I am disgusted both by the rhetoric against Syrian refugees and the apparent support the rhetoric is garnering in polling data. Listen to the following statements from some prominent politicians – some of whom want to be the next President of the United States.
Representative Steve King: "Filling your country up with people who have a completely different belief system ... and expecting they won't rise up against their benefactor is foolish," No refugees should be permitted into the U.S. from Syria "unless they be Christian refugees that are facing genocide."
Question for Representative King --- How are we going to know who is a Christian facing genocide and who is “faking it?” After 1492, the Spanish set up the Inquisition to figure out who was a true convert to Christianity and who was still secretly practicing either Judaism or Islam. Are you, Mr. Representative, interested in a new Inquisition?
A further comment on Representative King’s statement --- the argument against “filling up your country with people who have a completely different belief system” is just what was said in opposition to Irish immigration in the 1840s (those dangerous Catholics) and Jewish, Eastern European and Italian immigrants in the 1920s (dangerous “foreign ideologies of anarchism and communism). It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.
Senator Ted Cruz said allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S. would be "nothing short of crazy," warning that Islamic State terrorists could be among those entering the country.
"It would be the height of foolishness to bring in tens of thousands of people including jihadists that are coming here to murder innocent Americans," he said.
Donald Trump has a new radio ad out claiming that President Obama is planning to bring hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees to the US. Neither Cruz nor Trump is honestly reporting the true number. It is – as everyone knows --- 10,000. (I personally wish it were much more.) When a Syrian family group presented themselves at the Mexican border and asked for refugee status, Trump tweeted that they had tried to sneak in (they did no such thing) and that therefore we had to build a wall.
(You can’t make this stuff up!)
Cruz also claimed that Christian refugees pose "no meaningful risk" of terrorism. Perhaps that’s true of Christian refugees from Syria, but in fact there are plenty of Christian terrorists in recent American history – abortion clinic bombers, abortion doctor assassins, Timothy McVeigh – and the list goes on.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul introduced legislation to block President Obama's goal of bringing the 10,000 Syrian refugees to our country. This is the man who touts himself a full-fledged defender of freedom. I guess his belief in freedom comes with an asterisk – “except for foreigners I think my constituents might be afraid of.”
[For some details see Mollie Reilly “Republican Candidates Want to Block Syrian Refugees After Paris Attacks. The 2016 GOP field doesn’t want to allow them into the U.S.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/republicans-refugees-paris-attacks_564a1747e4b08cda3489da73]
Meanwhile 31 Republican governors joined by the faint-hearted Democratic Governor of New Hampshire either promised to keep Syrian refugees out of their states or demanded that President Obama renege on his promise to admit 10,000.
Governor Mike Pence of Indiana stopped a Syrian family who had already been accepted for resettlement in his State and refused to provide the promised state services for them. Hats off to the Governor of Connecticut who immediately welcomed them to his state.
The Democratic Mayor of Roanoke, Virginia suggested interning people in the US, just as the Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. The fact that the Japanese internment is considered one of the great moral blots on our country’s history seems to have escaped this official.
Today, the House of Representatives with much too much Democratic support (including the support of my own Congressman Sean Maloney [NY-18]) passed a bill insisting that the head of the FBI and other officials certify EACH INDIVIDUAL refugee one at a time before they will be allowed into the country. This is going to get an Obama veto --- it will be interesting to see how many Democrats are cowed by the Republicans on this one.
What is going on here?
First of all, let’s remember that as former Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland argued, adding 10,000 people to the 319 million Americans is like adding SIX (count ‘em, SIX) people to a 32,000 person football stadium.
This is a miniscule number of people. (An embarrassingly miniscule number).
Compare the figure 10,000 to the number of refugees from Vietnam who came to this country after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Initially, our government airlifted 130,000 people to the US and gave them special status and a fast track to green card status and ultimately citizenship. All in all, from 1975 through 2002, a total of 759,000 Vietnamese arrived in the United States as refugees.
When the Vietnamese started arriving, only 36% of the American people supported taking them in, but President Ford responded angrily to initial signs of racist opposition to these new immigrants. Over time, the country learned to value the contributions of these new Americans as they entered the mainstream over the ensuing decades. As far as I know, no one suggested that communist saboteurs and potential spies were embedding themselves in these refugees – they were in fact refugees from the new government of Vietnam, they were people who had supported the US during the Vietnam War.
For details see Alicia Campi “From Refugees To Americans: Thirty Years of Vietnamese Immigration To The United States” (Immigration Policy Center) http://www.ilw.com/articles/2006,0313-campi.shtm
Today, the people the US is admitting from places like Afghanistan and Iraq are in circumstances very similar to the Vietnamese we admitted after 1975. Many of these Iraqis and Afghanis worked with us as translators, etc. and are in grave danger of being killed by those of their countrymen who opposed our invasions. Syrians fleeing the current Civil War are often survivors of torture and imprisonment by the Assad regime or escapees from the terror of ISIS. Most Syrian refugees are secular (Syria under Assad is a secular state – that is why ISIS is fighting Assad). The US vetting process, meanwhile, is incredibly strict and detailed.
The people who express worry about the possibility (with a probability below 1% I would say) that some individual who is bent on harming us will sneak into the US as a refugee are either the worst kind of cowards or the worst kinds of cynics. These are the same people who demanded all flights from West Africa be suspended and all people travelling from West Africa not be permitted to enter the US when Ebola began its devastating march through a few West Afrian countries.
Those who demand a “pause” in accepting Syrian refugees haven’t the courage to take in a miniscule number of people because of the virtually zero percent possibility that a terrorist will sneak in. (Forget the fact that the border with Canada is a much easier route for a terrorist to gain entry into our country – Next these politicians will be urging we close the Canadian border).
In fact, however, these anti-refugee politicians are probably not really afraid of anything. They are just being cynical and dishonest, hoping to score points against President Obama and demonstrating a shocking contempt for the American people. So now we the people have a clear choice. We can prove the dishonest politicians correct in their judgement about us and succumb to cowardice, racism and ignorance – or we can prove President Obama right – that we’re better than that.
Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author (with Howard Sherman) of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.
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