Even 4-year-old Syrian orphans are too dangerous to welcome to the United States, says New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. What sort of man turns away desperate orphans out of fear?
Four-year-old orphans aside, it is not unreasonable to be concerned about the security challenges posed by Syrian refugees. It requires more than just screening out known radicals, a task which is difficult enough. Ideally, you would want to screen out those who may become disenchanted and radicalized over here, and that is impossible to predict. It does not take many Type I errors to have catastrophic results.
I think that there is rhetorical excess on both sides of the issue. A long time ago, I said that there is a lot of writing that is not designed so much to change anyone’s mind as it is to try to rally people on your own side not to change their minds. That is where I see the “debate” over refugees heading.
If someone can point me to an article on the subject that does not characterize the other point of view as “lunacy” or “irrational,” I would like to see it.
UPDATE: Apparently Megan McArdle and I have similar views.
You have likely already seen it, but Megan McArdle has a post explicitly against the tribal politics around refugees. Then at the end she makes her case for taking more.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-20/six-bad-arguments-for-u-s-to-take-in-syrian-refugees
I was just about to post the same thing. Not only is this a great post on refugee policy, it is a fantastic case for the general policy of treating the other side of an argument with respect.
Terrorists can fly into this country on a tourist visa, and even overstay without being caught if they need more time. So what’s the point of worrying about terrorists among the refugees at all?
Because it is unlikely HELPING thousands of Syrian civil war refugees will have a zero effect on the probability of terrorists attacks and when we had ONE we completely lost our shit.
If the argument is that our government can’t possibly stop anyone from coming, including refugees, because they are utterly useless then that’s fine.
Do we actually need to be screening people for hypothetical future political leanings that might lead them to commit crimes? That’s impossible. It’s not even clear what it means (other than discriminating against people who believe in a fundamentalist view of Islam). We don’t do anything like that when people gain permanent resident status through marriages.
And why is it harder to screen refugees for being radicals than it is to screen people on tourist visas?
I generally support political civility and I think your blog does a great job at a hard task, but it’s so difficult to take the anti-refugee side seriously because every argument advanced for it is so transparently bullshit. It’s like people are defending the TSA’s policies on shoes or liquids. They just make no internal sense.
Most of the problems that are cited as “refugee” risks are really risks of living in an open society. Unless we want to close our borders to tourists, issue travel papers to people and set up internal checkpoints to monitor us all, there is a risk bad people will show up in the country and do bad stuff. Deal with it. Wishing for the state to protect you against those risks is just infantile. Wanting the government to toughen the rules on people dealing with incredible hardship to give you that illusory sense of security is a morally wicked desire. You can explain that in terms as civil as you like, but it’s ultimately a message that people will refuse to hear.
What is the pro-refugee argument? Do tell.
“We don’t do anything like that when people gain permanent resident status through marriages.”
My experience has been that the DO ask those questions. When my wife (came to the US on a student visa, we got married earlier this year) and I were interviewed for her to obtain immigrant status, we were asked a whole host of ridiculous questions. My favorites:
25. Did you, during the period from March 23, 1933 to May 8, 1945, in association with the Nazi Government of Germany… participate in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin or political opinion?
33. Have you ever ordered, incited, called for, committed, assisted, helped with or otherwise participated in the following: Acts involving torture or genocide? Killing any person? Intentionally and severely injuring any person? Engaging in any kind of sexual contact or relations with any person who was being forced or threatened? Limiting or denying any person’s ability to exercise religious beliefs?
34. Have you ever served in, been a member of, assisted in, or participated in any military unit, paramilitary unit, police unit, self-defense unit, vigilante unit, rebel group, guerrilla group, militia, or insurgent organization?
You can see the whole form at https://www.ilw.com/forms/i-698fillable.pdf
You can argue the efficacy of asking people to volunteer accurate information regarding these kinds of questions, but the fact of the matter is the government at least attempts to discover that information. What they do with it, though, is another matter.
I’d also venture to say you’d probably get more than a few interesting responses to questions 33 and 34 from some Syrian refugees.
You’re engaging in the exact rhetorical excess and insulting people who disagree with you that AK is talking about.
“Wishing for the state to protect you against those risks is just infantile.”
Wanting the state to protect you against violence from strangers is infantile? Pretty much everyone expects the state to provide safety and stop or at least minimize the risk of other people from hurting you. that isn’t juvenile at all.
