” and “ambassadors (and their families), who were considered—by a fiction of extraterritoriality—to remain on foreign soil.” These groups are either not subject to US laws or outside of US control.

Given this determination, President Trump’s new order abandons its prior justification and explicitly ties its power to limit birthright citizenship to this latter phrase:

the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends the privilege of citizenship to children born to parents in the United States “for whom no extraterritorial fiction applie[s].” This order identifies, non-exhaustively, and prescribes action concerning certain categories of children of aliens who do not fall within the rule of birthright citizenship …

The extraterritorial fiction exists for diplomats because they and their children are not fully subject to US law—that is, they have immunity. The only way to extend the “extraterritorial fiction” that the administration now embraces would be to extend immunity—crucially, not just to the parents but also the children. As the Court stated:

Those children [in the certified class]…satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause: they are “born in the United States” and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The Fourteenth Amendment’s jurisdictional requirement applies to children, not the parents. A parent can be subject to US jurisdiction but not the child (a noncitizen non-ambassador who has a child with an ambassador outside of their household), and a child can be subject to US jurisdiction but not the parent (an ambassador who has a child with a US citizen). Even in the case of an invading army, a foreign invading soldier could be not subject to US jurisdiction, but his child could be, depending on the circumstances at birth (e.g., if the other parent was a US citizen or in territory controlled by the United States). The Trump administration’s defense will have to wade through these issues.

The New Order’s New Targets

Trump’s second order purports to adopt the Barbara majority’s justification, but as Steve Vladeck notes, its “non-exhaustive” list of parents whose children will be deemed not subject to US jurisdiction doesn’t appear to align with its legal justification:

1. “is a foreign government employee”;

2. is “employed by an international organization that possesses international-organization immunity”;

3. “is…a member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization”;

4. “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship for the person”;

5. “engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States”;

6. “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship”;

7. “engage in a commercial transaction with a surrogate present in the United States”;

8. “is born in a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by Federal statute.”

Ambassadors already fall outside the Citizenship Clause, and embassy and consular staff from the handful of countries with bilateral enhancement agreements hold the same diplomatic agent-level immunity. Beyond that narrow set, none of these groups is exempt from US criminal or civil jurisdiction.

The first of these would seem to be the easiest case, as it seems most similar to an ambassador. The problem is that foreign government employees—excluding those related to an embassy or consulate—do not currently receive any diplomatic immunity. The US government would have to show a court that it has taken steps to grant them any immunity. So far, it has not, though the order gives the relevant agencies 30 days to “ensure their regulations and policies are consistent with this order” (section 3(a)).

Alongside the executive order, the administration did make some changes to its page for ambassadors. Though it so far maintains the same narrow list of immunized positions, the government’s changes ended reference to the “blue list” for accredited diplomats, so now, with no official list, only the State Department knows who is immunized. The regulation still defines a diplomatic officer as a person on the Blue List, so the situation is confusing.

Immunity in Current Law

Does the president have the unilateral power to expand the list of individuals with immunity? Diplomatic immunity is governed primarily by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR) of 1961, the Diplomatic Relations Act (DRA) of 1978, and the International Organizations Immunities Act (IOIA) of 1945. These statutes limit immunities and the president’s power. The DRA repealed broader “flat immunity” from a 1790 act and replaced it with narrower, graduated immunity tiers in the VCDR. Following Article 37 of the VCDR, the statute (22 U.S. Code § 254b) grants immunity to non-signatories’ “mission, the members of the mission, their families, and diplomatic couriers.”

Both VCDR and the DRA grant some level of immunity only to: members of a foreign mission—the head of mission and diplomatic staff, administrative and technical staff, and service staff—and, for the first two tiers only, to the members of their households who are not nationals (or, below the diplomatic-agent tier, not nationals or permanent residents) of the United States. Families of service staff receive no immunity at all. That means that their children get citizenship even if their parents are not fully subject to US jurisdiction in every respect. Administrative and technical staff and their families receive full diplomatic immunity for crimes (VCDR Art. 37), but under the 2024 regulation, their immunity is still deemed a lesser immunity unless there is a bilateral enhancement agreement that enhances their immunity. This means that their children receive citizenship.

Under the DRA, the president could grant immunity to the families of service staff of a mission or embassy, but only “on the basis of reciprocity.” Bilateral treaties have already raised all embassy staff and some consular staff to full diplomatic immunity for some countries in the case of criminal prosecutions. After consultation with Congress, the Secretary of State in concert with the Attorney General may similarly grant immunities for a consular post and their families—again, based only on reciprocity with the United States; that is, the other country would have to treat US consular officers in its territory the same way.

Foreign government employees who are not members of a diplomatic mission, consular post, or national mission to an international organization have no path to immunity, and neither do their families. As for international organizations, the president may only grant immunity to those employees notified to and accepted by the Secretary of State, and the immunity is only for official acts; the IOIA specifically states that this immunity does not constitute diplomatic immunity.

Inherent Presidential Authority?

President Trump might say that the president’s power under Article II of the Constitution to receive ambassadors implies the power to recognize immunities even absent a statute, and that who constitutes representatives of a foreign government is up to his discretion. The State Department’s regulation states that “the question of whether any particular person enjoys diplomatic agent-level immunity and is therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States…is determined by the State Department.”

The preamble to the State Department’s 2024 regulation specifying who receives immunity states that immunity decisions are, in fact, based at least partly on “the President’s Article II authority to speak as the sole organ of the government with respect to agreements regarding diplomatic relations,” citing United States v. Belmont, 301 U.S. 324, 330 (1937).

In Belmont, President Roosevelt’s administration helped collect assets of a corporation that the Soviet Union had nationalized, despite no treaty and preempting a state law, and the Supreme Court permitted the collection, because the president has authority to make enforceable international agreements and no congressional statute blocked it. In Zivotofsky v. Kerry (2015), the Supreme Court “decline[d] to acknowledge” the “sole organ” view of Belmont as it was “unnecessary to the resolution of this case,” but nonetheless held that “the President alone determines what nations to formally recognize as legitimate” in part to identify “whether their officials will be immune.”

In Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon (1812), Chief Justice John Marshall seems to endorse the idea that immunities exist based on the law of nations, not any statute, writing:

It is true that in some countries, and in this among others, a special law is enacted for the case. But the law obviously proceeds on the idea of prescribing the punishment of an act previously unlawful, not of granting to a foreign minister a privilege which he would not otherwise possess.

The Ninth Circuit in Moncada v. Rubio (2025) stated: “The Constitution confers on the President alone the legal duty to receive diplomats and thereby immunize those diplomats from the jurisdiction of the United States.” However, it also asserted authority to establish if immunity was, in fact, granted. The DC Circuit in Carrera v. Carrera (1949) found that “judicial inquiry into the propriety of [the administration’s] listing [as a diplomat] was not appropriate.”

