This morning, Abdul Razak Ali Artan drove his car into a group of students at Ohio State University and then jumped out of the vehicle to slash others with a butcher’s knife. Ten people were hospitalized as a result. A campus police officer finally put an end to the attack by shooting Artan dead.
Artan was a student at OSU and a resident of Franklin Township, Ohio. According to neighbors, his family had immigrated to the Columbus area from Somalia.
Discussing the attack, Columbus mayor Andrew Ginther made no reference to Artan’s ethnicity or background. Rather, indulging in civic boosterism left-wing style, he boasted that Columbus is “warm and welcoming” to immigrants and refugees. “We welcome people from all over the world,” he said.
But should they? In September, a Somali-American stabbed nine people at a St. Cloud, Minnesota mall. And Scott Johnson has tirelessly reported on the exploits of Somali jihadists in the Twin Cities.
Nonetheless, the U.S. continues to accept immigration by Somalis at a rate believed to be around 700 per month. And liberal Democrats like Ginther continue to boast about it.
I’m confident that most of the Somali immigrants are peaceable folk simply looking to improve their lot. But there can be little doubt that members of this community participate in terrorism at a hugely disproportionate rate compared to immigrants from most other countries.
If so, it seems seriously misguided at best to keep permitting mass Somali immigration to the U.S. If we want to be compassionate, why not give the Somalis’ slots to poor immigrants whose nationality shows them to pose essentially no risk of engaging in terrorism? If we want to be hard-headed, why not cut back on immigration by the number of places currently given to Somalis?
I agree with Jeremy Carl. There is no valid excuse for allowing the mass immigration to America of a group whose members have few economic prospects and are disproportionately likely to engage in attacks on Americans. Donald Trump’s willingness to advance this common sense position is one of the reasons why he’s our president-elect.
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