In a recent UPI article, senior legal writer Michael Kirkland poses the question, "Is the U.S. turning its back on Syrian refugees?"
Sen. Dick Durban (D-Ill.) thinks so. According to the article, "Durbin said 'overly broad immigration bars' in the United States are preventing legitimate Syrian refugees from reaching the United States but President Obama has the power to do something about it."
How curious that one of our senators is complaining that the president has not taken enough executive action in his end-arounds of the constitutionally granted legislative powers assigned exclusively to Congress. The past couple of years have seen example after example of this administration substituting its preferences for those of Congress through extra-legal memoranda, many of which violate the plain language of both the Immigration and Nationality Act and Administrative Procedure Act. (By way of example, see "An Examination of the USCIS Parole-in-Place Policy".)
But this time, even the administration has shown the wisdom to refrain from going where angels fear to tread.
There is no doubt that the Syrian war is a great tragedy. There is also no doubt that the on-the-ground reality in Syria is quite complex, with Saudi Arabia and Iran using terrorist groups (including Sunni Al Qaeda affiliates and Shiite Hezbollah fighters) as proxies in what is increasingly a sectarian war and not simply a war to oust the brutal Bashar al-Assad as leader. These complexities are why the United States has refrained from any significant involvement in the war: How do you know who to trust and into whose hands weapons and materiel will flow?
These same complexities should give us great pause before admitting Syrian refugees onto our soil. According to the article:
Even tiny Lebanon, which has its own factions constantly on the verge of violence, "is hosting more than 860,000 Syrian refugees, more than 20 percent of Lebanon's population," Durbin said. "This is equivalent to the United States accepting 60 million refugees."
The analogy is sorely inapt. Lebanon shares a long land border and an equally long and troubled history with Syria, which for years considered it a client state. What is more, Lebanon's shadow government is the terrorist group Hezbollah. It becomes, then, a natural place of refuge for the families of Shi'a fighters who remain in Syria battling their opponents.
Sen. Durbin and a number of others also have observed that nearly half of those displaced are children. True, but it is unlikely that we would accept only children in our refugee program. More likely the United States would seek to accept and resettle whole families — including males of fighting age, such as the Shi'a men mentioned above.
Can we be sure we know who they are? I doubt it. We have too many examples of failure in that regard. Minnesota, which has become home to thousands of Somali refugees, is also home to a shocking number of young Islamist extremists who have chosen to ally themselves with al-Shabaab. This is well-documented in a Time magazine article from September.
Nor is the Somali experience an isolated case. Five Iraqi men originally admitted as refugees were arrested for a horrific rape in Colorado Springs in August 2012. The trial of one of them is still ongoing.
The fact is that our government has shown repeatedly that it does not possess the tools or perhaps the perspicacity to carefully discriminate between the "legitimate" refugees about whom Sen. Durbin anguishes and the dross who, in point of fact, are often the happy recipients of American openness and good intentions. Consider the Boston bombers.