Age of the Geek

7 Reasons It's Dumb For Governors To Turn Away Syrian Refugees
     Syria, for those of you that need a refresher, has been locked in a civil war since 2011. It’s a seed of the Arab Spring that grew to be particularly thorny. While President Bashar al-Assad was busy fighting against rebel forces, ISIS came in and laid claim to a big chunk of the country’s rural territory. Throw in a second rebellion from northern Kurdish groups and you’ve got 17 million people caught in the middle of a brutal four-way conflict.
     Syrian families live in danger of chemical weapons attacks from their president, beheadings from the terrorists that set up in their backyard and forced recruitment of their children into one of the militia groups. Shockingly enough, some of them have opted to leave the country.
     Actually, a lot of them have. About four million or so.
     Some of those four million are coming here to the United States, which has apparently become a matter of controversy following ISIS’s recent attack on Paris.
     Thirty governors, including our own Terry Branstad, have loudly declared that they will not accept Syrian refugees into their states. Because obviously the best way to combat ISIS is to make it harder for the people they terrorize the most to escape them. (One)
     Yep. The last thing we would ever want to do is allow native Syrians with no love for any of the brutal monsters ruining their home to immerse themselves into our culture. It would be terrible if stability ever returned to the region, allowing those families to return to their homeland with fond memories of American hospitality. That certainly wouldn’t be a positive step for Middle East relations.
     In case it’s not apparent. That’s sarcasm.
     Fortunately, our governors are there to protect us from such an outcome.
     “The State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack in Paris,” wrote Texas Gov. Greg Abbot in a letter to the White House.
     Well, I suppose after such a tragedy that’s a reasonable response, at least until you realize that governors don’t actually have the authority to prevent refugees from moving to their states. (Two)
     The authority to grant admission of refugees is explicitly given to the president and the 14th Amendment gives those refugees the same protections it does to everybody else.
     In their opposition to the president, these governors are disregarding the Constitution and overstepping their bounds. Wait, that sounds familiar…
     At the very most, governors can direct state agencies to not work with refugees once they are admitted to the United States, which is little more than a token gesture of infantile petulance.
     But hey, anything to keep America safe. After all, the Paris attackers were Syrian refugees. Oh wait… no, that’s wrong. One of them got into the country on a stolen Syrian passport, but most of them were French nationals from elsewhere. (Three)
     Yes, the same thought process that gave us the Iraq War after 15 Saudi Arabians and a handful of other non-Iraqi hijacked planes on 9/11 is now back and dictating Republican refugee policy.
     Speaking of 9/11, the refugee admission program was retooled after the attack. In other words, Republicans are trying to convince people that the refugee screening policy created during the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11 is hopelessly ineffective. (Four)
     That process, by the way, involves a referral from the United Nations, multiple security screenings and takes at least a year. We aren’t talking about a boatload of random immigrants spilling into New York.
     Which brings us to the next level of absurdity about this entire situation.
     Protecting America by keeping out Syrian refugees is like protecting your house by locking a tiny window in your attic. Visas are still a thing and come in a wide variety of flavors. And that’s if you want to get in legally. Sit down because this may shock you. A sizable chunk of people living in America today didn’t get into the country legally. (Five)
     If ISIS wants to get people into the country, there are far easier and more reliable ways to do it than getting in as a refugee.
     The 9/11 hijackers weren’t refugees. The Paris attackers weren’t even refugees.
     You know who else weren’t refugees? Adam Lanza, James Holmes and Dylann Roof. (Six)
     Or did everybody just forget that we’ve had more than 60 of our own mass shootings in the United States since the year 2000? And that’s using the strictest definition I could find, with three or more killed. Stretch that definition to three or more injured, and there have been 325 shootings just this year, the latest of which happened in Des Moines.
     In a flash of brilliant lack of self-awareness, one Texas official warned that we shouldn’t allow refugees into the country because of how easy it is to get a gun.
     What exactly are we scared of? That our next mass shooting might not come at the hands of a red-blooded American?
     This column is getting a little long, so let’s wrap it up with a few more quick facts.
     • The United States has already admitted 1,800 refugees into the country, of which about 2 percent are single men of combat age. This means there could be as many as 36 people in the United States right now that escaped from a war-torn country to seek out a better life.
     • This one will give the conspiracy nuts something to chew on. Obama is finishing out his last year in office by increasing the number of Syrian refugees to at least 10,000. Of course, that’s still just a fraction of the tens of thousands of refugees we bring in every year. The United States has an annual cap of 70,000 refugees, divided among regions across the world. President Obama plans on raising that cap to an even 100,000.
     • Among those refugees include about 40,000 from Iraq over the last three years. In case you’ve forgotten, Iraq is that other country ISIS has torn a big chunk out of. One would think that Iraqi refugees would pose the same risk of ISIS infiltration as Syrian refugees, yet nobody seems terribly concerned about them.
     • Speaking of refugees from other nations, the Tsarnaev brothers came to the U.S. from Kyrgyzstan after their father sought asylum in 2004. Here we actually do have an example of refugees committing an attack, and yet I don’t recall any push to stop Kyrgyzstan immigration after the Boston Marathon bombing.
     • By the way, not that it’s a competition, but France will be accepting 30,000 more Syrian refugees over the next two years, and they are a fifth our size. Germany has already brought in more than 50,000. (Not that their motives are entirely pure. An influx of refugees may serve as a solution to the country’s impending demographic crisis.)
     The bottom line is this.
     The call to deny refugees is nothing more than an overreaction to score cheap political points. The humanitarian need is great and the threat is negligible. This opposition is nothing more than baseless political theater.
     At least I hope it is, because there are state senators out there suggesting we repeat atrocities not seen since World War II. A Tennessee state senator wants to send the National Guard to forcibly evict the thirty-some refugees from his state. Another in Rhode Island is suggesting refugees be segregated into interment camps.
     These horrific ideas will do nothing to keep us safe. They will, however, serve as great recruitment tools for ISIS.
     In case the word “terrorists” wasn’t obvious enough, ISIS wants to scare people. They want the world to be so afraid of Muslims that they have nowhere else to turn but their Caliphate. This kind of logic-free fear mongering does nothing but play directly into their hands. (Seven)
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is not inclined to let terrorists win.