“Wanting the government to toughen the rules on people dealing with incredible hardship to give you that illusory sense of security is a morally wicked desire.”
How is this different from owning private property that explicitly denies access to others who may be facing incredible hardships?
I’d like to hear the pro-refugee types respond to Alain Finkielkraut’s criticism of immigration to France.
“Wanting the state to protect you against violence from strangers is infantile?”
That’s the basic idea of what the state is for, from Hobbes on down.
It depends on the statistics whether it is infantile or not.
But I’m not very receptive to hearing the opinion from the side that wants to take away my self-defense rights.
Well, I guess it takes a logical person. Yes, we’ve lost a lot of rights based on having to treat us all as if we are terrorists based on a very small number of Type 3 errors (Type 3 errors are when you didn’t even address the actual risks because you were too busy treating the rest of us like terrorists just so you wouldn’t look like an oppressor).
There is no reason to mix a human crisis with immigration. Granted, Republicans are doing it from the opposite direction, but what is Obama’s plan to help the refugees within the confines of The Constitution (as we heard on NPR this morning the ACLU is suing people for not accepting Syrians on an equality before the law argument) and then send them back? And how much does it “help” a 4-year old to not accept his 18-34 year old male family member(s)? Are people wanting to adopt 4-year olds and being denied? Come now. How are these refugees even getting over here? Unless they are taking a direct boat from here, they are immigrants, not refugees. And there is no plan to help them and then return them because this is trolling an immigration issue, not a logical response to a refugee crisis. They don’t even have a plan to stop destabilizing risky Muslim countries.
Good article by Megan. I liked the heuristic about commenting, hopefully I can apply it… 🙂
Given that there are ways to help legitimate refugees prior to resorting to resettlement, ones that are possibly more cost effective, avoid terrorism and assimilation risk, and are not irreversible, how is it not *the* rational position to try those first?
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/19/krikorian-refugee-resettlement-costs-12-times-providing-help-region/
I was thinking about the domestic spying recently, probably because Spectre along with almost every other action movie these days has as the plot the turning on of total surveillance in response to false flag attacks. Can we ever stop it? I determined that they are adept at manipulating the non sequitur that “we want security, therefore we must do X.” But why X? There are a million alternatives to X, and the only thing we really know about X is that it has little to do with actual security because (well,l because it has not stopped a single terrorist attack…EVER, and also because) is something Spectre/Hydra really really want- for actual reasons that have nothing to do with security…well, our security, that is..
This is the liberal take on that type of non sequitur. We want to be nice people, therefore we must bring refugees over here. There are million ways to help refugees (like, not destabilizing their country in the first place) that don’t involve the non sequitur of self-flagellation designed primarily to troll the other side of the debate. So, why is the argument that we must accept refugees? Because that is the one thing Republicans don’t want.
I’m sure Playboy is blocked here, so I’m not even going to bother trying to read the whole thing. But if the rest of it is more of the same “think of the children!” sentimentality as in the portion you quoted, I’m not sure I’m missing anything.
The Department of Homeland Security is sufficiently incompetent that the terrorists are getting in no matter what the refugee policy is.
Thus we have two possible outcomes:
1: Ban refugees. No peaceful refugees come in, terrorists come in anyways.
2: Let in refugees. Peaceful refugees enter, and perhaps help finger terrorists. Terrorists come in anyways.
It might be useful to remind ourselves that we live in an open society with many millions of people coming here each year legally for business, educational and tourism purposes. It is preposterously easy to get a few people into our country. I suppose someone could come in as a refugee with bad intentions, but why would they bother, when applying for refugee status is by far the slowest, riskiest and most difficult possible way to get someone in?
So, I guess I would make the case that it actually is unreasonable to be concerned about the security challenges posed by Syrian refugees.
I think the anti-refugee argument includes the fact that the Syrian refugees are not a random mix, but rather predominantly fighting age men. Talking about the horrors of keeping out women and children is largely a bait and switch argument.
There is no duty to take in people based on their neediness. The entire thing is a bait-and-switch. We don’t have to treat it like an immigration argument. And there don’t have to be any terrorist threat at all to say it is perfectly reasonable not to subsidize refugees moving here. The sum total of the pro-refugee argument is “people should be allowed to help refugees if they choose to.”
