Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: A commenter replies to my latest Taki’s column proposing that all immigrants be required to have immigration insurance against any harms they may visit up Americans:

This is what I did for a living: design insurance and financial products. “Pittsburgh Thatcherite” has the kernel of brilliance but you have the wrong “bond”.

If you are talking about immigrant mass murders you have a low frequency high severity event.

One of my goals is to get the concept of liability for immigration on the table in the first place. Cigarette companies, for instance, always admitted they would be liable if, say, a cigarette exploded and burned your eyebrows off. But that got the lawyer’s nose in Camel’s tent: after lots and lots of arguing, it turned out the cigarette companies were also liable for increasing customers’ statistical risks of lung cancer. That process wouldn’t have been worth it if somebody with deep pockets wasn’t involved.

This makes an underwriter twitchy to begin with. You will never get meaningful limits in the context of such an event (yes, everyone buys car insurance and Mexicans get $15/30 limits) and insurers will be challenged to screen risks among the riskiest immigrants. The other obvious issue is that in a suretyship transaction there is an oligor (the immigrant) and oblige (his victims?) and a surety. The surety likes it when he is positioned to recover from the obligor after paying the obligee. Won’t happen here. This leaves out the question as to whether the surety/insurer is going to be penalized for underwriting by ethnicity.

This is a capital markets play. Some kind of immigrant CAT bond or quasi-CDS structure. This covers a generational cohort or some such number. The bond pays a premium if immigrants behave; maybe it pays a robust premium if immigrants reach certain socio-economic benchmarks. If Allah Akbar events spike, or socio-economic benchmarks crater, the bond pays no income and certain tranches risk their principal.

The reason this idea might work is that institutions could be shamed or pressured to issue the protection. Soros believes in immigration — hey, back it up. Maybe we could sell some of the bonds to Mexico. But any member of the pro-immigration elite could be made to pony up. Want HB-1 Visas? Buy the … bonds.

So if you want big limits — that are intrinsically diversified or pre-diversified — go to the capital markets not insurers. Another advantage: insurers deny claims. Swap counter-parties can’t. I believe AIG believed, in 2007, that it could weasel out of its CDS protection with Talmudic disputation (much like its D&O policies). AIG’s banks said: f you, we need another 10 billion in collateral for the market moving against you. The capital market clears.

Not immigrant insurance. Immigrant CAT bonds with different triggers and tranches, shoved down the throats of the elites cheerleading for more immigration.

Comments:

* That’s a great idea, but we also need to attach liability to judges, politicians and parole boards. These people can make policies or hand down rulings that will result in the deaths of citizens on a routine basis, but never face any consequences, except that politicians may not get elected again.

* The original insurance idea remains key for several reasons; this catastrophe (or “cat”) bond idea is really just footnote or ornamentation to it, but one with a certain amount of appeal I’ll grant.

To begin with, it is usually insurers, faced with risks on a mass of individual policies, who issue cat bonds for the purpose of laying off some of the correlated risks inherent in their portfolio of policies. If there is no insurer, which institution has an interest issuing the cat bonds to investors, and would bear the expense of paying back principal and interest if the immigrants behave, or retaining the principal if they don’t? The government? If there aren’t retail policies earning premiums, how does the bond issuer get income to support investment returns? If there aren’t claims against policies, to what use is the retained principal put if a trigger event occurs? Haven’t we already taken it as a given that the government just isn’t going to do a good job assessing immigration risk, which is why we need to bring in private institutions and litigants? Without underlying insurance policies, cat bonds don’t serve any particular purpose. When an underlying insurance market exists, cat bonds sometimes make sense as a way for an insurer to obtain reinsurance on the capital markets, as opposed to strictly through the institutional reinsurers and retrocessionaires, but cat bonds don’t really make sense in the absence of some kind of underlying exposure.

I admit, I do like the notion of publicly hoisting people by their own petards — forcing an amnesty advocate to put his money where his mouth is, requiring him invest his life savings in cat bonds issued by an insurer facing risks on a hundred thousand Syrian “refugees” — that would be a vintage Kodak moment.

