2nd Update: As of Nov 3, 2011, it turns out that Dr. Bauman neglected to mention that he has kept a copy of his paranoid article on the Mexican border online despite having assured me it was taken down. Now you can see what I got all worked up about here.
Update: As of July 31, 2011, I and Dr. Bauman are no longer in disagreement over this issue, as indicated in the comments below. All documentation of this disagreement, other than this post, no longer exists because Dr. Bauman has chosen to take down the original post that started this debate, and the comments in which I and he discussed it on his website.
It pains me when I see liberals painting conservatives as scare-mongering crazies unhinged from reality. But it pains me much more when I see conservatives saying things that justify the accusation. Case in point: a recent defense of tightening border security, “Border Security, not Border Bigotry [link now dead],” the work of Dr. Michael Bauman of Hillsdale College. In it, Dr. Bauman claims that we’re facing a deluge of Muslim fanatics crossing our southern border — tens of thousands a year, and perhaps millions cumulatively.
He makes a staggering claim:
By the way, the latest figures show that more than 10% of those who enter America illegally from the south are adherents of militant Islam. Because the total number of illegal aliens is now in the tens of millions, you can begin to calculate how much more danger we are in because of the illegal influx of those who want us dead or destroyed.
Some quick math will indicate that he’s claiming that more than 30,000 Islamic radicals sneak into our country from Mexico each year (take at least 300,000 illegal entries times at least ten percent). These numbers sound almost mind-blowingly large — the equivalent of the entire population of my home town in terrorists entering the country every three months. I asked him to provide a source for this assertion. Instead of giving an exact source for his claims he simply claimed that his figures came from, uhm, something or other that the Department of Homeland Security released some time or another, and quoted himself as saying:
“According to the Department of Homeland Security, 30,147 illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico were apprehended in 2003; 44,614 were caught in 2004; 165,178 were nabbed in 2005; and 108,025 were detained in 2006. The great majority of them were apprehended along the U.S. Southwest border. They came from 35 countries known to harbor Islamic terrorists. Many were caught carrying terrorist literature, such as bomb-making guidebooks.”
See if you can follow the logical leap he made. If you answered that he made a flying leap from non-Mexicans to terrorists, go straight to the head of the class.
I decided to go check with the Department of Homeland Security and see if I could find any trace of these hordes of terrorists. I found a Department of Homeland Security report entitled A Line in the Sand: Confronting The Threat at the Southwest Border (click here). From page 3:
During 2005, Border Patrol apprehended approximately 1.2 million illegal alients; of those 165,000 were from countries other than Mexico.
This means that over 13% of illegal crossers were from countries other than Mexico. But here’s the next two sentences:
Of the non-Mexican aliens, approximately 650 were from special interest countries. Special interest countries those “designated by the intelligence community as countries that could export individuals that could bring harm to our country in the way of terrorism.”
So let’s try the math again. 650 individuals means that 0.05% of border crossers come from countries that could, potentially, send terrorists. But the real number of Muslim terrorists must be quite smaller than even that. Page 29 of the report lists some of these countries. Among them are countries like Cuba, Brazil, Ecuador, and China — countries which simply do not produce Muslim terrorists. Ever.
So how many actual candidates for terrorism are there? When the report leaves vague talk about “special interest countries” and moves on to discussing specifically Islamic people, the numbers get even more embarrassingly small. In 2006, for example, the report says that seven Iraqis and one Afghani were apprehended by border patrol in those countries. No indication is given for any reason to believe these eight individuals were militant Islamists (page 28). A suspicious jacket was also found with Arabic military badges. The jacket, apparently belonging to a soldier, was not from Al Qaeda, but did come “from countries in which al Qa’ida was known to operate” (29). Back in 2002, “several” Lebanese folks who are “believed to have terrorist ties to Hezbollah” entered (31).
To avoid getting lost in the details, here the short version: in 2002, a few Lebanese people crossed the border suspected of ties with Hezbollah, an organization which has never, ever launched an attack inside US borders, but rather concentrates on practices like “credit card fraud, illegal drug trade, cigarette smuggling and theft” (see here). And that’s all the “terrorists” that the DHS can round up for a publication specifically designed to showcase the terror-related weakness of our southern border.
In 2005, the Border Patrol apprehended 1,200,000 people crossing the border and found not a single confirmed Islamic radical. Not one in a twelve hundred thousand. And somehow Dr. Bauman blows a complete lack of militant Islamist traffic up to more than 10%. That’s over 120,000 missing militants he has to account for.
