Franklin & Marshall College



In Support of Synergy: The Syrian Refugee CrisisDave C. Mix ‘17Weis College HouseNovember 13, 2016Dave Mix, from Downingtown, Pennsylvania, was a Math major on the pre-medicine track with a minor in Chemistry A magna cum laude graduate, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Dave has traveled to and lived abroad in Vietnam twice, and he spends his time working as a writing center tutor, playing soccer, and carrying out biomedical research in Philadelphia. I want you to take a snapshot, right now, of the United States of America. Now I want you to freeze it inside your mind. Take a look around in that snapshot at what you see. In front of you, you’ll see me. A white, male person from a suburban, middle class family. But this random white male speaks Vietnamese. And what about everywhere else in the world? Well, in this college, you’ll see 7.6% Hispanic-American, 5.6% African-American, 5% Asian-American, and 17% international students (“Franklin & Marshall Fast Facts”). In Philadelphia, 44.1% Black, 13.6% Hispanic and Latino, 7.2% Asian, and 0.8% Native American. In this state, you’ll see 10.0% Black or African-American, 3.2% Hispanic or Latino, and 1.8% Asian, and, finally, in the rest of the country, 12.6% Black or African-American, 4.8% Asian, and 0.9% Native American (“2010 Census Data”). But how did we all get here? And also, why does this random white boy speak Vietnamese? And why does any of ths matter; how do these people influence our (American) culture? To answer these questions, we must take a deeper look at our roots and the fundamental principles of the United States of America. The United States of America has served historically and presently as a destination of hope for persecuted people, including my very own ancestors, John and Eleanor Billington, who traveled to this country in 1620 on the Mayflower to themselves escape religious persecution. In this paper, I will draw comparisons between the Boat People of the Vietnamese refugee crisis in the 1970s to 1990s with the current refugee crisis in Syria, and in doing so I will challenge the idea that allowing refugees to enter is unjustifiably risky and instead will argue that turning away refugees would be a betrayal of historical and present American values in which the U.S. has served as a beacon for persecuted people and that refugees will actually improve our society and strengthen our collective culture, all without compromising safety and our longstanding values. Before I can get into the argument, I need to lay out the process through which Syrian refugees end up resettled in the United States. Amy Pope, the Deputy Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, describes the process thoroughly on the official White House website, but there are other similarly thorough yet more graphical descriptions on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and elsewhere for the more visually inclined playing along at home. The process I am about to describe is the single most rigorous method through which any person can legally enter the United States. Deputy Assistant Pope identifies the first step in the process as “refugee applicants identifying themselves to the U.N. Refugee Agency, [the] UNHCR.” The UNHCR “collects identifying documents, performs [the] initial assessment, [and] interviews applicants to confirm refugee status and the need for resettlement.” This process involves taking biometric iris scans and biographical information. This process identifies the strongest candidates for resettlement, whereby “less than 1% of the global refugee population [move forward].” These passing applicants are then referred to a federally-funded Resettlement Support Center which “collects identifying documents, creates an applicant file, [and] compiles information to conduct biographic security checks.” This allows U.S. national security agencies such as the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department to screen each candidate for “connections to known bad actors, information that the individual is a security risk, outstanding warrants, [and] immigration or criminal violations.” In addition, Syrian refugees undergo an additional intensive screening process by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. Next come the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS interviews by officers “specially trained for interviews.” These interviews also include collecting and submitting fingerprints, and if new information arises, the refugee candidate can be reinterviewed or placed on hold while there is additional research and investigation. Following a successful interview, the applicant's fingerprints are screened through the FBI’s biometric database as well as the DHS biometric database which “contain watch-list information and previous immigration encounters in the U.S. and overseas.” Applicants further undergo medical checks and cultural orientation classes, and if they pass, they proceed to the next step. Applicants must undergo “screening from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center-Passenger” and be subject to the “Transportation Security Administration’s Secure Flight Program,” and only after passing all of these tests with no flags will they be allowed to travel to the U.S. Finally, once in the country, they must “apply for a green card within a year of their arrival” which itself adds more security precautions (Pope, Amy). In addition, the American SAFE Act was passed in the House of Representatives in 2015 which seeks to add an additional provision in which the director of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security must unanimously certify to congress that the individual refugee applicant is not a threat to national security. Needless to say, FBI Director James Comey argued that this act "seeks to micromanage the process in a way that is counter-productive to national security, to our humanitarian obligation, and the overall ability to focus on Homeland Security" (Perez, Evan). The system is very rigorous, and adding a provision by which the director of the FBI himself must individually sign off on each candidate is unnecessarily pedantic. Many politicians have changed perceptions of refugees in recent years from destitute to dangerous, despite the fact that facts don’t back this up. