Syrian and Iraqi refugees fleeing to Lesbos in October 2015. Wikicommons/ Ggia. Some rights reserved.In his Executive Order of 27 January 2017, US President Donald J. Trump claimed that “numerous foreign-born individuals have been convicted or implicated in terrorism-related crimes since September 11 2001… including foreign nationals who entered the United States through the refugee resettlement program.”
The notion that refugees are closely connected to terrorism has also been actively promoted by the EU law enforcement agency, Europol. According to one of its reports, “a real and imminent danger is the possibility of the Syrian refugee diaspora becoming vulnerable to radicalization and being specifically targeted by Islamic extremist recruiters.” Based on this assumption, the agency has recently announced that it “will in future be able to search the EURODAC database of refugee and asylum seekers’ fingerprints, so as to detect and prevent terrorist offences.”
Authoritarian politicians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban have exploited such statements to the maximum, describing refugees and migrants as “the Trojan horse of terrorism.” Extremist organizations have themselves been eager to perpetuate this frightening scenario, as when the Islamic State declared that 4,000 of its members had been infiltrated into Europe under the cover of the refugee influx.
