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.
Refugees Who Could Be Us
António Guterres, the head of the U.N. refugee agency, said the crisis was in part “a failure of leadership worldwide.”
“This is not a massive invasion,” he said, noting that about 4,000 people are arriving daily in a continent with more than half a billion inhabitants. “This is manageable, if there is political commitment and will.”
We all know that the world failed refugees in the run-up to World War II. The U.S. refused to allow Jewish refugees to disembark from a ship, the St. Louis, that had reached Miami. The ship returned to Europe, and some passengers died in the Holocaust.