Chilly reception

Fear has come to dominate American discourse on refugees, as it will in any nation where political leadership is lacking and Christian witness is in retreat. Our debate over Syrian refugees has become unmoored from reality, and—with an exploding crisis of Islamic militants attacking civilians first in Europe then in the United States—we are desperate for elected officials who can be statesmen first and leave political stunts at the shoreline.

The crisis that unleashed ISIS on the world is, as Walter Russell Mead noted after the Paris attacks, “in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn.” As a result, the world is reaping a whirlwind refugee crisis and the migration of terror to our shores—once the reason we fought wars over there.

But besides the blatant failings and politicizing of conflict on the Obama left, we now have it on the right. To hear the Fox News commentators and some of the Republican presidential candidates, if you’re not opposed to Syrian refugees, you’re not serious about fighting terror. Yet only weeks before the Paris attacks, Sen. Ted Cruz and others were saying we could take in more Syrian refugees.

Less than 1 percent of the global refugee population gets to apply to come to the United States.

Those politicians will struggle to name a known terrorist who came to the United States as a refugee, because there isn’t one. That’s not to say there couldn’t be, but we have a more urgent problem with those arriving via immigrant visas, like Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino shooters.

Less than 1 percent of the global refugee population gets to apply to come to the United States. And those that do will undergo while overseas a multilevel investigation that involves in-person interviews and biometric screening by a Department of Homeland Security agent. In the past agents have actually visited home villages to corroborate the story of threats leading to a request for asylum. If denied, there’s no appeal.

Immigrant visas, by contrast, can be handled at U.S. embassies and upon arrival in the United States (visa waivers actually may be applied for online), with multiple opportunities to appeal.

In short, we are not Berlin when it comes to taking refugees, and we are not Paris when it comes to ghettoizing them. But we are America, where nearly every one of us has a downtrodden refugee somewhere in the family tree, and we should beware of altering immigration laws in ways that alter our character and rob us of the refugee lifeblood that’s made us the country we are.

In an effort to secure his state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants to change our posture toward receiving refugees in ways that may prove unconstitutional. Only the federal government may regulate our borders, and since 1915 the Supreme Court has sided with it over states on the right to resettle refugees. Texas filed a lawsuit Dec. 2 in U.S. District Court against the Obama administration and the International Rescue Committee over plans to resettle six Syrian refugees in Dallas. Two days later the state withdrew the action, apparently recognizing the legal hurdles. Cruz and Abbott, undeterred, appeared together in Washington on Dec. 8 to introduce a bill in Congress to grant states greater prerogative in reviewing and accepting refugees.

In the meantime it became public that the state’s Health and Human Services Commission had sent a letter to refugee resettlement agencies on Nov. 19, directing them to report to state authorities plans to resettle Syrian refugees and “discontinue” services.

The letter potentially forced the nonprofits, some of them church-based charities operating under a federal contract, to choose between violating federal law or the state’s order. The directive also hampers free exercise of religion for those groups that believe it’s their duty to receive, feed, and house newly arrived refugees—a concept Cruz and Abbott fought for on behalf of religious nonprofits when it came to same-sex marriage initiatives and President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

That same week two Syrian families arrived in Texas. The politicized debate leaves a chilling reception for the refugees—many of whom have suffered under the same enemy we face—and could spell trouble for the resettlement groups aiming to help them.

Email mbelz@wng.org