The National Review’s Somali-Syrian Refugee Comparison Is Extremely Disingenuous

First, some history. The United States been a destination for refugees since the Puritans fled England for Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s. As Irish fled the Irish Potato Famine and Jews fled the Russian pograms, we became a nation of refugees. But not everyone was happy with this. Xenophobia took center stage and the Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted immigration for decades. We turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, sending them to their deaths.

Then came the Cold War, which pitted the United States against the Soviet Union. As the refugees of WWII were augmented with refugees of our Cold War military strategy, the U.S. faced a problem. How could we be a bastion of freedom if we closed our doors to those fleeing their countries in search of freedom? How could we portray ourselves as the “good guys” when our military actions led to refugee crises we refused to fix? And so, through a series of immigration reform bills, we opened our doors to refugees once again.

Cubans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians—refugees of the Cold War streamed to our shores by the tends of thousands. Haitian, Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan refugees came as well, along with Afghans and Iranians. The end of the Cold War didn’t mean an end to world conflict, and it didn’t mean an end to the flow of refugees, either. Burmese, Somalis, and Iraqis came to the U.S. in the decades that followed, fleeing war in their home countries.

And so it was with a bit of surprise that I came upon a National Review article by Ian Tuttle using Somali refugees as a model for understanding the consequences of accepting Syrian refugees. I had to wonder—is Tuttle unaware of how many diverse refugee populations we have accepted since WWII? Why not use Iraqi refugees as a model? Or Burmese, or Vietnamese, or Cuban refugees? But no, Tuttle had to compare Syrian refugees to Somali refugees and then argue that accepting Syrian refugees would be a bad move.

Let’s look at Tuttle’s argument:

For Minnesota, the arrival of Somali refugees — recently, up to 12 percent of the annual national intake, not including those settled elsewhere who then move to Minnesota — has not been an obvious boon. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported last November:

The num­ber of So­ma­li adults and children who participated in the state’s fam­i­ly cash as­sist­ance program jumped 34 percent from 2008 to 2013, to 5,950. At the same time, food assist­ance participation increased 98 percent, to 17,300 adults and children, which does not include U.S.-born Somalis.

Shelters, food banks, and local charities serve thousands of Somalis annually.

First of all, the reason the number of Somali immigrants on cash assistance increased between 2008 and 2013 was the arrival of a second wave of refugees. The article Tuttle quotes from makes this clear, but Tuttle leaves this fact out, which is disingenuous. But second, it’s common knowledge that it takes resources to settle refugees on the front end. If you were told you had three hours—or even a weak—to pack up to leave home and travel across the world and start a new life, you’d need help too—especially if your bank accounts were frozen and you could only take what you could carry. No one contests this.

What about in the long run? According to the Washington Post:

Refugees often lack the language skills necessary to do higher-paid work, and so a big influx of refugees into a job market can cause wages at the lower-end of the spectrum to fall.

But, in the longer run, refugees appear to play an outsized role in creating new jobs, and even raising the wages of natives. One reason is that refugees appear more likely than other groups to open small businesses.

Now it is true that Somalis are doing less well than other immigrant groups, but that in itself is relevant to this discussion—why did Tuttle choose an immigrant group struggling disproprotionately with poverty and unemployment as a comparison? I suppose the answer is fairly obvious—it appears that Tuttle wanted to find a way to paint Syrian refugees in the worst light possible, and to do so he chose one of the refugee groups that has struggled the most with economic integration as a comparison, rather than one of many other refugee groups that has not faced such an uphill climb. 

Rather than saying “Somali refugees are struggling with poverty, so Syrian refugees will too,” Tuttle should ask why Somalis are struggling with poverty. After all, it is clearly not simply because they are refugees, because if it was we would expect to see other refugee groups struggling at the same rate, and we don’t. 

And here we get to one of the biggest problems with comparing Syrian refugees to Somali refugees—their education levels are completely different. Only 7% of Somali refugees over 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher while a full 39% of Syrian immigrants over 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher (source and source). The literacy rate in Somalia is 37.8% while the literacy rate in Syria is 84.1% (source and source), which is not surprising given the huge difference in rates of school attendance (here and here). We can see immediately that it is unlikely Syrian refugees would struggle economically to the extent that Somali refugees do.

