Posted on 11/20/2015 9:30:25 AM PST by Yashcheritsiy
The battle of the refugees continues in Washington, DC. With 33 state governors (at the time of this writing) refusing to take in any additional refugees, Pres__ent Obama (D-ISIS) has been absolutely flipping his wig, petulantly calling his opponents names while attempting to berate the governors into reversing their decisions. The radical Left has not been negligent to back him up, either. The past couple of days have seen them advance a number of arguments against rejection of the refugees – ranging from the simply wrong to the outright laughable. I'd like to address some of these arguments below.
The most sophisticated argument they have been employing is to rely upon the powers granted to the President to grant entry to refugees under the Refugee Act of 1980. The Act, which revised provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1968 and the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962, delegates to the President the power to grant entry to 10,000 refugees a year, plus additional though unspecified numbers of refugees on an emergency basis. It is unlikely that this act would survive a challenge on its substance in the courts, considering that the courts have typically a dim view of laws which grant the executive broad and ill-defined power to decide what a law means (as opposed to broad powers to merely execute the law as specifically directed by Congress when it crafted the law). Likewise, the act is unconstitutional due to its blurriness on separation of powers (and hence, rightly nullified by the states in toto). Nevertheless, this is the closest thing to a "slam dunk" that the Left can get on this issue.
Problem is, it's not at all apparent that the vast bulk of the "refugees" actually qualify as refugees under this law. The Refugee Act specified that refugees eligible for resettlement had to demonstrate that they are unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin on the basis of a verifiable or well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or because of political opinion. For the Muslim refugees, not a single one of these provisions is met.
Let's go through the list. Are they in danger on the basis of race? Nope. These refugees are all Levantine Arabs, basically racially identical to everyone else in Syria. What about religion? Again, no. The Muslim refugees are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, a group which makes up 75% of the population of Syria, which puts them in the large and non-persecuted majority. Indeed, the Muslim "refugees" are the same sect as ISIS itself. Neither have Sunni Muslims been persecuted by the Alawite/secular regime of Assad.
How about nationality? If they're all Syrians, then they certainly aren't being "persecuted" by their own nation. Neither is there any particular "social group" to which they belong that has been singled out. Lastly, nobody has adduced any discernible political opinions that would single these "refugees" out for detrimental treatment in Syria. They can't even really be said to be "stateless" or dispossessed from their own country, since ISIS only controls about 1/3 of the land area of Syria, and there are regions far away from these to which these "refugees" could easily travel and find shelter.
So essentially, the Muslim "refugees" don't seem to fulfill even a single provision of the Act.
What's ironic is that there ARE "refugees" from this region who DO fulfill the religious and nationality provisions, such as Christians, Yazidis, Ba'hai, Jews, and other persecuted minorities from Syria and Iraq, people who genuinely ARE fleeing almost certain death or enslavement at the hands of ISIS. Yet, Obama has been extremely reticent about granting many of these groups asylum in America. So we see the strange situation where Obama is driving full steam ahead to bring in thousands of "refugees" who don't even meet the basic qualifications of our law, yet is turning away thousands who most definitely do.
The second argument that the Left has worked itself into a tizzy about is the one that says that efforts by Ted Cruz and others to exclude Muslim refugees from entry represent a "religious test" which is unconstitutional. Of course, we should keep in mind that the "religious test" prohibition in the Constitution (Article VI) applies only to holding public office. It doesn't apply to anything else. Indeed, in many cases, for the provisions introduced into our laws on refugees by the Refugee Act to be enforceable, we MUST apply a religious test when it requires determining whether a member of a persecuted religious minority qualifies for refugee status. The very law that left-wingers appeal to in their first argument above ends up completely refuting this second argument.
Next, left-wingers have taken to arguing that it is un-American and against our traditional welcoming of immigrants and refugees for us to refuse entry to this specific set of "refugees." But I would challenge these left-wingers to find a single, solitary instance in American history where we have voluntarily allowed in large numbers of empirically demonstrable and historically proven hostile foreigners. You won't find it. While we've opened our ports to those in genuine need or who wanted to come here to make a new life for themselves, we've never just thrown the doors open for people who have been openly hostile and who have declared their willingness to subvert our society and way of life in favor of replacing it with an alien and hostile culture such as Islam. We've never just opened the gates for people who hate us and want to destroy us.
Look to Europe's mistakes. They threw the doors open to these "refugees," and what did they get? They got a rape jihad, with hundreds of German and Scandinavian women being raped, abused, and even murdered by "refugees" so far. They've gotten riots. They've gotten vandalism and crime. They've gotten open declarations that the "refugees" are going to take over Europe and Islamize it. They've gotten religious triumphalism. And now, as Paris made clear, and as other incidents are continuing to do, they've gotten outright terrorism.