The other subtle point is that cat bonds are most suitable for highly correlated, large, but infrequent risks — the kinds of concentrations that keep insurers (and their regulators) up at night. For example, car crashes are relatively small and fairly uncorrelated — plenty happen in a big city over the course of a year, but they all tend to happen in their own time for their own reasons. No one event brings about a devastating wave of car wrecks and losses (a good winter storm can bring about a brief spike, but relative to the number of wrecks in a year it won’t be significant), and year-to-year the numbers don’t change much. You don’t see cat bonds for car insurance risks. But windstorm losses can be very concentrated and correlated. Years can go by with few claims out of the East and Gulf Coasts. Then one day Hurricane Andrew or Katrina or Sandy rolls ashore and the industry is faced with tens of billions worth of insured losses in a day. Or years go by without major earthquake claims in California, but then one day Northridge happens. So you see cat bonds for earthquakes and windstorms.

All that being said, it would be interesting to see what types of cat bonds would or would not get issued in immigration insurance, and how they were priced on the capital markets. An insurer covering a large cohort of Syrian “refugees” — maybe that company issues a cat bond against terrorism risk and the next 9/11. Another carrier covering mainly Latin American agricultural workers — they don’t bother, because they’re mainly faced with small, uncorrelated traffic and petty-crime risks. Pricing information on individual policies is not always very transparent, but a cat bond quoted over the Bloomberg terminal would say a lot about human nature.

Finally, the tort litigation angle is brilliant and should not be underrated. Abstruse triggers on abstract financial instruments don’t make headlines. But had there been a million dollar liability policy on Francisco Sanchez, the illegal Mexican immigrant who shot Kathryn Steinle on a tourist pier in San Francisco, you’d get a whole extra layer of drama and headlines and attention. And I see your additional point — Steinle already made the papers. Having million dollar policies all over the place would encourage tort lawyers to dig up cases we’d never otherwise hear of, which has a huge value of its own.

* Another idea, staying with the original insurance scenario, would be to make the immigrant’s home country the obligor (or, in the cases of failed states, the UN). Then the insurer would have someone to recover from, and countries would have an incentive to police their emigrants.

* As I read that, I have a mental image in my head.

I see GOP as a big old dying tree. Most branches are barren of leaves. It’s been axed from all sides by Neocons, religious right dummies, globalist free traders, cuckservatives, crunchy cons, libertarian amoralists, and etc. There are huge chunks missing from the side. Few remaining fruits are picked just for the elites. It is about to fall over.

Then, Trump comes along and picks up an ax…

and everyone says HE is the one who destroyed the GOP.

Or imagine a dead man in a coffin nailed shut… but there’s one remaining nail. Trump picks it up and he is blamed for the death of the man.

Trump is no hero, and he may indeed bring about the implosion of the GOP, but the reason why so many have flocked to him is because GOP elites and politicians have been such wusses who never did anything to stop the globo agenda.

* One reason there are many Syrian emigrants right now is that they are fleeing massive American bombing. The Washington Post reported that the US has dropped more bombs (22,478) on Syria this year than the past five years in Afghanistan. This is all part of a failed four-year American attempt to overthrow the government of Syria.

Since the American people refuse to rein in such behavior by its leadership, and many of them condone or support such behavior, then obviously they’re liable for producing these emigrants, millions of whom are fleeing to neighboring countries and Europe.

* I’m afraid that if this idea ever gets off the ground, the gov and the media will work harder than ever to cover up perps’ identities and motivations.

Case in point, remember that incident at UC Merced a couple months ago? Every time I check back, it gets more interesting.

* Every citizen is given an annual immigration allotment, say 1,000th of one immigrant. Citizens can pool their allotments to bring in an immigrant and here’s the important part, they’re jointly and severally responsible for the good conduct and any damages caused by the immigrants and the next generation.

Having 1,000 people jointly and severally on the hook gives lawyers many targets to pillage.

* Admitting an immigrant is having someone join the American family. Immigrants should only be admitted in small numbers and after very careful vetting. The criteria should be based on how they benefit US society. That way we don’t have to worry about immigrants’ behavior once they are admitted.

As Derbyshire says, “maximum security at the borders and maximum liberty within the borders.”

