Media cheer Obama's Syrian refugee plan
By Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) • 11/19/15 12:33 PM
Many in the mainstream press are calling for the U.S. to admit as many Syrian and Iraqi refugees as possible, despite warnings from top intelligence officials and evidence that refugees have been arrested for terror-related activity, and evidence that one of the Paris attackers last week entered France as a refugee.
On Thursday, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof said it would be a "stain on our conscience" to reject refugees attempting to escape war zones in Syria and Iraq, both of which are under siege by the terrorist group the Islamic State.
"
ecurity is critical," he wrote, "but I've known people who have gone through the refugee vetting process, and it's a painstaking ordeal that lasts two years or more. It's incomparably more rigorous than other pathways to the United States."
Kristof's argument was made by several other news outlets and columnists in the days following the Islamic State's attack on Paris last week, which left 129 people dead and injured hundreds more.
"They need to adopt some Syrian refugees," said Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke on Wednesday, referring to several governors who have said they will reject any refugees sent to their states. "First off, there's no better way to highlight how important family is to you than by expanding your own family."
Both The New York Times and Washington Post made the same argument. The Times said that "confusing refugees with terrorists is morally unacceptable and, as a matter of strategy, misguided."
"The risk from a small number of vetted refugees is far outweighed by the humanitarian imperative to help innocent people escaping from Syria's evil rulers and from the Islamic State," said the Post.
The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday said Republicans calling for refugee crackdowns were having "an emotional, and ill-conceived, overreaction" and said "there is already a system in place to vet the refugees."
There is, however, strong evidence that the vetting process, which includes interviews and record-checking of applicants, is not fool-proof.
Kathleen Newland, co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute, wrote in October that since 9/11, three refugees in the U.S. have been arrested "for planning terrorist activities."
President Obama has said the U.S. will take in more refugees from Syria, despite officials in his own administration raising doubts about the strength of their screening process.
"I don't, obviously, put it past the likes of [ISIS] to infiltrate operatives among these refugees, so that's a huge concern of ours," said James Clapper, director of national intelligence, in September.
"If someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them," he told Congress.
The GOP-led House is currently deliberating a bill that would require the heads of Homeland Security, the FBI and National Intelligence to individually investigate each refugee applicant from Syria and Iraq to determine whether he or she is "a threat to the security of the United States."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/media-cheer-obamas-syrian-refugee-plan/article/2576754
