There’s an unnecessarily heated discussion about accepting Syrian refugees going on. At the Wall Street Journal Jason Riley presents one side:
What most concerns the law-enforcement community is not a fake refugee but a long-term resident who later becomes radicalized. The Tsarnaev brothers, who perpetrated the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, arrived in the U.S. on tourist visas in 2002 at the ages of 15 and 8. Radicalization is an increasing problem, evidenced by the fact that stories about young Americans trying to sneak off to join jihad are no longer uncommon.
One reason the U.S. has largely avoided the type of turmoil that places like France have experienced with disaffected Muslim youth is our enduring model of assimilation. America’s focus on shared values and ideals over shared cultures tends to produce religious moderates. The war on terror, however, is clearly testing that paradigm.
To the public, the merits of Mr. Obama’s pro-refugee arguments matter less than the growing perception that ISIS is ascendant and has the ability to strike where and when it pleases.
while Dana Milbank presents the other at the Washington Post:
The attacks in Paris have inspired a xenophobic bidding war among Republican presidential candidates.
Gov. Bobby Jindal on Monday signed an order trying to get his state of Louisiana to block the settlement of any Syrian refugee, while Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, proposed we “wake up and smell the falafel†and said House Speaker Paul Ryan should resign if he can’t block the refugees’ arrival. Candidates Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and John Kasich also joined the jingoistic bid to block Syrian refugees.
In addition 24 Republican governors and one Democratic governor have gone on record as opposing the acceptance of Syrian refugees. Kevin Drum warns progressives that they be grabbing the wrong end of the stick, at least from a political standpoint:
Here’s the thing: to the average person, it seems perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of admitting Syrian refugees to the country. We know that ISIS would like to attack the US. We know that ISIS probably has the wherewithal to infiltrate a few of its people into the flood of refugees. And most voters have no idea how easy it is to get past US screening. They probably figure it’s pretty easy.
So to them it doesn’t seem xenophobic or crazy to call for an end to accepting Syrian refugees. It seems like simple common sense. After all, things changed after Paris.
and, based on poll numbers, the Republicans are on the right side of the issue (from a political standpoint).
What to do? It seems to me that the question comes down to one of mitigating risk. You can accept no additional risk by accepting no Syrian refugees. Or you can accept a heightened risk by accepting Syrian refugees on an unlimited basis. The right policy is probably somewhere in between.
Risk is a tricky issue. I strongly suspect that if you asked any security expert he or she would tell you the probability of a terrorist attack in the United States that takes human life is 100%. I also think they would tell you that taking more Syrian refugees increases that risk (by some unknown amount).
The way I think the battlespace is emerging is that progressives want to contend that being unwilling to accept additional risk is outweighed by the value of inclusiveness or, said another way, you’re a racist if you don’t think we should accept an unlimited number of refugee applicants. By and large conservatives think we shouldn’t accept any Syrian refugees no way no how which is probably more in line with the views of a majority of Americans.
This question needs to be settled through the political system, i.e. by Congress and the president in concert as approved or rejected by the courts. If the president issues a mandate to bring in more Syrian refugees, presumably based on accords to which the U. S. is already party, it will be a risky move on his part.
There’s another strategy that I think is worthy of consideration. We could start paying the Turks to keep the refugees in Turkey. Which bring up another issue.
When Syrians arrive in Turkey, they’re refugees. Refugees aren’t tourists. They don’t get to decide their destinations or their itineraries. When they leave Turkey, they’re either economic migrants, welfare tourists, or terrorists. Just a thought.
“progressives want to contend that being unwilling to accept additional risk is outweighed by the value of inclusiveness or, said another way, you’re a racist ”
Hmmm, never even thought of that. I think that when in doubt, you do the right thing, remaining true to your core values. We have always taken in refugees. We believe in that, or we did. There has always been some risk in doing so. However, there are also advantages. In the case of Syrians we are likely to get a literate, fairly well educated immigrant who is willing to work. We also get people who could be useful in our future efforts against IS. The kind of people who understand the language and culture. Having formed an allegiance with their new country, I could see them being quite valuable. Finally, I am not sure we want to turn this into a war of values, but if we do, what values do we demonstrate when we don’t take in orphaned young kids?