* I think the focus should be on cutting off immigration completely or dramatically cutting back on the numbers we admit each year. The problem I have with the insurance proposal or any similar proposal is the propensity of the Democrats in Congress to seize on good sound Republican ideas and turn them into gold plated entitlements. That’s what happened to the sound, modest Republican plan back in the late 80′s to provide “catastrophic coverage” to Medicare recipients. By the time the Democrats finished adding their extensive little options, the plan’s cost had been dramatically increased, and the old folks rebelled. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago, was trapped in his limo by a mob of enraged octogenarians protesting the outrage. The old folks didn’t mind the added coverage. They just didn’t like the idea they were going to pay for it. Somebody else should pay for it. Obamacare was based on an idea originated by Republicans, and look what it turned into. What I fear happening is that the Democrats in Congress (they are eventually going to come back) will seize on the insurance proposal and twist it into an entitlement that gives each immigrant an extra thousand dollars a year to ease their transition into American life. So that, instead of saving American taxpayers money, the plan will cost them more and do noting to stem the flood of immigrants.

* How about the Swiss system: leave naturalization up to the municipal parliament, or in some cases, a local popular vote. Devolve decision making over immigration, as much as possible, to the local citizens affected by it.

Much of the extraordinary political friction over immigration comes from stakeholder disenfranchisement – the inability of citizens to influence decision making that directly impacts their neighborhoods. Immigration outcomes are felt, correctly, to reflect a democratic deficit. The effects of immigration take place in neighborhoods and municipalities, but the Feds/central government gets to regulate it. Maybe they shouldn’t.

* Here’s a chart from the OECD – “reading performance by immigrant status” and Canada’s 1st and 2nd generation school kids read at about the same level as native born Canadians. In Australia, the 1st and 2nd generation immigrant kids out-perform native Australian kids. In the US though there is a big gap between native kids and 1st and 2nd generation immigrant kids.

The real story in that data is what is happening in the Nordic countries and Europe, but it does provide answers for your US-Canada-Australia focus – screening immigrants results in higher human capital levels as expressed in the performance of children in school.

The fact that this immigration screening doesn’t result in Canada and Australia economically out-performing the US doesn’t invalidate the results of improved human capital levels.

The question that falls out from this is what dead-weight is the US carrying as a result of the low human capital levels of most of its immigrants? How much higher would US per capital income be if not for the deadweight of its immigrants?

Your response focuses on all of the gap that the US has accumulated and posits that this is due to immigrants, rather than addressing how much of that gap has narrowed because of the immigrants.

Steve Sailer suggests that immigrants to America should have to buy insurance before coming here so that the country is protected from their misbehavior.

Comments at Takimag:

* The problem with the insurance angle is that insurance companies would not be allowed to use any kind of actuarial tables to decide who paid what premium any more than they do now.

Is there any doubt that Latinos have more traffic accidents than the rest of us? That the morbidly obese have more health problems? That Negroes die earlier?

Yet an insurance company cannot “discriminate” by applying higher premiums to these higher risk groups. They would never allow that for immigrants, either. A healthy, productive White man entering America would pay the same premium as the obese octogenarian Hutu.

* There is a difference, the government of Singapore and a few others (mostly not western) actually do things that safeguard the security of the nation. Western governments however, seem hell bent to do everything that destroys the well being and security of their nations. Singapore may have it’s flaws, but they are far ahead of most western nations in this regard.

* The problem, as with so much else immigration-related, is enforcement. We already have a requirement that immigrants must have an affidavit of support from a sponsor here in the United States before they can immigrate. If they become a public charge, the sponsor must reimburse the costs. Despite millions of legal immigrants (illegally) on the public dole, the affidavit of support mechanism has been enforced a grand total of zero times. I fear a requirement they have insurance would be similarly ignored.

Where the insurance idea might have some promise is by enlisting the armies of insurance industry lobbyists in compelling enforcement. The same people who wrote Obamacare and successfully got every state to coerce us into becoming car insurance company customers could conceivably come up with a way to impose insurance on immigrants. The only bright side I see to that, however, is as a deterrent to coming in the first place.