The argument that the president has authority to decide who may receive immunity absent a statute may be wrong—Congress clearly thought it could constrain the president—but given the Court’s concessions, it may not be frivolous. The question may be partly how committed the Trump administration is to denying birthright citizenship to, well, someone. Is it willing to unilaterally expand immunity just to salvage some kind of win here? Are courts willing to permit President Trump to call someone a “diplomat” who clearly is not? I doubt it.

Lesser and Revoked Immunity?

Here’s another question possibly left open by Barbara: How much immunity is necessary to trigger a loss of “jurisdiction”? Even “full diplomatic immunity” has limits, including civil actions related to professional or commercial activity outside of official functions. Some immunized representatives of foreign governments receive immunity only for official acts taken on behalf of the foreign government. By regulation, officials with lesser immunity are currently deemed to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States for purposes of birthright citizenship. Native American tribes—who received citizenship via statute—were not fully exempt from US jurisdiction either.

Clearly, the analogue for excluding the children of foreign government employees is the ambassador exception, so it is very difficult to understand how the Trump administration could defend this expansion in court without referencing immunity. Could the Trump administration assert the authority to grant some lesser forms of immunity to avoid owning the full consequences of its attempt to undermine birthright citizenship? That would allow the president to have his cake and eat it too. In Moncada, the Ninth Circuit stated: “immunity only for official acts mean[s] that [the consul] and his family were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” But that was based on the practice and laws in effect at the time, so it’s unclear if it’s saying that it must be this way or just that it was this way.

Another issue arises when the parent and children enter and exit these new categories. Ambassadors and their families receive Office of Foreign Mission–issued accreditation ID cards as evidence of their status (though only certification verified by the State Department officially matters). Their immunity ends when the ambassador leaves or after being given a reasonable period to depart voluntarily after ceasing to be an ambassador. The children lose immunity when they leave the household, get married, or turn 21 (23 if attending university full-time, or indefinitely if disabled).

These rules could, I suppose, be applied to foreign government employees, but the executive order is not limited to children of “accredited” employees. In any case, what about the other categories? When does “membership in a foreign terrorist organization” begin and end for this purpose? When do a mother and her child lose their extraterritorial status after having committed fraud to obtain citizenship?

It is important to note that ambassadors’ immunity does not protect them for crimes committed while an ambassador unless they were official acts on behalf of the foreign state. Could President Trump simply assert that birth tourist mothers and their children had immunity when they gave birth but lost it when they left the United States or were later identified? Another have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too gimmick. It will be interesting to see if a defendant—a terrorist—uses this executive order in court as an assertion of immunity against prosecution, which could be one quick route to ending this debate.

The President Shouldn’t Succeed

The only alternative strategy to granting some kind of immunity—asserting the president can label someone metaphorically outside the United States with no real-world effect—is just a rerun of Barbara. The majority opinion foreclosed a purely metaphorical “outside of US jurisdiction,” based on vague ideas like “allegiance” or “domicile.” There must be a real-world way in which the child would be outside the jurisdiction of US law. Immunity metaphorical enough to allow someone to still be arrested or deported as a terrorist or visa fraudster certainly means that the person is subject to US jurisdiction, and gimmicks shouldn’t get the president around the implications of his actions.

The new executive order’s carve-outs targeting people traveling to give birth, surrogates, visa fraudsters, and foreign terrorist organization members are likely more important in scope. Nonetheless, it is worth pursuing the possibility and difficulties of redesignating foreign government employees because it is the category most likely to survive legal challenge and change current practice. Given the difficulties here, the other categories have almost no chance at all. Defending this order will require a high level of creativity, to say the least, and it seems unlikely to survive.

The Supreme Court in Barbara also acknowledged the exception for ambassadors, not solely because of the grant of immunity. Rather, the grant of immunity flowed from who they actually are. Ambassadors are—and Native Americans historically were—meaningfully under the jurisdiction of their home nation (“the United States had voluntarily ‘cede[d]…a part of its territorial jurisdiction’ to another sovereign (or quasi-sovereign)”). Unless the foreign country agreed to fully govern its employees or other nationals in the United States, the parallel breaks down. Indeed, in the key passage articulating its principle, the Court stated that “intersovereign concerns” drove the need for the immunity and exception to jurisdiction for ambassadors and (historically) Native Americans.

Moreover, diplomats under the Vienna Convention—and the Diplomatic Relations Act—must be “appointed” by the foreign state, which triggers the immunity. It is an inherently bilateral action. How many foreign governments will agree to immunize all US government employees in their countries and deal with the bilateral problems associated with immunizing all their employees in the United States? Not many, I suppose.

The Court also quoted Chief Justice John Marshall in Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon (1812), saying it would be “dangerous to society” if large numbers of “private individuals” were not “amenable to the jurisdiction of the country.” The exemption Marshall articulated in that case—for a military vessel at a US port—was based on “common usage and common opinion,” the law of nations, and dignity owed to other nations. There is no possible argument along these lines for the types of exceptions contemplated by the executive order.

This order would be an unprecedented departure from common practice in world history. Of course, ambassadors aren’t the only analogy available. The administration may attempt to liken foreign terrorist organization members to invaders, even though they do not control territory like a castle or fort and would be fully subject to arrest; by definition, terrorists are non-state actors, so there are no “intersovereign concerns.” The analogy for birth tourists isn’t clear to me, but the upshot is that unless Trump grants them immunity, whatever analogy he uses wouldn’t work.

The president’s effort to evade the Supreme Court’s order will likely not change the rules around birthright citizenship. The added danger of handing the president the authority to arbitrarily exempt certain groups from US laws makes this limited order as dangerous. In the best outcome for the president, this case could potentially tweak the rationale of the Supreme Court in such a way as to give Congress an opening to effect the birthright citizenship rule. Most likely, however, it will just generate new controversy around what should be a settled issue.

The Houston Chronicle published my op-ed on how Trump, Vance, and others' attempts to inflate the number of illegal immigrants undermine their arguments for mass deportation. Here’s a selection:

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…The math is simple. The more illegal immigrants, the more Americans would have to pay to deport them. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that a single deportation costs on average $18,245. This means that when Trump invents the presence of 10 million more immigrants, he’s adding a theoretical $182.4 billion to the price tag. 

And that’s just the cost of deportation. The cost to federal revenue is even starker. Illegal immigrants pay sales tax — and, often, Social Security tax, income tax and property tax. The more illegal immigrants we deport, the more the cost of funding government would shift to American citizens and legal residents. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that recent illegal immigrant arrivals would have cut deficits by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, and  found that Trump’s crackdown in 2025 had already erased $500 billion of those savings. 

Illegal immigrants receive very few taxpayer benefits because they are ineligible for all the largest federal public benefit programs, and most states also restrict eligibility for smaller state programs. Since the benefits being paid are a known quantity, a larger illegal immigrant population suggests that the cost per immigrant is actually far lower than we think. 

But the taxpayer expenses are dwarfed by the broader economic impact: less stuff produced for the American people. The Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that just 8.3 million deportations would leave U.S. gross domestic product 7.4% lower than otherwise by 2028, the equivalent of about $2.5 trillion. Lower output means fewer goods and services — everything from food to childcare — for Americans.

