The month of March brought Islamic terrorism back into the headlines. An immigrant from Sierra Leone shouting “Allahu Akbar” reportedly opened fire at ROTC cadets at Old Dominion University. A Lebanese-born man allegedly crashed his vehicle into a Michigan synagogue. A Muslim from Senegal, wearing a “Property of Allah” sweatshirt, reportedly shot and killed four people at a bar in Austin, Texas. Two teenagers with parents from Turkey and Afghanistan are suspected of throwing bombs outside the mayor’s mansion in New York City.
Clearly, the Western world’s experiment with importing millions of Muslim immigrants resulted in spectacular failures in March. And what might April bring?
It is a mistake to see these failures as merely a problem of “vetting” would-be immigrants. While we should obviously exclude people with connections to terrorist groups, many Muslims who become terrorists in the United States are lone wolves. Some, like the alleged New York City bombers, even resided in well-to-do American suburbs. Even the most thorough vetting would not have prevented these perpetrators from reaching our shores.
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It is also a mistake to emphasize the rarity of terrorism. It remains true that the average American faces a minuscule probability of dying at the hands of a terrorist, but terrorism signals problems that go beyond body counts.
Terrorist attacks are the most extreme manifestation of a more fundamental cultural division between the Islamic world and the Western world. If cultural conflict is an iceberg, then terrorist attacks lie at the tip. Beneath the surface, less visible to us in daily life, are the clashing values, beliefs, and loyalties that shape society.
Sometimes survey data gives us a glimpse of such differences, and the results can be disturbing. In a report I wrote for the Center for Immigration Studies in 2021, when the Biden administration was facilitating the arrival of over 100,000 immigrants from Afghanistan, I used the World Values Survey to estimate what people in Afghanistan believe about gender relations.
About 78% of Afghans agree that “when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.” In addition, 63% of Afghans endorse the statement that “a university education is more important for a boy than for a girl.” Forty-three percent of Afghans even agree that it is sometimes justifiable “for a man to beat his wife.” The corresponding percentages among Americans are all far lower.
Separately, the Pew Research Center’s global survey of Muslims reveals what Afghans think about the role of religion in society. According to Pew, 99% of Afghans believe Sharia should be the law of the land. That includes stoning as a punishment for adultery (85% of Afghans agree) and the death penalty for leaving Islam (79%). Furthermore, 39% of Afghans believe suicide bombings are sometimes justified, and 60% endorse murdering a female family member for having sex outside of marriage.
One could object that these are the views of Afghans in Afghanistan, and not necessarily representative of Afghan immigrants. There are, of course, individual immigrants from Afghanistan and similar countries who successfully assimilate into American norms. It’s also true that select groups of immigrants, such as those who arrive on skill-based visas, tend to be drawn from the more cosmopolitan parts of sending countries’ populations.
However, refugees and other humanitarian immigrants from developing countries often have personal values and outlooks more typical of their compatriots back home. The flood of such immigrants in the aftermath of the Afghanistan evacuation means that the views of most Afghan immigrants today likely fall much closer to the average Afghan than to the average American.
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With cultural differences between immigrants and natives as profound as those described above, clashes are inevitable. The results could be residential segregation, persistent socioeconomic disparities, the proliferation of foreign languages, and a whole series of smaller alterations to the daily life of a community. Terrorism is by far the most severe form of culture clash, but it need not happen every day to tell us that there is a broader problem.
Vetting should continue as needed, but ultimately, the way to reduce culture clashes caused by immigration is to reduce immigration itself. Although the foreign-born population appears to have declined during President Donald Trump’s first year, it followed a massive surge during the Biden years. By January 2025, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population stood at a record 15.8% — a level that just two years earlier the Census Bureau had predicted would not be reached until 2042! The U.S. needs long-term, sustained immigration reductions to encourage integration of current immigrants and to avoid exacerbating the divisions that terrorism so violently reveals.
Jason Richwine is a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies.
