Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X of What People Really Care About When They're Mad About Immigration.
“The degree of public concern and anxiety about a social problem or phenomenon varies inversely as to its real or actual incidence.”
– Stephen Davies[i]
Realizing New Year’s Eve is the worst holiday shows growing age, wisdom, and maturity. You stay up late, maybe drink too much while listening to bad music, and explode fireworks to celebrate changing a few digits on the calendar. The weather (in the Northern Hemisphere) is bad, drunk drivers dominate the roads, and the youths make too much noise while you’re just trying to get some sleep. The best part is you have another excuse to kiss your spouse, which may be another downside for some of you. The Soviet Union allowed for a festive tree called the Soviet Fir to be displayed in homes to celebrate the New Year instead of Christmas, which ranks as one of their more atrocious aesthetic sins. Another tragic communist error.
Not all New Year’s are equally bad. A few hours after the New Year, in the early morning of January 1, 2025, Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove his truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.[ii] He continued for several blocks, veering to hit partygoers, before crashing into a boom lift. Then he started shooting. Jabbar was wearing body armor, which may have delayed his death at the hands of police who finally killed him. At the end, he murdered 14 people and injured 57 others.[iii] Jabbar, a convert to Islam, was inspired by another, more unusual (by the standards of vehicle ramming attacks) attack by an activist critical of Islamic governments named Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen in Germany just ten days earlier. Although the German killer had an Islamic name, no evidence of a motive for his killing spree emerged, but his social media made it clear that he detested Islam.[iv]
Jabbar was also confused about the German attacker’s motives, even as they inspired him. Regardless, the New Orleans attack came less than three weeks before Donald J. Trump was to be inaugurated after campaigning on the dubious notion of immigrants crossing the border to cause terrorism. In reaction to that ubiquitous Trumpian sentiment, Jabbar’s Islamic name, and the Islamist motivation for killing, the media and Twitter speculated that Jabbar was foreign-born. The truck that Jabbar drove had crossed the border recently, according to news reports on the day of the attack.[v] Fox News anchor David Spunt said, “The other thing that’s not entirely clear right now is the status, the immigration status of this driver.”[vi]
Trump said about Jabbar, “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true.”[vii] Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that, “Terrorist attack in NOLA similar to the one in the German Christmas market. What did we expect would happen with wide open borders and millions of gotaways?”[viii] We should expect our elected officials to carefully consider the facts before coming to a conclusion.
There was no immigration or border connection to Jabbar’s attack. It turns out that Jabbar was born in Texas to a black American Baptist family. He had converted to Islam along with his father. The truck, it turns out, was a rental. One of the previous renters had driven it to Mexico and back. Jabbar was another loser who worked in HR in the military, was married and divorced three times, and had to pay about one-third of his salary in alimony and child support. He responded by becoming more religious and reading about murders committed by other Muslims and terrorists overseas before killing innocent people. If Jabbar were a foreign-born terrorist and drove into the United States from Mexico through a legal port of entry, he would have been a legal immigrant or visitor.
Terrorists by Visa
There are very few terrorists in the world, and even fewer of them try to enter the United States to commit an attack here. Still, some do and even manage to evade the vast counter terrorism bureaucracy. A total of 237 foreign-born terrorists who attacked or intended to attack US soil have entered since 1975, and they murdered 3,046 people in their attacks. The morbid math of estimating terrorism risk can shed more light on foreign-born terrorism, even if it’s no consolation to the small number of victims.
The first step in dissecting this more morbid math is to track the visas that terrorists used to enter the United States. This is trickier than it appears. Let’s go back to the standard level of immigration knowledge possessed by the elderly woman in Arizona who asked me about why illegal immigrants don’t go to the Post Office to get a visa if they have nothing to hide. It would be news to her and most other Americans that different visas allow foreigners to come to the US for various reasons and durations. There are almost 200 different types of visas, depending on how you count. Some are for short stays for vacations, others to pass through the country, and others for work, residence, marriage, and eventually apply for citizenship. Quite a difference from before World War I, when the government created visas as a temporary 110-year-long wartime measure.
What complicates all this is that immigrants to the US usually enter on one type of visa and move to a different visa if they stay here long enough. In immigration law, this is called “adjustment of status.”