If the Trump administration’s hyperinflated figures were true, it would also suggest that illegal immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than we thought. Using a far lower estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the country, scholars had already calculated that, compared to native-born Americans, illegal immigrants  were far less likely to be incarcerated. But again, since we know who is in prison, if the free immigrant population were to grow, the immigrant incarceration rate would fall in turn. 

In other words, the Trump administration apparently believes that illegal immigrants are far less represented in the crime data than anyone else. Of course, the rate of crime — not the absolute number of crimes — is what matters, because the rate is how we estimate the likelihood that someone will become a victim of a crime. More immigrants would mean a much lower victimization rate — that the presence of illegal immigrants reduces the likelihood that Americans will be victimized. .

Finally, the more deportations required for mass deportation, the more the campaign will violently intrude into the lives of Americans. According to the best estimates, about 12 million Americans, including 1.2 million spouses, lived with illegal immigrants. If these estimates are actually low, then many more Americans will end up losing their families or be forced to leave the United States along with them.

Read the full piece here.

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On December 11, 2025, a Border Patrol agent killed a Mexican man in Starr County, Texas. On December 17, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued a statement, saying a 31-year-old Mexican man with others “attempted to abscond to Mexico” from the Texas side of the border. The agent “engaged in an active struggle with the man for two minutes and ultimately discharged his CBP-issued firearm,” hitting him three times.

Until now, no additional reporting had established who the agent was, why he felt he must shoot him, or any details about the deceased immigrant. A month ago, I obtained Starr County and Texas Department of Public Safety records, showing that Border Patrol agent Armando Flores was the shooter and that another agent, Jawuan Wallace, arrived at the Starr County Sheriff’s Office for fingerprinting at 11:25 pm on the night of the shooting. The agencies also stated that Texas DPS is still actively investigating the shooting seven months later, refusing to release body camera footage and audio from the scene.

Over the last month, I’ve worked with Texas Tribune reporter Lomi Kriel to build out the story. The Tribune published its story today, identifying Isaias Sanchez Barbosa as the victim.

• Sanchez Barbosa had no known criminal history

  • He has no record of any prior entry into the United States.

  • He apparently had no family in the United States.

  • He was from a largely rural and impoverished area in southern Mexico.

  • No weapons were found on his person or in the area.

• CBP refused to disclose any details about the employment of the agents, the shooter Armando Flores or Jawuan Wallace, who was fingerprinted.

  • Flores shot Sanchez Barbosa at “close range” three times, hitting his right forearm as well as his right and left chest, fracturing his left rib and shredding his lungs.

  • Law enforcement failed to file the search warrant with the court for 8 months until the Tribune requested it.

  • A grand jury declined to indict the Border Patrol agent, though we have no idea what evidence it reviewed.

CBP’s statement was entitled: “Border Patrol Agent defends himself in deadly struggle with illegal alien,” effectively exonerating the agent prior to the completion of the investigation. From the little information available, Border Patrol agent Armando Flores attempted to physically stop Sanchez Barbosa from returning to Mexico, and the agent shot him three times.

CBP’s statement itself does not explain why the shooting was justified. There is no statement to the effect that the agent feared death or serious bodily harm for himself or others—a prerequisite under DHS’s use of force policy. The policy explicitly states, “Deadly force shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.” Sanchez Barbosa was fleeing back to Mexico, which presumably lessens any threat that he posed to the agent or others. The Tribune quotes me:

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., said the details of the case sparked his interest after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, an American citizen and 37-year-old mother of three who immigrant agents killed after she was leaving a Minneapolis protest in her car earlier this year. Video footage calls into question the Department of Homeland Security’s accounts that Good tried to run over the agent.

“After months of having DHS tell clear falsehoods about shootings caught on video, I doubted its account here where no film had surfaced,” said Bier, who first obtained some records in Sanchez Barbosa’s death. “This case had all the hallmarks of those later cases: An apparently unarmed victim who was retreating, a quick DHS statement exonerating the agent and very few other details.” …

That so many questions remain months later is “stunning,” said Bier of the Cato Institute.

He questioned whether investigating authorities sought statements from other witnesses, including the migrants in the group with Sanchez Barbosa, and if law enforcement officials independently interviewed Flores, the agent who fired the shots. Bier noted that the initial statement CBP issued did not state that the officer used force to prevent serious injury, either to himself or the public.

“So why was it justified?” Bier asked. “An administration that has repeatedly lost the confidence of the public should be open and transparent about the evidence that it used to conclude that this shooting was justified.”

CBP’s pronouncement accepting the officer’s self-defense claim should carry little weight given the extensive record of DHS agents lying to their supervisors about assaults on them. The Wall Street Journal has documented that about half of the US citizens who DHS has publicly accused of assaulting its agents were never even charged, and the New York Times has reported that of the resolved cases, nearly half of the individuals charged with assaulting officers failed to result in convictions. CBP’s statement by itself presents little reason to believe the agent’s self-defense claim.

I requested body camera footage and any recorded audio from Texas DPS and Starr County Sheriff’s Office, in hopes that the early on-site statements would reveal more light on the situation. But both agencies refused those requests on the grounds that the shooting was still being investigated.

Read the Texas Tribune’s report here: A border agent killed a migrant who crossed into Starr County. Eight months later, it’s still under investigation.

Here’s the timeline with the link to the relevant source:

4:14 PM — Agents observe a group in camouflage walking north and approach, identifying themselves as agents (CBP).

4:18 PM — A struggle begins; the agent radios for help and, after roughly two minutes, fires his weapon. The man ultimately “sustained a total of three gunshot wounds” (CBP).

4:24:16 PM — Starr County dispatch logs the 911 call: “MCALLEN BP REQ EMS 83/MIDWAY INVOLVED IN A STRUGGLE AND SHOTS WERE FIRED” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

4:25 PM — Agents request EMS, apply chest seals, and begin CPR (CBP).

4:33 PM — Dispatch notes: “MUTIPLE BP UNITS AT LOC” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

4:36:40 PM — Dispatch logs: “123 ADV THERE ARE MULITPLE UNITS THAT ARE BLOCKING THE WAY FOR EMS” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

4:37 PM — Starr County EMS arrives and assumes care (CBP).

~4:41 PM — Dispatch logs EMS reporting the patient in cardiac arrest (“code blue”) (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

5:08 PM — The man is pronounced dead at Starr County Hospital (CBP; corroborated by CAD log entry “he is 10–7”).

5:35 PM — Texas Ranger Bryan Rodriguez arrives on scene (Starr County CAD Event Sheet / DPS Case File).

