I found this article by Kelefa Sanneh at the New Yorker on immigration interesting. Right from the outset it starts tackling tough issues:
What, exactly, are our obligations to people in other countries who would like to come to this one? The argument over Syrian refugees is a good example of how our political conversation tends to sidestep this thorny issue. Ironically, strong opposition from Republicans made it easier for President Obama to avoid explaining how he had determined that ten thousand, not more, was the proper quota for Syrian refugees. Were there security concerns that prevented the U.S. from admitting, say, a hundred thousand? How many Syrian refugees—an estimated five million have fled the country’s civil war—would be too many? Obama didn’t have to entertain questions like these, airily insisting that “refugees can make us stronger,†and claiming, not implausibly, that some of his political opponents seemed to be deficient in “common humanity.â€
If there is such an obligation, which countries bear it and why? Japan, for example, accepted fewer than 30 asylum-seekers in 2015 and fewer than 200 to date in 2016.
My own view is that there’s a distinction between virtue and obligation. It would be virtuous to accept genuine asylum-seekers but we are not obligated to do so. I’d be more comfortable if more of the refugees were being settled in Marin County, California, Westchester County, New York, and Fairfield County, Connecticut than in suburban Omaha or Indianapolis.
Our experience in accepting refugees from the Middle East and North Africa has not been particularly felicitous. Somali refugees have had unemployment rates north of 25% for decades and constitute a very large proportion of the Americans who’ve joined DAESH. And we shouldn’t forget that an astonishing proportion of the total number of Chechen refugees in the United States either perpetrated or were complicity in the Boston Marathon bombings, despite their having by all accounts very little to complain about in their treatment here.
Is it possible that there isn’t actually much of an analogy between Ashkenazic Jewish refugees 70 years ago and Middle Eastern refugees today?
It’s a very good question, one of several foundational questions we never get around to asking ourselves. It comes down to our self-definition as a country.
If this election has shown one thing it is that racism, nativism and misogyny are potent forces in the American population, and that almost no one on the right actually believes what they claim they believe. (I’ve been saying this for years but I didn’t expect to be proven so categorically correct.) So-called conservatism is clearly revealed as nothing but greed at the top and hate at the bottom. Conservatives willing to actually vote their alleged beliefs amount to some Mormons in Utah and people with regular columns at the WaPo.
The left is less about greed and hate and more about smug self-satisfaction and lethargy. Repeating myself tediously: the Democratic Party is running out of peoples to liberate. And beyond raising my taxes a bit – not enough for actual redistribution, not enough to lessen the concentration of wealth at the top, just enough to be annoying – I couldn’t tell you what Hillary has planned for her first 100 days.
We have lost the narrative thread as a country. We don’t know what we are, we don’t know what we want, we don’t know where we’re going. A third of the country is no longer even participating in consensual reality. This isn’t good. You can’t get from here to there unless you have some notion of where there is. The centre is holding but its grip is weakened.
Pat Buchanan has been calling for a moratorium on all immigration legal and illegal for at least the past twenty years.
Of course he has been opposing all our interventions in the Mideast
for even longer.
Seems about right to me.
Sorry I missed your Ashkenazi reference.
Yes, there is an analogy.
Dual loyalists here played a prominent dominant role in the Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Yemeni interventions.
Seems like their preferred country should take multitudes of Iraq and Syrian refugees.
Michael:
There’s almost no end to the people who can be liberated. I gather that progressives want to liberate the poor people of the Middle East and Africa by settling them in Indianapolis, Omaha, and Boise.
I’d have more confidence in the sincerity of their aspirations if they wanted to settle them in La Jolla but that’s a minor quibble.
Ken Hoop:
The linked article mentions that if more Ashkenazic Jewish refugees had been accepted in the United States, Britain, etc. there wouldn’t have been as many stuck in Germany, France, etc. for the Nazis to kill.
“Is it possible that there isn’t actually much of an analogy between Ashkenazic Jewish refugees 70 years ago and Middle Eastern refugees today?”
Or maybe we are different. We are a post-industrial society now. I also wonder, pure speculation, if the immigrants are different. If the Ashkenazi who made it here were the ones with the means an gumption to get here, they were more likely to succeed. If the Somalis who make it here are the ones who just happen to arbitrarily get chosen by some agency to come here, I would expect lower success rates.
Steve
There are all sorts of differences. It’s been a long time. We’re different. The refugees are different. Our economy is different. The world is different.
Reductio ad Holocaustum is as much a fallacy as reductio ad Hitlerum.
“If this election has shown one thing it is that racism, nativism and misogyny are potent forces in the American population, and that almost no one on the right actually believes what they claim they believe. (I’ve been saying this for years but I didn’t expect to be proven so categorically correct.) So-called conservatism is clearly revealed as nothing but greed at the top and hate at the bottom. Conservatives willing to actually vote their alleged beliefs amount to some Mormons in Utah and people with regular columns at the WaPo.”
Painful shot that is, If you are right, then maybe we hicks should be liquidated , lebensraum for the virtuous peoples of the third world,
who, I must point out, have had quite a few millennium to improve their lot at home and can’t.
As one of my favorites, Robert Benchley, put it, there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t.
Gray:
Or the racists and misogynists and nativists could grow up. That would be easier than your rounding up and liquidating notion.
Your definition of maturing others would call deterioration.
Lenni Brenner has excellent works demonstrating Zionist collusion with Nazis.
But taking your reference directly, acceptance would have meant an even stronger Lobby.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/10/top-five-clinton-donors-are-jewish-how-anti-semitic-is-this-fact.html