Wanted to add this study, too.
This one puts the odds of being killed by a refugee at one in 3.64 billion.
You’re more likely to be killed by your own clothes than by an immigrant terrorist The odds of being killed by a refugee terrorist? One in 3.6 billion. Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Jan 28, 2017, 11:08am EST
On Friday evening, President Trump issued an executive order barring refugees from entering the country for 120 days — and Syrian refugees indefinitely. It also bans people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the country. The justification, allegedly, is security: The order is titled “Protecting the Nation From Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals.”
But there’s precious little evidence that immigrants and refugees actually pose a serious terrorist risk to the United States. A recent report, from Cato Institute analyst Alex Nowrasteh, is one of the most sophisticated attempts to investigate this question. What it found was striking: The risk of terrorism from immigrants is astonishingly tiny.
Cato is a libertarian think tank that has a noticeably pro-migration stance. But Nowrasteh’s research is on really solid ground: He combed through data on terrorism and immigration from nine different sources, covering 1975 through 2015. He counted any attack on US soil in which an immigrant participated as a terrorist attack by immigrants, even if some native-born Americans also helped in its planning or execution.
Virtually all the deaths from immigrant attacks (98.6 percent) came from one event: 9/11. Other than that, fatal immigrant-linked terrorist attacks in the US were vanishingly rare — and ones linked to refugees specifically rarer still.
The average likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in which any kind of immigrant participated in any given year is one in 3.6 million — even including the 9/11 deaths. That is a very, very, very low number.
To put that in perspective, I’ve produced the following chart, which compares the average annual likelihood of American pedestrians being hit by a railway vehicle, dying due to their own clothes melting or lighting on fire, and being killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by an immigrant. It’s quite revealing:
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