Steve
The risk is an unknown unknown. For existing potential terrorists in the US, they are unknown knowns. They have a history. If the terrorist intelligence network is working, they can be located when they inadvertently cause a ripple. The new arrivals have no history, and there is no way to obtain one.
A better idea would be to take the next 100,000 illegal aliens that are caught and give them visas without any questions.
Dana Milbank and the Left are proud of that President Obama can tingle his bell the loudest and fastest. They believe that the captain of the ship should keep things simple.
The Bellman is well suited for the crew.
There’s more than one core value, steve. Among the several I can think of are “bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, etc.” and that the federal government has a higher obligation to those already here than it does to those who aren’t.
When there is a conflict among competing values, typically that’s either settled through the courts or, my preference, through the political process.
I don’t think I’ve made my own position clear in any of my posts. I think we should be predisposed to accept Syrian refugees but a) we should only accept genuine refugees and b) the circumstances dictate that refugee applicants should be maintained in controlled circumstances until their claims can be verified. Our typical process in recent years has just been to release people on their own recognizance while their claims are processed. I don’t think that’s the right course of action in this case.
Steve, there are significant differences between now and 1883. Among them are personal empowerment, mass transportation, and the lack of a national consensus on assimilation. When circumstances change, I think it makes sense to change your policies. What do you think?
1). Equating today’s Syrian immigrants/refugees etc to those of yesteryear or, say, Swedes is just bizarre.
2) By both CIA and FBI accounts, differentiating terrorists from true blue refugees – except for, ahem, widows and orphans – is problematic. The margin for error is thin. Also, you can’t have it both ways, they are widows and orphans but they might be useful in the fight against ISIS?? That’s laughable.
Dave, your points in a and b in comments seem spot on. Yes, there is some risk in making a mistake even in accepting “true” refugees, but the world is full of risk. Which is why I concluded this morning in the shower that point b is warranted. We might take you in out of humanitarian considerations, but it doesn’t mean we have to lose track of you.
But one thing puzzles. Just a few weeks ago, on this site and many others, the view was stridently expressed that the Middle East was someone else’s problem. No involvement by us. No risk to US lives. No national interests for us. And yet, and as was pointed out in an opposite view, tremendous humanitarian concerns pertained over there a few weeks/months ago what with mass murder and persecution of Christians rampant. Now, a complete reversal of concerns stated at the time.
I hope people will pardon me for adopting a cynical attitude……….
It seems to me that there are two issues: one is the possibility of terrorists slipping in with the population of refugees, and the other is whether we’d be taking on a refugee population that wouldn’t assimilate. Perhaps the latter isn’t too big of a concern if we’re only taking in a smallish number, but it’s pretty clear that Europe is now dealing with the problem of previous waves of immigrants who didn’t become productive citizens and it’s certainly not unreasonable for us to consider this.
I pretty much agree with Dave. I’d just note a couple of things:
1. Progressives are going to lose on this issue. Less than 20% of Americans agree with their view. See also the entertaining OTB comment section where Micheal points this out in very blunt terms and suffers the wrath of OTB downvoters.
2. Where have all these people who are so concerned about refugees been the last several years? This isn’t a new problem. Had we been more proactive in terms of assisting Syria’s neighbors with refugees, we’d be better positioned to stem the flood now. In the last year the number of refugees in Turkey increased from about one million to over two million. Lebanon, a country with only 4.5 million people, holds over a million refugees, Jordan ~600k. Meanwhile all of Europe has about 800k. And we’re not even mentioning those that are internally displaced. The US is spending a lot of money (about ~$5 billion) but it’s not enough.
