Refugees of Conflict, Casualties of Conjecture: The Trojan Horse Theory of Terrorism and its Implications for Asylum

ABSTRACT

There are more displaced persons worldwide today than there ever has been before. Many countries, despite the urgent need for collective effort in providing for these persons, have been slow to accommodate them. Applicants continue to face stringent legal and practical barriers to asylum, even in countries party to the various international refugee agreements. Restrictions on applications are routinely justified with reference to national security, and in particular to defense against terrorism. There is a belief in some sectors of the polity and public that allowing greater numbers of refugees into the country will result in more incidences of violent terrorism. Refugee resettlement programs are caricatured as the Trojan horse permitting terrorists’ passage through national borders. Little has been done, empirically, that could testify to the veracity of such a theory, and that which has been done has been equivocal. Moreover, previous studies were unable to establish anything past a coincidental association between refugee populations and experiences of terrorism. This study explicitly tests the idea that refugees, by their own actions, cause terrorism. The findings of the study do not support Trojan horse or other theories that villainize refugees, nor are they decisive of a connection between refugees and terrorism.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• refugees
• displaced persons
• count regression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

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37. Ideally, we would also have data on the circumstances of UN “persons of concern,” i.e., what percentage of these persons in a given country reside in settled camps or are part of a mass movement, for example. It is probable that among refugees of different circumstances, there is variability in receptiveness or vulnerability to terrorist recruitment. This is something that future research in this area might consider.

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46. State violence includes things like torture, unlawful use of deadly force, extra-judicial executions, political imprisonment, arbitrary arrests, and kidnappings.

47. Choi and Salehyan, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished,” 59.

48. Ibid.

49. Aldo M. Garay, Elizabeth M. Hashimoto, Edwin M. M. Ortega, and Victor H. Lachos, “On Estimation and Influence Diagnostics for Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Regression Models,” Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 55, no. 3 (2011): 1304.

50. The count sides of the zero-inflated negative binomial models included the fixed effects variables; this was not possible for the zero sides of the models, because of issues of perfect collinearity.

51. Including lagged dependent variables might run the risk of “soaking up” the explanatory power of other variables in the models (see Choi and Salehyan, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished,” 59). To check that this was not the case, the regressions were performed without including the lagged dependent variables. Removal of these variables did not change the (lack of) significance in either of the refugee variables, and, in fact, when the lagged dependent variable was removed from the second model, the variable for the number of displaced persons, previously significant at the 0.1 level, became non-significant.

52. Abadie, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism,” 54.

53. Siobhan Kattago, “The End of the European Honeymoon? Refugees, Resentment and the Clash of Solidarities,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 26, no. 1 (2017): 35–52; Michael Ignatieff, “The Refugee as Invasive Other,” Social Science Research 84, no. 1 (2017): 225.

54. Ignatieff, “The Refugee as Invasive Other,” 224–225.

55. Ibid., 226.

56. Maryellen Fullerton, “Trump, Turmoil, and Terrorism: The US Immigration and Refugee Ban,” International Journal of Refugee Law 29, no. 2 (2017): 332; Stern, “‘Our Refugee Policy is Generous,’” 35. Such was the case when the American judiciary, with recourse not to refugee law but to U.S. constitutional provisions, fought Trump’s January 2017 attempt to suspend all refugee admissions to the U.S. and ban entrance to all other citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and when, in 2012, the Swedish judiciary convened to determine the status of a female applicant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, shrugging off the counsel of the UN committee who steadfastly defended her right to asylum, given the risk of her being subjected to sexual violence if forcibly returned to the DRC.

57. Kattago, “The End of the European Honeymoon?” 50; Ignatieff, “The Refugee as Invasive Other,” 230–231.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cory Eybergen

Cory Eybergen obtained his MA in the School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University. His research interests are in terrorism, political violence, the geography of crime, and quantitative research methods. He is currently undertaking policy evaluations for social programs.

Martin A. Andresen

Martin A. Andresen is a Professor in the School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University. His research areas are in spatial crime analysis, crime and place, geography of crime, environmental criminology, and applied spatial statistics and geographical information analysis. Within these research areas he has published in criminology, sociology, geography, and public health. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, an Affiliated Scholar in the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, and Chair of the Crime and Place Working Group in the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University.