Here’s an example of the “adjustment of status” saga from a friend of mine. Alan, as I’ll call him, came to the US on an F-1 student visa to study at the University of Texas. After graduating in a STEM field, Alan got a temporary job through the STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. After a few years working, his company decided to sponsor him on an H-1B visa for temporary workers in specialty occupations. After working in an H-1B for over a decade and after numerous visa renewals, Alan’s company sponsored him for an employment-based green card. He took the citizenship test five years later at the first opportunity. Alan cycled through four statuses – an F-1 student visa, STEM OPT, H-1B, and a green card before finally becoming an American citizen.
Faisal Shahzad’s journey from student to terrorist followed a similar legal immigration trajectory that ended with a buffoonish attempted terrorist attack. He entered the United States on a student visa in 1997 and eventually graduated from the University of Bridgeport. Shahzad received an H-1B visa for skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations just before graduation in 2002. He married Huma Asif Mian in late 2004, who was also from his native Pakistan, and continued to legally work on an H-1B visa while also earning an MBA degree. His employer sponsored him for a green card, and he became an American citizen in 2009. He became increasingly religious and distraught about the world during this time. “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?” Shahzad wrote in a message intended for peaceful protesters.[ix] He had an idea.
In 2010, he attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in New York City, parking the car near the Minskoff Theater while leaving the engine running. The bomb fizzled, nobody was injured, and Shahzad was arrested two days later when he tried to flee to Dubai. He successfully exploded his life, not his car. Prior to committing legal suicide in an attempt to murder people in Times Square, Shahzad quit his job, defaulted on his mortgage, and ruined his marriage.
Shahzad had four visa types or legal statuses before he parked his car in Times Square. Before attempting his attack as a naturalized US citizen, he had gone through three different visas. It doesn’t make sense to count all of them and place a check mark next to student, H-1B, green card, and naturalized citizen because Shahzad was just one man. It also doesn’t make sense to count the visas he had after he entered or before he attempted his attack, in the same way it doesn’t make sense to label an 18-year-old who commits a crime as a minor just because he concocted his criminal scheme when he was a minor. Using the visa or legal status he had when he committed his attack is reasonable, but it’s also not helpful because the initial potential security failure occurred when he first entered the United States. Reasonable people can differ, but the case for counting the first visa that Shahzad and other foreign-born terrorists had when they entered the United States is the best way. Shahzad entered on a student visa.
Shahzad wasn’t the only one. During the last half century, two dozen other foreign-born terrorists entered on student visas. Altogether, terrorists who entered on student visas murdered 159 people in attacks. The most infamous was Hani Hanjour, one of the 9/11 hijackers, who is credited with his share of the victims in those attacks. The other two are the less well-known Eyad Ismoil, who drove the explosives-laden van into the garage under the World Trade Center for the 1993 attack, and Rashid Najib Baz, who murdered a Hasidic Jewish student in a mass shooting in New York in 1994. Both entered as students, Ismoil from Jordan and Baz from Lebanon.
The forty-four terrorists who entered on tourist visas are the deadliest, and murdered 2,829 murdered people in attacks. Eighteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers entered on tourist visas and the nineteenth as a student. Terrorists who entered as students and tourists account for over 98 percent of all people killed in terrorist attacks committed on US soil by foreigners since 1975. Studying bombings and touring murder aren’t the purposes of those visas.
The other visas that terrorists used to enter the United States are rounding errors in terms of deadliness, but account for the majority because most terrorists don’t kill anybody. Eighty-one terrorists entered on green cards, the most common visa used, but they only murdered fewer than two dozen people. There were 29 refugees, 16 who entered on the visa waiver program, and single digits for all the others, which account for five murders in terrorist attacks.
Asylum is the only visa category that is confounding because it’s not a visa. Asylum is for migrants who are on US soil who fear that they’ll be persecuted if they are forced to return to their home countries. All asylum seekers must be on another visa or have entered unlawfully to apply. In other words, an asylum seeker can’t apply from abroad to come in as an asylum seeker. In cases where a foreigner enters US soil on one visa or another means and shortly thereafter applies for asylum before committing an attack or being arrested for planning one, he’s counted as an asylum seeker. This isn’t an academic exercise – it happens more often than you’d think.