Ballpark figure 10,000 people will be killed by other people with guns in the USA this year (and maybe twice that many will commit suicide with guns, but that’s another issue). We know this, we accept this, and most of the American public is quite comfortable with the knowledge. Ten thousand lives, most of them innocent of major offense, is a perfectly reasonable cost to preserve the important liberty of carrying a weapon. We’re probably not going to change this policy for years to come. It’s a basic part of being an American.
So how many additional lives will be lost if we accept ten thousand Syrian refugees, or even a million Syrian refugees? Ten thousand per year, a number as splendidly acceptable as gun deaths? Fifty thousand per year? Fifty?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Different category. Many, many more people are killed by automobiles. We don’t ban those, either. Half a million die every year from smoking related causes, 50,000 from alcohol related causes, and 25,000 from drug overdoses. Same story.
My recollection is that the Germans spend about $10,000 per refugee accepted annually and we spend about $15,000. That’s another motivating factor behind my idea of paying Turkey to take care of refugees (something they’re supposed to do without being bribed): it would be cheaper.
Dave,
There’s a limit to what Turkey can do no matter how much money we throw at them. There are limits to what NGO’s can do. Turkey’s refugee numbers increased by a million in the last year. When I think of how our government would handle that kind of flow and I tend to cut the Turks’s some slack.
What we need is surge capacity to handle refugees and we don’t have it. We should have built it, but we didn’t. The result is we’re all scrambling to come up with a policy while smugglers rake in cash only to let their “customers” drown in the med and ISIL exploits the situation. PPP=PPP.
Then pay Turkey and Greece and Bulgaria and Jordan and Serbia and even Hungary. Lord knows they could use the money. The Greeks in particular have been heroic in their response to the flood of refugees.
The closer to the country of origin, the better.
My bottom line is that there is some of level of asylum-seeking that goes beyond the carrying capacity of any country to handle, including the United States. Except for actual refugees, it should be discouraged.
Dave-When have we ever had a national consensus on assimilation? AFAICT there have always (at least for the last 150 years and you can find examples dating back much further) been complaints about the newest immigrants not fitting in. Not learning the language. Bringing disease and being crime prone. Killing the innocents already living here and taking their jobs to boot.
I can live with b. I actually kind of doubt that we don’t keep track of some of the immigrants and refugees anyway.
Drew- Involvement in a civil war, which is in many ways really a religious war, by putting troops into the middle of it is much different than dealing with the refugees the conflict produces. I still think we should have minimal involvement in the fighting. I could have my mind changed as some people whom I respect have suggested that destroying the “Caliphate” (current ISIS territory) might actually make them less appealing and less able to recruit. However, even then, I think we could certainly accomplish a lot by working with Russia and Iran. They are willing to commit troops already it looks like.
Steve
My goodness, steve, you cannot possibly have read anything written in America in 1900 and say that. There was a consensus that immigrants should assimilate. That’s what has vanished.
Believe it. Bureaucracy does what’s easy to administer not what’s right. A hefty proportion of those who come to this country on student visas just overstay them. Consequences are rare.
So Steve wants to bring in Syrian “refugees” to compete with Americans for jobs, inevitably suppressing wages. Fantastic.
If they’re coming here to work, and stay, they aren’t refugees so much as immigrants.
As for the poor orphans. The leader of Finland got scammed a few months back by such an orphan. He claimed he was underage and that his parents were dead, blah blah blah. The Finish leader bought it, despite the guy’s very large size. The refugee orphan claimed he was so large because he lifted weights.
Turns out that in addition to being a lifter, the guy was in his twenties and had been a soldier in Assad’s army. Oops.
The crack staff that figured that out were commenters on the interwebs who, being raciss & all, smelled a rat. So they checked the guy out and found his Facebook page. This was beyond the EU’s crack intelligence agencies, apparently, and no doubt beyond the Obama government’s capabilities.
So by all means, let them in.
A few other points: Why should we take them in when their Arab brothers mostly won’t? The Arabs think these folks are nothing but trouble, so I see no reason why we think they won’t be.
Second, there’s already a safe zone in Syria that could be used for refugees. It’s called the Golan Heights.
