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Colonization by Immigration

York: A “Rational Reading of Trump’s Muslim Proposals”

Applying the principle of charity to Donald Trump's rather robust expressions.

BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | June 21, 2016

Byron York of the Washington Examiner has hit upon the rare idea of actually trying to understand Donald Trump.  York has penned a piece that applies what is known in philosophy as “the principle of charity,” which means assuming that the person speaking is a rational being and trying to understand his argument in the best and strongest possible way.  The result, York claims, is a plausible set of policy statements that are at least as defensible as anyone else’s.  You just have to get past the bluster to see it.

Trump is making what are really two arguments, York says:  “The first is that the U.S. admits too many immigrants. The second is that, given nearly two decades of Islamic terrorism, the government should take special measures to keep out Muslim immigrants who might threaten safety and security.”

Trump’s talk about percentages refers to Muslims who believe that suicide bombings or other terrorist killings are justified in the name of Islam. In recent days, Trump has referred to extensive studies done in the last five years by the Pew Research Center on Muslim attitudes worldwide and in the U.S… Pew found that 81 percent of the nearly 3 million Muslims in the United States said such violence is never justified. Five percent said it is rarely justified; 7 percent said it is sometimes justified, and 1 percent said it is often justified. Six percent said they didn’t know.

One can read those numbers reassuringly — 81 percent disavow jihadist violence — or one can read them alarmingly. Trump reads them alarmingly. If Pew’s numbers are correct, then 13 percent of the Muslims currently in the United States believe Islamist violence is justified in at least some cases. Given the current Muslim population of the U.S., that’s just under 400,000 people.

Four hundred thousand people who believe that Islamist violence is at least sometimes justified is indeed an alarming figure.  Trump has also spoken about whether or not these populations are truly assimilating.  It’s another problem that is rational to consider given that second generation immigrants appear to radicalize at twice the rate of first generation immigrants.  This is not limited to the Orlando shooter, whose father was an Afghan immigrant but who was born in New York.  It’s a wider problem that has been observed across the West.  The problem has been discussed by Foreign Policy, by PBS, and studied by statisticians in Denmark.  It appears that not only is assimilation not occurring properly, it might be said that the second generation of Muslim immigrants is often even less assimilated than their parents.

York deciphers Trump’s remarks about the Orlando shooter.  What Trump actually said was, “The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place, was because we allowed his family to come here.”  York points out that the same Pew survey shows that 57 percent of Afghans believe Islamist violence is at least sometimes justified, and that 99 percent believe that sharia should be the law of the land.

Nevertheless, immigration from Afghanistan has been increased five fold under President Obama during his second term.  The implication is that Trump’s mangled bluster nevertheless hides a policy idea that better fits reality than the one enacted by the smooth-spoken President.

York argues that Trump should swap out his proposed ban on Islamic immigration for a country-by-country approach that limits immigration to regions that don’t appear to foster jihad.  “The essence of governing is compromise, Trump might argue, and while he still believes in his original proposal, he knows there is substantial opposition. So here is the compromise: a ban on immigration from X countries and areas of the world with substantially radicalized populations.”

Would that be enough to win Trump the Presidency?  It may be that if we apply the principle of charity to all of his statements, we will find in them nuggets of far better ideas than those that govern the Obama administration.  They may also prove to be better ideas than those that would govern a Clinton administration (if indeed Hillary Clinton were motivated by ideas and not large sums of often-foreign money).  One still must judge his temperament and character, although fortunately for him he is only being measured in those departments against a single opponent.

Still, York’s piece is a welcome addition to the debate.  He deserves praise for trying to understand the ideas rather than merely mocking their mode of expression.

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