I’m all for taking in refugees from other countries.
One of the greatest influences on my 18 year old life was a family of Polish refugees who came to North Dakota. Seeing and hearing about life under Soviet rule was one of the things that set me on the glide path toward voting for Ronald Reagan when I was a few years older.
Anyway – I’m all for taking in people who genuinely have no place else to go. And yep, you can hear a certain fringe of anti-Muslim animosity and, yeah, racism among some opponents of throwing the floodgates open to immigration from the Middle East (and everywhere else), but the fact is that the US has taken in 70% of the UN-designated “refugrees” that have actually been resettled in recent years – and it’s the Obama Administration that has been picking and choosing the refugees it wants to take; out of 3.6 million refugees from Afghanistan, South Sudan and the Central African Republican in the last couple years, the Obama Administration has accepted less than a thousand.
But let’s not focus on the administration for now. Let’s focus on organic criticism.
Racism is in the minority, among a lot of people who say “look at what’s happened in Europe” and “have we learned nothing from the Somali influx”, where the government essentially dumped thousands of Somalis here without any support, with thousands of passive Jihad sympathizers and where dozens, maybe more, have gone off to join ISIS and/or Al Shabab,?
At any rate – advocate for immigration if you want. I’m with you. My beef isn’t with immigration, or taking in refugees, or even Islam at large. It’s with the avalanche of emotional, illogical, logrolling arguments we’re being subjected to by immigration proponents.
So – if you’re passing any of the arguments below, especially with the air of suffocating self-righteousness that seems to be so in fashion with these sorts of arguments these day, we may have to talk.
“We HAVE to take in refugees! There are women and children among them!” Sure – but a disproportionate number are men, especially men who are of military age.
“Have you seen the state the children are in?” So give them a leg up on getting in to countries. Why is this an all-or-nothing proposition?
“But they’re fleeing WAR”! Many if not most of the “refugees” in Europe right now are economic, not war, refugees, from places like Somalia and Sudan that may be pretty miserable, but aren’t war zones.
“It’s just like the WW2 Internment camps!” No – the camps interned American citizens. The refugees are not citizens, and there is no human right to enter this country. None.
“None of them have attacked anyone yet!” Well, that’s just awesome. On 12/6/1941, no Japanese plane had ever attacked American territory. On 9/10/01, it’d been 56 years since any American had been killed by a deliberately-crashed plane. As they say in investing, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
In fact, let’s say, hypothetically, that not a single would-be terrorist infiltrates the US via this wave of immigration. It could happen!
But then let’s say the refugees are resettled in the same manner than the State Department is handing Somali refugees; paying social service non-profits to put them in communities, supporting them for a year, and then washing their hands of them. This leaves communities of unacculturated immigrants with little skill in English (or, what the hell, Spanish), menial job skills, and little contact in the larger community. What happens to them?
If they’re lucky, they get a decent job with neighborly Americans who introduce them to American life. Or they land in a community that has some Somalis that’ve established themselves, and are among the 85-90% of Somali that are not Jihad sympathizers, and who’ll help them complete the transition as relatively cleanly as possible.
If they’re not? They’re alone, stranded in a strange country, poor and dependent, speaking the language poorly if at all, and ripe for the picking by the thin film of opportunistic, Jihad-sympathetic imams that are working that population even as we speak. Which brings us to the next point:
“All of the Paris terrorists were French Nationals!” – Oh, goody – so the fact that people who have been in the west for a while, long enough to gain or be born with citizenship, are blowing up their countrymen is the good news?
If the Administration plans to use the Somali influx as its model – dumping masses of poor immigrants into our communities, unsupported – how do we avoid these new communities turning into the the like of the Arab suburbs of Paris, Lyon, Brussels and Stockholm, which were in fact the breeding grounds for the last few waves of Paris attackers?
“It’s just exactly like when the Jews tried to flee Nazi Germany”: Not even close. The Jews of the 1930s had *nowhere* to go, and no state of their own to take them in. They were excluded from the US due to pure anti-semitism. The VAST majority of this wave of refugees are already someplace safe; Greece, Germany, Jordan, Egypt, wherever. Nobody’s going to ship them to a concentration camp, or kill them (unless ISIS takes over Greece, Germany,Jordan, Egypt or wherever. The Arab world is chock full of countries with immense wealth and space – but no impetus to take in refugees. We can not forever be the world’s safety valve.