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania claims that, "In light of the credible report that a violent Islamist extremist claiming refugee status participated in the attacks in Paris, we must reexamine our security protocols for admitting Syrian refugees. While most refugees are innocent people in dire situations, unfortunately we presently have no fully reliable way of vetting those who come from chaotic terrorist havens such as Syria. As a result, we should suspend refugee admissions from Syria until we are able to determine with full confidence that there are no security risks among them. The safety of our people must come first" (Toomey, Pat). However, this argument does not hold up when looking at the backgrounds of the attackers. The identified Paris attackers were actually EU citizens, not refugees, who crossed borders without the tough scrutinization that would have been placed on refugees for a minimum of 18-24 months; however, even though the attackers did cross borders, they were registered as terrorism suspects. This alone would have ended their refugee application if they had hypothetically applied to be refugees, a good indication that the refugee vetting process would have flagged these people and rejected their (hypothetical) applications for refugee status. The leader of the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was born in Belgium in 1987 to a man named Omar Abaaoud who himself emigrated to Belgium from Morocco in 1975. Another member of the attackers, Salah Abdeslam, was of Moroccan descent and was born in Belgium in 1989. He was living in France and his family had lived in Belgium since the 1960s (“Paris Attacks”). These are just two examples of the backgrounds of the known attackers, including its mastermind and leader. All the of known attackers were EU citizens, not refugees from Syria, who, if they were hypothetically seeking refugee status, would not even have passed the rigorous tests laid out above. These members registered multiple terrorist suspicions as well as convicted crimes and links to foiled terrorist activities, so the concern that these perpetrators had infiltrated France through the refugee process does not hold up. These perpetrators were full EU citizens who had never been undergone the refugee process, and if they hypothetically had, they would have been rejected due to the red flags that littered their backgrounds. In this regard, the refugee system itself works, and refugees were not the people who perpetrated the attacks.However, what Toomey may really be talking about, more so than the these identified perpetrators, is a perpetrator with the alleged name Ahmad Almohammad. A passport was found next to a disfigured body of one of the perpetrators that appeared to be a refugee-seeking person. (“The Mystery Surrounding”) What complicates this issue, however, is that the passport was confirmed to be fake by French officials. We can still track the location of the passport and analyze how this person got there. The passport first appears in Greece with a man registered with this passport by police after coming to Leros, Greece on a sinking migrant boat. He followed the refugee path in Europe until checking into a refugee center in Croatia and continuing on to Austria, after which the passport disappeared and resurfaced on the disfigured body. Now, the first argument against the claim that the refugee system is unsafe is that this man was not a resettled refugee and was never granted refugee status in the first place, merely seeking refugee status. As a reminder, only 1% of all global refugee-seeking candidates are allowed to continue to the rigorous demands of the UNHCR process laid out above. So in the sense that a refugee committed these crimes, this is false. This man was an illegal, undocumented immigrant, not a resettled refugee through which refugees are allowed into the U.S. In addition, no refugee would pass the rigorous tests by the UNHCR with a fake passport and immigration violations, so even though this man was seeking refugee status, the system itself would have denied him such status. The main perpetrators of the attack were EU citizens, including the mastermind himself, born and raised in Belgium, and this mysterious member is not only not a resettled refugee, but likely an illegal immigrant whose illegal status itself would have disqualified him for being granted resettlement as a refugee. So Sen. Toomey’s concerns that refugees are committing terrorist activities based on the Paris attacks are unfounded. Another argument beyond the fact that refugees have already infiltrated and committed terrorist attacks, namely in Paris, is that terrorists are currently utilizing the refugee process in order to infiltrate the U.S. and commit future terrorist attacks, which