By Dan McLaughlin
Saturday, January 28, 2017
President Trump has ordered a temporary, 120-day halt to
admitting refugees from seven countries, all of them war-torn states with
majority-Muslim populations: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and
Somalia. He has further indicated that, once additional screening provisions
are put in place, he wants further refugee admissions from those countries to
give priority to Christian refugees over Muslim refugees. Trump’s order is, in
characteristic Trump fashion, both ham-handed and underinclusive, and
particularly unfair to allies who risked life and limb to help the American war
efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is also not the dangerous and radical
departure from U.S. policy that his liberal critics make it out to be. His
policy may be terrible public relations for the United States, but it is fairly
narrow and well within the recent tradition of immigration actions taken by the
Obama administration.
First, let’s put in context what Trump is actually doing.
The executive order, on its face, does not discriminate between Muslim and
Christian (or Jewish) immigrants, and it is far from being a complete ban on
Muslim immigrants or even Muslim refugees. Trump’s own stated reason for giving
preference to Christian refugees is also worth quoting:
Trump was asked whether he would
prioritize persecuted Christians in the Middle East for admission as refugees,
and he replied, “Yes.”
“They’ve been horribly treated,” he
said. “Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least
very tough, to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come
in, but if you were a Christian it was almost impossible. And the reason that
was so unfair — everybody was persecuted, in all fairness — but they were
chopping off the heads of everybody, but more so the Christians. And I thought
it was very, very unfair.
“So we are going to help them.”
Trump isn’t making this up; Obama-administration policy
effectively discriminated
against persecuted religious-minority Christians from Syria (even while
explicitly admitting that ISIS was pursuing a policy of genocide against Syrian
Christians), and the response from most of Trump’s liberal critics has been
silence:
The United States has accepted
10,801 Syrian refugees, of whom 56 are Christian. Not 56 percent; 56 total, out
of 10,801. That is to say, one-half of 1 percent.
The BBC says that 10 percent of all
Syrians are Christian, which would mean 2.2 million Christians. . . . Experts
say [one] reason for the lack of Christians in the makeup of the refugees is
the makeup of the camps. Christians in the main United Nations refugee camp in
Jordan are subject to persecution, they say, and so flee the camps, meaning
they are not included in the refugees referred to the U.S. by the U.N.
“The Christians don’t reside in
those camps because it is too dangerous,” [Nina Shea, director of the Hudson
Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom] said. “They are preyed upon by other
residents from the Sunni community, and there is infiltration by ISIS and
criminal gangs.”
“They are raped, abducted into
slavery and they are abducted for ransom. It is extremely dangerous; there is
not a single Christian in the Jordanian camps for Syrian refugees,” Shea said.
Liberals are normally the first people to argue that
American policy should give preferential treatment to groups that are oppressed
and discriminated against, but because Christians are the dominant religious
group here — and the bêtes noires of
domestic liberals — there is little liberal interest in accommodating U.S.
refugee policy to the reality on the ground in Syria. So long as Obama could
outsource religious discrimination against Christian refugees to Jordan and the
U.N., his supporters preferred the status quo to admitting that Trump might
have a point.
On the whole, 2016 was the first time in a decade when
the United States let
in more Muslim than Christian refugees, 38,901 overall, 75 percent of them
from Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, all countries on Trump’s list — and all
countries in which the United States has been actively engaged in drone strikes
or ground combat over the past year. Obama had been planning to dramatically
expand that number, to 110,000, in 2017 — only after he was safely out of
office.
This brings us to a broader point: The United States in
general, and the Obama administration in particular, never had an open-borders
policy for all refugees from everywhere, so overwrought rhetoric about Trump
ripping down Lady Liberty’s promise means comparing him to an ideal state that
never existed. In fact, the Obama administration completely stopped processing
refugees from Iraq for six months in 2011 over concerns about terrorist
infiltration, a step nearly identical to Trump’s current order, but one that
was met with silence and indifference by most of Trump’s current critics.
Only two weeks ago,
Obama revoked a decades-old “wet foot, dry foot” policy of allowing entry to
refugees from Cuba who made it to our shores. His move, intended to signal an
easing of tensions with the brutal Communist dictatorship in Havana, has
stranded scores of refugees in Mexico and Central America, and Mexico last
Friday deported the first 91 of them to Cuba. This, too, has no claim on the
conscience of Trump’s liberal critics. After all, Cuban Americans tend to vote
Republican.
Even more ridiculous and blinkered is the suggestion that
there may be something unconstitutional about refusing entry to refugees or
discriminating among them on religious or other bases (a reaction that was
shared at first by some Republicans, including Mike Pence, when Trump’s plan
was announced in December 2015). There are plenty of moral and political
arguments on these points, but foreigners have no right under our Constitution
to demand entry to the United States or to challenge any reason we might have
to refuse them entry, even blatant religious discrimination. Under Article I,
Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress’s powers in this area are plenary, and
the president’s powers are as broad as the Congress chooses to give him. If
liberals are baffled as to why even the invocation of the historically
problematic “America First” slogan by Trump is popular with almost two-thirds
of the American public, they should look no further than people arguing that
foreigners should be treated by the law as if they were American citizens with
all the rights and protections we give Americans.
Liberals are likewise on both unwise and unpopular ground
in sneering at the idea that there might be an increased risk of radical
Islamist terrorism resulting from large numbers of Muslims entering the country
as refugees or asylees. There have been many such cases in Europe, ranging from
terrorists (as in the Brussels attack) posing as refugees to the infiltration of
radicals and the radicalization of new entrants. The 9/11 plotters, several of
whom overstayed their visas in the U.S. after immigrating from the Middle East
to Germany, are part of that picture as well. Here in the U.S., we have had a
number of terror attacks carried out by foreign-born Muslims or their children.
