Gatestone Institute | Judith Bergman | February 15, 2020
A new report, “What Terrorist Migration Over European Borders Can Teach About American Border Security“, by Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, describes the extent to which terrorists disguised as migrants have entered the European Union to commit terrorist attacks. Although the study was written primarily for an American audience to prevent the same mistakes from being made on US borders, the study is extremely relevant for the European public — especially as Germany recently warned of a repeat migration crisis, similar to the one that occurred in 2015. According to Bensman:
“Between 2014 and 2017, 13 of the 26 member states lining the so-called Schengen Area’s external land borders recorded more than 2.5 million detections of illegal border-crossings along several land and sea routes, an historic, mostly unfettered surge that came to be known as the ‘migrant crisis’. The Schengen Area, which generally encompasses the European Union, consists of countries that combined immigration enforcement of a common external border of 27,000 sea miles and 5,500 land miles while removing all interior border controls to facilitate the free movement of goods and people.
“During the 2014-2018 migrant crisis, the majority of travelers who crossed the external border and were then able to move unfettered between member nations came from nations in the Middle East, such as Syria and Iraq; South Asia, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan; and Africa, such as Somalia and Eritrea. It first became known that some ISIS terrorist operatives also were in the flows after some of them committed the November 2015 Paris attacks… and then the March 2016 Brussels attacks”.
According to Bensman “The totality of how migration and terrorism intertwined as a destructive force against Europe, and the continent’s response, remains largely unacknowledged, undocumented, and not analyzed”.
Nor does it get much — if any — prolonged attention in European public debates about migration.