THIS has not been a great election season for cool appeals to reason. Few public debates have strayed as far from Socratic ideals of truth-seeking as those involving refugees, and in particular whether America is running intolerable risks by granting asylum to Muslims from such terror-wracked regions as the Middle East. Strikingly, some of the loudest calls to bar new refugee arrivals have come from communities that are rarely, if ever, sent refugees from Syria or other high-risk countries.
After terrorist outrages in Paris, California and Brussels, in some cases involving attackers who arrived as asylum-seekers, more than two dozen governors and numerous members of Congress have decried the decision, made by Barack Obama in September 2015, to increase the number of Syrians admitted as refugees in fiscal 2016 to 10,000, up from 2,000 the previous year. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has gone further, calling—loudly but vaguely—for a temporary national entry ban on Muslims “until we find out what’s going on.” What’s going on is that whereas 158,655 Syrians completed asylum applications in Germany in 2015, Mr...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1WwPRKj
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