* Sorry, Steve, but if –against all odds– this was ever even proposed in the legislature:

(1) The leftmedia and the dem party would scream bloody murder about how racist it is to make foreigners post bond for their good conduct. They will reply that white Americans should be made to post bond to insure minorities against the cost of white oppression.
(2) The rightmedia and the republicans would initially defend the measure, maybe even long enough to get it passed, but probably not.
(3) If it did pass, dems would use it as an excuse to expand the number of immigrants coming into the country legally. They are, after all, now -presumably– a growth industry.
(4) Immigrants would begin applying for these policies, and would promptly default as soon as they’d been here long enough to make deporting them a hassle.
(5) Defaulters will, of course, not be deported, regardless of whatever the law says.
(6) Insurance Companies might, however, actually try to pursue deadbeats for their errant premiums, until…
(7) The leftmedia and the dem party scream bloody murder about how conservative policies are turning poor, downtrodden migrants into a class of perpetual debt slaves.
(8) By this time, the rightmedia and the republican party will have folded, admitted it was all racist from the beginning, and promised to be extra nice to brown people, from now on, in penitence for their sins.

* How about we require the Feds to bond each immigrant and allow individuals and states the ability sue the Fed if they screw up? Each failure of the Fed will cost it one GS-13 or above. This way we shrink government and hold the Fed responsible for its Constitutional duty.

* I have said we are at the threshold where perhaps the only solution left now is physical action. Destroy the places which welcome, house and help migrants.

Small problem though: many of those places are churches, and too many people will be unable to cause harm to churches–quite despite the fact those churches are actively causing white genocide and destroying this country. What to do?

Almost every church in this country (with the notable exception of the Orthodox) participates in bringing in the Replacements. They get federal money to do it, along with their stupid bleeding-heart Churchian congregation’s money, and of course pay no taxes.
Apparently that is what deus vult.

* How about we just STOP all immigration? Too sensible? Too effective?

How about we shoot illegal aliens crossing the border? Too sensible? Too effective?

How about we fine and jail the employers of illegal aliens? Too sensible? Too effective?

Insurance? Are you NUTS? Turn the Federal responsibility over to tort courts?

Jesus H. Christ, Sailer. Pick your “great ideas” after a bit of critical thinking, eh?

* Immigration moratorium now and all immigration since 1964 to be considered illegitimate. Prompt deportation of all criminal aliens and alien subversives.

The insurance scheme proposed has also been floated as a way for the commie scum to work around the second amendment; just force people to buy insurance for all their weapons. The problem is that the insurance racket has become a particularly onerous form of tax-farming. They bribed or otherwise corrupted legislators to pass laws that force people to buy their worthless policies. This is corruption and criminal extortion under color of law. Insurance bagmen are equal to burglars in dignity and to be treated with utter contempt. These are thieves, muggers and criminal filth of the lowest order.

* You could shut down these sanctimonious waterheads from the Episcopal and Lutheran churches who bring Mexicans, and Somalis to the diversity deprived areas of our once great nation. I’ll bet those bastards would fall off the social justice bandwagon in a new York minute if they were held liable for what their poor little darlings did to honest hardworking Americans.

* I am of the mind that – barring all immigration of non-whites into white homelands – all bleeding hearts should be required to personally sponsor those “humble and downtrodden migrants” in their own home. If they believe such people are good enough for the nation as a whole, then they should be good enough to lodge them in the same dwelling as their own family, as a means of proving the honesty of their pose.

Let Juan and Pancho, the Sanchez brothers, or Mahlid and Coco, fresh from Somalia, have the guest bedroom across the hall from their white 16 year old cheerleader daughter. And if they’re not comfortable with that, then they are welcome to rethink their cheap grace.

This may be an effective cure for “good person-itis,” the malady of our time.

* The idea of immigration insurance is brilliant. If a risk exists and that risk can be assessed, why shouldn’t it be a financial product?
As for its being only applicable to legal immigrants, the risks created by illegal motorists are already factored into premiums overall.
In passing, I suspect that resistance might arise from the misunderstanding by otherwise intelligent Americans about the purpose of compulsory motor insurance.
It doesn’t exist to fix your car when you stack it; it exists to protect others from the consequences of your lousy driving.

* Immigration insurance is a brilliant idea, but only if government allows the insurance carriers to underwrite properly, so that higher-risk immigrants are charged more than lower-risk ones.

Automobile insurance, for example, costs more for a 17-year old adolescent male with a hot rod than it does for a 50-year old housewife with a minivan. This is (so far) regarded as an acceptable form of discrimination.