6:42 PM — Deputies are told “RANGER RODRIGUEZ WILL BE TAKING OVER THE CASE BODY CAM WILL BE TURNED OFF” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

9:50 PM — A search warrant for the scene is signed by Judge Jose Luis Garza (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

10:44–11:25 PM — USBP Agent Jawuan Wallace arrives “for Fingerprinting” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

11:27 PM–12:25 AM — The body is released to a funeral home for autopsy; the log notes “NO ID WAS RECOVERED” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

12/12, 10:50 AM — Ranger Rodriguez formally opens DPS case 2025–0057208, summarizing: “On 12-11-2025 at approximately 4:20 PM, I, Company ‘D’ Texas Ranger Bryan Rodriguez was contacted by the Texas Department of Public Safety Command Post who advised me about an Officer Involved Shooting” (DPS Case File).

12/17/2025 — CBP publicly releases its account, describing the incident as a “deadly struggle with illegal alien” and reporting the agent “defends himself,” six days after the shooting (CBP).

7/16/2026 — DPS states the records related to the incident “would interfere with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of an open or pending criminal matter” under Gov’t Code § 552.108(a)(1). (Ref. #P018562-070926) (DPS records request response).

7/17/2026 — Starr County Major Carlos Delgado responds: “This case is under investigation.” (Starr County records request).

1. “Under socialism, ‘You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right.’”

There are prices on housing, medicine, food, and energy because these goods are scarce and have alternative uses. Scarce means that there is not enough of them to satisfy all demand at a price of zero. Those goods must be produced by people who must be fed, trained, equipped, and persuaded to show up to work. In a free market economy, workers produce those goods because they are paid to, the owners of firms organize production efficiently because their profits depend on it, and the owners of capital sell it to the most profitable firms. All that activity is guided by the incentives and information provided by prices.

Similarly, there are many different uses for these goods. Prices provide a signal and incentive to producers to decide what to build and to consumers to decide what to buy. Abolishing prices abolishes neither the costs of production nor the choices of consumption. It destroys the information and incentives that tell producers what to make, in what quantity, where, and at what sacrifice of alternatives. No socialist economy has ever solved the problem of efficiently allocating those resources without prices set by market exchange. The Soviet Union rationed by queues and shortages rather than by price, a condition documented for decades by the economist Alec Nove. It also rationed by prices of a sort, but they were set by central authorities with no incentive to change them in response to changing supply or demand. A price of $0, or any price below that which would be set by the market, does not create abundance. It results in greater scarcity by failing to reward producers and lets consumers know that they can be wasteful. Everything still gets paid for, in taxes, in waiting, and in greater scarcity from the goods that never appear.

2. “Free markets are failing workers because, ‘The world is in chaos, but for the bosses, it’s all going according to plan.’”

About 43 percent of humanity was in extreme poverty in 1990 when communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By 2024, it had fallen to 10.4 percent, the largest improvement in living standards in recorded history. Roughly 800 million of those people were in China, where poverty collapsed after the Communist Party abandoned collectivized agriculture and shifted away from a planned socialist economy. Both endpoints use the World Bank’s new $3.00-a-day extreme poverty line (2021 prices), applied back in time so the comparison is consistent over the decades.

American workers share in the gains. Median household income reached a record $83,730 in 2024, and, measured with the correct deflator, real wages for typical production and nonsupervisory workers rose more than 40 percent since 1990. They are also working less. Annual working hours in rich countries fell from roughly 3,000 in 1870 to about 1,750 today, which means free markets already delivered a shorter workweek and threw in a doubling of life expectancy while at it. The sectors where American workers still face rising prices and stagnant quality (housing, health care, and education) are precisely the sectors where the government already restricts supply, controls a large share of production, and/or sets prices. The bosses did not plan economic problems; the people, most likely socialist central planners in today’s societies, unintentionally did (with a hearty assist from Baumol’s cost disease).

3. “As free market economies fail, they turn to right-wing authoritarianism, but ‘if we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty.’”

Economic freedom and political freedom are correlated. The Economic Freedom of the World report finds that the freest quartile of economies enjoys average incomes 6.2 times higher than the least free. Incomes for the poorest tenth are 7.8 times higher and life expectancy is 17 years longer. Denmark, the democratic socialists’ favorite exhibit, is nothing of the sort. It ranks ninth in the world for economic freedom, and its prime minister traveled to Harvard to say, “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” The regimes that actually abolished private ownership ran the authoritarian experiment themselves. More than two dozen socialist trials ran over the past century, and every one that collectivized its economy ended in one-party rule. Socialists will often deny that those countries were really socialist because they are selecting on outcomes, but there is a long history of Western socialists celebrating each new socialist government at the beginning of its reign, only to sour on it when the disaster strikes. The worst get on top, as Hayek warned, because socialism rewards the greediest, most power-hungry, and least restrained politicians.

The classless society fared no better on its other promises of peace and social harmony. Each trial produced a new ruling class of party officials with better apartments and worse manners than the bourgeoisie they replaced, peace among nations tracks commerce rather than collective ownership, and China invaded Vietnam four years after Vietnamese communists conquered the entire countries. Socialists couldn’t even stop fighting each other whether in World War II, in the Sino-Soviet border war of 1969, or after the Vietnam War. Authoritarianism follows the concentration of economic power in the state. That concentration is the DSA’s core proposal.

4. “Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals.”

“At no cost to individuals” doesn’t include the individuals who will pay for it. The Mercatus Center’s Charles Blahous estimated that Medicare for All would add $32.6 trillion in federal costs over 10 years under assumptions favorable to the plan, and the left-leaning Urban Institute put the figure at $34 trillion. That mostly shifts spending from premiums to higher taxes, but the new expanded tax bill would start near a tenth of GDP, grow from there, and exceed what doubling all projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections could cover. And presumably the entire point is to expand health care consumption that randomized experiments show does little to improve health, so these estimates understate the extra resources that such a scheme would require. Single-payer systems also pay with longer wait times, because a monopoly provider whose patients cannot take their business elsewhere doesn’t have an incentive to change. England’s National Health Service carried 7.3 million waiting cases as of this spring, and the median Canadian patient now waits 28.6 weeks between referral and treatment, triple the wait in 1993.

America’s own health care problems cannot be blamed on free markets because the United States does not have a free market health care system. The US government controls 84 percent of health spending through a complex system of tax rules, expenditures, and other mechanisms. That’s higher than in 27 out of 38 OECD countries. The share of the US health care sector under government control “is closer to communist Cuba (89%) than the average OECD nation (75%),” according to Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute. The specific portions of the national health care systems under direct government control and how they are controlled vary across countries. American health care is a largely government-run system.

5. “Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control, and guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.”

Government intervention tends to raise housing prices. Universal rent control would deepen the shortage it claims to address and is among the policies most widely critiqued by economists. A 2012 survey asked economists about whether rent control would have a positive impact on the quantity and quality of broadly affordable rental housing and 2 percent agreed that it would, about what you’d expect if they misread the question. Economist Nancy Stokey summarized the evidence well when she wrote, “The planets are lined up here: theory and evidence point in the same direction.”