But, since there is probably a millions times higher probability of having a terrorist among Syrian refugees compared to all other tourists or immigrants or illegal immigrants we could also have a constructive discussion of the last time there was a single coordinated terrorist attack we destabilized Iraq, setting the stage for The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
If people promised not to completely lose their minds after a single terrorist attack and start treating American Citizens like terrorists I’d be more inclined to not treat Syrian refugees like terrorists.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2015/11/everythings-fine-until-bombs-go-off.html
And the White House has just started pushing a plan to distribute tourniquets the same as we do with AEDs. While of value in many scenarios, tourniquets are of most use after traumatic amputations that accompany bombings. This goes double for making them readily available to non-trained personnel, which wall caches would do.
It doesn’t take an intelligence analyst to see that the administration is expecting more bombings.
One problem here is that no one is explaining why any particular number is too generous or stingy. What does it mean to say, “I think 60K is better than 40K?” Is there some formula in the background? Where does that formula come from? What is the basis for negotiation that would give anyone a belief that a compromise would be stable?
And the trouble is that if anyone says, “Let’s do 20K” someone else can always virtue-signal and say, “So stingy! Let’s do 40K. Look how much better a person I am than you; look how much more I care about people less fortunate than myself.”
This always happens and indeed is unavoidable anytime we are arguing about common public expenditures and impacts. That’s why private options would be preferable to everyone except the status-signal seekers.
So one problem here is a political manifestation of the fallacy of the excluded middle.
I want to be humane and generous, but that shouldn’t mean the only two choices are ‘tough luck’ and the functional equivalent of green cards of unlimited tenure and unlimited family reunification. Which is what most people suspect will happen, because no one is trying to assuage these concerns. After all, how many progressives are offering a compromise such as “100K refugees for the duration of the conflict, but then immediate repatriation of everyone, including descendants, no exceptions, upon the establishment of a new political settlement in the region.”
It’d be nice if there were a private way to contribute my own wealth to the establishment, security, and maintenance of a refuge and sanctuary in the region or nearby, without demanding that some of my neighbors be forced to spend money they don’t want to spend, and be forced to accept policies they disfavor.
Something like this had occurred to me as well. The unspecified methodology part, not the tragedy of the commons part, that was pretty astute.
Any inquiry into the origin of arbitrary quantities demonstrates that people aren’t willing to show their hands and/or are just trying to show off.
It’s a general problem that comes up in the study of the theory of games and bargaining. Here are more examples:
Consider the number of people in prison. Someone says, “Our incarceration rate it too high!” But one asks, “Ok, what is the right incarceration rate, and why is that?” No response.
Someone says, “The minimum wage should be raised to $15 to help poor workers earn more.” One asks, “Why not $25 then? What’s so special about $15? Is more better or not?”
Someone says, “Taxes are too high.” (or ‘too low’) One asks, “What should the tax rate be then?”
Believe me, it is very easy to go on and on with this list.
There is a sense where non-arbitrary answers could always be “as high (or low) as optimal”, but then the question is “Optimal according to which yardstick?”
The only way to justify any seemingly arbitrary quantity as a kind of valid political compromise is to be able to demonstrate that it is in fact not totally arbitrary, that it has some kind of special character where one can ‘carve nature at the joints’ or that it is somewhere near the reasonable balance point of countervailing forces or competing values.
The message is that as a result of these features, the compromise is likely to be stable and respected and not attacked again the minute after the cease-fire talks end.
But the problem is that if some political advocate tips their hat in recognition of the competing value, they will neutralize their own game of being always able to show off the fact they are a better person by advocating for even more (or less) of some quantity.
To be able to play the leap-frog game with each other, the virtue-signalers always need to be able to point further along some spectrum.
They can never concede that there is a principled point where one needs to put on the brakes, and so they say that any brakes at all are unprincipled and only the result of having to put up with the evil limits imposed on them by the opposition.
And that’s why no one seems to be able to do anything about the accelerating slide into increasing nonsense occurring on campuses today. An example:
That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This makes sense. I will have to tune my model to be more sensitive to this pattern going forward.
To even wink at the concerns of ‘conservatives’ wouldn’t accomplish the actual goals.
So, I am left to wonder if conservatives are simply equal and opposite in this behavior. I keep coming up with no, not really.