If the government could not evaluate Nikolas Cruz how will they evaluate jihad risk among immigrants?

by philg

The standard argument for why Donald Trump is wrong when he says that he wants to shut down immigration from violence-plagued countries is that the U.S. government will “vet” potential immigrants and screen out those who are prone to waging jihad or likely to perpetrate other forms of violence.

I always wondered how this was going to work, especially since the people being screened would be coming from a culture in which neither speech nor documents are in the English language. Would it be the U.S. military, which failed to notice the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, for example? The FBI that failed to heed flight instructor warnings about the 9/11 hijackers? The FBI that, after being tipped off by the Russians (they were our friends back then, but we hate them now?) about the Tsarnaev family, investigated and cleared the Tsarnaev brothers?

Now we’ve got a new data point in that the FBI was tipped off to Nikolas Cruz’s likely behavior (Miami Herald) and yet failed to prevent the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. The local police also got some tips. Compared to screening potential immigrants, this was an easy situation for law enforcement. The people offering the tips were native English speakers describing events that had occurred within the U.S. The potential criminal was a native English speaker. There was no need for an interpreter and no need to verify information about an event that had occurred on the other side of the planet.

Government does some great stuff (as you’d hope given $4 trillion per year in federal spending alone), but should we give up on the idea that government can usefully predict which people are most likely to commit violent acts?

14 thoughts on “If the government could not evaluate Nikolas Cruz how will they evaluate jihad risk among immigrants?”

  1. It’s hard to agree or disagree with this posting without knowing the governments success rate at preventing violent acts. Were there comparable acts to the ones you enumerated that the government successfully prevented? How would we find out? Does anyone know?

    It’s conceivable that we’d be safer if we took money away from federal government and invested some of that money in local vigilante groups instead, kind of like the drug cartels in Mexico who also provide security to the local population and in some cases do a better job than the local corrupt police (from what I’ve been told anecdotally). But personally, I’d want to know just how bad our government is before giving up on it completely. It’s clearly not good enough, but that doesn’t clearly mean that it isn’t better than nothing.

  2. Not sure about the success rate but surely the failure rate is measurable. There is some evidence that the government arrests, convicts and imprisons people who likely would not have committed violent acts. Surely the government counts such people as “another disaster averted”.

  3. No, that’s still not a failure rate. That’s just saying that there are failures in the other direction—in addition to not catching violent people, the government also erroneously catches people who are not violent. Both situations are bad. But that still doesn’t tell us whether we’d be better off with less government in the violence-diagnostic arena because neither data point contains information about when/if the government does do its job and catches people that do need to be caught.

  4. Under an “abandon faith in government screening” there wouldn’t be immigrants from Yemen (for example) “that do need to be caught” because there wouldn’t be any immigrants from Yemen (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/permanent-travel-ban/?utm_term=.e8207728a069 for the list of countries from which Donald Trump attempted to stop immigration). The screening process would be applied at the country level, not at the individual level.

  5. There are 2 factors in play:

    It seems like there was an agreement between school district and the police to decrease the delinquency:

    When social services approached Peterson in its investigation of Cruz, the officer “refused to share any information . . . regarding [an] incident that took place.” Peterson and his colleagues appear to have been under pressure to post lower statistics on school-safety problems.

    From: https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-did-parkland-shooter-slip-through-cracks-15741.html

    With fewer arrests every year, more money was available to the school district.

    Secondly, how can we expect the FBI to respond to tips on a potential school shooter, when entrapping mentally deficient youth is a sure way to get convictions and promotions?

    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-fbi-entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-20120515

    [The FBI frequently finds people who are either deranged, financially destitute, or suffering from low IQ’s, and then convinces them to carry out these plots by doing everything short of lighting the fuse themselves. According to Andrea Prasow, a deputy director with Human Rights Watch “Many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.” ]

    http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-fbi-has-been-involved-in-just-about-every-terror-plot-since-911_092015

  6. The FBI frequently finds people who are either deranged, financially destitute, or suffering from low IQ’s, and then convinces them to carry out these plots by doing everything short of lighting the fuse themselves

    Yes, and this applies to the FBI’s make-work efforts targeting the KKK and biker gangs. Nine out of ten so-called KKK members are barely literate government informants sitting around bonfires in the woods, drinking beer, and informing on each other. The others are frail and half-demented 80-year old ex-cons.