In this article, Dr. Bauman bemoans the sorry state of his peers (theologians), claiming that “they can’t think straight,” and throwing the word “foolish” and “fool” around with reckless abandon, claiming that they “lack intellectual virtue” and many similar accusations. He should take a long at hard look at the way he uses scare tactics based on mis-cited data from nowhere before he goes back to condemning whole disciplines for their “seriously defective” “objectivity skills.”
And Mexico could probably use an apology for the wild accusation of sending the US upwards of 120,000 Islamic militants per year.
7 Comments
Apparently, you’ve found Dr. Bauman.
. He’s a nice, funny, intelligent guy, but as a lot of Summit teachers are, a little extreme when it comes to Islam, immigration, and demographics. Now that the 2010 census results and the immigration stats are in, I’m looking forward to seeing if they change their tune at the conference or at least tone it down. 
After listening to their few lectures on demographics, I was convinced the end of Western Civilization was right around the corner because of the Latinos coming here and Muslims (non migrating and migrating types). Then I read all the books they recommended and changed my mind about the end of West being near. Strange. 
You said exactly what I was thinking about Dr. B’s post- I just couldn’t state it as eloquently
I’m sure he’s a swell fellow. And I’ve got no objection to concern over our borders and the possible issues that might arise with our Muslim and Latino inhabitants. That’s fine.
As to the West, I think there’s some hard times coming up, but I just don’t see another player on firmer footing to take us down. And maybe they will take us down. But the Church perseveres, and she will win the day among white people, brown people, and any other people on this earth.
I’m perfectly okay with religious folks deciding to make a bunch more religious folks. But it just gets weird when they see themselves as helping to prevent the demise of the white race.
Mitchell,
I take your point. I misread the data. Mea culpa.
Best to you,
MB
Dr. Bauman,
I’m glad we’ve come to an understanding on that issue. This is the messy equivalent of peer-editing as it exists in the wild west of the internet. I’ll revise this post to indicate that we no longer stand in disagreement on this issue.
Best to you also,
Mitchell.
Thanks, Mitchell.
I have taken down the posting from my blog site. Given the error, it deserves deletion.
Best,
Michael
If one group grows by 4%/a (doubling all 20 years) while another one e.g.the secular,technical and scientific educated grow only by 1%/a (doubling all 100 years)the latter ones disappear in a few hundred years and with it the developed human spirit and skill for research and scientific activities and thus the understanding for the ephemeral existence of humanity on this planet.That means regression to the earlier,naive and simple human existence of the underdeveloped, some 1000 years ago, but now with the enormous growth rate which developed during the time of scientific agrarian techniques and energy technologies.As high birth rates are simultaneous with strong creed,this immigration will no doubt block further development and the country will drift toward anachy.
Dear H. F.
First, a note on your math. I think the doubling rate for a group growing at 4% is more like 18 years, and the doubling rate for one growing at 1% is more like 72 years. See this Wikipedia article for a handy way to calculate doubling time: Rule of 72.
But beyond the math, there’s another place we disagree. You see the groups as permanent in character. I don’t. Studying birth rates shows that birth rates are not static: see my post Fertility Rates in Predominantly Muslim Countries, which documents how Muslim birth rates are steadily dropping throughout the world.
Furthermore, ethnic groups change over time. When the Irish first arrived in the United States in large numbers, they had great numbers of children and lived in squalor with very low IQ’s. Now they are wealthier, have normal IQ’s, and make as much money as other white Americans. Black Americans used to have an average of seven children per woman. Now they’re averaging only about two. For more on the economics and demographics of ethnic groups over time, I recommend Thomas Sowell’s book “Ethnic America.”
One Trackback
[...] Dr. Bauman has earned this harsh language. A few months ago, he went into a xenophobic rant ironically called “Border Security, not Border Bigotry” in which he made the unsourced accusation that Mexico allowed more than 120,000 “adherents of militant Islam” to sneak into the United States illegally, and that this flood militants justified much stricter border control. I attempted to correct him by pointing out that even the Department of Homeland Security, in an effort to drum up fear of terrorist immigration from Mexico, was unable to come up with even one example of a militant border-crosser. In response, he did the verbal equivalent of pounding his chest and trying to throw doubt on my understanding of our immigration situation. I would link to that interchange between him and myself, but he has since deleted all the evidence on his site. All that’s left is a copy of his article on another site (here), my criticism of that article on my (here), and his admission that he destroyed the evidence because it, conveniently, “deserves deletion” (here). [...]