Third, if we must bring them in, put them on some large, remote, out of use military base. If the concern is there safety from Assad, ISIS and our allies al Qaeda, make them safe. There’s no reasons to just turn them loose in the country, especially since President Dumbfuck is assuring us that his Syrian strategy is brilliant and is going to work any day now. Then they can return to rebuild their own country in the manner that Obama finds beautiful, such as the south side of Chicago or Ferguson Missouri.
Finally, since Obama has been wrong at every turn in his Syrian policy choices/implementations, why should we think he isn’t going to Fuck this up too?
I think analogies to car accidents, guns etc fail, as they relate to unavoidable risk activities or Constitutional issues. Letting terrorists in along with refugees is an unforced error. I still maintain, you can serve the humanitarian objectives but basically quarantine people until fully vetted. They are fleeing mortality. They are still better off.
BTW – I just heard Obama bloviating – being particularly juvenile and dishonest – with this talk of fear of 3yr old orphans showing up on the doorstep. First, they are very few. Second, unless they are awfully, awfully precocious I doubt said 3yr olds would get here alone, but, perhaps, escorted by radical Islamists, er, jihadists……..not even their parents. A charitable explanation would be to say it wasn’t his finest set of remarks. Truth is, given the record, this is the cheap man we elected. In any event, I don’t see how we can risk a, ahem, “setback.”
“Finally, since Obama has been wrong at every turn in his Syrian policy choices/implementations, why should we think he isn’t going to Fuck this up too?”
Um, because his signature program reduced insurance premiums $2500??? I have it on good authority that those increases are illusory. Figments of Tea Party imagination. The bankrupt exchanges, too. Temporary “setback” at worst.
What did Obama just say at his press conference yesterday, when responding to reporters questioning his weak leadership/lack of strategy, in processing actions taken against ISIS — something about “aiming” before shooting.???
Well, if that’s his way of assessing a crisis why the sudden reversal of “full steam ahead” when taking in Syrian refugees, in light of a majority of people, governors etc. voicing national security concerns? Furthermore, does chiding other government officials, politicians who oppose the immediate entry of these refugees, implying they’re bigots, weak, or don’t have a heart, help clarify his reasoning more, grow a consensus or do anything positive to forge a working compromise among so many with a difference of opinion?
Car and gun risks are existing. The correct analogy would be lowering the drinking and/or driving ages and legalizing automatic weapons. In the case of Syrian refugees, issue them AK-47’s, and make them promise to handle their weapon responsibly.
If they are so trustworthy, there should be no problems. The Left should welcome this opportunity for foreigners to demonstrate to idiot Americans how gun safety works. Yeah, I thought so.
To my friends on the Right, I would remind you that President Obama is fully qualified to be president. As a famous fiction writer pointed out, he is elegant, and he is black. What more is required? Well, a bell of course.
“My goodness, steve, you cannot possibly have read anything written in America in 1900 and say that. There was a consensus that immigrants should assimilate. ”
Hmmm. Guess I misread you. Yes, there was consensus that people should assimilate. I was making the point that there was no consensus that people actually were assimilating. There have been complaints about almost every group of immigrants and who they were failing to immigrate.
“Finally, since Obama has been wrong at every turn in his Syrian policy choices/implementations, why should we think he isn’t going to Fuck this up too?”
Well, the alternative is “they will greet us as liberators” “the war will pay for itself”, “Mission Accomplished” and “the Bush tax cuts will pay for themselves and create jobs”. Unfortunately, it really is a binary choice.
Steve
Hope you guys read Doug’s articles. Just read the one from CATO. We have admitted about 1 million refugees since 2001. Zero domestic terrorist acts. It takes about there years to go through the process. Very low yield for a potential terrorist. Student or business visa much quicker.