  7. The standard argument for why Donald Trump is wrong when he says that he wants to shut down immigration from violence-plagued countries is that the U.S. government will “vet” potential immigrants and screen out those who are prone to waging jihad or likely to perpetrate other forms of violence.

    I don’t think that that’s a standard argument. America has never done that in its long history of immigration and neither have countries like Canada or Australia, which take in immigrants from all over the world. If a family comes into the country that includes and an infant and a toddler, there’s no way to tell whether they might commit violent crime. If hundreds of thousands of people enter the country annually, some fraction of them will eventually commit violent crime, just as some fraction of people born in the country will. There’s no need to contemplate Nikolas Cruz to understand those concepts.

    Under an “abandon faith in government screening” there wouldn’t be immigrants from Yemen (for example) “that do need to be caught” because there wouldn’t be any immigrants from Yemen (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/permanent-travel-ban/?utm_term=.e8207728a069 for the list of countries from which Donald Trump attempted to stop immigration). The screening process would be applied at the country level, not at the individual level.

    There are violent people in every country. Banning immigration from Yemen or Russia will not stop the fact that some portion of all immigrants will eventually commit a violent crime.

  8. I think philg’s argument is that eugenics/culture can help us reduce the probability that we admit a violent criminal. It’s kind of like the argument that it is efficient for employers to not hire women for technical jobs because women have statistically lower aptitude for math than men and so why expose yourself to a on-average-lower-quality candidate pool. I guess the validity of this approach depends on both whether you believe that it will work, and whether your want to live in a democratic society with these kinds of values. And I guess again the argument here is that the electoral college has democratically revealed that it would prefer to have a society that errs on the side of limiting people.

  9. Yz: I don’t think that Trump’s attempt to ban people from certain countries is a “eugenics” idea. There was no reference to research on the heritability of criminality, e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4009388/
    Nor was there a serious attempt made to exclude children or grandchildren of criminals. The countries on Trump’s list were ones where active conflicts are raging and therefore the fear seems to be that immigrants will carry on that conflict after they arrive here in the U.S. (or sometimes their children will carry on that conflict; see https://www.npr.org/2015/02/18/387302748/minneapolis-st-paul-remains-a-focus-of-jihadi-recruiting for example).

  10. Ok, but elsewhere on your blog you seem to view Vietnamese refugees rather favorably, despite the fact that there was a conflict raging in Vietnam at the time of their arrivals.

  11. I hope that I didn’t presume to judge immigrants “favorably” or otherwise. I think that I pointed out that Vietnamese immigrants’ economic achievements were unlikely to be repeated by immigrants from countries with much lower academic attainment. This doesn’t make Vietnamese immigrants “better.” It may be, for example, that some Americans support low skill immigration so that they can feel better about themselves by comparison.

  12. Alright, by “favorably” I suppose I should have said “statistically likely to pay more in taxes than they consume in social services” which seems to be the measure of immigrant worth on this blog.

    But that’s a distraction from the main assertion, which is that banning immigration from violence-ridden countries will reduce likelihood of violent behavior in the US. I don’t see why Vietnamese immigrants aren’t a good case study for that situation either —vietnam was quite violent during the Vietnam war, so we would expect, based on your theory, that Vietnamese immigrants should have above average incidence of violent acts. The violence rate of Vietnamese-Americans is at least in principle knowable.

    With regards to eugenics, I wasn’t ascribing the eugenics argument to the Trump administration, I was ascribing it to you. I think you can support a politician’s policy even if your arguments and motives aren’t identical to those of the politician.

  13. @Yz: It’s kind of like the argument that it is efficient for employers to not hire women for technical jobs because women have statistically lower aptitude for math than men and so why expose yourself to a on-average-lower-quality candidate pool.

    I’ve never heard this argument.

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