I am wrestling with this question, challenge, dilemma--call it what you will. It is a classic dilemma: trying to reconcile two "goods". Here are my thoughts. I am praying that our world leaders will reach the right conclusions.
A migrant shouts next to Macedonian policemen as she waits to cross the borders from northern Greece to southern Macedonia, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2015. (AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos)
We know what the bible says. We know if the mantra, "Everyone Counts", means anything we in the United States need to play a leading role helping those women and men fleeing to save their lives and their children's lives from persecution.
At the same time, governments owe their citizens and their families a safe environment. Governments should not take action which they believe introduce risk of murder of their citizens of the kind that took place in Paris last week. That means as we accept people into our country or any country we should be as sure as humanly possible through our vetting process that they will not do harm. In fact, the vetting process already in place, is extremely rigorous, especially for refugees from Syria. The average clearance time is 18-24 months. As many as 10 U.S Agencies are involved before the refugee is cleared to come to the U.S.
So what concretely do I believe is required of the U.S. and other nations:
1. All nations (West, Arab, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, etc.) under the auspices of the United Nations or other broad based coalition must work together to achieve: a) a cease fire and then political settlement in Syria which will bring a halt to the Civil War and b) marshal the forces to eliminate the ISIS plague and the threat it represents to the civilized world. This is also essential to stop the outward flow of refugees and enable those who have already left to safely return. We must set aside past grievances, real or manufactured, to do these two things. Specifically, we must work with Russia and, yes, Iran to that end. The discussions in Vienna are encouraging. We must use our leverage to demand participation by Saudi and other Arab nations.
2. These same nations under the auspices of the United Nations or other broad coalition should create a plan to:
a) support (and I mean really support) the refugees who have already left their home to locate in a safe location as close as possible to Syria until they can return to their home. This will probably require establishment of "safe zones" protected by joint forces including NATO, Russia, Turkey, Iran and others nations. It will be necessary to give much more financial support to the countries neighboring Syria (e.g. Jordan) to make this possible. Following the achievement of a political settlement we will need a Marshall Plan like effort to rebuild the infrastructure of Syria to permit a return to viable life. Doing this has to be predicated on a political settlement and the elimination of the ISIS plague. It will require a massive investment far beyond what has been done to date;
b) continue to draw on the best intelligence and security experts in the world to ensure that the Syrians who have already sought or are seeking asylum in other countries can be "vetted" to assure they do not pose a threat to the local populations. As I wrote above, my reading indicates that the vetting process for our country is already extremely rigorous and steps will continue to be taken to make it stronger. We will never achieve "zero risk" on this anymore than we can achieve that with our own indigenous population but we have to provide convincing assurance that the risk is minimal. We have to recognize that this will delay and probably limit the number of immigrants who can be accepted. But we should not lead this to turn our back on playing the role we should in aiding those most threatened. We turned our backs before as sadly described in the article below. Let's not have it happen again on our watch.
Stepping back we should recognize and ACT on this as the greatest global crisis since WWII other than perhaps the threat of nuclear annihilation . If there ever was a reason for the United Nations or the G-20 to exist this is it. If there ever was a reason for the nations of the world to unite this is it.
No one should be using this crisis to try to gain political advantage, for example in the U.S. Presidential campaign or anywhere else.
People should get the facts on the refugee clearance process before shooting from the hip and calling for a ban on immigration.
People should get the facts on the refugee clearance process before shooting from the hip and calling for a ban on immigration.
Let us act on the best evidence of what we know to be true in protecting lives--all lives.
ope’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930s anti-Semitism
A migrant shouts next to Macedonian policemen as she waits to cross the borders from northern Greece to southern Macedonia, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2015. (AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos)
A humanitarian crisis of historic proportions has been growing in Europe, as hundreds of thousands of refugees and economic migrants from the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia have crossed the continent's borders this year alone.
The scale of the influx is now well-documented. According to the European Union's border agency, some 340,000 migrants crossed its borders in first seven months of 2015; in July, the figure was on its own an astonishing 107,500 people. The majority of those making the hazardous crossing across the eastern Mediterranean are Syrian refugees, displaced by a horrifying, grinding civil war that has forced roughly half of the country's population out of their homes.