Steve
As I hope I’ve made clear I’m not unfavorably disposed to the idea of accepting refugees. However, the articles you refer to pretty consistently use bad assumptions, the most notable being that human beings are not commodities and there is little reason to expect a uniform distribution of violent radicals within the population. The first 750,000 refugees could be fine, decent, peaceloving people and the second 750,000 could all be bloodthirty radicals because human beings are not commodities. They’re not blood corpuscles or microbes or atomic particles in which the principles of finite sampling work pretty well.
If you were talking random samples, sure, but we are not. We are talking about people who are vetted over the course of 2 years or more. Is it really believable that an ISIS terrorist will be willing to go through that for 2 years to get to the US? While knowing that only 2% of the refugees admitted by the program are males of military age? While ISIS is the current bogeyman group, I think that AQ had shown a willingness to attempt to come here and kill people. Why didn’t they send someone over the last 15 years through the refugee program?
BTW, note the claim made in these articles that Turkey already has 2 million refugees.
Steve
I do not know how long it will remain up, but for your viewing pleasure:
The Bellman welcoming the new passengers.
That’s “cute,” Tasty.
Like almost every other issue provoking the US, the rationale being expressed in support/opposition/solutions is either extreme or void of depth.
Trump-talkers just want to round people up and export them. While people like Steve, muse over statistical correctness as being what people should focus on, rather than the unpredictability of seemingly most circumstances being experienced today.
How many times has the news used “unexpected” in it’s coverage to describe something adverse in the economy, in a policy, or in some foreign/domestic horrendous event! Whether it’s Putin invading Ukraine, people murdered in an act of terrorism (more likely termed “workplace violence” by Obama), under-performance of our economic “recovery”….we always seem surprised, and with our pants down, when faced with events that didn’t meet the government’s promises or expectations.
This dovetails right into current stories detailing how intel reports have been continuously altered in order to meet specific narratives groomed by the WH. Such was the case regarding even how virulent ISIS was becoming back in 2012. Michael Flynn (Obama’s DIA Director), SOD Panetta, Gen. Patraeus, and even HRC submitted much harsher portrayals of the ISIS threat to the WH, and it was dismissed and ignored (many say, because of the inconvenient truths involved that might taint Obama’s reelection).
@jan
There are a few things that I truly dislike. One is misplaced blame, but another is despoiling an office or billet instead of the person in that position. Sometimes it is not intentional, but it happens.
For six years, the Left flung as much shit at President Bush as they could, and to foreigners, a lot of it landed on the office not the man. Today, the lowered status is not directly due to President Obama’s actions as president. Interestingly, he and the Left still flung shit on the presidency, at least initially, and of course, they continued to fling it on Bush for another six years.
I do not want the same thing to occur with President Obama. Unless he is impeached, he is the president, and the only recourse is Congress. Although, there is satire. While a nonsense poem does seem perfectly suited for our president, it is highly unlikely that a children’s author and mathematician was a soothsayer as well. Thus, the captain of our ship is the Bellman, and we should “procure a second-hand dagger-proof coat”.
The Left, and most people, understand the world in the way they describe it. When they accused the Bush Administration of doctoring intel, they believe that intelligence is doctored. When the blame an internet movie for an embassy attack, they believe Muslims are irrational and will attack for any reason. When Secretary of State blames Charlie Hebdo for the terrorist attack, they believe anybody who micro-aggresses the terrorists or invades their safe space gets what is coming to them.
(The Right is no different, but the Left has control of most of the reins of power, at least for now.)
Learning that they will doctor intelligence, lie about Obamacare, get in bed with Wall Street fat cats, use poor people, or use minorities should be no surprise. It will all be denied. The results are simply a coincidence. The good intentions are what count. When the person who claims their good intentions is benefiting while the target is suffering, I am a little skeptical.
(The Right is often different when called out on this. There may be the initial knee jerk reactions, but many will eventually think about it. They may not change, but at least, they will address the issue with some type of reason.)
Finally, none of it really matters. The financial world has been heading deeper into unknown territory since the financial collapse, and it will take each country with it. The terrorists are an easy problem compared to the elites controlling the financial sectors and governing the countries. The elites are far more entrenched, and they will “not go gently into that good night”.