“They’re just looking for a safe place” Some, maybe most, are. But they’re also making beelines for Germany and Sweden and France, as opposed to safe places like Poland or Slovakia or even, for crying out loud, Lithuania, which is rolling out the welcome mat but doesn’t pay welfare benefits to refugees. Why do you suppose that is?
“Look at this photomeme of the Indians and Pilgrims! Ironic!” Well, yeah. I guess you could say it’s ironic that your dimbulb photomeme supports *my* point better than yours, ja?
“Mary and Joseph were refugees looking for a place to stay!” No, they were paying their taxes at the behest of the government. The Judean IRS was apparently even worse than ours. But let’s say they were refugees; that was a pretty gutsy innkeeper, what with that Judean movement that was beheading Nazarenes in the streets.
“It’s just fear!” – That’s not an argument. That’s bullying. By the same “logic”, owning a fire extinguisher and looking both ways before you cross the street is “fear”. No, “fear” is a chanting point, intended to emotionally bully people into doing what they’re told.
“It’s racist to oppose the resettlement” Look – see above. Historically and in recent years, we’ve taken in more of the refugees that have been taken in than the rest of the world, twice over. And that’s on top of the illegals. America’s Muslim population is on track to exceed its Jewish population – the largest outside Israel – very shortly here. If there’s “racism” out there, it’s taking its sweet time manifesting itself. Beating people over the head with accusations of “bigotry” isn’t an argument; it’s browbeating and bullying.
It’s logrolling – the same cheap emotional bludgeoning that supporters of same sex marriage used to browbeat anyone who said “er, maybe we want to think a little before we fundamentally alter society’s fundamental building block” into compliance. Whether you agree with gay marriage or not (I barely agree with straight marriage), it was depressing, seeing society decide a crucial issue the exact same way the Mean Girls did back in junior high.
And I’ll tolerate none of it.
America has benefited from each new wave of immigrants, including those that inspired race riots with their great numbers and poverty, like the Irish, those that clustered in close communities speaking different languages, like the Germans/Swedes/Norwegians/Poles, those that fled violence and terrorism (Anarchist terrorism, anti-Jewish pogroms) from Eastern Europe, and those where the first wave was 90% young men (China, Japan). As MBerg notes, our history is replete with examples where racism, anti-religious venom and fear have led Americans to shameful and stupid actions that embarrass their descendants, such as Japanese internment, turning away Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and the anti-Chinese immigration acts.
Burkean conservatism hesitates to blunder into bold new ventures in social engineering. It claims to learn from history and avoid the mistakes of the past. It claims to avoid knee-jerk politics of emotion. A conservative would look at this situation, and calmly continue to let in refugees after background checks, knowing that the actual risks have not changed from a week ago, or a year ago. There is nothing conservative about the reaction of many Republicans, using the latest terrorism as an excuse to vilify refugees. It is nothing more than populist xenophobic fear mongering, and nothing to be proud of. The politics of fear is ugly.
I’ll accept open borders in exchange for the elimination of the welfare state. That is the conservative position.
Regarding Emery’s post, exactly how do you do an accurate background check when the nation being fled is one where the government is either unwilling or unable to defend the refugees from attacks by their neighbors or the government itself? Do we really think that we can trust the government’s database, if it even exists, or the testimony of neighbors who were trying to kill them?
Closest match to this emigration and refugee situation is that which confronted us after the Communists mostly took over Indochina, and knowing the risk of importing “those in black pajamas” to the United States, most of those escaping spent a couple of years in refugee camps while we did the necessary paperwork and…..observed how they behaved in places with a decent government.
Refugee camps aren’t the nicest places, but they sure beat where they came from, and they definitely beat letting terrorists into the country without seeing how they behave in polite society.
The world is so frightening, how do you get out of bed in the morning? If it is not cowardice that inspires your sentiments, than it is fear mongering. There is nothing conservative about knee-jerk emotional reactions and sudden changes to established practice (i.e. refugee immigration after background checks). This is nothing more than populist race-baiting. Next time include the line “I’m only advocating this to protect our children” to put the cherry on top of the xenophobic sundae. You may be Unliberal, but you are no conservative.
And don’t use “We”, use I when expressing your opinions. There are plenty among “We” who find them abhorrent and don’t appreciate the association. And don’t just whine about all of the bad things happening in the world, propose some constructive solutions to a massive refugee crisis and desire for economic migration, both of which are likely to continue on and off for decades.
