This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 17, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When Donald Trump floated the idea of extreme vetting for would-be migrants,

he left out the fact the United States largely already

engages in these practices and it's getting worse.

Cato's David Beer in his new paper Extreme Vetting of immigrants estimating

terrorism vetting failures. He discusses what works and what

doesn't in keeping potential threats out of the United States.

We spoke yesterday.

When Donald Trump on the campaign trail initially used this term extreme vetting, what did he mean by that?

I don't think he knew what he meant, but certainly part of it was always this idea that we're going to

ban certain nationalities that we deem more threatening to the country and beyond that just really getting into

people's ideological beliefs and you know reviewing their social media in order to identify

whether they're reading the radical Islamist newsletter or whatever he thinks that they're doing and that is going to be able

to tell us whether if they're issued a visa they're going to come here and commit crimes and terrorism in the United States.

So what does regular vetting when it comes to people coming to the United States. What does that look like?

Well it depends a little bit on how you come to the United States, but if you're an immigrant

you're sponsored usually by a family member, but also by employers, and that

connection is pretty thoroughly investigated.

You have to prove your connection to that person. That person's records are also reviewed. They probably have an extensive history with government agencies and people in the United States.

All of that stuff is then fed through a very complicated vetting process that involves intelligence

agencies as well as the Department of Homeland Security in order to identify anything that might be a red flag and anything that

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