FLASHBACK: It’s Time for a Grown-Up Alternative to Trump’s Crude Muslim-Immigration Proposal, by Mark Krikorian, 8 Dec 2015. First, Trump’s proposal is legal:

First of all, it’s important to underline that Congress can exclude or admit any foreigner it wants, for any reason or no reason. … What’s more, … he does have the statutory authority to keep anyone out, for any reason he thinks best. …

Second, there is a lot of Muslim immigration:

Under current trends, the United States will admit about 1 million new Muslim-origin immigrants over the next decade, plus hundreds of thousands of Muslim guest workers and foreign students. In addition, something like 50,000 young people from Muslim immigrant families turn 18 in the United States each year.

Third, the problems can be quantified and do indeed justify special action (including profiling):

Polling suggests between a quarter and a third are not attached to the principles of the Constitution, supporting things such as sharia law over U.S. law and the use of violence against those who insult Islam.

Nor is this merely hypothetical; Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the U.S. population but account for about half of terrorist attacks since 9/11. That means Muslims in the United States are about 5,000 percent [i.e. 50 times] more likely to commit terrorist attacks than non-Muslims.

What does the author suggest?

But while Islam is indeed a religion, it is also more than that — and it is the political aspects that concern us. As Andy McCarthy noted last week, Islam’s non-religious element — sharia — “involves the organization of the state, comprehensive regulation of economic and social life, rules of military engagement, and imposition of a draconian criminal code.”

That program of Islamic supremacism is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution, and we should strive to minimize the number of people living in our country who hold such beliefs. As Walter Russell Mead wrote the other day, “a cosmopolitan and tolerant society can’t thrive if it admits millions of migrants who hate and despise cosmopolitan values.”

The narrowest solution would be to restore the principle of “ideological exclusion” to U.S. immigration law [applied until 1990]. … [A]longside ideological screening we need to cut immigration overall, focusing on the categories most likely to cause problems.