THE strangest commentary produced by the news that the Boston terrorists seem to have been a pair of Chechen brothers from Dagestan has been speculation that this could mean trouble for immigration reform. The initial speculation earlier this week, before the bombers' identities were known, involved comparisons to 2001, when the Bush administration's immigration-reform plans were put on hold after the September 11th attacks. Since last night's news, some anti-immigration conservative media figures have begun sending out feelers. This morning in congress, Charles Grassley, a Republican senator, said the events underlined the need to ensure that "those who would do us harm do not receive benefits under the immigration laws." Immigration reform is basically about two problems. One is how to give some kind of legal status to the estimated 11m undocumented foreigners currently living in America, most of them Hispanic. The other is how to smooth the tangled, restrictive visa system that currently prevents American businesses from hiring foreigners they'd like to recruit, as well as creating absurd travel complications for many Americans with non-citizen spouses and relatives. In discussions of these problems, possible terrorism by legal American residents born in Dagestan is not usually considered a major factor. For Marco Rubio, the Republican senator who has been trying to craft a bipartisan immigration-reform bill, the idea that a goofball lone-wolf terrorist attack by a frustrated Chechen boxer and his younger brother could torpedo his efforts must sound bizarre.

And yet it's not entirely impossible, for two reasons. The first is that there is no plausible foreign-policy response to this terrorist event. The September 11th attacks, and the few subsequent instances of deadly terrorism in America, launched political contests over foreign-policy and security issues: military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, massive expansions of homeland security and surveillance. Today, the hot conflict in the Middle East is a civil war in Syria that has little appeal to Americans on either right or left, and no plausible connection to the violence in Boston, even on the sub-rational emotive level where politics often takes place. So anyone trying to exploit the bombings for political advantage is limited to domestic initiatives.

The second reason is that, rationally or not, terrorism involving foreigners in America has always been linked to immigration politics. The first push to restrict immigration in the 20th century got started after anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley; he wasn't even an immigrant himself, his parents were, but it was enough to prompt Teddy Roosevelt to ask congress to bar "the coming to this country of anarchists or persons professing principles hostile to all government". The resulting Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, and the Immigration Act of 1918 which expanded its authority, didn't end up actually kicking out more than a few dozen people. And the 1924 Immigration Act, which really did lead to a drastic cutback in immigration, was based on quotas by race and country of origin rather than ideology. But the political discourse supporting immigration restrictions has always leaned heavily on supposed threats of violence, both criminal and ideological. A couple of immigrant ideological terrorists, running around Massachusetts killing people—the last time the media got hold of a story like this, Sacco and Vanzetti (pictured) were sentenced to death, and four years later immigration to America was cut to a trickle.

Sacco and Vanzetti were probably innocent; that seems much less likely to be true of today's suspects. On the other hand, Sacco and Vanzetti were more iconically appropriate to the anti-immigrant sentiment of the time. There was a lot of immigration from Italy in 1920, and the Italian anarchism of Galleani was a modestly significant current in radical left-wing agitation. With the brothers from Dagestan the iconography is all off-kilter. The ethnicity is tiny, and has nothing to do with the main thrust of immigration into the US today. The clumsy nature of the attacks makes them seem less threatening than pitiful. Immigration foes will have to stretch pretty hard to try to turn the Boston bombings into an argument against immigration reform. But that doesn't mean they won't try.

(Photo credit: Wikimedia commons/Boston Public Library)