San Francisco’s rent control expansion cut the supply of rental housing by 15 percent and likely raised citywide rents by about 5 percent. Publicly owned housing adds an agency problem on top of a shortage while making the government your landlord who cannot go broke, answers to politicians rather than to tenants, fills units by political allocation, and maintains buildings the way Pruitt-Igoe was maintained. If the goal is to increase the supply of housing to lower prices, abolish or reduce the burden of zoning and other land-use ordinances. We should do that anyway, and it would be far better and infinitely cheaper than a cross-country government construction project.

6. “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.”

Venezuela ran this exact program on its largest industry, oil, within living memory. The Chávez government fired about 20,000 employees of the state oil company for political disloyalty, packed it with loyalists, and eventually put a general in charge. Production fell from 3.2 million barrels per day in 1997 to 2.4 million by 2015, before Washington imposed any sanctions on the industry. Venezuelan GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, fell 73 percent between 2012 and 2020, a decline that began years before US sanctions could have caused it. If free markets caused Venezuela’s poverty, cutting Venezuela off from global markets should have enriched it. These failures all began years before American socialists stopped praising Venezuela for its socialist policies.

The failure in Venezuela, as elsewhere, is a principal-agent problem, not a personnel or cultural problem. A private owner who wastes capital loses his own money, and a firm that wastes enough goes bankrupt. A political manager wastes other people’s money, cannot go bankrupt, and gets promoted for loyalty rather than output, while the nominal owners (the people) have no way to monitor him and no shares to sell. Democratic control of the Venezuelan state oil company just meant control by whoever controlled the state, which is what it has meant in every large-scale nationalization. The longer experiments agree. North Korea was richer than South Korea in 1970, and after five decades of public ownership on one side of the DMZ and private ownership on the other, South Korean incomes are about 29 times higher.

There is no superior class of American personnel in the Trump, Biden, or any likely future administration that will overcome those problems of socialist command and control. There is no good reason to expect the mass nationalization of American firms to succeed and every reason to expect it to fail. Let business owners and investors take the risks of running businesses, keeping the profits and eating the losses. There is no good reason for the state to take on those burdens.

7. “Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.”

The 400 richest Americans are worth $6.6 trillion and the federal government spent $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025. Confiscating every asset of Forbes 400 wealth, once, assuming no fall in value, would run the federal government for about 11 months. An annual wealth tax is a very high income tax in disguise. A 3 percent levy on wealth earning an 8 percent return takes the equivalent of a 38 percent income tax before the actual income tax arrives. At the 5 percent rate proposed on California’s November ballot, any asset yielding less than 5 percent faces an effective rate above 100 percent.

The number of OECD countries with net wealth taxes fell from 12 in 1990 to 4 today. Norway raised its rate in 2022 and its own finance ministry counted $14.1 billion in deferred income leaving with the emigrants, exit tax notwithstanding. France’s tax raised about €3.5 billion a year and cost roughly €7 billion a year in other revenue, as an estimated €200 billion in capital went abroad. Seventy-three percent of American billionaires are self-made, and they owners are among the most mobile people in the world. If taxed, they will just move and take their capital and economic productivity with them.

The DSA seems to think that wealth is hoarded treasure when much of it is capital. Capital is just a fancy economics term for the stuff that people use to produce other things, like machines, tools, buildings, and equipment, as opposed to the other inputs, like land and raw materials, the people doing the work, and the ideas that bring it all together. Homes and personal assets account for just 2.7 percent of billionaire wealth. They own the wealth because they built the firms that created it. The incidence of a wealth tax is a separate question. In theory, a tax that follows the owner’s residence rather than the capital itself could leave workers untouched, since foreign investors would buy the taxed assets and keep the machines running. In practice much of that wealth sits in closely held businesses that foreign capital will not buy, so taxing it shrinks the tools that make labor productive, reducing the marginal value product of workers and their pay. Modeling of the Warren tax found 63 cents of every revenue dollar falling on workers as lost earnings.

8. “Establish ‘a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits, and a living minimum wage . . . [and] a federal jobs guarantee.’”

The jobs guarantee’s own advocates at the Levy Economics Institute estimate direct spending of $409 to $543 billion per year, and outside reviewers found even that figure understated by roughly a third. The cost is the smaller objection. An employer that cannot fire anyone, cannot go broke, and answers to elected officials becomes a patronage machine. Fifteen million guaranteed jobs would make the federal government the largest political employer in American history, with every incentive to expand the rolls before each election. If people are forced to work less, who is going to supply the goods and services that the DSA wants to redistribute?

The Congressional Budget Office estimated a $15 federal minimum wage would lift 900,000 people out of poverty while eliminating 1.4 million jobs, with losses concentrated among the least-skilled workers the policy claims to help. This pattern has already been confirmed across the literature, where 79 percent of published employment estimates are negative. France tested the mandated short week twice. The 1982 cut from 40 hours to 39 raised affected workers’ probability of losing their jobs by 2 to 4 percentage points, and the 35-hour law failed to raise employment at all. A 32-hour week at 40 hours of pay is a 25 percent labor-cost increase, and employers will economize on the newly expensive input by replacing it with capital, outsourcing, or just making less. Shorter workweeks were purchased by productivity growth, not by government decree.

9. “Provide free, quality public education from pre-K to college and cancel all student debt.”

Canceling all student debt is a regressive transfer from working-class Americans to higher-income college graduates. Universal forgiveness delivers about five times more money to the top income decile than to the bottom, $6,267 against $1,276 in present value, with the top 30 percent of earners collecting 40 percent of the dollars. The majority of American adults hold no bachelor’s degree. They would be taxed to relieve the minority whose degrees already earn them a large wage premium. That’s because education is not a public good, it’s rivalrous and excludable. There may be some positive externalities from education (and plenty of negative ones too), but the people who pay to attend school capture most of the benefits in the form of higher wages. They don’t need a taxpayer-subsidized deal any more than a business making an investment to increase profits.

10. “Fully abolish ‘the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.’”

American criminal law reaches too far into American life. Legalizing drugs and eliminating other victimless offenses would reduce encounters between citizens and police. Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter argues that legislatures shouldn’t pass laws they aren’t willing to kill to enforce because every law the police enforce is ultimately enforced at gunpoint. Police officers respond to rotten incentives because the doctrine of qualified immunity prevents anyone from suing them when they break the law. Worsening that problem, the Trump administration is not going to prosecute ICE agents for committing crimes when there are illegal immigrants to deport for civil violations of immigration law. Immigration enforcement is a recent exhibit, with dozens dead in custody since 2025 mostly for the offense of selling their labor in the US without government permission. Still, police are essential for protecting life, liberty, and private property. Yes, they would do that better if they faced better incentives and didn’t enforce so many plainly silly victimless crimes.

Socialism, as law professor Ilya Somin observes of its century-long record, has always required coercion to make people surrender their property to the state. An extensive police force is the one government agency the rest of the DSA platform cannot do without. Abolishing the police would undo the rest of the DSA platform. I don’t favor abolishing police, but doing so would be the only way to obviate the rest of this platform if the DSA ever takes power. In such a case, they would not take this final step.

