Republican leaders say they simply want to tighten security to keep America safe. That’s an echo of what American officials claimed in the late 1930s and early 1940s as they blocked the entry of Jewish refugees.
Breckinridge Long, then a senior State Department official in charge of visas, warned that Nazi spies were trying to enter the U.S. as refugees. In the name of security, he established vetting rules so strict that few Jews could pass.
The Civilized and the Damned
The massacre proved Voltaire’s observation — “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
.. Sadly, it’s been done before, when a ship full of Jews fleeing certain death at the hands of the Nazis was turned away off the Florida coast in 1939, a move that reflected polls that most Americans wanted to keep them out.
.. A great crisis can act as a valuable filter, a winnowing that separates true leaders from all the rest, the courageous from the cowards.
In Defense of Refugees
Let’s start with the moral point: Unlike the many tough and controversial tactics the Bush and Obama administrations have used in combatting terrorism, what’s going on now involves action directed at concededly innocent people. Even the CIA’s interrogation program waterboarded people believed to be Al Qaeda’s senior operational leadership. The tens of thousands of people governors are pledging to keep out of their states are, by contrast, innocent victims of the very people we are fighting. Nobody contests this. Nobody argues that they are, in fact, an army of ISIS operatives. The concern, rather, is that some tiny percentage of them will be sleeper operatives infiltrated into a much larger group of people deserving of our protection.
.. Let’s concede the point that our rigorous and slow screening system will fail in some small percentage of cases and that we will admit some number of people who turn out to be bad. If that is enough to stop all Syrian refugees from finding shelter here, why do we grant visas—and we grant many of them—to people from that part of the world at all? Why do we let students come here from the Persian Gulf? Why do we let tourists come here from just about anywhere? And, more to the point, why have we let refugees come here from all sorts of nasty places in the world? Each refugee community brings with it a certain number of bad apples. But I wouldn’t give back the Mariel boatlift, though it involved a fair number of Cuban criminals.
In Republican Debate, Candidates Battle Sharply on Immigration
Mr. Cruz suggested donors were tone-deaf on the issue because they did not appreciate the economic impact of what he said was illegal immigrants’ pushing down American wages. “The politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande,” he said, adding that the news coverage would also differ if undocumented immigrants were seeking journalism jobs.
.. Mr. Cruz also argued repeatedly for big government changes, but stumbled notably when he pledged to eliminate five major federal agencies and then struggled to name them — a moment that recalled another Texan, then-Gov. Rick Perry, in a debate during the 2012 presidential race.