On Syrian Refugees

“It’s so dysfunctional under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It’s so ineffective. It’s so ineffectual that the American people say, we don’t trust them to do anything anymore. So I’m not going to let Syrian refugees, any Syrian refugees in this country.[1]”

- Gov. Chris Christie

“If we allow 9,999 Syrian refugees into the United States, and all of them are good people, but we allow one person in who’s an ISIS killer — we just get one person wrong, we’ve got a serious problem.[2]”

- Senator Marco Rubio

As one of the most contentious issues of the 2016 political debates, President Obama’s decision to welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees fleeing their bloodied homeland has sparked a vein of xenophobia that finds roots within the Cold War. While critics fear that admitting Middle-Easterners will soon lead to domestic acts of terrorism, they have curiously ignored the fact that compassion has long existed as a policy of containment. After all, for most of the latter 20th century, the United States allowed various groups of refugees to settle within its borders — as long as these acts served an anti-communist agenda.

Following Fidel Castro’s establishment of Cuba as a socialist state in 1959, the United States would eventually welcome over 300,000 Cuban refugees[3] through its borders, despite concerns of potential spies and infiltrators. Similarly, over a million Southeast Asian refugees fleeing communist governments also settled in the U.S.[4] (the U.S. was not always so humanitarian in intent however — for example: the U.S. denied asylum to Haitians escaping the dictatorship of pro-U.S. Francois Duvalier, claiming that their grievances were not political, but rather economic[5]).

The reasons here for accepting both Cubans and Southeast Asians appear twofold. First, there was a clear incentive to demonstrate dissatisfaction with communism. The United States, as the anchor of democracy, benefited in proving to the world that its ideological commitments had practical implementations. By accepting these immigrants, America could portray itself as a beacon of freedom, simultaneously painting Marxist institutions as extensions of evil. Second, one could reasonably argue that there stood a moral obligation for the American government to offer security to those most affected by its prolific acts of interventionism — acts that flared up tensions in regions abroad. For Cuba, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis incident immediately come to mind. For Indochina, the United States involved itself within multiple conflicts, performing both open and clandestine military operations that led to the genocide of anti-Communist dissidents.[6]

While the United States no longer considers communism an imminent threat, the past treatment of communism certainly parallels our modern perspective towards radical Islam, and for certain people — the perspective towards the religion of Islam itself. Antagonists of Obama’s pro-refugee platform present the issue as a new one; instead, it is a conflict as old as time. Unavoidably however, there remains a mark throughout history, however tainted by ulterior motives, where offering a helping hand to refugees was viewed as pivotal towards keeping America safe. Upon signing the Refugee of Act of 1980 (which provides for a thorough and lengthy vetting of potential refugees, something that many opponents fail to remember in their hackneyed attacks against the Obama administration), Jimmy Carter stated that it was the “historical policy of the United States to respond to the urgent needs of persons subject to persecution in their homelands.[7]” However we ultimately proceed in regards to Syria and its outflow of distraught civilians, we should be keen to remember that.

[1] 2 http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-prez-gop-debate-syrian-refugees-htmlstory.html

[3] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/12/18/cubas-refugees-pthe-old-american-embassy/

[4] http://www.unhcr.org/43141e9d4.html

[5] http://www.moreorless.net.au/killers/duvalier.html

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/07/why-the-world-should-not-forget-khmer-rouge-and-the-killing-fields-of-cambodia/

[7] http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33881-decades-of-xenophobia-shape-us-response-to-syrian-refugees