And that's what the left-wingers want to bring here. It has already been established beyond a doubt that at least two of the Paris attackers entered Europe after being processed through Greece as "refugees." Here in America, we've already seen al-Qaeda terrorists who have been caught here after they entered via the refugee program. We've arrested several ISIS members who were plotting attacks and who entered as refugees. Most recently, one refugee who had just been resettled in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, disappeared earlier this week, only to be found in Washington DC today. Even outside the official channels of the refugee resettlement program, we just saw five Syrian "refugees" with fake passports and refugee papers from Europe arrested by Honduras as they tried to travel to the US. Another eight Syrians were caught trying to illegally cross our border into Texas at Laredo.
Clearly, even the "refugees" who aren't actively bombing or shooting anyone yet are still bad news – and there's no historical precedent for America to be foolish enough to take them in.
The next argument is a classic one for the Left – how can we be so heartless as to turn away poor, helpless women and children? Think of all the poor widows and the three-year old orphans that Obama was jibber-jabbering about today!
Problem is, it's all a racket. Have you ever wondered why in those pictures of the "refugees" your see from Europe, nearly all of them are military aged males? It's because nearly all of them are military aged males. Indeed, the demographics are so lopsided that the Syrian women are wondering why all their "men" are leaving them behind to face the dangers of war and genocide and going to a cushy life in Europe. So the large majority of these "refugees" are men, not women and children. Men who, as we have seen above, have generally made a roaring nuisance out of themselves. There's no reason to think that the true numbers of those coming here will be any different.
Then there's this argument – turning away the Syrian "refugees' is just like when America turned away Jewish refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany. Really? The problem for this argument is that there's really no comparison between the at all. To begin with, the Jews were actual refugees – while the Muslim Syrians, at least, don't even qualify for that label. Further, the Jews did not go around raping, stealing, vandalizing, defacing churches, and declaring their intention to conquer their potential host countries in the name of their religion, as the Syrian "refugees" have been doing. If left-wingers can't figure out the difference between the two, and why refusing to take the Jews was a terrible tragedy while refusing to take the Syrians is simply sound public policy, then they aren't competent to even be having this discussion with the rest of America.
Lastly, there's this little argument which I actually hadn't heard used yet until I saw it in an email from a particularly...incompetent...left-winger who emails me every so often. I have since seen it used in a couple of other places. It goes as follows: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees, so if you support turning away the Syrian "refugees," then you hate Jesus and can't be a "real" Christian.
Well...Joseph never raped anyone in his host country of Egypt. Jesus didn't steal from his hosts. Mary didn't vandalize any synagogues or temples while there were there. I doubt the officials in Roman Egypt had any cause to reasonably suspect that the Holy Family might flip out one day and go all Jihad Johnny on them. Argument fail.
In summation, while we see that the Left has managed to throw together quite a number of arguments in favor of accepting the Syrian "refugees," not a single one is actually a good argument. None of them hold any water. All of them are some combination of illogical, untenable, and/or ignorant. There is simply no reason why anybody should find them to be a reason for not supporting the governors and the members of Congress who are trying to prevent a likely national catastrophe from being caused by Trojan Horse terrorists sneaking in with the rest of a larger and quite radicalizable military-aged male population who hates us.
Hmmm....
The anti-Refugee blanket looks a lot like the anti-Immigrant blanket.
Because we want some careful scrutiny of the refugees, to protect against terrorist infiltration, we’re somehow hateful and bigoted.
my brilliant idea:
draft all refugee males 15-65 years of age. Take them to one of our military camps and train them to be a “Free Syria” army, and return them to Syria to free their homeland.
We don’t want them around here terrorizing Americans.
I’m going to use some of these arguments. Thanks for posting!
There is zero reason for the Western world to be taking in any of these so called refugees. How may is Saudi Arabi or the UAE taking? None. They are smart. They don’t want to be overthrown.
Kinda strange but the muzzies who have taken over the hotel in Mali (wherever that is) are making the hostages quote verses from the Koran to make sure they shoot a muzzie by accident. If it is good enuff for the muzzies it should work the same for us. Why are the leftists nuts? I do not understand how common sense seems to have totally deserted them.
i’ve been watching a lot of news and commentary this week, and i’d like to clear up one seeming point of confusion
the poem in the statue of liberty has no more legal or foreign policy weight than graffiti in the mens’ room in a truck stop on i95
there seems to be some who think it’s a binding international treaty or something
Well, from the mouths of stupid left-wingers one would expect stupid left-wing arguments.
This is excellent - thanks for posting. Lays it all out in common sense terms but we can’t expect the liberals to understand it. Defeats their purpose!
If only such an article could be reduced to many many fewer words so that it could be transmitted within an 11-second attention span.
Here are images of Obama”s Orphans.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=palestinian+kids+with+suicide+vests&t=ipad&iax=1&ia=images
Zero reason is right.
Of course the comeback is western civilization is better than those misguided countries and what kind of Christian belief is turning our backs on these poor refugees etc. Well following Christian belief is not supposed to mean suicide.
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