But will an analogous approach be acceptable in charging for immigration insurance? Will it be politically acceptable to charge a Pakistani or Saudi Arabian immigrant more than (say) one from Japan?

Bear in mind that part of the changes in medical insurance mandated under the Obamacare legislation was to impose “community rating,” which required health insurers to offer insurance at the same price to all persons in a given territory, without medical underwriting that took an individual applicant’s health status into account. Basically, it told the insurers that they could not discriminate on the basis of risk.

We see the same approach displayed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s crusade against dealer markups on auto loans, which reflect a risk-based approach to credit underwriting. This, too, is now considered an invidious form of discrimination.

Egalitarianism seems to win against realistic assessments of human differences in so many aspects of life that I would not care to bet it won’t in this one, too.

* An insurance policy on immigrants?

I think an upfront cash bond to be posted by their sponsor, a private citizen, not a corporate fiction of a citizen, would be the way to go.

Get the money up front.

The amount of the bond can be determined by age, sex, occupation, skills previous record if any in their old country, and likelihood of this newcomer costing the taxpayer any more burden than a natural-born citizen would.

Once the bond market is set up and monies go into escrow, THEN the insurance market will evolve to protect those assets.

* nder extant yet unenforced law, legal aliens (my status prior to 30 Sep. 2012) are ineligible for any and all benefits and grants excepts such awarded for educational purposes (e.g. Pell grant). Furthermore, before I was issued my Permanent Resident Visa, my uncle who is also my sponsor, executed an affidavit with the USG promising to pay for our expenses and needs. The law also mandates the submission of a bond ($5K, I think) by the sponsor (unenforced).

Essentially, the USG removes all obstacles to immigration and settlement that have been enacted by prior, more sensible, administrations. Therefore, legal provisions enacted to prevent immigrants from becoming public charges are routinely ignored.

In the absence of either a public grievance or powerful private difference, the USG has absolutely no reason to mend its wicked ways and the silly proposal described herein which is no way as strict as the extant law would also end up ignored and would eventually fade away.

* I have often thought a way to solve immigration problems would be to require all immigrants to be sponsored by an individual who would also be required to post a bond. In addition, the immigrant would be barred from any government aid or assistance, education costs, or free health care at hospitals or clinics for 20 years. If the immigrant committed any crime, the bond would compensate victims and the sponsor would be banned from sponsoring others.

If immigrants commit few problems, the bonds should be very low cost. This plan would make it difficult for employers to hire an immigrant at low wages and pass the true costs onto the community and expect the immigrant to obtain help from government programs.
Finally, we should allow only an amount of immigration equal to the loss of population through death and the emigration that occurs naturally thereby creating a stable population. Of course,all efforts need to be made to insure those coming have a history of assimilating in other cultures and countries or we will be creating ethnic strife with the immigrants children.. This would mean citizens who wanted to replace our culture and governance with Sharia would logically and prudently be banned.

* It was not exactly insurance and it would have fallen on US citizens wishing to sponsor the immigration off their parents rather than the immigrants themselves, but the Jordan Commission on US Immigration Reform proposed that those wishing to sponsor parents be required to sign a legally enforceable affidavit obligating them to support their parents financially for the rest of their lives during which they would be ineligible for public benefits.

In their final report to Congress they recommended:

Parents of U.S. citizens should be admitted as the second priority. This permits adult children to sponsor their parents, most of whom are past working age. However, the Commission is mindful of the potential negative impacts that the entry of parents may pose for the U.S. taxpayer if these individuals utilize Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, and similar programs. Therefore, the Commission believes that continued admission of parents should be contingent on a legally enforceable affidavit of support. The affidavit should ensure that parents who are unable to work enough quarters to become eligible for Social Security or Medicare do not become a burden to taxpayers through use of SSI, Medicaid, or equivalent state and local services. Further, the Commission recommends that affidavit signers (petitioners and, if necessary, co=guarantors) should provide

Verifiable assurance that they indeed have the capacity to provide what may be a lifetime of financial support to the parent immigrants; and
Verifiable assurance of the purchase of what may be lifetime health coverage for the parent immigrants (obtained either privately or through buying into Medicare, which the government should make available at an actuarially fair price).

