Op-ed: Vetting in All the Wrong Places

There’s an old joke about a drunk looking for his keys under a streetlight. A cop joins him in the search and asks if he’s sure this is where he lost them. The drunk says, no, he lost them in the park, “but the light is better here.”

When our leaders assure us that an immigrant has been “vetted,” they mean they checked where the light is better. Sometimes that’s all they can do, but we need to understand the limitations of vetting and adjust our immigration policies accordingly.

Whether it’s last week’s Afghan alleged murderer in D.C. and the tens of thousands of his countrymen who leapt aboard the last planes out of Kabul, or the millions of border jumpers the Biden administration released into the country, vetting is often just a superstition, like knocking on wood or carrying a rabbit’s foot — it might make you feel better, but it’s unlikely to have any effect. Running a foreigner’s name through a U.S. criminal database — which is what “vetting” usually consists of — isn’t going to tell you anything. Even checking international terrorist or criminal databases is unlikely to be of much use.

There are three reasons for this. First, many of the countries that immigrants come from are so backward or chaotic, they have no systems for recording basic information about their citizens. This is the reason for the presence of several countries on President Trump’s June travel ban. The state has essentially ceased to exist in Libya and Yemen and Haiti, and probably never really existed in the first place in Somalia.

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[Read the rest at National Review.]