Stripping citizenship won't end extremism, essentially a homegrown problem.

Within hours of the March 22 attack in London, politicians were calling for a ban on migration from the Middle East. This reaction was inflammatory, opportunistic and, more importantly, off the mark.

The London attacker, Khalid Masood, was from Kent, often referred to as “the garden of England.” Born and bred in Britain, Masood, 52, was a convert to Islam, a former prison inmate with a history of knife violence.

Masood’s puzzling rise to infamy has left British authorities with a raging headache. What do you do when one of your own turns on you? How do you pre-empt an attacker who was not on the security services’ radar? How do you decode the motivation for a murderous attack when the home-grown criminal is described as “apolitical” and uninterested in radical Islam?

Western countries confront these questions in different ways. Germany, for the first time, has begun the process of deporting two German-born non-citizens over their alleged involvement in planning a terrorist attack. Australia, Canada and Britain have consistently revoked the citizenship of dual-nationals who join extremist groups overseas. Even the U.S. is trying to turn a Pakistani-born naturalized U.S. citizen who was convicted on terrorism charges into a non-citizen.

The motivations are obvious. Western governments are under pressure to demonstrate their resolve to prevent extremists from entering their countries and launching attacks.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department promised to step up efforts “to pursue denaturalization proceedings against known or suspected terrorists who procured their citizenship by fraud.” This is to prevent “the exploitation of our nation’s immigration system by those who would do harm to our country,” the DOJ said in a statement.

Fair enough, some might say. Except it may not be fair at all: Some legal scholars say revoking a terrorist’s U.S. citizenship would solidify the post-9/11 trend of treating accused terrorists differently from others who break the law. Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security in New York, says taking away citizenship adds an extra punishment that is not in the criminal statute under which a terrorist is convicted.

This may sound like legal quibbling. It is not. Just treatment of citizens – terrorists or not – is important for countries that claim to be governed by the rule of law.

These cases mostly involved dual-nationals, so they were not left stateless by the revocation of citizenship.But Germany’s proposed deportation of two non-citizens born on German soil to Algeria and Nigeria, however, is troubling for two reasons: The men have not been convicted of any offense and their main link to Algeria and Nigeria is their parents’ heritage; they have never lived in those countries.

That is a pretty hard line to take. Perhaps it is the obvious line to take in an election year: German Chancellor Angela Merkel cannot afford to relax.

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL is a columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at rashmee.com