A few (more) words on the refugee issue

Hey, have you read any recent updates on Venezuela?  Last I checked, the shelves were still empty, so the country’ll make a useful thought experiment.

What if:

what if the current low-level repression turned into a shooting war?  — either with the regime firing on protesters, or with protesters becoming rebels?  And what if hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans headed northward, arriving at U.S. border control and demanding asylum, with each intermediate country saying, we’ll let you through but you can’t stay?  In theory we should say, “hey, Panama’s safe, so you should have stopped there” and set up a refugee camp or two until the shooting stops, but would we actually do so?  Would we not be obligated to process them in the usual manner and give them hearings and hear their claims?

And, should it happen that anyone from Venezuela is deemed to automatically be a refugee, it stands to reason that the creation of false Venezuelan passports would be a profitable enterprise indeed, for Mexicans, Honduras, Guatemalans, etc.

This is something we’ve never had to deal with, but this is what’s going on in Germany right now.  This is a completely different set of circumstances, a literal ocean apart, from the U.S. accepting a small fraction of the refugees currently in camps for resettlement.

At the same time, there are four separate issues with respect to the U.S. and refugees:

First, the fact that it seems more compassionate to resettle refugees in the U.S. than fund refugee camps, but it’s not, considering Mark Krikorian’s 12 : 1 ratio, that every refugee helped here is at the cost of many others inadequately housed and fed in camps in the region.  Resettlement is a matter of choosing lottery winners.  That’s not just.

Second, those individuals now in refugee camps may not be ISIS plants, but we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that they’re all peace-loving and support our Western ideals of democracy and equal rights.  This is foolishness, to think that just because one is a refugee one automatically values equal rights.  How to deal with this I’m not entirely certain, and this stretches beyond the question of Syrian refugees, to the entire refugee program, and the entire immigration program, the student visa system, and so on.  Various European countries have “assimilation classes” in which they instruct their students that women have equal rights and are not “asking for it” if they wear short skirts, but I doubt this classroom instruction actually changes minds.

Third, porous borders are a real issue, of much greater concern than vetting refugees.

Fourth, there are fools on twitter and facebook who are now coming up with all kinds of cockamamie ideas, like “rejecting refugees is what ISIS wants because” (the theory being that this’ll drive these refugees into extremism, I guess, or maybe because ISIS will be able to kill them if they stay put, but mostly the because is a “because I said so”) or “we need to take in refugees to save Europe” (because somehow our 100,000 that would have otherwise gone to Europe will make the difference between Europe collapsing under the weight of millions of refugees, or not).  No, no, and no — we cannot resettle 5 million or more Syrians to Europe and the U.S.  Cessation of hostilities and repatriation afterwards are necessary.

So that’s that.