The Libertarian Cato Institute released a study in 2016 that actually disproves Donald Trump’s theory that banning Muslims from entering the United States will save American lives. That likely wasn’t the intention of Cato, but their own work proves that Trump is full of it. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
The Libertarian Cato Institute actually released a report in 2016 that incidentally happened to completely disprove everything that Donald Trump and his Administration have told us about the intended effects of their Muslim ban. Now as it stands right now the Administration is currently redrafting that executive order to make it into something that the courts are not going to rip apart. The likelihood of them being successful with that, extremely low considering the fact that these are not lawyers, these are not people who understand foreign policy. It’s likely they’re going to write something that’s not exactly going to pass the muster when it comes to being legal.
However, this Cato Institute study from 2016 shows that in the years between 1975 and 2015, a 40 year span, there were 20 incidents where refugees entered the United States and committed acts of violence. In those 40 years, of those 20 people who were refugees three people were killed. 40 years, 20 refugees involved in incidents. Only three people killed.
Contrast that with home grown terrorism. I mean, how many people died in the Oklahoma City bombing? How many people have been killed by right wing hate groups? I mean just this week two men were killed by one white man because he thought they were Muslims. He thought they were Middle Easterners. Turns out they were from India. They were engineers, very well respected people with huge educations, working to make things in the world better, and he murdered them in a hate crime because he thought they were Middle Eastern, as if that’s some sort of justification for killing another human being. While he murdered them he was yelling, “Get out of my country.” No. You get out of the country. That’s not what we do here in the United States.
I bet if Donald Trump and his Administration actually looked in to the amount of terrorism being caused by white men in the United States, maybe we’d have a different kind of travel ban. It’s not hard to identify the problem when you look at all the variables. Now the Cato Institute Study was just trying to figure out if refugees coming into the United States were a threat or not. It turns out according to Cato that they’re not. If we want to address the real threats we have to look at all the data. We have to look at the acts of home grown terrorism being committed by white men in the United States, because those are the treats. Those are the real problems. The people who take over a wildlife refuge in Oregon, the people who have standoffs with federal officers in the SouthWest, those are terrorists. Those are people that we need to be worried about. Those are people that we should probably be afraid of. Those are people that should spend the rest of their lives behind bars because that is illegal.
Those are the people that we should be worrying about, but instead the Trump Administration, Republicans in general, they’ve created these Middle Eastern boogeymen, telling us that we need to be afraid of them coming over here and trying to kill us. Meanwhile, the real people who pose a threat to our very lives are the ones around us. Maybe the crazy neighbor, maybe the guy down the street. The people that you wouldn’t ordinarily think because statistically they pose a far greater threat to our lives here in the United States than anyone coming over as a refugee.
