Two views
“Most refugees pose absolutely no threat to us, but we simply don’t have a sufficient process for figuring out who each person is and verifying his or her background.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
“Any reading of our history shows our refugee system has paid off and that locking them out has always caused more damage than good.”
Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy expert, CATO Institute.
By the numbers
81: Percent of likely Republican caucus voters in Iowa who oppose accepting Syrian refugees into the U.S.
859,629: Number of refugees accepted into the United States from all over the world since Sept. 11, 2001.
3: Number of those refugees who have been convicted of plotting terror attacks.
0: Number who were successful.
Sources: Quinnipiac poll, Cato Institute
New York billionaire Donald Trump warns Syrian refugees “could be one of the great Trojan horses.” Writing for Fox News, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee denounced President Barack Obama’s “outright dangerous” plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States.
And even Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has assiduously cultivated an image of moderation in a Republican presidential field of conservatives, said this month at the National Press Club in Washington “we understand” those fleeing Syria “are in trouble, but think about putting somebody on our street or in our town or in our country doing us harm.”
Yet as millions of Syrians desperately escape the unspeakable carnage of a civil war that has claimed more than 200,000 lives since 2011, a growing number of experts suggest the rhetorical fears of many Republican presidential candidates are wildly exaggerated.
“These threats could change in the future,” acknowledged Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy expert at the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute in Washington. “But the refugee vetting process is very good. They err on the side of rejecting people.”
The current debate, in which each Republican candidate seems determined to show they will resolutely prevent Islamic State militants from slipping in among refugees trying to reach the safety of America, mirrors a recurring theme in American politics.
From the Japanese in the 1920s to Jewish refugees in the 1930s, and South Vietnamese in 1975, each wave tends to find a welcome in America ranging from indifference to outright hostility.
“In America, we always think of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, which we are,” said Tom Jawetz, vice president of immigration policy for the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress, a non-profit organization in Washington. “But it’s almost always taken us a long time to warm up to each new immigrant flow. The country has always had an initial reaction that has been based largely on fear and xenophobia that in time has looked wrong and short sighted.”
Just a couple of months after many Americans were horrified at the sight of a drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach as his family fled the conflict, the Islamic militant attacks in Paris two weeks ago which killed at least 130 people dramatically reduced sympathy for the plight of those refugees.
A new Quinnipiac University poll of 600 Iowa Republicans likely to vote in that state’s February’s caucuses shows 81 percent oppose accepting Syrian refugees. While the poll shows those Republicans likely to vote in the state caucuses are more conservative than typical voters, they are the ones who have a large say in next year’s GOP presidential nominee.
In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the Republican controlled U.S. House brushed aside an Obama veto threat and voted, 289-137, to temporarily halt the refugee program while insisting FBI Director James Comey declare each refugee will not pose a threat to the United States. The Senate has not yet acted on the bill.
House Republicans who backed the measure included Mike Turner of Dayton, Jim Jordan of Urbana, Steve Chabot of Cincinnati, and Brad Wenstrup of Cincinnati. Defending the vote in an opinion piece for CNN, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., contended “most refugees pose absolutely no threat to us, but we simply don’t have a sufficient process for figuring out who each person is and verifying his or her background.”
Yet in a report released this month, Nowrasteh wrote since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, only three of the 859,629 refugees accepted into the United States from all over the world have been convicted of plotting terrorist attacks — all of which were to take place outside the United States and none which succeeded.
The White House and independent analysts say the security checks are rigorous, last as long as two years and include multiple personal interviews and background examinations, leading Jawetz to say “there is no more difficult way” to enter the United States “than through the refugee program.”
The White House argument is resonating with Democrats, at least Iowa. Unlike their Republican counterparts, 81 percent of Iowa Democrats likely to vote in the Feb. 1 state caucuses support accepting Syrian refugees, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll.
Historically, many refugees fleeing persecution from the Nazis, Communists or Russian pogroms throughout the decades have risen to the pinnacle of American business, entertainment and politics.
They include former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger from Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler; Andrew Grove, onetime chief executive officer of Intel who escaped Hungary after the 1956 Soviet invasion; Carlos Gutierrez, former chief executive officer of the Kellogg Company who fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and Louis B. Mayer, founder of MGM studios, whose Jewish family left Russia in 1887.
But those success stories have not stopped efforts — usually launched by Congress or governors — from trying to impose restrictions on immigrants trying to reach the safety of the United States.
In 1924, alarmed at the Communist seizure of power in Russia, the spread of the Communist movement into Central Europe and Asia, and the controversy over the 1921 murder conviction of Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Congress overwhelmingly approved a sweeping anti-immigration bill that sharply curbed Eastern European immigration and prohibited Japanese immigration.
Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill, although “he felt the exclusion of Asians and the direct rejection of the Japanese was unnecessarily hostile and dangerous,” said Amity Shlaes, author of Coolidge, a 2013 biography of the nation’s 30th president.
“Coolidge warned explicitly that the Japanese exclusion would have repercussions and said he would have vetoed that exclusion if” it had not been part of the larger anti-immigration bill, she said.
“Lawmakers of the period saw a chance that the revolution happening elsewhere would happen here, too, especially if workers here could not find jobs, as had happened after World War I,” Shlaes said. “Reassuring U.S. workers was the goal here, whatever one thinks of the method.”
The same ferocious debate erupted in the spring of 1975 after North Vietnamese troops toppled the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon, prompting hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to flee.
The Democratic-controlled U.S. House initially rejected providing $177 million to allow them to settle in the U.S., prompting President Gerald Ford to call the vote “not worthy of a people which has lived by the philosophy symbolized in the Statue of Liberty” and which “reflects fear and misunderstanding rather than charity and compassion.”
When California Gov. Jerry Brown said he did not want any Vietnamese refugees to enter his state, he only relented when Ford adviser Julia Taft threatened to “announce that the governor did not want any church, synagogue, family, former military family in California to be able to help these people.”
Eventually, roughly 131,000 South Vietnamese entered the country, including Lien-Hang Nguyen, a prominent professor at history at the University of Kentucky who, at age five months, was whisked out of South Vietnam by her family.
“Any reading of our history shows our refugee system has paid off and that locking them out has always caused more damage than good,” Nowrasteh said. “The damage to our reputation, the damage to human rights in the world, and the locking out of millions of people who could have been productive citizens because of some temporary local fear … has always caused more damage.”
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