Less than a month ago Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said his “approach to immigration is very simple.”
“Legal? Good. Illegal? Bad,” Cruz said.
But a series of recent terrorist attacks proves that legal immigration can be just as dangerous as illegal immigration.
On Thursday Mohamed Bailor Jalloh — a Sierra Leone national — opened fire at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, killing Brandon Shah. Jalloh came here legally. But his legality didn’t stop him from providing material support to ISIS — the Islamic terrorist organization — in 2016. It also didn’t stop him from murdering an American hero.
That same legality didn’t stop 41-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali — a Lebanese national who came to this country in 2011 and was naturalized in 2016 — from crashing his car into a Michigan synagogue on Thursday while armed with a rifle. Nor did it stop Senegal national Ndiaga Diagne, who opened fire at an Austin, Texas, bar, earlier this month, killing three and wounding 13 more. Diagne came to the United States in 2000 and was later naturalized in 2013.
Meanwhile New Yorkers were spared on Saturday after two radical Islamists whose parents immigrated here from Afghanistan and Turkey allegedly tried to bomb anti-Islam protesters outside of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s official residence.
Legality also didn’t stop the Boulder, Colorado, terror attack, allegedly by an Egyptian national, or the fatal shooting of a National Guardsman in Washington, D.C., allegedly at the hands of an Afghan national.
In each of these cases, the suspects themselves were either legal immigrants (at some point) or the children of immigrants. But coming here legally did not prevent radicalization or violence.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Thursday that the United States needs to have a serious conversation about legal immigration.
“We need to reform our legal immigration system. A lot of these people have come in legally. A lot of American workers have been displaced by foreign workers,” Schmitt said. “A lot of American students have been displaced by these visa mills at universities and tax breaks that companies get after the fact.”
For decades Washington has operated under the false pretense that immigration is objectively good so long as it is done legally. That assumption has led to us to suicidal decisions — like admitting Senegalese, Lebanese and Sierra Leone terrorists who murdered Americans or attempted to do so. It has also, as Schmitt mentioned, led to the displacing of American workers and students, as well as a disruption in national unity and cohesion. As these terrorist attacks show, legality alone does not make someone American in culture and norms, nor does it ensure that these immigrants share the same political and religious values that underpin our republic.
Alexander Hamilton warned of this very reality in 1802, saying that it is “extremely unlikely” that foreigners would “bring with them the temperate love of liberty” that is so necessary for a republic. Instead, people tend to bring with them the same habits and politics and cultural norms formed in the places that they are now leaving.
When immigration policy ignores these differences, it leads to the importation of radical ideologies — like radical Islam and its terrorist behavior — and a population of foreigners who are simply unable to assimilate to the American way of life.
Now that’s not to say all immigrants are terrorists, but Americans should not forced to tolerate even just a few terrorist attacks for the sake of propping up a lax immigration system that fails to grapple with reality. Immigration policy is always supposed to be to the benefit of the American people, and there’s little justification for importing a large number of third-world foreigners who come from places that do not promote Western values. There are also less deadly but still negative effects that result from migration from vastly different cultures and people, too, as pointed out by Hamilton.
As I previously wrote, not all cultures produce the same outcomes. If all cultures were equal, then every single nation in the world would look like the United States in political, legal, and social framework. But they don’t, which is exactly why our immigration policy must reflect that reality and consider the cultural, political and religious backgrounds of everyone we admit.
The standard cannot be simply whether someone will obey our laws once they arrive — that is the bare minimum expected of anyone living in the United States. Immigration should be reserved for those who bring a skill or talent that our country genuinely needs. Our immigration policy should not blindly sweep in people who add to the population while bringing vastly different cultural, religious, and political assumptions. Had a discerning and measured immigration policy been in place, terrorists from Senegal, Sierra Leone, Egypt, and Afghanistan would not be here and their acts of violence would not have taken place.
Thursday’s attacks are just the latest reminder that good immigration policy isn’t simple a matter of legality. It’s a matter of who comes to the United States and what beliefs and culture and religion and political assumptions they bring with them.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
