Yesterday the House of Representatives voted by a substantial majority to severely tighten the screening process for Syrian and Iraqi refugees. According to the New York Times, Congress voted 287-137 (with 47 Democrats joining the Republicans) for a bill that “would require that the director of the F.B.I., the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence confirm that each applicant from Syria and Iraq poses no threat.”
From what I read elsewhere, such confirmation is nearly impossible, and would either stop the incursion of Syrian refugees cold or slow it to a trickle. This form of certification could take many years for even one individual, much less the thousands that President Obama wants to accept. Obama promises to veto the House bill, but Congress can override such a veto with a 2/3 vote, and 287/424 is 68%, slightly more than enough to cancel a veto. (One hopes that at least a few Democrats will defect.) The bill hasn’t yet been voted on in the Senate.
Alongside this embarrassing rejection of Obama’s humane policy of accepting refugees (one favored by Hillary Clinton), 31 U.S. state governors, more than half of all governors (all of these save one are Republicans), have said that they will take action to prevent the refugees from coming to their states.
This inhumane and unwarranted kneejerk reaction reminds many of our country’s shameful historical policy of rejecting “unwanted immigrants,” including pre-war Jews, who were turned away and sent back to Europe, where they faced extermination. I understand why people are nervous about these refugees, for they will probably include a few hidden terrorists, as they did in Europe. But they will also include vastly more people who are seeking refuge, many of whom, sent back, would face a fate similar to the rejected Jews who died in the Holocaust.
This shameful act betrays our values in two ways. America has historically been a refuge for the oppressed, and it smacks of bigotry to turn away a whole class of refugees because they might contain a few bad apples. Further, our country has been immensely enriched by immigrants; in fact, most of us (including me, the grandchild of people fleeing the Russian Revolution) have an immigrant only a few generations in our past. Steve Jobs’s biological father, for instance, was a Syrian immigrant.
How much does accepting these refugees endanger us? I suspect not very much, for that we already have in place a laborious vetting process that’s been largely successful. On top of that, if ISIS wanted to sneak terrorists into the U.S. it has many other ways to do so besides embedding them within Syrian refugees: for example sending terrorists of other nationalities—people who aren’t refugees. Recruitment of U.S. citizens or legal immigants by the internet can also work.
I don’t want to be part of a country that rejects threatened Syrians as it rejected threatened Jews 75 years ago. We are now ashamed of what we did then, and we’ll be ashamed in the future if we build a dam to stop the latest flood of refugees.