According to U.N. figures, the current global levels of displacement have not been matched since World War II. In 2014, the number of refugees, asylum-seekers and people forced to flee within their country surged to nearly 60 million people.
It's hard to grasp the scope of this in real terms -- a nation of the displaced -- but it's been hideously dramatized in recent news. Desperate refugees and migrants, at the mercy of smugglers and human traffickers, have been confronted by walls and soldiers, have drowned in the Mediterranean, and suffocated in the back of trucks.
Over the past year, many in Europe have bristled at the influx -- from far-right political movements and fear-mongering tabloids to established politicians and leaders. The resentment has to do, in part, with the burden of coping with the refugees. But it's also activated a good amount of latent xenophobia--leading to anti-Islam protests, attacks on asylum centers and a good deal of bigoted bluster.
Some governments in Eastern Europe have even specifically indicated they don't want to accommodate non-Christian refugees, out of supposed fear over the ability of Muslims to integrate into Western society.
"Refugees are fleeing fear," urged a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency last week. "Refugees are not to be feared."
It's important to recognize that this is hardly the first time the West has warily eyed masses of refugees. And while some characterize Muslim arrivals as a supposedly unique threat, the xenophobia of the present carries direct echoes of a very different moment: The years before World War II, when tens of thousands of German Jews were compelled to flee Nazi Germany.
Consider this 1938 article in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid still known for its bouts of right-wing populism. Its headline warned of "German Jews Pouring Into This Country." And it began as follows:
"The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest."In these words, Mr Herbert Metcalde, the Old Street Magistrate yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering this country through the 'back door' -- a problem to which The Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.The number of aliens entering this country can be seen by the number of prosecutions in recent months. It is very difficult for the alien to escape the increasing vigilance of the police and port authorities.Even if aliens manage to break through the defences, it is not long before they are caught and deported.
No matter the alarming rhetoric of Hitler's fascist state -- and the growing acts of violence against Jews and others -- popular sentiment in Western Europe and the United States was largely indifferent to the plight of German Jews.
"Of all the groups in the 20th century," write the authors of the 1999 book, "Refugees in the Age of Genocide," "refugees from Nazism are now widely and popularly perceived as 'genuine', but at the time German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews were treated with ambivalence and outright hostility as well as sympathy."
Part of that hostility was fueled, as some of the European grievances are now, by stereotypes of the refugees as harbingers of a dangerous ideology, in this instance communism and anarchist violence.
There were also economic concerns. The world was coming off the Great Depression. In France alone, there were a million people unemployed. Resentment against French and foreign Jews (large numbers from Germany and Romania had arrived by the early 1930s) led to "a new wave of antisemitism," detailed by a report put out by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Chamber of Commerce of the city of Metz, for example, grumbled in 1933 that "highly undesirable" Jews "have become a veritable plague for honest French merchants." By 1935, the then French government enacted a series of quotas on certain professions -- effectively blocking Jews out. This was a precursor for the more pernicious and deadly forms of antisemitism to come.
In Britain, as a 2002 article in the Guardian recounts, perhaps as many as half a million German Jewish asylum seekers were turned away by authorities ahead of the outbreak of World War II. Many who were admitted in were given asylum less out of altruism than a need to fill low-paying domestic work "spurned by the native British." The situation was no better elsewhere:
Canada accommodated only 5,000 European Jews between 1933 and 1945, Australia 10,000, South Africa some 6,000. And the US's unyielding quota system meant that, between 1933 and 1937, only 33,000 German Jews were admitted (and only 124,000 between 1938 and 1941).
Meanwhile, those trapped within Nazi-controlled Europe faced the horrors of the Holocaust. Millions were systematically killed. Yet it was only in 1944, when the extent of the genocide had become better known, that the United States made a real effort to rescue European Jews. Even during World War II, let alone before it started, antisemitism was rife in American political and public life.
Unwanted foreigners have always caused consternation among a section of any society. Thankfully, there's an equally vociferous chorus in Europe currently championing the plight of Syrian refugees, and urging others to help make a new home for those displaced by conflict and other hardships.
Everyone deserves the chance to live a better life, activists argue.
