Terrorism analysis on Trump's immigration policies

Challenge

After Trump's election in the United States in 2016, an immigration ban on different Muslim countries was conducted. This ban was predicted to have several social implications, particularly in terrorism. The purpose of this project was to understand the impact of Trump's policy banning 6 countries from the Middle East and Africa on terrorism actions executed in the US.

The idea was to generate a model that would represent on a macro perspective the impact of a policy that, while reducing the number of potential terrorists by reducing population and tightening immigration policies, also generates hate — one of the main drivers for terrorist actions.

This is a very complicated social topic, but very well documented. The challenge was to use available information to understand causalities and measure at least qualitatively if terrorism attacks would increase, decrease, or remain the same.

Solution

Based on existing documentation, the first step was to understand the main causalities leading to an increase in terrorism. A Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) was created showing the main drivers and feedback loops associated with terrorism.

This CLD is a simplification of the complexity related to this topic but takes the most important factors into consideration. For instance, extremist ideologies, repression, external actors, and charismatic leaders are all summarized in the variable "hate towards U.S."

Model Validation

The variable to measure is the number of attacks per year in the US. The model had to roughly replicate the data to be validated. The yearly attacks data was taken from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD).

The model shows that the attacks tend to stabilize around 37 attacks per year, which is roughly the same data from the GTD in 2015.

Outcome

The results showed a 2% to 4% reduction of attack attempts in the US with Trump's policy in place. From the GTD data, since 2003 the percentage of successful attacks is 80%. So the number of attacks that would be stopped by Trump's policy in the next 5 years would be around six at most, and these don't necessarily have fatalities. Is this worth it in exchange for all the social, political, and economical stress?

Project Features

• Industry: Government
• Model: System Dynamics
• Duration: 1 month