Congratulations to Emery for using every “argument” this post was complaining about. Very DG of you, though you didn’t use the expletives she would’ve included.
Emery, instead of mouthing platitudes, maybe….respond to the arguments? Maybe tell us how we can do an effective background check when the major resources we have are the government and neighbors the refugees are fleeing.
It’s up to you, because obviously the Obama administration and the U.N. want us to neglect little details like this.
Some people dearly love to be cheap with the security of others.
ISIS and al Qaida have made threats to kill service members and their families at home. Emery’s response? “The world is so frightening, how do you get out of bed in the morning?”
This said by the guy who is terrified of ‘global warming’.
The last huge immigration wave, around the turn of the 20th century, was not universally welcomed. Two of its most important, most vocal opponents were Owen Wister and Frederick Remington. That’s the guy who wrote the seminal cowboy novel The Virginian and the guy who created the iconic paintings and statuary celebrating the taming of the American West.
Wister and Remington are far more American than Obama or Emery.
Yet Obama and Emery would call Wister and Remington ‘un-American’?
That literally makes no sense. It would be like calling George Washington un-American because he owned slaves. Sorry, that is America, pal. We have dropped nukes on cities full of civilians. We have interned people because of their ethnicity. We drove the original inhabitants of North America onto tiny reservations.
You don’t want to be part of that history, find another country.
If the advantages of mass immigration are so great, I’m certain you’ll be happy to find a country of your liking. Please leave mine alone.
Emery- Isn’t there a phrase something like “he issued a non-rebutall rebuttal”? Now there is.
Terry, you’re blathering again.
BB, Once you accept the goodness of drawing lines and manning borders with machine guns, there will always be those calling for more lines and more borders. It is a short distance from populist policies excluding Muslims at the border to segregating black people in the American south, or restricting where Jews can work and live in Europe.
“Terry, you’re blathering again.”
Not again!
I came down with a bout of sudden onset bronchitis last night. Holy cow, at 4PM I’m fine and by midnight I’m afraid my coughing will split my chest open, and I can’t stand up w/o getting dizzy. No fun at 14,000′.
So today I’m at home and taking dayquil, which can make you loopy.
Emery, there is a HUGE difference with immigrants arriving in the U.S. before about 1980.
All four of my grandparents arrived in America from Germany & Italy respectively. They didn’t receive, nor did they expect handouts from the government, every informational sign and application to be in 50 different languages to accommodate their lack of knowledge of the English language. They learned English on their own, as fast as they could, so they could become citizens of their adopted country. They also scrimped and saved to buy their houses and farms, believing that a debt anything bigger than borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbor, was shameful.
My dad and all but one of my uncles that died in a truck explosion at age 17, proudly served in the military, with five of them doing so during wars.
The majority of Immigrants today, aided by the low rent lefties that are exploiting them for political gain, are mooching off of the rest of us. Contrary to the leftist lies that they are paying taxes, far more of them are taking than they are giving!
If you lefties want them here, then you support the moochers. The ones that realize how much better off they are here than where they came from, start their own businesses or get jobs, no matter how menial your ilk think they are and improve their lot in life, will be fine.
In other words, blow it out your ass!
SmithStCrx/bosshoss429:
I am concerned about the impact of immigration on America’s system of universal benefits. I would support freedom of migration, limited by background checks, fees, and limits on services for immigrants. The presence of large numbers of migrants will hasten major changes to the current social welfare state, already straining as rich country workforces grow older, and increase already high inequality within rich countries, while possible decreasing it worldwide.
What’s a few dead Americans to EmeryTheAntisemiteSoci@list? Apparently nothing. Life means nothing. It is just a price HE is willing to pay for a progressive world.
‘When they came for the Muslims, I remained silent; I wasn’t a Muslim. When they came for’ ….
There are no amoral depths EmeryTheAntisemiticSoci@ist is not willing to sink too. In his fucking murderous mind, everything has a moral equivalency. Again, he proves the point that he does not value human life. But then what would you expect from a Marxist.
Go soak your hot head you hypocritical schmuck.
Once again, emerytheantisemiticsoci@list, your amoral compass of moral equivalency is infallible.
