Hey, have you read any recent updates on Venezuela? \u00a0Last I checked, the shelves were still empty, so the country\u2019ll make a useful thought experiment.<\/p>\n
What if:<\/p>\n
what if the current low-level repression turned into a shooting war? \u00a0\u2014 either with the regime firing on protesters, or with protesters becoming rebels? \u00a0And 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\u2019ll let you through but you can\u2019t stay? \u00a0In theory we should say, \u201chey, Panama\u2019s safe, so you should have stopped there\u201d and set up a refugee camp or two until the shooting stops, but would we actually do so? \u00a0Would we not be obligated to process them in the usual manner and give them hearings and hear their claims?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This is something we\u2019ve never had to deal with, but this is what\u2019s going on in Germany right now. \u00a0This 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.<\/p>\n
At the same time, there are four separate issues with respect to the U.S. and refugees:<\/p>\n
First, the fact that it seems more compassionate to resettle refugees in the U.S. than fund refugee camps, but it\u2019s not, considering Mark Krikorian\u2019s 12 : 1 ratio, that every refugee helped here is at the cost of many others inadequately housed and fed in camps in the region. \u00a0Resettlement is a matter of choosing lottery winners. \u00a0That\u2019s not just.<\/strong><\/p>\n Second, those individuals now in refugee camps may not be ISIS plants, but we cannot delude ourselves<\/strong> into thinking that they\u2019re all peace-loving and support our Western ideals of democracy and equal rights. \u00a0This is foolishness, to think that just because one is a refugee one automatically values equal rights. \u00a0How to deal with this I\u2019m 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. \u00a0Various European countries have \u201cassimilation classes\u201d in which they instruct their students that women have equal rights and are not \u201casking for it\u201d if they wear short skirts, but I doubt this classroom instruction actually changes minds.<\/p>\n Third, porous borders<\/strong> are a real issue, of much greater concern than vetting refugees.<\/p>\n Fourth, there are fools on twitter and facebook who are now coming up with all kinds of cockamamie ideas, like \u201crejecting refugees is what ISIS wants because\u201d (the theory being that this\u2019ll drive these refugees into extremism, I guess,\u00a0or maybe because ISIS will be able to kill them if they stay put, but mostly the because is a \u201cbecause I said so\u201d) or \u201cwe need to take in refugees to save Europe\u201d (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). \u00a0No, no, and no \u2014 we cannot<\/strong> resettle 5 million or more Syrians to Europe and the U.S. \u00a0Cessation of hostilities and repatriation afterwards are necessary<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s that.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hey, have you read any recent updates on Venezuela? \u00a0Last I checked, the shelves were still empty, so the country\u2019ll make a useful thought experiment. What if: what if the current low-level repression turned into a shooting war? \u00a0\u2014 either with the regime firing on protesters, or with protesters becoming rebels? \u00a0And what if hundreds, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[449],"class_list":["post-3262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-refugees"],"yoast_head":"\n