This is the Cato Daily podcast for Wednesday, March 19th, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown. Sorry, but it bears repeating your odds of being killed by a foreign-born terrorist are vanishingly low. And many of the resources devoted to preventing that kind of tragedy could be much better used to save

lives elsewhere.

Alex Narasta details the results of a new Cato paper.

What can be said with confidence about a person's country of origin and their propensity to engage in terrorist acts in the U.S.

We put out a recent report here at Cato where we took a look at the 237 foreign-born terrorists

who committed or planned attacks on U.S. soil since 1975 and took a look at all

of their countries of origin, took a look at the number of people they murdered in their attacks,

if they murdered any, and took a look at the visas they used to enter the United States.

And when we take a look at their countries of origin,

what we find is fairly unsurprising.

The country that has sent the greatest percentage

or greatest number of terrorists to the United States is Saudi Arabia with

19 terrorists, 15 of whom were the 9-11 hijackers, followed by Pakistan, followed by Croatia,

which is a surprising one. Uh, and then, um, Egypt, Iran, Cuba, Lebanon. So those are the

countries with the greatest, uh, number of terrorists on U.S. soil. However, since this report goes back

50 years and it covers 50 years of foreign-born terrorism, you have some surprising ones like Croatia and Cuba,

which really, those terrorist actions really petered out in the 70s and 80s, for the most part.

Okay. So with respect to, and I know you like to frame up the data this way, what is the average

American's likelihood of being killed by a terrorist?

The person's chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack and U.S. soil committed by a foreign-born attacker is about 1 in 4.6 million per year.

That is, to put that in context, your chance of being murdered in a normal homicide

is about 330 times greater per year over that entire period. And it's a real risk. It's definitely

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