is also disingenuous. Donald Trump claimed that "we have no idea who these people are. We are the worst when it comes to paperwork. This could be one of the great Trojan horses" (“Donald Trump: Syrian refugees”). This is even more misleading than Sen. Toomey’s argument. The UNHCR spends 18-24 months investigating each candidate recursively, thoroughly investigating and interviewing each candidate, investigating where these candidates come from, utilizing biometric scans, and querying the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Fraud Detection, and National Security Directorate. There are far easier ways to enter the U.S. than the refugee path, and each and every one of those paths are far more attractive to any terrorist wanting to commit crime in the U.S. I would further argue that we know far more about any matters of national security concern for resettled refugees than we do about Donald Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and has been linked via business ties to Russian oligarchs (Schmidt, Michael; Kranish, Michael; Aleem, Zeesham). Donald Trump may pose a larger risk for national security than resettled refugees, but that can be explored in a separate paper.However, I am not arguing that no refugee will ever commit any crime or perpetrate any terrorist attack, more that risks themselves are miniscule and not unjustifiably risky. Donald Trump, Jr. asked a horrifying question: “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.” Now, this argument is misleading on the numbers, but that’s not the main reason this argument is horrifyingly troublesome. This argument actually originates in 1938 Nazi Germany in an anti-semitic children’s book titled, “The Poisonous Mushroom,” written by Ernst Hiemer and published by Julius Streicher, later executed as a war-criminal for his part in the propaganda machine of Nazi Germany. In this book, in a partial translation published by Calvin College with the permission of the “Friends of Europe” in London, this excerpt is presented as an exchange between a mother and son:“The mother . . . says, ‘Look, Franz, human beings in this world are like the mushrooms in the forest. There are good mushrooms and there are good people. There are poisonous, bad mushrooms and there are bad people. And we have to be on our guard against bad people just as we have to be on guard against poisonous mushrooms. Do you understand that?’ . . . ‘And do you know, too, who these bad men are, these poisonous mushrooms of mankind?’ . . . Franz slaps his chest in pride: ‘Of course I know, mother! They are the Jews!’ . . . [the mother continues], ‘Just as a single poisonous mushroom can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk’” (Hiemer, Ernst). The argument Donald Trump, Jr. is using with his skittles analogy has heavy undertones to this piece of anti-semitic propaganda from Nazi Germany, and it should have no place in modern political discourse. That being said, ignoring the Nazi overtones for the sake of the argument, the numbers themselves are also misleading and do not represent the refugee population, especially the Syrian refugee population, because they heavily inflate and falsify the risk. The numbers are just flat out wrong. Of the more than 800,000 settled refugees since 9/11 in the U.S., “exactly three resettled refugees have been arrested for planning terrorist activities—and it is worth noting two were not planning an attack in the United States and the plans of the third were barely credible” explains Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute. Not a single resettled refugee has even committed a terrorist attack. In skittle terms, this is like saying you have 800,000 skittles in a bowl, and not one will hurt you.FBI Dir. Comey also talks about numbers and lays out a valid concern in the system, however rigorous it may be. He argues that “we can only query against that [data] which we have collected. So if someone has not made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or intentions reflected in our databases, we can query our databases until the cows come home, but nothing will show up because we have no record of that person” (“Syrian Refugee Flows”). But Dir. Comey also seems to have faith in the system, where in the House Judiciary Committee on FBI Oversight on October 22, 2015, the FBI Director James Comey indicated that he stands behind the vetting process and believes it is effective in querying the combined national security intelligence and that refugees are investigated thoroughly (“House Judiciary Committee”). While there are some limitations to the system, the lack of terrorist plots and attacks by refugees indicates that the system itself is working and restricting dangerous individuals from passing the intensive 18-24 month investigation process by almost every branch of the U.S. national security administration. But beyond the mere numbers of the risk, there is a moral argument to allow refugees to resettle in America. Our country is founded on the principle that we are a destination of hope for persecuted people. Even in our very beginnings, refugees came to this country on the Mayflower to escape religious persecution. In the Cuban refugee crisis, the United States served as a place of hope for economic and political prosperity for Cuban refugees. Before and during World War II, while many did not come explicitly as refugees, there was a mass influx of Jewish immigrants seeking better life in this country and to escape political turmoil in Germany. As a nation, we have accepted more refugees than any