This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 2, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One of the key drivers of the president's plan to dramatically cut legal immigration is the fear of terrorism.

So what risks do immigrants pose and which of visas do foreign-born terrorists use?

Alex Narasta is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, he breaks down the costs

and benefits.

One of the arguments that the president makes both explicitly and implicitly is that immigrants pose special risks to Americans.

Does anyone in his administration actually spell out what that looks like?

Well not in any kind of detailed way, however the president and other members have said that immigrants

who enter through the chain migration system or family sponsorship

through green cards and those who come in on diversity visas

are especially deadly and that these categories represent a national

security threat and that's one of the

arguments that they are using to try to restrict the immigrant flows in those

categories. Okay so what do we know about those categories and the risks that those categories pose when it comes to terrorism?

So looking at data from 1975 through the end of 2017, we have identified an estimated 53 foreign-born terrorists who

entered the United States on a green card. Now we don't have data for all those people in terms of the exact type of green card they entered on, but it looks like all of them are either family through family reunification or family sponsorship or the diversity visa since

1990 which are the two categories the president has targeted.

We found that those 53 foreign-born terrorists have murdered in terrorist attacks a total

of 16 people on US soil during that time period.

That's out of a total of about 3,037 people murdered by foreign-born terrorists during that time period.

So it represents less than about one-half of 1% of the total.

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