Minnesota, Once More on the Front Lines of Terrorism

Not many years ago, the idea of Minnesota as a hotbed of Islamic terrorism would have been laughable. No longer: a mass immigration of Somalis has put Minnesota on the front lines. Authorities estimate that 15 or more Minnesotans have traveled to the Middle East to join ISIS.

At least two of them have died there. The second, Abdirahmaan Muhumed, was reported yesterday by local media. Muhumed was 29 years old and had nine children. He had no criminal record and formerly worked for Delta Airlines at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport:

Multiple sources tell Fox 9 News that, for a time, he worked at a job that gave him security clearance at the airport, access to the tarmac and unfettered access to planes.

Muhumed won’t be coming back, but apparently there is no legal obstacle to his fellow American jihadis returning to the U.S. Some in Congress are trying to fix that problem.

But isn’t the issue far broader than the potential return of a few known jihadis? According to this Pew report, immigration of Muslims to the U.S. approximately doubled between 1992 and 2012, to around 100,000 per year. Currently, according to Pew’s numbers, more than one-half of all Muslims in the U.S. are immigrants (1.7 million between 1992 and 2012).

Most will be good citizens and, of course, the overwhelming majority will never be terrorists. But what reason is there to believe that no one in the current stream of Islamic immigrants is already a radical, being placed in the U.S. by ISIS, al Qaeda or other terrorist groups? None. And what about those who, to all appearances, are harmless and assimilated immigrants like Douglas McAuthur McCain, the first Minnesotan to die for ISIS? Until he became radicalized, McCain was “just a regular American kid,” as one friend told the San Diego Union-Tribune. How many such “regular American kids” will there be, as millions more enter the U.S. from Islamic countries in the years to come?

Given the persistence of radical Islam both globally and here in the U.S., isn’t it time for a thorough and objective re-examination of our immigration laws?

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