Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chillingeffect 3412 days ago
At least on my fb feed, it's a far-right trope that refugees are admitted with no vetting process whatsoever. Enough that I managed to research it and found this very informative infoposter from the Obama administration:

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/11/20/infogra...

note: multiple stages of bio checking, numerous three-letter agencies, additional steps for Syrians.

I used to post this every other day on fb, but lately I just realize there are simply groups who repeatedly gaslight each other and aren't interested in reality. One of them referred to my post as "liberal facts," implying, apparently, that the government doesn't perform the above screening process which it claims it does. shrug.jpg

2 comments

I think the weakness here is in the first step "Collects identifying documents". If a potential terrorist in some countries can procure 'official' documents with a different name than their own, then all the rest of the screening will fail, because they will be checking the record of a presumably innocent resident of that country, while the person who would actually enter the country if approved would be someone else. Ideally, the government doing the checking also needs to be able to get or verify additional information from the potential refugee's home governments.

It therefore seems reasonable to me you might want to restrict travel from countries that either have such weak governments that fake 'official' documents can be obtained (somalia, syria, yemen etc) or countries that have a stated policy of non-cooperation with the US government on such matters (Iran).

That would also explain why you would not exclude people from 46 other muslim majority countries - there would be no reason to if their official documents can be relied on, and they are responsive to queries from the US when some information needs to be verified.

My argument isn't that the USA performs no screening, which is a strawman argument. It's that the screening process is inadequate. That is a nice checklist, but it relies on unreliable data such as documents and iris scans.

Unless the government has every present and future terrorist's fingerprints in a database, how will scanning fingerprints be effective? It cannot be, it logically does not make sense. This logic is confirmed by FBI director Comey who told congress the same thing.

Perhaps that is where your disagreements with the "far-right" are stemming from?

Why do you think it's inadequate, and what would be adequate?