Enjoy.
https://youtu.be/k_IXzU-lnLU
When they came for the Muslims, I remained silent
Allah is an enemy to unbelievers. – Sura 2:98
On unbelievers is the curse of Allah. – Sura 2:161
Slay them wherever ye find them and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. – 2:191
Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme. – Sura 2:193 and 8:39
Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it. – 2:216
Please accept that as if I had reached through your monitor and slapped you off your chair, Emery. Thanks.
Emery, maybe….try interacting with the arguments. Exactly how do you do a decent background check for a refugee from a failed, or totalitarian, state, given that we must presume that whatever data they have is either flawed or will not/can not be shared?
Nice try at a straw man argument, but hey, sometimes you meet someone who actually thinks it’s appropriate to deal with the real arguments.
There is no question there will be risk when you bring in people. I don’t think you cannot deny that or counter that argument. I don’t think any politician can guarantee the American people that letting in refugees nothing will happen. Nobody can predict that about anything. You can’t argue a case by looking backwards. In a sense it’s the wrong question. There are no guarantees.
Why should the American people require an absolute guarantee? There are no absolutes. That’s what politicians need to say, you cannot expect perfection. Furthermore, all the people we know to have been involved in the Paris attacks were born either in Belgium or France. They were not immigrants or refugees.
Emery makes a cogent point. With itinerant muzzies, the first wave makes themselves at home in the host country, sponging and mooching, protesting the lifestyles of their infidel hosts, a little mosque building, perhaps driving a little cab or (if government financing is available) running a corner smoke shop. But no Jihad.
Jihad is reserved for the first native born generation. Speaking and dressing like a native, they have the ability to blend, to be a gray man.
Quick trip back to the Fatherland for boot camp, and they’re ready to pay the infidels back for taking them into their countries.
Allahu Akbar Monsieur!
It is one thing to talk about fearful ignorance on the part of Americans looking for safety in a world that suddenly seems more dangerous. It is quite another thing to look at the politicians who would deliberately cultivate that fear–and ignorance–for political power. Scare people enough, feed them a steady diet of misinformation and outright lies, and they’ll give you anything for the illusion of safety. Those who, in our frustration, argue for a war on Islam, rather than a war on ISIL have already conceded defeat. My preferred solution requires patience and tolerance, which is hard when terrorists frequently goad you to over–react.
Beware the man who wants you to give up freedom and give him authority for a promise of order and safety. He will be your master.
Yes, Emery, there are no guarantees….except here, we do have a guarantee; it is impossible to do a decent background check on these people. Come on–you can’t eliminate the possibility of problems, but you sure can take intelligent measures to reduce their likelihood.
You want a guarantee, you mudsucking amoeba? If you DON’T let them in they will ABSOLUTELY not kill anyone in the US. There is your fucking absolute guarantee, you witless illogical strawman-buggering moron.
I swear, if EmeryTheAntisemiticSoci@list did not exist, Merg would have to invent him to showcase how morally depraved and logically obtuse libturds are.
After they settle in numbers, muzzies will be throwing debauched lefties out of windows….and yet here they are, squirting tears to let them in.
How frickin’ stupid are…oh, never mind.
Yeah too much noise on SiTD. I prefer to treat it as a write–only medium anyway.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving Holiday boys and girls!
Still waiting on you to answer a basic question, Emery. How do you do an adequate background check when the authority with the database is the one whose behavior is causing its citizens to become refugees?
“How do you do an adequate background check when the authority with the database is the one whose behavior is causing its citizens to become refugees?”
That’s true – but that’s true in any kind of vetting situation. It’s the same refrain we hear when someone who has never committed a crime picks up a gun and shoots up a school. If no one has shown any evidence of radicalization, they will be hard to vet. That doesn’t mean impossible, however, and it doesn’t mean that no vetting occurs because of it.
https://youtu.be/0Wi8Fv0AJA4
No, Emery, it’s not the same as every other vetting situation. We have adequate, though certainly not perfect, records of who has, and has not, committed a crime, which we use for various purposes. Nations from which refugees come do not have such trustworthy databases.
Now background checks are not perfect, but keep in mind that you, and the Obama administration, are claiming that somehow vetting will be done when there is no database we can trust. To cite Mr. Reagan, that’s a phrase from our nation’s rich agricultural tradition.
Momentum to bar Syrian refugees slows
Republican party elders and some lawmakers push to reconsider House legislation passed in haste.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/syria-refugees-republican-leadership-legislation-216329