Syrian Refugees in the USA

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

The United States has accepted 11 Syrian refugees this year.

11

Not 11,000. Not 1,100.
Eleven.


Less than twelve.

While we bomb the shit out of them.

[excalibur]

We bombed the shit out of military targets, be it ill-advised. Do you really think it's a good idea to accept refugees of people whom we just made an enemy of?

[CharlesPhipps]

The argument there is kind of missing some context.

So I'll reframe it.

"Should we accept Jews from Nazi Germany? I mean, we're hostile to Germany so clearly these Jews are our enemy."

In this case being the refugees fleeing from Syria are the people who the people in Syria....ISIS and Assad are murdering by the thousands.

They are fleeing FROM Syria and I think we should accept them by the thousands.

Mind you, that's because I think it may be a good idea to have people who speak Arabic on our side in the future. There will be more conflict in that region and having friends and their children who can help us with the situation is a good idea.

[AllanO]

Optimistically America has actually accepted more refugees at some times. The most obvious case is accepting hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of South Vietnam (a place America had just finished bombing). Anyway so there is at least a chance that the USA accept hundreds of thousands of refugees and the sky will not fall if they do.

Sadly people don't seem to make the connection between past refugee situations and current ones. The worries about current refugees are often similar and similarly unjustified to worries about historical refugees.

Whatever logistical or political trouble Syrian refuges may cause in the US or richer countries, how much trouble are they causing and going to cause in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey where there are millions of such refugees and those countries surely have less capacity to absorb all those people. So lots of other countries should be accepting refugees to share some of the burden.

[TGLS]

It's because people fear terrorism. People fear terror, which they equate with Arabs, so they fear Arabs. Refugees aren't admitted, and the wedge between Muslims and the West gets bigger, eventually leading to a greater conflict. And so, the terrorists win.

[Darth Wedgius]

I think it would be less like taking in Nazi Germany's Jews and more like taking in the Confederates from the U.S. civil war. I hear again and again how these aren't the people doing terrible things, these are the people fleeing terrible things being done -- but that's not a logical way to look at it. People who will happily slaughter the families of their enemies face-to-face will flee if the battle turns against them in a nasty way. Not that all the refugees would be ISIS or people sympathetic to ISIS (or similar groups), or necessarily event most of the refugees, but we do know that this is the area where a lot of monsters can be found, and you can't really tell X from Y.

To make a rational decision, we'd have to see how well the influx of Arabs in Europe has worked for Europe. I'd say that's still pretty uncertain, and I'm having a tough time trusting information from either side there as regards to support for Sharia law, crimes against women, or the grooming of children for sex.. But until I know better, I want the influx of any group limited to the rate at which they can assimilate into broader American culture.

[AllanO]

The thing is that people did indeed worry that Jewish refugees would provide cover for NAZI agents to enter the US and so on. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 180957324/

So there really is a close parallel between those sorts of arguments.

Also there had long been fears of the inability to assimilate immigrants. Some equate fears of the cultural otherness of Syrian refugees and the like to the fears of Eastern European Jews in the 1890s-1930s. (an opinion piece making the claim https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... e26845276/ and here is an article from the period that suggests the state of the debate back at the start of the 20th century in America https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history_c ... peril.html a bit I found relevant "Then you are told that there are two kinds of immigrants- desirable and undesirable, the desirable being those that are designed as the ones who are kin to us in race or blood or habits, and the undesirable are all the rest.")

For me these sorts of arguments were unconvincing in the past and are unconvincing now, but it seems likely, if not guaranteed, that they will win out again (or rather already did).

There is of course a fundamental disagreement in principle that can be at work here. What is the ratio of refugees saved to criminals, terrorists etc. let in that is acceptable. The number different people view as acceptable is going to very. Some are going to say they happily sacrifice the lives of any number (thousands, millions etc.) of refugees to prevent a single criminal/spy/terrorist entering the country under these sort of auspices (this would probably make allowing any refugees ever a non-starter if you stuck to it), others are going to be tolerant of a fair degree of criminality in order to save some lives.

I am more inclined to worry about the fate of refugees than worry about increased crime rates etc. Certainly when the social costs are such that it is hard to say if there even has been a rise in aggregate crime rates my attitude is that even if it turns out you are able to tease out some correlation as data accumulates, the fact that you can't right away tells me it is small enough to be within my tolerance given what is at stake for the Syrian refugees.

[Darth Wedgius]

"The thing is that people did indeed worry that Jewish refugees would provide cover for NAZI agents to enter the US and so on. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 180957324/"

I hadn't heard of that. It's food for though; thank you.

And after a bit more research, I will note another caveat on my concerns. It seems that Muslim immigrants (I didn't see data for Arab immigrants, so I have to generalize) have historically assimilated better in the U.S. than in Europe (maybe a benefit the U.S.'s focus on civic nationalism?) so if Europe is having bad experience (and when I say "if" I mean "if"), it wouldn't necessarily be as bad in the U.S.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

If you bomb the shit out of innocent people, then you have a moral obligation to accept refugees fleeing the bombing.
Almost every other country has been more willing to accept refugees from Syria, as in, a leading refugee crisis of this day and age.
If you don't, you're a coward who says "my hypothetical safety from possible terrorist agentsis more important than their immediate safety from the death we rain down upon them."

[excalibur]

I don't believe in that notion. Saying it's "moral obligation" is basically guilt tripping the other side. How many German "refugees" were still accepted after the end of WWII very actual immigrants, same with Koreans, Vietnamese. We bombed the shit out of Vietnam and no one's clamoring as to why we didn't start scooping up refugees.

If we won the war, we should invest in fixing what we've destroyed. Japan was in utter ruin after all the bombings and 2 nukes but within 10 years, the entire country rebuilt itself with help from the US and became an economic power house today thanks to that.

We haven't won shit in the middle east and taking an untold amount of people displaced and then into another part of the world they know nothing about and expect them to survive under the welfare of a system that literally is the reason why they are here.