Eileen wound up going in to the urgent care clinic with a upper-respiratory bug Sunday morning (she's on the mend, although it did knock her out of a Sunday concert for her chorale). Fox News was on in the waiting room (a change from the customary CNN, interesting switch) and the crawler noted that one of the Friday night attackers was a Syrian refugee.
I told Eileen at the time "that's going to give fodder to the Islamophobes." Shortly thereafter, she got called back to see the doctor and a bit after that, The Donald was on the phone with the Fox crew playing that exact card, warning of ISIS fans being part of those huddled masses.
That's a real threat, not an imagined one. A uncertain percentage of the refugees are either closet jihadists or might become such if life starts to suck in their new locale and going to war against the racist infidels sounds like a plan.The first group doesn't hit the refugee center with a "I heart ISIS" T-shirt on, nor does the second; the latter might pass a jihadi-sympethiser exam with flying colors, only to get "radicalized" later on.
Yesterday, CNN was running a piece on a Syrian couple with three kids and a fourth in the oven who has settled into Toledo. The family seemed to be a near-perfect advertisement for letting the better-angels of our nature win the argument and take the refugees in. They were also a Central Casting contrast to Gov. Kasich becoming a growing number of governors who have requested that Syrian refugees not be sent their way.
Kasich has been on the left side on the GOP (as much a statement of modern conservatism than of Kasich, who is more establismentarian than liberal) in his presidential run, but in a debate between compassion for the outsiders and safety for the folks already here, safety seems to have won out. Michigan Gov. Synder isn't a fire-breathing nativist either, but he was ahead of the curve on the refugee issue. He sets an interesting middle ground here, avoiding the Muslim-baiting not uncommon on the right.
Snyder demanded that the Department of Homeland Security review its security procedures for vetting refugees but avoided blanket suspicion of people from any region.
"It's also important to remember that these attacks are the efforts of extremists and do not reflect the peaceful ways of people of Middle Eastern descent here and around the world," Snyder said.
I'm not sure what legal grounds a state would have for barring immigrants from being in their state; I don't recall a customs check-point on US-23 north of Toledo coming south from Michigan or going back in from Ohio. They might have grounds for not giving welfare benefits, but the decision on who does and doesn't get in the country is a federal one.
That doesn't mean that the federal decisions are wise ones, but it is on their plate. The current administration has not been all that diligent in enforcing immigration law (to be as polite as I can) and also has had a tin ear on the religious nature of ISIS and other jihadis, so they will likely err on the side of compassion rather than safety.
Erring on the side of compassion isn't evil or (as far as I can tell) a secret plot to destroy the US from within. It may well be misguided, but it isn't evil.
One idea that came to mind would be some sort of refugee camp where the folks would be separated from the community at large. However, separation sounds like segregation to an egalitarian ear, and the media would quickly cast the refugee camps as interment camps (if they want to play the Japanese-American WWII card) or concentration camps (if they want to crank the outrage to 11 and play the Nazi card). Thus, that would likely be a non-starter for the Obama crew and political dynamite for others to posit.
Given the lack of interest in enforcing immigration law, the administration would be severely mistrusted by the rightmost 60% of the population in keeping tabs on the Syrians they let in. It would clearly become a campaign issue, as Democrats would try not to look too much like hemophiliacs and Republicans would run the twin gauntlets of not looking soft on terrorism in the primary and not looking like a heartless islamophobe in the general.
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