Thirteen foreign-born terrorists were asylum seekers, and they murdered fewer than ten people in attacks. The most infamous asylum-seeker terrorist is Ramzi Youssef, one of the masterminds of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that murdered six people, injured 1,042, and caused about $1 billion in property damage. He entered the US on a visa in September 1992, claimed he lost his passport, and applied for asylum with a hearing date set for later that year. In the meantime, he was allowed onto American streets. He planned and carried out his attacks with five other foreign-born terrorists, including a Palestinian asylum-seeker named Ahmed Ajaj.
The deadliest terrorists who got asylum were the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon in April 2013. Dzokhar, one of the brothers, was captured alive, and the other, Tamerlan, was killed in a police shootout four days later. Dzokhar was 8 years old, and Tamerlan was 16, when they entered the US with their family. They eventually applied for asylum and got green cards. The brothers had killed five people by the end of the 2013 manhunt. The only case of an asylum seeker who crossed the US-Mexico border was Mauritanian Sidi Mohamed Abdallah, who asked for asylum in 2023. In October 2024, he attacked and injured a Jewish man in Chicago and was charged with a state-level terrorism offense. Abdallahi remains the only asylum seeker who entered across the US-Mexico border who became a terrorist.
It’s not bigoted to look at the names above and conclude that most foreign-born terrorists are motivated by Islamist ideology. Sixty-eight percent are and they are responsible for just about 100 percent of the murders in attacks. The 9/11 attacks account for almost all that carnage, but Islamist terrorists are still responsible for almost three-quarters of all those killed in foreign-born terrorist attacks, excluding 9/11.
The next deadliest set of terrorists are motivated by right-wing ideology, but there were just 15 of them and they murdered just 11 people, followed by foreign nationalists who haven’t been a threat since the early 1990s. The most infamous terrorists inspired by the love of foreign blood and soil were 17 Croatians in the 1970s who, oddly enough, committed several attacks and even hijacked an airliner while murdering three people altogether. Twelve left-wing foreign-born terrorists murdered one person. The thirteen remaining terrorists were motivated by a smattering of different ideologies and murdered nobody in their attacks.
Terrorist countries of origin are unsurprising given their ideological motivations. Saudis are the largest and deadliest contingent of terrorists, accounting for 19 in total (15 of whom were 9/11 hijackers), and almost eighty percent of all murders. In descending order of deadlines are foreign-born terrorists from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Cuba, and Croatia. Foreign-born terrorists come from sixty different countries, and terrorists from 18 of them have murdered at least one American in attacks. Those countries certainly didn’t send their best in these cases.
Terrorism Vetting Can’t Be Perfect
After the San Bernardino attack, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump read the statement, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”[x] The word “hell” was epanorthotically added by Trump. One of the attackers was Tashfeen Malik, an immigrant from Pakistan who entered on a fiancée visa to marry her US-born husband. After taking office in 2017, one of President Trump’s first actions was the so-called Muslim ban that barred the immigration and travel of foreigners from some Muslim majority countries for a period that was then expanded to more countries and extended in time. After many iterations of the so-called Muslim ban, which is how President Trump himself described it before and after his election, it applied to ten majority Muslim countries.[xi] All inspired by the supposedly failed vetting of Tashfeen Malik.
Malik’s immigration status was the focus of the debate over how the government should respond to the San Bernardino shooting. Commentators focused on her fiancée visa, also known as a K-1, for supposedly lacking proper vetting. That point convinced economic commentator Larry Kudlow to shift from being a pro-immigration reformer to believing that “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.”[xii] Conservative activist David Bossie argued that “We are at war and our homeland security and immigration policies are a complete mess . . . The next president should enact an immigration moratorium or strict quotas across the board.”[xiii] Trump obliged with an order that didn’t even exclude migrants or travelers from Malik’s home country of Pakistan.
However, the coverage of the security dangers posed by the fiancée visa was based on rumor. Far from lacking security or being a major loophole that allowed terrorists to enter, Malik was the only terrorist to have entered the US on a K-1 fiancée visa. Of the roughly 900,000 immigrants who have entered on a K-1 visa, only Malik committed an attack. If she had lived to face trial, she would have been the only person charged with committing or planning a domestic attack who entered the United States on that visa.
