This obstructionism is pointless. The refugees are coming to America—as they should. Seven states to date (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington) have vowed to cooperate with resettlement plans. And once those refugees are in the United States, they have the ability to freely travel within the nation and to relocate wherever they may so choose. That means that these bans, even if they were legal, would do nothing whatsoever to stop potentially bad-actor refugees (who, given our vetting procedures, are unlikely to get into the nation in the first place).These refugee bans make no sense. They fail to recognize how dissimilar the U.S. situation is from Europe’s ordeal. They fail to recognize American legal realities. But more than any of that, as numerous politicians have pointed out, they betray fundamental American values of inclusivity and refuge. They shirk our moral responsibility to aid those displaced by a conflict that has killed 250,000, destroyed a nation, and for which we are at least partially responsible by merit of our chronically misguided and shortsighted Middle Eastern politics. (Americans often balk at that notion, but the sooner we own our culpability, the better it will be for us and for the world, now and in the view of history.) And, coming as they do alongside calls for tighter monitoring of Islamic communities in the States and implicit calls for religious or ethnic tests on migrants, they reek of a deep Islamophobia. Given that the vast majority of the Paris attackers were Europeans, and given the acknowledged presence of a massive homegrown terrorist front in Europe (consisting of white radicals and Muslim extremists), it’s bizarre that we’ve chosen to restrict entrance to Syrian refugees and not to Belgian or French citizens.
Source: The Un-American Politics of Rejecting Refugees | GOOD
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