On October 24, 2016
© By John Arkelian
A few weeks ago, Donald Trump’s son used a confectionary parable to illustrate his father’s concerns about the danger that a real or potential extremist might get into the United States along with throngs of refugees from such war-torn places as Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Imagine, he said, that you had a bowl full of ‘Skittles’ (a small hard candy). If you were told that three of the candies in that bowl would kill you, would you take a handful? Most of us would say no. But, as an analogy for the entry of immigrants and refugees into the U.S., the parable was inapt. Here’s a better one: Forget about the bowl. Instead, imagine an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled to the brim with Skittles. Now, imagine that you were told that one of those candies might potentially be harmful, but that even if it did prove to be harmful, it would probably be harmful only to one person out of, say, 50 million. Would you take a handful then? Yes, most of us would. Why? Because the odds that one Skittle might be poisonous and that we’d be the person to unluckily pick it from the large pool would be very, very small. The pool full of Skittles, with only the possibility that one might be harmful, seems a more realistic accounting of the odds that a refugee or immigrant is (or might become) a would-be terrorist, and the even slimmer odds that any given terrorist act would directly harm you.
Copyright © 2016 by John Arkelian.