The Home of the Brave Trembles in Fear

It has become routine for America to disgrace itself. Having always been a scold of other nations' human rights abuses, in the panic after the 9/11 attacks we immediately cast aside the values we preach to others by rounding up over a thousand American Muslims for months of detention without cause. We set up secret black sites outside the country to which we "renditioned" captives for torture. We set up an out of Canada Welcomes Syrians : Dec.14: Newly-elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeted refugees with "You are home" and might as well have been scolding America when he said, "Tonight, they step off the plane as refugees. But they walk out of this terminal as permanent residents of Canada, with social insurance numbers, with health cards, and with an opportunity to become full Canadians."
    
country site for the indefinite detention without trial of "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo. And now, with Europe overwhelmed with refugees and some countries accepting hundreds of thousands, America's Republican leaders hope to slam the door, defying President Obama's intent to place a mere 10,000 Syrian refugees throughout our country, a minuscule number just 1% of what tiny Lebanon has accepted.

To keep them out, the House passed a bill that would place new hurdles in the path of admitting the refugees; state governors — over two dozen, all but one a Republican — vowed to refuse to accept the Syrians; and all Republican candidates for the presidency announced their opposition to admitting them. The three Democratic candidates would allow entry.

That terrorists could pose as refugees and slip into the country is the nominal fear. The actual driver is the spinelessness of politicians who fear that if that happens, and American deaths result, they will be held responsible and voted from office. They are in accord with the 53% of Americans who oppose the admittance of Syrian refugees, which says that Americans reliably fail in practice to follow what they believe they stand for.

The bill passed by the House was shepherded by newly elected House Speaker Paul Ryan. "Our nation has always been welcoming. But we
cannot allow terrorists to take advantage of our compassion". So we will abandon this spurious compassion, nowhere in evidence, because "the prudent, the responsible thing" is to pause the refugee program "to verify that terrorists are not trying to infiltrate the refugee program". Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has an alternative simpler than admitting refugees. Instead "what we need is a strategy obviously to give the refugees an opportunity to stay in their own country".

And so, voting 289 to 137, with close to 50 Democrats in support, the House passed a bill that would require the heads of the F.B.I., Homeland Security and national intelligence to attest that each applicant for refugee status from Syria and Iraq poses no threat. Already in place is a rigorous process of background checks first by the U.N. and then multiple U.S. agencies that takes two years. Calling upon three parts of the executive branch to do their own vetting and making individuals responsible is clearly aimed at tying the process in knots so as to shut out the refugees altogether.

Mr. Obama emphasizes that refugees are already subjected to “the most rigorous vetting process that we have for anybody who is admitted”. Lavinia Limon, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, affirms that “refugees are the most thoroughly vetted people to enter this country”. Nevertheless, our Congress seems incapable of reasoning that, given the length of time a refugee applicant must wait before gaining entry to the U.S., the refugee path is the least sensible way to infiltrate the country. A terrorist could instead simply fly in on a tourist or student visa and go right to work. “That somehow [refugees] pose a more significant threat than all the tourists who pour into the United States every single day just doesn’t jibe with reality,” Obama said.

Over two dozen governors — only one a Democrat — intend to set their own rules. They vow they will disallow refugee placement in their states. "I write to inform you that the State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria", said Governor Greg Abbott of Texas to the President, and Texas has now gone to federal court to keep Syrian refugees out of the state. Governor Mike Pence of Indiana turned away a Syrian family and when apprised that he had no authority to do so said he would instruct state agencies to refuse assist the refugees. (The family was relocated to Connecticut; the ACLU has filed suit.)

Washington's Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, reminds us that the United States has always been a refuge for the storm-tossed and warns that now "the American character is being tested".

Apart from the hostility and indifference to people in need, are these two dozen governors really unaware that they cannot deny freedom of movement between the 50 states, that they cannot shut out people from their state?

They are mostly the same governors who have lobbied for years to preventing the closing of Guantánamo and the transfer of detainees to their states. Why they are so fearful is baffling, as if they expect the captives will somehow break out of their prisons to wreak havoc. Congressional Republicans have done the governors' bidding by keeping laws in place to thwart Obama's original campaign pledge to close Guantánamo. In reaction to his recently announced intention to close the base anyway, Congress has just passed a military funding bill with provisions tacked on that make it still more difficult to shut down Guantanamo. The bill bans bringing detainees to the United States altogether, even for prosecution, and even bans transfer to other countries.