The DSA platform saves its most revealing demand for the end. It would place the entire coercive and economic apparatus of the state under a single chamber of government with no institutional checks. It would be a strongman soon enough if they ever got power. No court could prevent that body from violating individual rights at a whim. A government that owns the largest corporations, employs every worker who wants a job, sets every rent, and faces no court it does not control would be just another socialist principal-agent problem waiting for economic forces to destroy it. The DSA platform is not a serious work of political horse-trading, but a wish list that is unusually unspecific and thoughtless about the economic challenges. We don’t have to learn that lesson again.

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Why State-Sponsored Visas Make Sense

A state-sponsored visa is a fantastic idea. If the State-Sponsored Visa Pilot Program Act had existed, there would have been very little illegal immigration since 1986, the last major guest worker reform. American employers would have had a legal way to hire foreign workers, and foreign workers would have had a legal way to come and work. A legal workforce also benefits American workers by creating more opportunities for them in complementary roles as managers and supervisors.

As I detailed in a Cato policy brief in 2017, a state-sponsored approach is better than a purely federal monopoly on setting the rules.

In 1986, illegal immigration was primarily a problem in the seasonal agricultural sector. Now, after four decades of the government muddling up the complex process, the H‑2A seasonal agricultural visa solved the problem for seasonal agriculture. In the meantime, farm labor has shrunk in importance, and illegal immigration has moved on to every other industry. If states had been constantly updating their systems piecemeal over the last 30 years, the illegal immigration problem would not have ballooned into the crisis we have today.

Every state has different labor needs and labor rules; there is no reason why a federal monopoly makes sense here. There are vast differences in both the amounts and types of labor demanded. Under the federal system, states already sponsor immigrants in their roles as employers and universities. The only difference in this proposed process is that states could sponsor them for any economically related reason they wanted. Canada has a similar, successful, and popular program for provinces.

How the Bill Works

States opt in to the program, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must approve any application for a state-sponsored program that is adopted by the state legislature and meets a few other minimal requirements, including annual reports on where the sponsored workers live. The foreign workers would receive a status valid for 3 years, renewable, contingent on continuous residence in the sponsoring state.

There is a cap of 500,000: 5,000 per state and DC, plus a share of a pool of 245,000 based on the state’s population share. The state’s program would expand at a 10 percent rate if fewer than 3 percent of workers fail to comply with the rules, and would be cut by 50 percent otherwise. States could sponsor immigrants who were physically present in the United States as of December 31, 2016, even if they are now in the country illegally.

The latest version introduces some new labor-protectionist rules that could gum up the program for employers, but given that states would have discretion over how to implement those rules, it is still a very flexible program overall.

The State-Sponsored Visa Pilot Program Act is a rare thing in immigration policy: a genuinely federalist reform that lets Washington’s one-size-fits-all approach give way to 50 different answers to 50 different labor markets. This legal channel for the workers that America’s economy already demands is better than the illegal one it has settled for. Nearly a decade after Ron Johnson and John McCain first proposed this idea, Congress has another chance to let states lead where Washington has failed to.

The gap in quality between the book described by reviewers above and the actual book Melting Pot or Civil War? is wider than in any other book that I can remember reading. Descriptions of “calm” and “reasonable” are the most perplexing. True, he appeals to Americans “who are willing to meet others halfway” to solve the problems that he’s identified. On the other hand, he also argues that we need to follow his policy recommendations or face a racialized civil war. That is the very opposite of a “calm” or “reasonable” argument. A better description would be “hysterical” or “paranoid.”

Salam’s book argues that lower-skilled immigrants since 1968 are creating a permanent racialized underclass whose descendants will not rise to the middle or upper classes. He claims that the melting pot model of American immigrant assimilation is broken. Salam blames the breaking of the melting pot on many culprits: automation that will destroy jobs, American elites who don’t insist on assimilation anymore, and new low-skilled immigrants who drive down the wages of longer-settled low-skilled immigrants.

This broken melting pot will result in a racialized underclass that will then be culturally, economically, and ethnically distinct from successful Americans. That could morph into “social unrest,” “political turmoil,” and an “even more dangerously divided society” that could soon “rise to the level of respectable people saying they want their political rivals dead.” Although America has avoided those problems so far, Salam finds it “hard to shake the feelings that our luck might soon run out” and we’d have a civil war on our hands caused by an immigration policy with which he disagrees. Thus, Salam argues that the United States should greatly reduce the flow of low-skilled immigrants and replace them with skilled immigrants, add lots of welfare for the poor immigrants or their children who remain to help them assimilate, and legalize illegal immigrants.

Salam’s worries about the assimilation and economic mobility of the second generation (those born to immigrants) drive his support for more welfare and cuts to low-skilled immigration. Recognizing that emigration is the one nearly guaranteed way for the poor of the developing world to dramatically improve their incomes and livelihood, Salam proposes to offset that loss with a massive increase in U.S. foreign aid and a concerted U.S. effort to create charter cities in poor countries. He also suggests that elderly Americans should retire in Mexico to create jobs there.

Salam’s great sins are his use of cherry-picked half-truths, frequently contradictory evidence, and shifting his own goal posts. He tries to have both sides of every argument and presents every fact as evidence in his favor. For example, Salam disagrees with himself over whether the goal of immigration policy should be to increase wages and employment for low-skilled immigrants and their descendants, or per capita productivity growth in small sectors of the economy. He rightly claims that immigration barely affects wages in the United States, but then argues that a major benefit of stopping low-skilled immigration is higher wages for native-born and immigrant dropouts. Salam correctly points out that low-skilled immigrants today compete mostly against other low-skilled immigrants, so he wants to help low-skilled immigrants here by stopping more from immigrating in the first place.

A groundbreaking paper by economists Michael Clemens, Ethan Lewis, and Hannah Postel found that farm wages rose more slowly after the U.S. government canceled the bracero guest-worker visa program for low-skilled Mexican farm workers in 1964. The main political justification for canceled bracero was to raise the wages of low-skilled American workers, but Clemens et al. found that wages rose more slowly after bracero was canceled relative to before. Salam dismisses that paper by moving his own goal posts to focus on agricultural productivity rather than wages for low-skilled workers. Remember, Salam is also worried that automation will take jobs in the future, but not in empirically inconvenient real-world examples such as the end of bracero which resulted in workers being replaced by mechanized pickers. In the same chapter, Salam praises Singapore because it selects immigrants based on purely economic criteria. But Singapore’s massive foreign-born population of 47 percent has low productivity growth because of such high levels of low-skilled immigration.

In case you can’t follow Salam’s contradictory argument here, he argues that low-skilled immigrants barely affect wages, but that small effect is to lower wages, so we should cut immigration to help the immigrants. He then argues that reducing wage growth for low-skilled workers is also good because the workers who remain will be more productive as in Singapore, even though Singapore’s immigration lowers per capita productivity while boosting national output.

