Visas and Walls. Nazli Avdan
voices these fears: “Migration and terrorism are linked; not because all immigrants are terrorists, but because all, or nearly all, terrorists in the West have been immigrants” (Leiken 2004, 6). The Hamburg Cell, a group of expatriate students that formed around a jihadi radical who had illegally immigrated to Germany, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. Radicalization is a multistep process (Sageman 2004), whereby host-country context can interact with active recruitment machinations by terrorist groups to produce extremism on host-country soil. States also fear that operatives may hide among the general populace and activate sleeper cells within the host (Dishman 2005). The prospect of infiltration makes it possible that foreign violent actors can lodge themselves within the state, in effect allowing them to repudiate borders and gain a foothold in destination states.
Psychological Impact
The desire to instill and disseminate fear lies at the core of terrorist violence. Fear is what links the motivation to use violence to an anticipated policy outcome (Braithwaite 2013). Fear is the pivot point of terrorist violence and, consequently, public perception is the true target of terrorist assaults. Terrorists use violence to manipulate the expectations of an audience that expands beyond the immediate victims. They intimidate through the promise of future violence to come. The public has a double role as the audience of terrorist violence and the impetus for policy change (Friedland and Merari 1985). By spreading fear, terrorist actors also seek to undermine the government’s competence in the public’s eye (Bueno de Mesquita (2005).
Public fears stimulate policy change insofar as political leaders believe tougher policies will alleviate these fears. For public attitudes to have policy impact, leaders should also factor in these fears. Typically, because democratic leaders are office seeking, they are cost-sensitive and more responsive to these fears. Management of fear is especially important given empirical patterns of terrorism: terrorism is a rare event (Mueller 2006). Risk assessment becomes more inaccurate in the face of high-consequence rare events (Kunreuther 2002). Transnational terrorists embody this phenomenon: terrorist actors capitalize on unpredictability to create a sense of helplessness. Mueller stresses that “the costs of terrorism commonly come much more from hasty, ill-considered, and over-wrought reactions, or overreactions, to it than from anything the terrorists have done” (2005, 222). Precisely because these threats are hard to anticipate, ameliorating fear goes a long way toward effective counterterrorism (Friedman 2011; Khalil 2006).
Scholarship from psychology is insightful in terms of understanding how the public responds to terrorist violence. Persistent terrorism generates a range of ill effects. Moreover, these effects are enduring: terrorism not only dampens public morale but negatively (and perhaps irrevocably) alters the psychosocial fabric of democratic societies (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015). We also know that terrorism evokes fear and anger and that these emotional responses are tied to different types of policy demands (Huddy et al. 2005). Fear demands caution whereas anger demands retribution. Attitudes toward terrorism have implications for a range of policy outcomes. Policy change is more likely in the face of terrorism because the political milieu shifts to the right, whereby the public gravitates increasingly toward illiberal and authoritarian attitudes. Chronic terrorism leads to limitations on minority rights (Merolla and Zechmeister 2009). Terrorism rewrites public attitudes by sapping forbearance in societies, thus posing a danger to democratic governance (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015). The literature thus conveys that terrorism has direct and indirect effects on policies. More directly, violence can animate specific antiterrorism measures. Indirectly, it shapes public attitudes toward policies and thereby enlarges the scope for policymaking. The public becomes more intolerant of minorities and more willing to support hard-line policies such as increased surveillance, enhanced interrogation tactics, and restricted civil liberties and minority rights (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015; Piazza 2015).
So far, scholarship has sidestepped the question of how public attitudes toward violence affect migration and border control. The political attitudes that inspire toughness in antiterrorism may do the same for migration and border control. Widespread authoritarianism and illiberalism should generate a political environment supportive of migration restrictions and border crackdowns. If heightened fears bring in strongman leaders and right-wing governments, this should also bolster policy stringency. Chronic terrorism also foments generalized feelings of insecurity, which are linked not to particular incidents or perpetrators but to beliefs that the state and society are vulnerable (Joslyn and Haider-Markel 2007). Even when threats do not emanate from outside the state or are unrelated to terrorism, leaders can animate latent feelings of insecurity in order to push forward hard-line agendas. The death of a border agent in Texas in November 2017 reanimated the Trump administration’s calls for the border wall (Bever, Hawkins, and Miroff 2017). The incident is unrelated to terrorism, but it can still be leveraged to push the wall forward because of extant fears of outside threats.
There are two insights from previous research about public attitudes toward terrorism that I argue connect fears to policy change. The first concerns the distinction between selfish and communal fears, which mirrors the well-known distinction economists draw between pocketbook concerns and macroconcerns over the national economy. Joslyn and Haider-Markel (2007) show that sociotropic fears rather than personal fears connect more closely to policy demands. Perceptions that the community and the way of life are endangered are more powerful drivers of policy change than personal fears that one’s life is in danger. The second insight is that terrorist threats are prone to othering and, at the extreme, scapegoating those outside of the community (Piazza 2015). Violence stirs resentment, creates demand for punitive measures, and exacerbates ethnocentrism (Feldman and Stenner 1997). The perception that threats emanate from outside the community justifies stringency in migration and border control. Moreover, the link between terrorism and border policies relies on the perception that threats arise from outside the state. Threat perception functions through the prism of nationhood, which turns on a hard distinction between the nation as a community and foreigners as others.
Taken together, the psychological effects of terrorist violence link terrorist events to harder borders insofar as border policies serve a reassurance function. They are symbolic because they permit the state to demonstrate its commitment to protecting the citizenry. Public anxiety can prompt tighter policies through a corollary mechanism: widespread anxieties furnish policymakers with greater latitude in pushing forward more draconian policies. Part of this process hinges on the exploitation of fear (Altheide 2006; Mueller 2006). Fears can instigate novel policies or, alternatively, rekindle stalled policy endeavors that favor more rigorous border control. For example, in the case of India and Israel, border security projects that had stagnated as a result of domestic opposition gained renewed steam as a direct consequence of a series of terrorist incidents: after the Second Intifada in the case of Israel and after a series of bombings following the 2008 Mumbai attacks in India’s case.
Nevertheless, hypervigilance is not always about manipulating fear. Given uncertainty about the timing and location of terrorist events, it pays to be overly cautious (Friedman 2011). Policymakers would rather be overcautious than communicate optimism and be proven wrong. As Gelpi and Avdan note, “Policy makers are willing to tolerate large numbers of false-positive predictions of a terrorist threat in order to avoid a single instance of a false-negative prediction that results in a terrorist attack” (2015, 18). After all, it is far more costly for states—and for the political careers of decision makers—to be over-prepared for terrorist events that do not come to pass (false positives) than to fail to be prepared for incidents that do occur. After the attacks in Brussels in March 2016, the Belgian government was denounced for precisely this type of error in judgment.
Targeted and Global Threats
The policy response to terrorist events is determined by how close to home the assaults occur. Incidents that directly target the state’s interests tie into tighter policies in a more straightforward manner. Direct experience can take two forms: transnational terrorist incidents conducted within the state’s borders and events that transpire abroad but victimize the state’s own nationals.9 To illustrate, on March 19, 2016, a suicide attack took place in Istanbul, killing four foreigners and injuring thirty-six more. Among the victims were nationals of the United States and Israel. From the perspective of the United States and Israel, the attack occurred abroad but