A new academic paper published this week shows there is no real link between the arrival of refugees and other immigrants and the rise of extremist violence, despite increased rhetoric on the subject from US presidential candidates and European Union leaders as they grapple with containing a refugee crisis.
"There is a clear link between illegal migrants coming to Europe and the spread of terrorism," Hungarian Prime Minister Orban claimed last summer. In the US, Donald Trump proposed banning entry to all Muslims, and Ted Cruz wants to carpet bomb Middle Eastern cities to "see if sand can glow in the dark."
The paper, "Does Immigration Induce Terrorism?" was authored by researchers at the University of Warwick in the UK and published this week in the University of Chicago's Journal of Politics. In the study, the researchers used three decades worth of "data on migration inflows from the World Bank, weighted by the number of terrorist attacks in the country of origin of the immigrants."
While the study did find some links between political instability and large-scale migration, this represents a smaller, contemporary phenomenon, which they say, should be viewed in the context of broader history.
"When migrants move from one country to another, they carry skills, knowledge and perspectives, which stimulate technological innovation, the diffusion of new ideas and economic growth," writes Vincenzo Bove, the lead author of the study, told the Washington Post in an interview.
"If terrorism and economic development are indeed related more migration decreases the opportunity for terrorism. So banning all inflows of migrants and pursuing overly restrictive policies affecting all immigrants seems to put a country at a disadvantage," Bove writes.
Instead, the authors say, enacting heavy-handed immigration measures that demonize vulnerable communities, only makes them more likely to turn to radicalization.