Somalia has been wracked by civil war since 1986. Syria’s civil war only began in 2011. It should be pretty obvious that that would matter when it comes to things like education, job experience, and skills, and yet Tuttle overlooks this entirely.

Let’s look at Tuttle’s other main point:

And there is the terror problem. To date, more than 60 young Somali men and women have left Minnesota to join al-Shabaab, the Islamic State, and other Islamic terrorist organizations in the Middle East and Africa. Others have been stopped at local airports attempting to make the journey, and prosecutions for sending money to terrorist outfits abroad are not uncommon. 

I’m really not sure why this is so hard to understand, but apparently it is, so let me say it again: An individual who grows up in an impoverished and stigmatized refugee group is more likely to be open to radicalization than an individual who grows up in a financially stable refugee group that is accepted as part of the community. Not only have Somalian refugees had to struggle with poverty, they’ve also had to struggle with the double whammy of being both black and Muslim in a society that is fraught with white supremacy and anti-Muslim sentiment. It is not at all surprising that some young Somalis have been radicalized.

The solution to the radicalization of refugees, however, is not more stigmatization but rather less. Anti-Muslim sentiment feeds groups like ISIS, giving them more pull in their recruiting work. The refugees currently fleeing Syria are running away from ISIS’ grasp, and the group knows that. ISIS wants the West to discriminate against these refugees based on religion in order to force them back to Syria and, ideally, into ISIS’ arms. The best way to fight radicalization is by refusing to feed it—and that means cutting down on anti-Muslim bias and stigma in places like the U.S.

Can we also talk about the fact that Minnesota is home to at least 25,000 Somalis (community leaders believe this count is seriously low) and the 60 who have left to fight abroad comprise less than one quarter of one percent of that total? And the Somali population, as you might guess, skews young. The vast vast majority of Somali young people staying in the U.S. What they need is job training and acceptance, not stigmatization and further alienation.

In case it’s not clear already, Tuttle’s attempt to use Somali refugees to argue against accepting Syrian refugees is flawed on multiple levels. It is completely disingenuous to act as though a population struggling with three decades of civil war, illiteracy, and disadvantaged by their skin color makes a good comparison for a light-skinned population that has seen only five years of civil war and has far higher literacy and education rates, and yet that is what Tuttle does. What Tuttle is doing—using Somali refugees’ struggles to argue for shutting the door to Syrian refugees, instead of to call for improving our treatment of refugees—is about as far from compassionate as you can get. And frankly, speaking as an American, it’s sickening.

Refugees are not some sort of abstract for me. The wife of one of my husband’s colleagues is a refugee from Afghanistan who has been in the U.S. for decades, and I have relative who is married to a woman who fled Southeast Asia as a child. Somali refugees are not foreign to me either. As a teen over a decade ago, I did a short stint of volunteer work with Somali refugee children. Somali refugees are people too, and they need our support and our open arms as much as anyone else.

We ought to be able to take pride in being a nation of refugees. We should strive to be a country that accepts those fleeing war or catastrophe, or simply those looking for a better life and more opportunity. After all, with the exception of Native Americans and African slaves, our ancestors were those refugees and opportunity seekers. Some days I feel like I am living an enigma. How is it that this country is both so largely built of refugees and immigrants, and at the same time so very anti-refugee and anti-immigrant? It’s like living in an walking contradiction.

Tuttle titles his article as follows: “Before Welcoming Thousands of Syrian Refugees, We Should Consider What Somali Immigrants Have Brought the U.S.” Why must we consider what Somali immigrants have brought us rather than what we have brought them? Is it irrelevant that we have given them the opportunity to flee war and death? Do we care about others only when they can do things for us? Is that what Emma Lazerus meant when she spoke of accepting “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free“? Somehow I don’t think so. I think we can be more than that.

My great-great-grandfather was in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. He was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic (the 1920s version of anti-Muslim) and formed part of the groundswell that virtually ended immigration to the U.S. in 1924. I am not proud of this fact, and I am glad that, in some small way, I can work to right the wrongs my great-great-grandfather took part in nearly a century ago. And yet I look around and I worry that we are returning to that day.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, let’s not go back there.