The conduct of the Republican candidates for the presidency has been uniformly reprehensible, going well beyond simply recommending a pause or a "timeout".

"The fact is that we need for appropriate vetting", said Chris Christie, indicative of several of the candidates hurriedly making statements in the wake of the Paris bombings before informing themselves of the stringent refugee vetting process already in place.

Ben Carson chose an offensive stand-in for Syrians saying we must protect our children from "a rabid dog running around your neighborhood" but that "doesn’t mean that you hate all dogs by any stretch of the imagination”. He wrote House Speaker Paul Ryan urging legislation to cut off funding for settling Syrian refugees.

Bobby Jindal, who has since dropped out of the race, issued an executive order seeking to prevent Syrian refugees from being resettled in his state of Louisiana. John Kasich said he
will write to President Obama asking him to stop resettling Syrians in his Ohio and thinks there should be a new government agency to broadcast Judeo-Christian values around the world.

Ted Cruz called it "absolute lunacy" to resettle Syrians in this country. "Who in their right mind would want to bring over tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, when we cannot determine…who is and who isn't a terrorist?", he asks. Marco Rubio concurs. He would be "open" to accepting refugees "if there was a way to ensure they were not being infiltrated by terrorists", a requirement of perfect safety not found elsewhere in the affairs of man.

Cruz expressed astonishment that only 3% of the Syrians who have so far gained entry to the U.S. are Christians. Cruz and Jeb Bush think we should only admit Christian Syrians. "We do not have religious tests for our compassion", Obama reminded them.

Donald Trump said, "I'm putting people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they're going back", contending that Islamic State militants could be hiding among them. A total of 2,290 Syrian refugees have arrived in the United States over the three years of the Syrian civil war. No terrorists have yet emerged. Former ambassador to Syria Ryan Crocker knows "how highly Syrians value hard work and education". In a Wall Street Journal op-ed he says, "They're precisely the people I'd want living next door to me and attending my children's schools." Moreover, State Department data says 67% of those referred to the U.S. by the U.N. have been children under the age of 12 and women.

That scares Christie. "I don't think that orphans under 5 should be admitted to the United States at this point".

As president, Trump would consider creating a government database to track Muslims in the U.S. Does he perhaps think they should be made to wear yellow armbands embroidered with the star and crescent?

"I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that has been coming out of here during the course of the debate", was Obama's remonstrance. "Many of these refugees are the victims of terrorism themselves. That's what they are fleeing".

And that's the senseless contradiction. To assure the safety of their constituents, politicians are determined to shut out people fleeing from the horrors of a country filled with death and bombed to rubble who themselves want only to find safety. But that does not register with the best and brightest we send to Washington.

In a Wall Street Journal symposium, Marco Rubio says, "You cannot accurately do a background check on 10,000 people". True enough. Nor be sure you will never have an auto accident, or fall off a ladder. Guaranteed safety is not available in life. An obsessive quest to make America safe and hermetically sealed by shutting out refugees from fear there might be a needle in the haystack seems to have become the zeitgeist, witness the parallel at universities where students insist that their institutions be cocoons shielding them from the unpleasantness of the world without. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy summed up a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee that quizzed government officials on safety with, "I haven’t heard a single one of you say there’s no risk". The new demand is for a country so safe as to be risk-free.

That's impossible, of course. There are risks. That's the chance we have to take. For this of all countries to refuse its part in the massive refugee crisis in order to tuck in safe and sound in our homes while others suffer is shameful. The upshot of excluding the 10,000, and the tens of thousands more that this country should bring in, amounts to massive collective punishment of those in desperate straits out of fear for what some one or two of them might do.

Obama tweeted, "Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values". We have been down this road before, to our eternal shame, as when in the 1930s we turned away 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany, sending the ship, the "St. Louis", back to Europe where an untold number would meet their death. (Polls were 2-to-1 against accepting them). We then interned somewhere between 110,000 and 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry out of fear some would spy for Tokyo. Those now in government from new generations who no longer learn history are making the same mistake.

Isn't it odd that we celebrate the extraordinary bravery of the "greatest generation", those hundreds of thousands of Americans who died facing the terrible odds of flying the next mission or attacking the next pillbox, yet half of us seem to have become cowards, unrepentant to casting aside what America has always stood for and turn away "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore", choosing instead to become huddled masses yearning to be safe.