Assimilation Academies

David French writes at National Review,

Some immigrants from jihad zones will be involved in murdering Americans. Is this an acceptable price for compassion?

At 9:52 a.m. on Monday morning, a silver Honda jumped a curb at Ohio State University and plowed directly into a crowd of students, sending bodies flying through the air. As students rushed to help, a young Somali immigrant, Abdul Razak Ali Ratan, got out of the car and began attacking horrified students with a butcher knife. All told, eleven people were wounded before a university police officer shot and killed Ratan, ending the attack.

Ratan is the third Muslim immigrant to mount a mass stabbing attack in 2016. The first occurred at an Israeli-owned deli in Columbus, Ohio, the second at a mall in Saint Cloud, Minn., and the third Monday at Ohio State. The attacks together wounded 25 people. The latest stabbing comes on the heels of Afghan immigrant Ahman Khan Rahami’s September bomb attacks in New York and New Jersey that left 29 injured.

The toll continues. Muslim immigrants Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev killed five Americans and wounded 280 in the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent shootouts. Muslim immigrant Muhammad Abdulazeez killed five men and wounded two in attacks on military recruiting stations in Chattanooga, Tenn. Muslim immigrant Tashfeen Malik accompanied her first-generation Muslim-American husband to attack a Christmas party in San Bernardino, Calif., killing 14 and wounding 22. First generation Muslim-American Omar Mateen — son of Afghan immigrants — carried out the deadliest domestic terror attack since 9/11, killing 49 and wounding 53 at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.

...For every successful attack, there are multiple unsuccessful plots, including attacks that could have cost hundreds of American lives.

After all these incidents, can we finally have an honest conversation about Muslim immigration — especially Muslim immigration from jihadist conflict zones?

...If the Democrats wish to maintain immigration from jihadist conflict zones, they need to rid their rhetoric of the language of “Islamophobia” and tell the truth. If they want to continue admitting refugees from jihad zones, they need to make the case that meeting the humanitarian needs of an an extremely small fraction of the world’s Muslim refugees is worth the cost of importing a small number of mass murderers. They must make the case that the human toll in America is the price we must pay for national compassion. Of course no Democrat wants a terror attack to occur, but Democrats must understand and acknowledge that under present policies, such attacks will occur — despite our best efforts to stop them.

Rea French's specific proposals here.

Bookworm has a different idea:

f we truly believe that we have a moral obligation to protect civilians from the ravages of civil war and social breakdown in their own countries, we can allow them to immigrate subject to a law requiring high-risk Muslim refugees to spend one year into American-based internment camps where (a) they can be taught American laws and values and (b) they can be monitored for terrorist tendencies.

We’ve used internment camps before to protect Americans. During WWII, the Democrats unconstitutionally stripped Japanese-Americans of all of their rights, wealth, and freedom without due process. Before people get their knickers in a twist about “imprisoning” innocent people, what I’m proposing is legally and practically different.

In the case of incoming Muslim refugees, the people placed in these camps would not be American citizens. Moreover, they would enter the camps voluntarily. They would be told that, as a condition of immigrating to America from a country that’s associated with radical Islam and high rates of terrorism, they must first spend a specific amount of time (say, a year) in a residential “assimilation Academy.”

At this camp, the immigrants would be taught English, America’s law customs and practices, and job skills. They would also be screened for the pretty nasty diseases that are par for the course in the poverty-stricken, no-infrastructure places in which these refugees originated. Assembling them in one place for an extended period of time, in addition to teaching them “America 101,” would also allow the government to have agents mixed amongst the refugees to monitor them for radical Islamist ideas and terrorist plans.

The expense? Well, I don’t know that it would be that much. After all, we taxpayers already feed, house, clothe, and educate Muslim immigrants. At least this way, we’d be able to include with the package a heavy dose of American assimilation, along with more information about who the refugees are and about their future plans once they graduate from the Assimilation Academy and are officially allowed to enter America.

Again, these Muslims are not citizens deprived of their rights and imprisoned. Instead, they are non-citizens entering into a voluntary exchange with the American people: In exchange for being allowed to enter this country and benefit from its largesse, they must spend a year learning how to be Americans and putting aside their radical, non-democratic, anti-American beliefs and habits.

Read more here.