The self-contradictions don’t stop there.

Forgetting everything that he wrote about labor markets, Salam praises a science fiction-esque scenario of “virtual immigration” where workers would work remotely by operating robots in the United States from their home countries — even though the labor market effects of that would at best be economically identical to allowing them to immigrate and work here. Salam argues that “virtual immigration will do more good than harm for U.S. workers, provided we have the right safeguards in place [emphasis added].” Salam does not explain what those safeguards are, how they would prevent competition in labor markets, and why the government couldn’t just apply those same safeguards to prevent labor market competition between low-skilled immigrants and low-skilled natives.

Salam cites research that Mexican immigrant assimilation stops at the second generation when educational attainment peaks at 12.6 years and then flattens in subsequent generations to argue that Hispanics will form a racialized uneducated underclass. Salam later mentions a phenomenon called “ethnic attrition,” whereby the more educated descendants of immigrants stop identifying with their ancestors’ ethnicity or country of origin. The same chapter of the same source that Salam cites discusses adjusting measures of education attainments to account for ethnic attrition and finds that Mexican Americans continue to become more educated into the second and third generations. Salam should have evaluated all Mexican immigrants and their descendants to predict their future integration, not a shrinking subset who are exceptions. At a minimum, he should have made clear that those in subsequent generations who self-identify as Hispanic and who are poorly educated shrink due to ethnic attrition.

Salam fails to draw additional connections between wages and education. He worries about low levels of educational attainment among the descendants of immigrants but also favors restricting low-skilled immigration to raise the wages of high school dropouts. He does not explain how raising the wages for dropouts relative to other educational cohorts will incentivize workers to spend more time in school (hint: it won’t). Salam is worried that automation will destroy lots of jobs, so he wants to stop low-skilled immigration to raise wages for low-skilled Americans and immigrants already here, which will just make it more likely that their jobs will be automated.

Salam worries that new immigrants consume more in welfare benefits than they pay in taxes, so he wants to greatly reduce low-skilled immigration. However, he also supports increased welfare payments to poor immigrants already here, to help them and their children escape poverty. He is using the existence of our welfare state to argue against low-skilled immigration rather than the easier, cheaper, and more likely to succeed strategy of further limiting new immigrant access to welfare benefits. Part of Salam’s justification for blocking low-skilled workers from immigrating to the United States, rather than limiting their access to welfare once here, is that it is morally unacceptable to treat low-skilled immigrants as second-class citizens. But, his solution of treating would-be low-skilled immigrants as non-entities and locking them in a life of poverty and despair in their countries of origin has even worse moral implications.

Salam’s exaggerated claims about the failure of the melting pot are familiar. He goes completely off the rails by arguing that it will lead to civil war. He presents no evidence that our society is fracturing or that we’re on the verge of social chaos, let alone a civil war. If crime, domestic terrorism, race riots, and urban decay are evidence of social fracturing or a looming civil war, then we’re doing great. Crime has fallen dramatically as immigration has risen — the number of domestic terror attacks is a minor concern relative to the heyday of the Weather Underground. Race riots are rare and urban decay has reversed in just about every city. In fact, the last time this country had serious social problems from a combination of rising crime, race riots, domestic terrorism, and escalating urban blight was in the late 1960s and early 1970s — the tail-end of a restrictive immigration law.

To his credit, Salam does admit that there is no private political violence in American today that is comparable to the chaos before the Civil War, but that “it is hard to shake the feeling that our luck might soon run out.” Civil war is a deadly serious topic, and perhaps this reviewer is being too nitpicky, but I require more than Salam’s difficulty in “shaking a feeling” to take his worry seriously. He should have done more to show that the choice is really between his “melting pot” or a “civil war.”

Salam believes that the United States is a country with an economy and not the other way around, and he is not alone when he writes about how immigration diminishes social cohesion, reduces solidarity, produces fractionalization, racializes society, tears us apart as a nation, and a lot of other imprecise social criticisms that are impossible to refute. When I was young, communists and socialists were the ones who threw around vague social criticisms on how “the corporations” were tearing apart “our communities” in ill-defined ways. It’s disheartening to see so many conservatives take up the same style of left-wing rhetoric, except they blame “the immigrants and their children” instead of “the corporations.”

Salam mentions the enormous economic cost to those foreigners who would be locked out of the United States under his preferred immigration policy. He proposes a package of U.S. foreign aid to bribe foreign governments to establish charter cities so that low-skilled immigrants can go there instead of the United States. Oddly, he predicts those charter cities will become “fonts of entrepreneurship and public policy solutions” and that excellent new ideas developed there will enrich America. If low-skilled immigrants are entrepreneurs who will create fantastic new ideas in these charter cities that will eventually make it to America, why not just let them come here in the first place? Why spill so much ink supporting a utopian scheme of charter cities as a solution to global poverty when immigration is a tried and true method?

Salam supports charter cities because developing countries have bad institutions that stifle economic growth. Like him, I wish the governments of poor countries would respect free markets, private property, and free trade, as well as liberalize capital markets and adopt representative government. Doing so would lift billions of people out of poverty. But the failure of IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Loans (SALs) to bribe lagging governments to adopt better institutions should dampen anybody’s enthusiasm for aid-funded charter cities as a viable way to increase global prosperity, especially when immigration works so well.

Ironically, more emigration from the developing world to the United States has a better chance of improving economic institutions overseas according to a vast quantity of empirical peer-reviewed research. Mass emigration convinces elites to improve institutions to stop the exodus, so-called social remittances send new governance and social ideas back to poor countries, and return migrants bring back norms, habits, resources, and opinions from developed countries. By eliminating low-skilled immigration to the United States, Salam would likely slow down the process of economic and political reform that has lifted living standards in impoverished countries over the last generation.

The subtitle of Salam’s book is: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. Being the son of immigrants does not give one license to cherry-pick research, produce unfounded predictions of a looming civil war, and make a generally inconsistent and self-contradictory argument. If anything, Salam’s book is evidence that the second generation assimilates just fine into a political culture that rewards identity over logical and reasoned argument supported by evidence. If that’s the result of assimilation, perhaps we’d all be better off with a little less of it.

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As I have detailed, Trump had already cut legal immigration far more than illegal immigration—2.5 times as much. These two rules will exacerbate that trend. Neither targets anyone who crossed the border illegally. Both target people who did exactly what the law asked of them.

The student rule: banned from changing your mind.

Previously, international students on F visas, exchange visitors on J visas, and foreign media on I visas were granted admission for their “duration of status”—that is, for as long as they were in status or following the rules of the visa programs. DHS’s final rule replaces that with a fixed period of entry of no more than four years (for international students and exchange visitors). But it does far more than end open-ended admission. Littered throughout it is a set of unprecedented restrictions with no statutory basis.

