As President Donald Trump struggles to defend his decision to halt refugee resettlement and immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations, its become increasingly clear that the executive order he signed on Friday is a solution in search of a problem.

Islamophobia may sell in the White House, but many Americans find it hard to buy his argument that the order will keep out radical Islamic terrorists but is not about religion .

No refugee from any country targeted in Trumps ban has carried out a fatal U.S. terror attack . This fact is inconvenient for Trump. He first proposed what critics and reportedly, Trump himself referred to as a Muslim ban in December 2015, after a Muslim couple killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

Syed Rizwan Farook, the husband, was an American born in Chicago. And Tashfeen Malik, the wife, was a legal permanent resident of the U.S. whose native country, Pakistan, is not included in Trumps order.

Yet those facts didnt stop White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer from citing the San Bernardino shooting as a justification for Trumps ban on immigrants and travelers from other Muslim-majority countries this week.

Theres little factual basis for this anti-immigrant fear-mongering, but it does enable the Trump administration to scapegoat people from a set of countries that have a combined population of 218 million. Only four nations in the world are that populous.

To understand the inconsistencies at work, its helpful to consider the terror threats the White House isnt talking about the ones that are part of a wider trend of domestic terrorism motivated by white supremacy and other forms of right-wing extremism.

First, lets talk about the fatal attacks carried out by foreigners in the U.S. Between 1975 and 2015, foreign-born terrorists including immigrants and tourists killed a total of 3,024 people on U.S. soil, according to a 2016 Cato Institute report . All but 41 of those deaths came on Sept. 11, 2001 and the following days.

Three deaths came at the hands of refugees: a pair of political attacks by anti-Castro Cubans in the 1970s. A number of non-fatal terrorist attacks including three by refugees from Iran and Somalia , both nations on Trumps list also took place over that time .

Not only is the death by refugee terrorist phenomenon extremely rare, but dying in an attack by a foreign-born terrorist is among the least likely causes of death in America over the past four decades. According to the Cato Institute, theres a 1 in 3.64 billion chance each year of dying in a terror attack carried out by a refugee.