Terrorism and Immigration Reform

The city of Boston is still reeling from the bombing of its marathon on Sunday.  Today it is practically shut down as police search for a suspect named Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.   Dzhokhar and his older brother, now dead after a shoot-out with police, are allegedly the perpetrators of the double bombing that has killed three so far and maimed hundreds.  Video surveillance puts both men at the site of the bombing carrying back packs.  The fact that Dzhokhar’s older brother appears to have died in part from a bomb strapped to his body has closed the jury deliberations in the court of public opinion.  These men are guilty and they are terrorists.

For a few days following the blast and before the video surveillance break, the popular media in the US was conscientiously quiet about speculating on the perpetrators.  There were some hints that the date, April 15, was an ignominious date for right-wing extremists in the US.  They noted that the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 occurred on April 19.  As fragments of the bombs were recovered, they were determined to be made from pressure cookers.  This was a low-tech, low-cost design seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The official media mostly held its tongue.

Officials enlisted the help of the public in plowing through videos and photos of the area looking for possible leads.  However, the crowd sourcing turned up many red herrings.  17-year old Salah Eddin Barhoum and his friend Yassine Zaime appeared on the front page of the New York Post as suspects of interest after the paper picked up their photo from some of these websites.  Eddin was identified because he carried a back pack and had brown skin.  When images of the actual suspects emerged a few days later, they were not brown, but they were foreign.

The suspects were identified as Chechens and Muslims.  Their family had migrated to the US from Kyrgyzstan in 2003.  As the media digs deeper into their foreign travels and their backgrounds xenophobia will be stoked.  This is a natural, though not excusable, reaction to terrorism.  The “otherness” of people behind atrocities like the shooting at Newton or the summer camp in Norway or 9-11 is always highlighted.  They are crazy or fanatics or outcasts or everything together.  The worry is when these emotional responses bleed into policy.

The impact of 9-11 on US domestic and foreign policy is a subject for several books.  One of the major impacts was felt in immigration policy.  Since 2001, immigration policy has been tightly linked with border security and enforcement, as if the attackers had entered illegally.  A segment of the political elite is already wary of immigrants and their impact on today’s economy and society.  Adding foreign-born terrorism to these worries is a death-knell of rational compromise.

Today’s story is shaping up to be: “Chechen terrorists bomb the Boston Marathon.”  No doubt more nuances will be added as details unfold.  However, this is a delicate moment with regard to immigration reform in the US.  There appears to be the political will to at least begin a dialogue to confront the failings of the current system.  Terrorist hyperbole cannot be allowed to derail progress.   To paraphrase Nasser Waddady: The US has suffered a wound, but can choose to avoid a worse kind of wound: the self-inflicted.