Trump’s #MuslimBan Can Keep Muslims Safe from Extreme White People

One of Donald Trump’s first actions as president of the United States was enacting a controversial ban on immigration from 7 Middle Eastern countries, and it sparked massive protests at New York City’s JFK Inernational Airport and the Philadelphia International Airport, among other places. The ban, which ended up targeting legal visa and green card holders, is seen by its opponents as an unconstitutional workaround meant to keep Muslims out of the country, and also as just plain immoral.

The ban ended up coinciding with an extreme white nationalist terror attack in which a lone gunman shot up a mosque in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. That attack, initially reported as being perpetrated by a Syrian immigrant but actually carried out by a 27 year old white man named Alexandre Bissonette, was paradoxically used by the White House as justification for the keeping out of violent religious extremists. However, it’s possible that the ban will actually end up having a silver lining for people from the effected countries: keeping them safe from the crazy white people who hate them.

Think of it like the war on drugs: if there are no users or addicts, then drug dealers will have no demand for their wares, and will instead move on to legal professions that are more productive to society. Maybe they’ll follow in the footsteps of former drug dealer Sean “Jay Z” Carter, who graduated from selling crack to making rap music, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in show business; maybe they’ll move they’ll follow their entrepreneurial spirit to Silicon Valley and become tech magnates. Drug dealers aren’t out to sell harmful substances, they’re out to make money, and as such will follow the path of least resistance to making money.

Violent white nationalists, presumably, work the same way. If you remove Muslim immigrants, they’ll have no Muslims to mass murder. Without any easy targets to mass murder, they’ll take their insane, violent ideologies to more productive areas of the public and private sectors. If they’re the more hands-on types, they may join the military, where directly killing Muslims is not met with scorn, prison sentences, or online debate but with medals and potential promotions.

The more big-picture oriented insane Islamaphobes who don’t want to work their way up through the rigors of the military may instead graduate to designing weapons used to target Muslims abroad. Drone strikes, for example, kill both terrorists and innocent Muslims (some of them American citizens, as an added bonus) all the time. A white nationalist who has a hand in inventing new types of drones, or helping making important tweaks to the ones already in use, could kill a number of Muslims that a radicalized lone wolf gunman could only imagine in his hate-fueled fever dreams. If the peaceful Muslims are trying to escape those targeted countries and make their way to America but are denied access, they’ll probably find their way to a more welcoming country, so they won’t be effected by those drone strikes. If they are, it’s their own fault for not being resourceful enough to get out of their violent homelands.

Skeptics of this sort of thinking will point out that the sort of radical white people who would perpetuate violence against Muslims are likely to find another target to shoot. There are two arguments against that logic. The first: prove it. You can’t. The second: perhaps the ban doesn’t go far enough in protecting the lives of minorities. For example, if there wasn’t a black Christian church for Dylann Roof to shoot up, then Dylann Roof wouldn’t have shot up a black Christian church. Maybe black people should be banned from entering America as well, so as not to anger any mentally unstable 4chan/Reddit cruisers.

Not only would these bans, and others like them, curb violence against ethnic or religious minorities by removing the demand from attackers, they might eventually force the most bloodthirsty radicals to turn against each other over petty ideological squabbles. Eventually, white nationalists will all end up killing each other over what section of Mein Kampf is most emotionally uplifting or which syllable in the spoken N-word makes it sound most hateful, eliminating the supply of extreme white Christian violence as well. Then, we can take a look around at the America that’s left, and determine whether it’s prudent to start letting Muslims and black people in again.

In the meantime, we’ll have increased the overall entrepreneurial spirit of an inherently entrepreneurial nation, which will hopefully offset the number of radicalized potential immigrants who would have otherwise peacefully settled in America. Every policy decision has a bright side. It’s possible that by keeping immigrants and people of color safe from crazy white people, Donald Trump will make the United States safer for them in the long run. It’s certainly worth a shot.