The Commission’s generally excellent suggestion were completely ignored by President Clinton and the report passed from view on the untimely death of the Commission’s chair, Barbara Jordan. Australia had such a program at one point and it would be worth taking a look at their experience.

Joseph Puder writes: Speaking at the National Achieves in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday (December 15, 2025), President Barack Hussein Obama compared the Syrian refugees now flooding Europe with Jewish refugees during World War Two (WWII), a comparison that is an insult to history and truth. Six million Jews were murdered in gas chambers, shot and buried in pits throughout the Ukraine, White Russia, and the Baltic states, while the world looked the other way; Syrian refugees have been able to find shelter, however uncomfortable, in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Europeans who refused to shelter Jews, and in fact turned them over to the Nazis to be murdered in Auschwitz and other death camps, i.e. Vichy, France, are now welcoming the Syrian refugees, especially Angela Merkel’s Germany.

President Obama is wrong to compare Syrian refugees who have choices, and Jewish refugees who had none. Syrian citizens are choosing to leave their homes. True, Assad’s barrel-bombs have killed indiscriminately, and Islamic State (IS) brutality has impacted on many. Yet should the U.S. and its allies impose “no fly zone” safe havens in civilian areas, Syrians (unless they are Christians, Kurds, or Yazidis) wouldn’t have to abandon their homes. Yesteryear, Jews from Arab lands had no choice. They were thrown out of their homes were they lived for millenniums, with literally the “shirts on their back.” Jewish properties were confiscated by the Arab authorities or taken by street mobs. Similarly, survivors of the Holocaust could not return to their homes, and all their properties and belongings were taken by the native non-Jewish population or the Nazis.

Nazi Germany aimed to eradicate all Jews from Europe and elsewhere, while no such danger has faced Syrian refugees. In fact, there are 57 Islamic nations that are able to receive their fellow co-religionists. The Jews of Palestine during WWII would have done their utmost to absorb Jewish refugees had the British Mandatory regime in Palestine not closed the gates to the Jews of Europe. Anti-Semitism and Jew hatred motivated most nations in the West, including the U.S. during WWII. Islamophobia on the other hand, is a cudgel in the hands of radical Muslims to beat on the western sense of guilt.

As a retort to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposal to temporarily bar Muslim immigrants, Obama piped up, “In the Muslim immigrant today, we see the Catholic immigrant of a century ago. In the Syrian refugee of today, we should see the Jewish refugee of World War II.” President Obama should know better. Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, or Poland did not seek to create “Catholic law,” the way Muslims immigrants in Britain and throughout the West have demanded “Sharia Islamic law.” Catholic immigrants, unlike Muslims, did not kill American citizens shouting “Allah Akbar.”

The Syrian refugees today are in no way like the Jewish refugees of WWII. The Jewish refugees were thrilled to assimilate into the American way of life. They did not harbor potential terrorists ready to kill Americans on behalf of the Islamic State. The recent experience with Muslim refugees from Somalia and Iraq has not been a success story. Moreover, America has traditionally been a home for refugees from religious persecution. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) defines a refugee based on the following parameters: “Owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” The only religiously persecuted refugees are Syrian and Iraqi Christians, as well as Yazidis, but not Muslims. Yet, the overwhelming majority of the Syrian refugees President Obama seeks to admit into America are Muslims.

President Obama is correct when he pointed out that “[w]e can never say it often or loudly enough: Immigrants and refugees revitalize and renew America.” The problem is that not all immigrants and refugees are the same. The recent immigrants from Somalia have been a burden on America; some have joined the Islamic State (IS). Many Syrian immigrants might likewise pose a serious security problem. The FBI director, James Comey, testifying at a congressional hearing last month told lawmakers, “If someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing showing up because we have no record of them.”

According to the FBI Annual Review of Hate Crime, “Last year (2014), as in previous years, Jews were the most frequent victims of reported crimes targeting members of a religious group. Of the 1,140 reported victims of anti-religious hate crimes, 648 or almost 57% were Jewish. Looked at another way, of the 1,014 reported anti-religious hate crime incidents (some of which had multiple victims), 609 or slightly more than 60% targeted Jews. Anti-Muslim hate crimes amounted to 14%.” It is therefore anti-Semitism rather than Islamophobia that is most problematic. In fact, much of the anti-Jewish hate crimes in America and Europe were committed by Muslims.