Karen Greenberg was quoted in a Washington Post article about terrorism and immigration.
President Trump has called for an end to the practice of letting naturalized U.S. citizens bring their relatives into the United States — critics call this “chain migration” — and for abolishing the “diversity lottery’’ for green cards. In releasing the report, administration officials said the figures underscore a need for tougher immigration standards to keep terrorists out of the United States.
Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham University’s Center on National Security, said the figures instead show there is a need for applying tougher statistical standards to government reports.
“It’s an awfully thin report for an absolutely important topic,” she said. “There’s almost no rhyme or reason to the things they choose to include or not include — they don’t explain it.”
The report considers only those incidents motivated by international terrorist groups — so instances of domestic terrorism are not counted. Moreover, individuals captured overseas, extradited and brought to the United States to face trial are included in the same category as people who emigrated to the United States and were charged with terrorism offenses years later.
For example, Ahmed Abu Khattala, convicted in November in connection with the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, is counted in the same category as someone who successfully applied for a visa to enter the United States.
“Doing that intentionally confuses the threat of domestic terrorist attack with the number of foreigners, by increasing the number of foreigners,” Greenberg said. Extradited terrorism suspects are not immigrants, she said, and should be taken out of the sample.
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Greenberg, whose center at Fordham issues reports analyzing terrorism prosecutions, said there are about 80 such cases.
Greenberg also questioned the time frame examined in the report, saying that looking back to 2001 paints a misleading picture of today’s terrorist threat.
Online indoctrination and recruitment by the Islamic State and other terrorist groups over the past few years has led to an increase in the number of U.S.-born terrorism suspects. About 54 percent of those charged with supporting the Islamic State in recent years were born in the United States, Greenberg said.
