ALEX BOLLFRASS is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs and a Fellow at the Stimson Center. ANDREW SHAVER is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He served previously as a Pentagon analyst and Foreign Affairs Fellow with the U.S. Senate. YANG-YANG ZHOU is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s Department of Politics and a National Science Foundation Fellow. She has previously worked with refugees and asylum seekers at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

After the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, hostility toward refugees in many Western countries has surged. Last week, France’s anti-immigration National Front, already popular before the attacks in Paris, achieved its best ever results [1] in the first round of regional elections, winning almost a third of the vote. In the United States, meanwhile, 31 governors and almost all the Republican presidential candidates oppose further refugee [2] settlement in the United States.

Fear of refugees following a terrorist attack is a natural reaction [3], and some confusion over the connection between refugees and violence is understandable. Even the academic community, which has studied the topic for years, has yet to settle on an understanding of the relationship between the two.

But making efforts to block people fleeing to the West from war zones is the wrong response to the horrors of Paris. The latest evidence suggests that the connection between refugees and terrorism is tenuous. The West can take in refugees without jeopardizing its national security [4].

JUSTIFIED FEARS?

The two main grounds for caution in welcoming people from conflict-torn regions are intuitive and widely shared. The first is that individuals seeking refuge across international borders threaten to destabilize the countries that take them in. 

Some research supports this view. Experts [5] have theorized that refugee communities may include political activists and insurgents who mobilize and recruit in the receiving country, giving rise to the purported phenomenon of the “refugee-warrior.” Refugee camps serve as potential military bases from which refugee-warriors can wage insurgencies. Others [6], including the political scientists Idean Salehyan and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, have argued [7] that refugees, as they themselves flee violence, are a mechanism by which internal conflict in one state can spill across borders. People leaving war zones may bring weapons, terrorism [8], and militant ideologies with them.

The second argument against welcoming refugees is that although the vast majority of refugees may be peaceful, they may