Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reminds us that Europe’s terror problem is our problem too:

Leading lawmakers identified Belgium as a hotspot for terrorism months ago and are warning that many of the radicalized individuals living there are still able to travel to the United States without first obtaining a visa and undergoing thorough security checks…. “There’s no enforcement once they get here,” [Representative Ron] DeSantis said. “Hundreds of thousands of people come over and then overstay” their visas. “You are not going to be removed under current policy under this administration.”

DeSantis proposes that we shift America’s visa waiver program from a national to a neighborhood level.  When a neighborhood is identified as a hotspot, its denizens would be treated as if they were citizens of a terror-linked nation like Syria or Iran.  Failure to do that, he points out, means that at least six of those guilty of the mass murders in Paris last fall would have been eligible to come to the United States without even a visa.

When he speaks of neighborhoods that need special monitoring, however, he is not speaking of ordinary bad neighborhoods.  There is a specific kind of neighborhood that produces terrorism.  Even Bill Clinton can now say that it is Muslim immigration that has caused these neighborhoods.  Europe now has many of them.  Some call them Muslim ghettos, and point out that terrorists can flourish there because the society is so cut off that the police cannot readily see what is going on inside of them.  That is what allowed the terrorist Abdeslam to hide in this very neighborhood of Brussels for five months after staging an attack in Paris.

If the neighborhoods are opaque to police, though, what good would the heightened visa scrutiny be?  Once we had identified that they were from a dangerous neighborhood, what then?  Extra background checks only matter if there is some useful information that will turn up on such a check.

There are two proposals for addressing this problem from the Republican side of the Presidential race.  The better known is Trump’s proposal to pause all Islamic entry to the United States until we figure out how to understand who is a terrorist and who is not.  The alternative proposal, made just yesterday by Ted Cruz, is to give police tools to help them prevent the creation of such opaque neighborhoods here in America.

Cruz’s suggestion that we should empower police to engage the populations of Muslim neighborhoods in America was widely panned by his political opponents, but so far they have not proposed a workable alternative.  To say that it is a violation of our basic principles to single out a religion for special scrutiny will not make the bombs stop.  Refusing to consider it, while major terrorist attacks become a regular feature of Western life, pushes us all towards the harsher answer Cruz’s opponents hate even worse.