• Students can’t change majors or transfer schools in year one—and graduate students can’t ever. The rule’s own summary states it plainly:

For F‑1 students changing educational objectives or transferring to an SEVP-certified school, requiring that the student complete his or her first academic year of a program of study at the school that initially issued his or her Form I‑20 or successor form, unless an exception is authorized by SEVP; Prohibiting F‑1 students at the graduate education level or above from changing educational objectives at any point during a program of study.

Undergrads get one year before this restriction lifts. Graduate students never get it lifted at all, absent a SEVP exception. Change your mind about your PhD topic in year four, and you’re the same as someone violating status on day one.

• You can’t complete a second degree at the same level, or step down a level, ever. Also from the summary:

Requiring any nonimmigrant who has completed a program at one educational level to only be allowed to begin another program at a higher educational level as an F‑1 student and prohibiting a change to the same or a lower educational level while an F‑1 student.

Finish a master’s and want a second master’s in a different field? Illegal. Finish a PhD and want to pick up an associate’s degree in something practical? Illegal.

• DHS’s real response to people worried about the need to double-major: plan ahead, or too bad. Commenters pointed out this would devastate students in interdisciplinary fields who need two degrees to do their work. DHS’s answer:

this rule does not prevent students who need double majors to achieve their goals from planning ahead and enrolling in both at the same time. For example, nothing in this rule prevents someone from doing a J.D./M.B.A. program at one institution with one I‑20 indicating the program end date that accounts for the longer time it takes to complete the double major.

A J.D. and M.B.A. are not even examples of majors at all, as opposed to types of credentials, so whoever wrote this rule doesn’t have the slightest idea what students are even doing in higher education. More to the point, though, many people arrive at a US university not already knowing they’ll need to pursue a joint degree on day one. DHS’s answer to that reality is: you should have known in advance.

• 30 days to find a job, get out, or become illegal. The rule also slashes the departure/status-maintenance window from 60 to 30 days. Giving people 30 days to leave the country is an unreasonably short period after many of these individuals will have spent many years in the United States.

• And the paperwork will bury USCIS’s own broken system. Every one of these changes—first-year transfer denials, graduate-level exceptions, program extensions past 4 years, OPT filings—now requires a Form I‑539 filed with USCIS. Right now, 20 percent of Form I‑539 applications to change to F or M student or J exchange visitor status from another status already take 8 months or more to process. This rule is about to flood that same broken pipeline with hundreds of thousands of additional filings a year.

• “May apply” is not a promise. Cato adjunct scholar Stuart Anderson flagged the tell in DHS’s own language, responding to comments that four years isn’t enough time for most degrees:

Students who demonstrate continued academic progress and meet F‑1 eligibility criteria may apply for an extension of status to complete their programs, consistent with the realities of U.S. higher education.

In other words, there is no guarantee of approval. DHS will still subjectively evaluate each request. DHS’s own numbers make clear how often that gap matters: NCES reports a median of 52 months—4.3 years—to finish a bachelor’s degree, and NSF reports a median of 5.7 years for a PhD. Both exceed the fixed four-year period, for a majority of students, in the government’s own data.

• J‑1 research scholars and physicians get squeezed hardest. J‑1 categories like research scholars and alien physicians are authorized under DoS rules for programs running 5 to 7 years—longer than most F‑1 degree programs. Under this rule, none of that matters. DHS says it outright. A physician in a multi-year medical training program, doing exactly what their visa category contemplates, still hits a DHS-imposed wall at year four and has to file for permission to keep doing the thing they were already approved to do. That’s more costs, uncertainty, and wait for important researchers and physicians.

DHS can’t explain why any of this is necessary. Read DHS’s own characterization of the comments, and it becomes obvious there is no reason for these rules, no statutory mandate to create them, and no engagement with the practical harm the agency is creating. International students keep American universities the most elite in the world, and they often stay after graduation to start many of America’s most valuable businesses.

The public charge rule: a stealth ban on “low-income” immigrants

The second rule made public today paves the way for the USCIS to ban most legal immigrants who it projects will have low incomes. The Immigration and Nationality Act section 212 renders inadmissible people deemed to be “likely to become a public charge.” Back in the 19^th century, public charges were people who lived in almshouses supported by the public. Since 1999, it has meant people who are institutionalized or receive most of their cash income from welfare—“primarily dependent” on the taxpayer. If the officer projected that an immigrant was likely to meet this definition after receiving a green card, they could deny the green card application.

• Replacing a clear rule with nothing: In 2019, in his first term, President Trump rescinded this rule and replaced it with an extremely detailed, convoluted, and perverse regulation. The Biden administration quickly reinstated the 1999 rules. This time, DHS decided not to reissue that 2019 rule. Instead, it is simply rescinding the current public charge regulation and replaces it with nothing—not a new definition, not a new standard, just unbounded agency or officer discretion. This one hits family immigration hardest, because family-sponsored immigrants—the spouses, minor children, and parents of US citizens—dominate the flow of legal immigrants subject to the rule.

Officers will now decide, in their own discretion, whether someone might ever use any of a much broader list of public benefits than DHS previously considered (such as, free school lunch), based on nothing but “the totality of the circumstances.” DHS suggests that it may provide “subregulatory guidance,” but we have no idea what that will be. Either way, it sets up a situation for arbitrary denials of legal immigrants based on a subjective standard.

It is important to clarify that this rule does not simply ban noncitizens or even green card applicants from using benefits, as many news outlets have reported. It is a rule that bans people based on a prediction that they might, someday, use welfare. If DHS simply banned green card applicants from using welfare, that would be no problem at all—they’d just stop using it. That’s not what this does. This is about excluding people from the country based on a subjective guess about their future, not about giving anyone a chance to prove themselves self-sufficient under a knowable standard.

• The “low income now” framing is wrong. As we show in our recent paper, low-skilled immigrants—defined in our analysis as those without a bachelor’s degree, the population public charge officers will be most inclined to flag—were fiscally positive by $2.8 trillion from 1994 to 2023. They work at higher rates than similarly-educated US-born workers, and use old-age benefits, education, and prison spending at well below the per capita average.

What’s more is that it makes no sense to look at someone’s income the moment that they apply. Green card applicants are often ineligible to work when they are applying. That’s why historically as long as someone could work, the default was to assume that they would work. The default presumption should hold, absent strong evidence to the contrary, such as still being on benefits when they apply. The exact effects remain unknowable because DHS states it will provide more guidance only after the rule is final—the “finalize the regulation to find out what’s in the regulation.”

The Most Anti-Legal Immigration Administration

Neither of these rules touches anyone who crossed the border illegally. One targets people who already followed every rule to get a student visa and simply want the same academic flexibility every American student has. The other targets people whose only “offense” is being related to a US citizen and not being wealthy enough to satisfy an undefined, unappealable, after-the-fact judgment call by a single officer.

These rules highlight that the administration’s focus is not on reducing illegal immigration. It is about making legal immigration illegal as well. Immigrants are good for government budgets and our prosperity, increasing our productivity through innovation, entrepreneurship, and work. There is no reason to adopt these harmful, ill-conceived rules. Congress should intervene to prevent them from taking effect.