Another media-inspired rumor swirled that DHS employees who vetted Malik’s fiancée visa application may have missed social media evidence of her belief in radical Islamist ideology that, if discovered, could have scuttled her visa application. John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis, said that when Malik’s visa was vetted, “Immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process.”[xiv] If such a ban were really in effect, it was news to immigration attorneys.
Shortly after the San Bernardino attack, Matthew Kolken, one of the most prominent immigration attorneys in the United States, told me:
The first time I confirmed that the government was investigating social media was around 2009 when an adjudicator at a marriage fraud interview confronted my client with a series of pictures he was tagged in on Facebook. The only person more surprised than me was his wife when she saw that the pictures were posted by his girlfriend the previous weekend. The silver lining is that when the officer witnessed my client’s rage, he approved the application on the spot.[xv]
He wasn’t the only attorney who said something similar. Immigration attorneys Charles Kuck, Greg Siskind, Aileen Josephs, and Dave Bennion all confirmed to me that the government routinely looked at social media posts before the San Bernardino case, especially in marriage cases where the government seeks to confirm that there is a romantic relationship between the applicant and the American sponsor.[xvi]
Only Bryan Johnson, another immigration attorney, said he has no examples of clients whose social media behavior was reviewed. He then reiterated that he was unaware of any policy that prohibited the government from doing so and that, “The government has time to interview every applicant in person so therefore they would have time to do a brief social media search – it takes about two minutes.”[xvii]
It turns out that Malik hadn’t posted anything publicly on social media about Islamic extremism or hinted that she was planning an attack. Malik communicated with her husband in “direct, private messages,” according to then-FBI Director James Comey, who quashed Cohen’s rumor that there was a ban on immigration bureaucrats checking social media when evaluating visa applications.[xviii] The Trump administration confirmed as much two years later when it published a new regulation that would have required visa applicants to turn over more information about their social media accounts when applying for a visa.[xix]
If the fiancée visa were really such a security vulnerability, it’s surprising that there is no evidence of anyone besides Malik herself exploiting it. She had done nothing wrong in public prior to her attack in December 2015, and all evidence that she harbored an intent to kill was contained in private messages exchanged with her husband going back to 2013.[xx] She would have been denied a visa if those private messages had been discovered.
Terrorism vetting after 9/11 through the end of 2016 only failed 13 times – allowing one terrorist into the country for every 29 million visas issued. Most of those terrorists didn’t murder anybody in attacks either. When looked at that way, there was one deadly foreign-born terrorist admitted for every 379 million visas issued during that time.[xxi]
We don’t know how many innocent people were denied visas from the post-9/11 security visa vetting process, but the low number of terrorists is evidence that there aren’t that many terrorists or, maybe, that vetting works well. The latter is hard to believe, but it could be true. The most effective vetting devised can identify some bad actors and falsely exclude many more innocent people with no ill intentions whatsoever, but it can’t predict what people will do to a high degree of certainty.
We cannot expect a security vetting system to be perfect. The system we have likely mostly appears to be effective because there are very few foreign-born terrorists who intend to commit attacks on US soil. Focusing so many resources, worry, and time on foreign-born terrorism is one way of finding wonder in the little things. Trump’s second term has already imposed another ban on migrants and travelers from countries based on flimsy anti-terrorism pretexts and is subjecting travelers to social media screening to weed out people who are jerks on social media. The government has a good model of such offenders based on the man at the top.
Immigrant and Foreign-Born Terrorists Are Not Coming to Kill You
Terrorism is a minor threat. Terrorism is a serious crime when it occurs, the government should try to prevent attacks, and terrorists should be severely punished under the law, but freaking out about it often results in more harm than the attacks themselves. Attacks committed by immigrants and other foreign-born terrorists are extremely rare, and most don’t kill anybody. Adding insult to injury, the evidence is overwhelming that counterterrorism spending has killed more people than it has saved. We let fear of foreign-born terrorism change our society for the worse because the 9/11 attacks were so big and dramatic. The threat of foreign-born terrorism is above zero, but the damage done by reacting to it is many times higher. Government officials and politicians like to say that the risk of foreign-born terrorist attacks today is higher than a few years ago, even though an American hasn’t been murdered in a domestic attack committed by a foreign terrorist since 2019. They are probably wrong. But even if they are correct, the risk is higher relative to an extremely low base rate.
Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X of What People Really Care About When They’re Mad About Immigration.
[i] Stephen Davies, “Spencer’s Law: Another Reason Not to Worry,” Foundation for Economic Education, August 1, 2001.
[ii] “FBI Releases Investigative Update in Bourbon Street Attack,” FBI New Orleans, January 14, 2025.
[iii] “FBI Releases Investigative Update in Bourbon Street Attack,” FBI New Orleans, January 14, 2025.
[iv] “2024 Magdeburg car attack,” Wikipedia, last edited August 25, 2025.
[v] “Truck crossed border Nov. 16, ID of driver doesn’t appear to be suspect, sources say,” FOX News, January 1, 2025 .
[vi] D’Angelo Gore and Saranac Hale Spencer, “Republicans Wrongly Tie New Orleans Attack to Illegal Immigration; Suspect Was a Citizen,” FactCheck.org, January 3, 2025.
[vii] “Statement by President-elect Donald J. Trump on the Terrorist Attack in New Orleans,” The American Presidency Project, January 2, 2025.
[viii] Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG), “Terrorist attack in NOLA similar to the one in the German Christmas market,” X post, January 1, 2025, 10:30 a.m.
[ix] Andrea Elliott, Sabrina Tavernise, and Anne Barnard, “For Times Sq. Suspect, Long Roots of Discontent,” The New York Times, May 15, 2010.
[x] Jenna Johnson, “Trump calls for ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’,” The Washington Post, December 7, 2015.
[xi] Donald J. Trump, Executive Order 13769: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. January 27, 2017. Federal Register 82, no. 20 (January 31, 2017): 8977–8982. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2017-02-01/pdf/2017-02281.pdf; Donald J. Trump, Executive Order 13780: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. March 6, 2017. Federal Register 82, no. 97 (May 4, 2017): 13209–13219. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2017-03-09/pdf/2017-04837.pdf;
Donald J. Trump, Presidential Proclamation 9645: Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats. September 24, 2017. Federal Register 82, no. 186 (September 27, 2017): 45161–45171. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2017-09-27/pdf/2017-20899.pdf; Donald J. Trump, Presidential Proclamation 9983: Improving Enhanced Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats. January 31, 2020. Federal Register 85, no. 22 (February 5, 2020): 6699–6705. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2020-02-05/pdf/2020-02530.pdf.
[xii] Larry Kudlow, “I’ve Changed. Seal the Borders. Stop the Visas.” National Review, December 12, 2015.
[xiii] David N. Bossie, “Conservatives Should Think Bigger On Immigration Ban,” Breitbart, December 11, 2015.
[xiv] ABC News, “Secret US Policy Blocks Agents From Looking at Social Media of Visa Applicants, Former Official Says,” ABC News, December 14, 2015.
[xv] Alex Nowrasteh, “Secret Policy to Ignore Social Media? Not So Fast,” Cato at Liberty (blog), December 15, 2015.
[xvi] Alex Nowrasteh, “Secret Policy to Ignore Social Media? Not So Fast,” Cato at Liberty (blog), December 15, 2015.
[xvii] Alex Nowrasteh, “Secret Policy to Ignore Social Media? Not So Fast,” Cato at Liberty (blog), December 15, 2015.
[xviii] Adam Goldman and Mark Berman, “FBI: San Bernardino attackers didn’t show public support for jihad on social media,” The Washington Post, December 16, 2015.
[xix] Alex Nowrasteh, “Feds, Wasting Time on Facebook,” Cato Institute, September 28, 2017.
[xx] Pete Williams and Halimah Abdullah, “FBI: San Bernardino Shooters Radicalized Before They Met,” NBC News, December 9, 2015.
[xxi] David J. Bier, “Extreme Vetting of Immigrants: Estimating Terrorism Vetting Failures,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 838, April 17, 2018.