other nation on Earth, and, as a nation, we represent those around the world who have no home except here: my ancestors, my friends, my colleagues. The Syrian refugees are more than 50% children, with only “2% of those admitted [being] single men of combat age” and 2.5% of those admitted being elderly (Koran, Laura). The demographics of the resettled refugees lend themselves to cultivating our already-rich culture and improving our society. As mostly young people, they will grow up and give far more back to this country as adults than they took as child refugees. And even if you argue that we should not be helping non-citizens when we have citizens of our own to support, many of our own are sons and daughters of refugees, and we owe incoming refugees the same support that was given to our mothers and fathers before us. Without resettling Vietnamese refugees in this country, I never would have had the supreme pleasure to learn about the Vietnamese-American culture from the offspring of two refugees, one fleeing capture by running across the western board of Central Vietnam to escape capture and one fleeing the country via boat. The Vietnamese-American offspring of these two refugees incorporated me as a member of their own family, and in doing so, I was blessed with the opportunities to travel back to Vietnam and learn their language, ti?ng Vi?t, first hand. Not every positive aspect of resettling refugees is immediate, and it may take forty years before you see positive effects like you see in my own case. But as a country, we owe refugees the support of this country just as that support has been provided to ancestors or our friends before us. Allowing refugees into the U.S. is not about eliminating risk, but about managing the inherent yet small risk while maximizing our humanitarian efforts to aid largely women and children. And if you argue that any risk, however small, is unjustifiable, it is worth noting other activities in descending order of risk. The chance that you die yearly from asphyxiation from choking is 2.3x10-2 %, a car crash is 1.2 x10-2 %, murder for any reason is 4.5x10-3 %, eating cookie dough (by my calculations using data from the CDC and the NYT) is 2.8x10-8 % (“What Are the Odds”; Patterson, Paul; “Salmonella”). Even eating cookie dough has risks: again, the chance of dying yearly from eating cookie dough (assuming about 1 in 160 eggs are used in cookie dough and assuming every batch of cookie dough is eaten entirely as cookie dough) is 2.8x10-8 %. The chance of dying yearly from a terrorist attack committed by a refugee is estimated as 2.7x10-8 % by the CATO institute, a lower risk than eating cookie dough (Nowrasteh, Alex). So if you’re arguing against refugees, you’re arguing against eating cookie dough, too. References1. “2010 Census Data.” . Web. 13 Nov. 2016.2. Aleem, Zeesham. “6 different agencies have come together to investigate Trump’s possible Russia ties.” Vox. VOX, 21 Jan. 2017. Web. 21 Jan. 2017. 3. “Donald Trump: Syrian refugees a 'Trojan horse'.” CNN News. CNN, 16 Nov. 2015. Web. 17 Nov. 2016.4. Hiemer, Ernst. Der Giftpilz. Julius Streicher, 1938. Web.5. “House Judiciary Committee on FBI Oversight.” C-. 22 Oct. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2016. 6. Koran, Laura. “How do Syrian refugees get into the U.S.? Explaining the process.” CNN News. CNN, 17 Nov. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.7. Kranish, Michael. “Trump says he has ‘nothing to do with Russia.’ The past 30 years show otherwise.” The Washington Post. WP, 11 Jan. 2017. Web. 21 Jan. 2017.8. “Franklin & Marshall Fast Facts.” Fandm.edu. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.9. Newland, Kathleen. “The U.S. Record Shows Refugees Are Not a Threat.” . Migration Policy Institute, Oct. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.10. Nowrasteh, Alex. “Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis.” . CATO Institute, 13 Sep. 2016. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.11. “Paris Attacks: Who were the attackers?” BBC News. BBC, 27 Apr. 2016. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.12. Patterson, Paul. “Egg Quality Assurance Programs.” The New York Times. NYT, 25 Aug, 2010. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.13. Perez, Evan. “FBI Director James Comey balks at refugee legislation.” CNN News. CNN, 19 Nov. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2016. 14. Pope, Amy. “Infographic: The Screening Process for Refugee Entry into the United States.” Obamawhitehouse.. 20 Nov. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2016. 15. “Salmonella.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.16. Schmidt, Michael. “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry into Trump Associates.” The New York Times. NYT, 19 Jan. 2017. Web. 21 Jan. 2017.17. “Syrian Refugee Flows.” Homeland.. Homeland Security Committee, Nov. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.18. “The mystery surrounding the Paris bomber with a fake Syrian passport.” Washington Post. WP, 18 Nov. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2016. 19. Toomey, Pat. “Admission of Syrian Refugees into U.S. Should be Suspended.” Toomey.. 16 Nov. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.20. “What Are the Odds of Dying From…” . National Safety Council. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.21. “With Skittles tweet, Donald Trump Jr. draws another round of condemnation.” The Washington Post. WP, 20 Sep. 2016. Web. 13 Nov. 2016. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download