The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing were children
of asylees; the Times Square bomber was a Pakistani immigrant; the underwear
bomber was from Nigeria; the San Bernardino shooter was the son of Pakistani
immigrants; the Chattanooga shooter was from Kuwait; the Fort Hood shooter was
the son of Palestinian immigrants. All of this takes place against the backdrop
of a global movement of radical Islamist terrorism that kills tens of thousands
of people a year in terrorist attacks and injures or kidnaps tens of thousands
more.
There are plenty of reasons not to indict the entire
innocent Muslim population, including those who come as refugees or asylees
seeking to escape tyranny and radicalism, for the actions of a comparatively
small percentage of radicals. But efforts to salami-slice the problem into
something that looks like a minor or improbable outlier, or to compare this to
past waves of immigrants, are an insult to the intelligence of the public. The
tradeoffs from a more open-borders posture are real, and the reasons for
wanting our screening process to be a demanding one are serious.
Like it or not, there’s a war going on out there, and
many of its foot soldiers are ideological radicals who wear no uniform and live
among the people they end up attacking. If your only response to these issues
is to cry “This is just xenophobia and bigotry,” you’re either not actually
paying attention to the facts or engaging in the same sort of intellectual
beggary that leads liberals to refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal
immigrants. Andrew Cuomo declared this week, “If there is a move to deport
immigrants, I say then start with me” — because his grandparents were immigrants.
This is unserious and childish: President Obama deported over 2.5 million
people in eight years in office, and I didn’t see Governor Cuomo getting on a
boat back to Italy.
Conservatives have long recognized these points — which
is another way of saying that a blank check for refugee admissions is no more a
core principle of the Right than it is of the Left.
A more trenchant critique of Trump’s order is that he’s
undercutting his own argument by how narrow the order is. Far from a “Muslim
ban,” the order applies to only seven of the world’s 50 majority-Muslim
countries. Three of those seven (Iran, Syria, and Sudan) are designated by the
State Department as state sponsors of terror, but the history of terrorism by
Islamist radicals over the past two decades — even state-sponsored terrorism –
is dominated by people who are not
from countries engaged in officially recognized state-sponsored terrorism. The
9/11 hijackers were predominantly Saudi, and a significant number of other
attacks have been planned or carried out by Egyptians, Pakistanis, and people
from the various Gulf states. But a number of these countries have more
significant business and political ties to the United States (and in some cases
to the Trump Organization as well), so it’s more inconvenient to add them to
the list. Simply put, there’s no reason to believe that the countries on the
list are more likely to send us terrorists than the countries off the list.
That said, the seven states selected do include most of the influx of refugees and do present particular
logistical problems in vetting the backgrounds of refugees. If Trump’s goal is
simply to beef up screening after a brief pause, he’s on firmer ground.
The moral and strategic arguments against Trump’s policy
are, however, significant. America’s open-hearted willingness to harbor
refugees from around the world has always been a source of our strength, and
sometimes an effective tool deployed directly against hostile foreign
tyrannies. Today, for example, the chief adversary of Venezuela’s oppressive
economic policies is a website run by a man who works at a Home Depot in
Alabama, having been granted political asylum here in 2005. And the refugee
problem is partly one of our own creation. My own preference for Syrian
refugees, many of them military-age males whom Assad is trying to get out of
his country, has been to arm them, train them, and send them back, after the
tradition of the Polish and French in World War II and the Czechs in World War
I. But that requires support that neither Trump nor Obama has been inclined to
provide, and you can’t seriously ask individual Syrians to fight a suicidal
two-front war against ISIS and the Russian- and Iranian-backed Assad without
outside support. So where else can they go?
Also, some people seeking refugee status or asylum may
have stronger claims on our gratitude. Consider some of the first people denied
entry under the new policy:
The lawyers said that one of the
Iraqis detained at Kennedy Airport, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, had worked on
behalf of the United States government in Iraq for ten years. The other, Haider
Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, was coming to the United States to join his wife,
who had worked for an American contractor, and young son, the lawyers said.
These specific cases may or may not turn out to be as
sympathetic as they appear; these are statements made by lawyers filing a class
action, who by their own admission haven’t even spoken to their clients. But in
a turn of humorous irony that undercut some of the liberal narrative, it turns
out that Darweesh told the press that he likes Trump.
Certainly, we should give stronger consideration to
refugee or asylum claims from people who are endangered as a result of their
cooperation with the U.S. military. But such consideration can still be
extended on a case-by-case basis, as the executive order explicitly permits:
“Notwithstanding a suspension pursuant to subsection (c) of this section or
pursuant to a Presidential proclamation described in subsection (e) of this
section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case
basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration
benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise
blocked.”
Trump also seems to have triggered some unnecessary chaos
at the airports and borders around the globe by signing the order without a lot
of adequate advance notice to the public or to the people charged with
administering the order. That’s characteristic of his early administration’s
public-relations amateur hour, and an unnecessary, unforced error. Then again,
the core policy is one he broadcast to great fanfare well over a year ago, so
this comes as no great shock.
The American tradition of accepting refugees and asylees
from around the world, especially from the clutches of our enemies, is a proud
one, and it is a sad thing to see that compromised. And while Middle Eastern
Christians should be given greater priority in escaping a region where they are
particularly persecuted, the next step in this process should not be one that
seeks to permanently enshrine a preference for Christians over Muslims
generally. But our tradition has never been an unlimited open-door policy, and
President Trump’s latest moves are not nearly such a dramatic departure from
the Obama administration as Trump’s liberal critics (or even many of his fans)
would have you believe.
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