The Disconcerting Reason We Aren’t Racing to Embrace Syrian Refugees

In the wake of the recent tragic attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, both supporters and critics of the United States Syrian refugee policy are trying to untangle our country’s moral obligation to help those in distress from diverting and managing the threat of another terrorist attack.
Donald Trump’s plan to stop Muslims from entering the United States, in effect ending protection for Syrian asylum seekers, is only the newest packaging of an old tradition. To blame GOP rhetoric and the most current terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino for the present hesitation in refugee policy only obscures a pattern of ambivalence toward refugees. Past humanitarian responses reveal that the current reluctance to aid Syrian refugees is par for the course.

One need only look at the spotty history of Ronald Reagan’s refugee policy antics to understand how deeply flawed is the idea of the United States as a benevolent protector; the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s provides a dramatic example of just how hesitant the U.S. has been to extend aid. Furthermore, though Trump’s connection between terrorists and able-bodied male refugees capitalizes on prevailing fears, this is certainly not the root cause for American intransigence, which has shown up in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. The ambivalence toward refugees and asylum seekers has less to do with able-bodied male refugees than with the significant numbers of women and children who comprise the bulk of refugee movements. Indeed, the anxiety around the age and gender of migrants, whether refugees or otherwise, culls from a deep cultural well of suspicion of children and women. To suggest that the U.S. should return to its deeply valued humanitarian behavior is nothing more than a means of deflecting important questions about this country’s questionable humanitarian record.. Even when reports fail to bear out Trump’s claim that most refugees are able-bodied males, the plight of the women and children who comprise the bulk of refugee movements has inspired little action.


http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161539


This is quite interesting

Have to laugh, left a lefty looking dumbfounded at work this morning by winding them up.
She knows I am all for helping refugees, but I so had her going for a moment until I smiled and she realised I was talking the piss.


She was saying that Europe have never really seen a refugee crisis like this of this magnitude. I told her, that is not really the case, as when the Huns migrated across and devesated many Germanic tribes to the point whole migrations of hundreds of thousands came to the fronteres of Rome begging to be let in. I then said the Romans after some conflicts and allowed them to settle within the Empire to their cost. She asked me quite shocked if I was comparing the mass refugee crisis to the Germanic one that eventually saw the fall of the Roman Empire years later. Of course not I told her, for that to happen,  we would have to be daft enough by incoorporating them into the army.

lol very naughty, but she was just glad I was joking.