The White House has listed a phenomenal 15 Jihadis who have been caught in acts of terrorism against the U.S., all because they were let in based on winning diversity lottery slots, or were able to take advantage of chain migration privileges.

Breitbart News writes:

The February 2 list of jihadis includes a senior leader in the Islamic counter-attack against personal freedom, Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook. He is an “alleged United States Hamas leader [who] received his green card through a predecessor program to the visa lottery,” said the statement. “Marzook was deported in 1997 for terrorist activities.”

The White House uses these examples to argue against these two destructive policies, which are already unpopular based on the numbers of poorly educated, ill-adapted nationals from bad countries who have little chance of succeeding in the U.S. and who are unlikely to like it here anyway. Such immigrants are heavy consumers of social services, and as they assimilate into the underclass, eventually become Democratic voters. The whole thing pretty well amounts to importing poverty. Don't think so? Check out how many foreign translations there are from s-hole countries on a typical welfare form.

Now the White House makes a powerful argument for public safety in its list of 15 Jihadis, too. It highlights that right now, our immigration system is not based on merit, as it is in most countries, but on family connections, and the luck of the draw. Of course a lot of bad actors are going to filter in from that. Mohammed may be fine as a U.S. immigrant, but his brother, Ahmed, who gets in based on his relationship to Mohammed, spends his time on Jihadi websites. Yusuf wins the jackpot of life through the visa lottery - and then proceeds to kill the very people who handed it to him. People like this are out there.

Nobody needs them here. Just the presence of these 15 Jihadis and who knows how many other sleeper cells out there, should be enough to end those bad programs. Let everyone come here based on their own merit, with full screening from terrorist-infested countries, so the argument goes.

But even a merit-based orderly migration process may not be enough.

Aren't quite a few of these Jihadis well-educated? The 9/11 attackers all had college degrees in demanding disciplines, such as engineering. The terrorists who attacked Fort Hood and Scotland had medical degrees. Quite a few terrorists have these kinds of degrees, rather than degrees in womyn's studies, for example. (This is not to say engineers and doctors are terroristically inclined, but that most Jihadis start out in life admiring these fields, and when they can't succeed at them, turn to terroristic pursuits instead.) Such people would not be screened out by merit-based migration alone.

What's needed then, is not just ending the visa lotteries and the chain migration privileges, but to adding some kind of moral criteria to allowing who gets in here. The forms used, as Breitbart demonstrates in its report, simply asking terrorists if they are terrorists and only screening out those who say yes, does not seem to be sufficient. Seriously, you ask a sneak-attack terrorist who specializes in killing women and toddlers, if he is a terrorist and expect him to be honest?

Much better to have the would-be migrant pay to have himself investigated - how many jihadi websites does he visit, what is his place of worship, who are his associates - in a far more evasion-proof, liar-proof screening. Presumably some of that has been done, but it's obviously not enough. A better moral criteria needs to be established in screening even merit-based migrants or else the bad ones will continue to get in. The one thing that might make a difference, would be to hold the consular officers who let such terrorists in accountable. That should provide an incentive for them to err on the side of caution.

In any case, what we are seeing is 15 migrants too many. The argument is a good one for getting rid of the visa lottery system and chain migration privileges just on the problematic effects alone. What's important, though, is that the replacement of merit-based migration doesn't allow the same kinds of problems to happen. Meirt-based migration must include moral merits.