Part of a New York Times story on responses the the Paris attack caught my eye. At the same summit meeting, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said there was no need for a complete review of the bloc’s refugee policy in response to the terrorist attacks. “Those who organized, who perpetrated the attacks are the very same people who the refugees are fleeing and not the opposite,” Agence-France Presse quoted Mr. Juncker as saying. “And so there is no need for an overall review of the European policy on refugees.”
Attitudes like that are going to be devastating in upcoming elections. Voters never agreed that the EU should be a suicide pact.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34813650 Norway is now advertising that if you just show up illegally then you will not be allowed to stay. Good policy.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/gop-lawmakers-syria-refugees-215936 Republicans want to shut down the government due to the President wanting to resettle some of the refugees here. I think they are over playing their hand especially when GOP governors claim they will some how not let people with legal documents live in their states.
Not letting in 65,000 fighting-age Syrian males who we can't vet is not a losing position. In fact, in recent polling the number of people who agreed with the President was not significantly different from zero. The majority wanted to take no Syrians at all, while a substantial remainder only wanted to accept 1,000 to 2,000. Of course we could throw open the doors to about a half million Christians, but Obama ruled that out.
It would be interesting if you had the spectacle of President Obama sending federal troops to force states to allow the Syrians in. I can hear it now. "obama is willing to send ground troops to Texas but not to Syria..........."
Um, Dayton, you must have a pretty minimal understanding of the Constitution if you think states have a mechanism for keeping people out who have passed through the national border.
Hungary has announced they will sue the EU claiming the plan to force countries to accept migrants is illegal. We shall see what happens. I don't know enough about EU treaties to form an opinion.
The problem you face, is that the argument you are making all throughout this thread is supported by GTurner and Federal Farmer. That should tell you something......
Here's some actual data, and it's not looking too good for the refugee haters: http://www.economist.com/news/unite...ng?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/yearningtobreathefree Almost 750,000 post-9/11 refugees admitted to the United States, not a single arrest for domestic terrorism committed by one of them.
The latest news is that an Algerian man who came to Germany as a refugee (Algeria is listed as a safe country btw) has been arrest in a migrant center in Germany in connection to the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday. You truly do have a lot of people who are not refugees coming in. No, meaningful screening is currently being done prior to their entry and that must change. Gul, you will also notice those numbers mix a lot of different groups together. The article quotes a Copic Christian who fled from Muslim terrorism along with large numbers from Indo-China. Around here we get a lot of Assyria Christians who tend to mix in well. A bigger problem are Muslim Somalia who immediately ghetto I've themselves into ethnic enclaves, suck up public services, and generally have quote high crime rates. So rather than telling use about Christians who had to flee from Muslim attacks or Vietnamese fleeing communism maybe you ought to quote us the number of Sunni (especially Sunni Arab) refugees so as not to confuse the matter. Also, you will recall a number of terrorist attacks have indeed been stopped, huneeds of American muslims have joined terror groups overseas, and despite the claim there have indeed been terror attacks since 9/11 in the US.
The US does at least do a lot of screen prior to letting refugees loose in the country. We at least have that going for us. Europe... Not so much. We still admit way to many and welfare/public assistance usage is sky high among these groups. Earlier I linked to a GAO report which said each Syrian will cost just the Feds $65,000 on average just for the first five years. That is extremely expensive and it does not even count state and local expenses nor measure the increased crime costs.
I guess the Tsarnaev brothers were just counted as regular Muslims. And of course the two in Texas weren't arrested for terrorism, they were just shot where they stood. Bizarrely, the Economist led off with "JOSEPH, an Egyptian Copt who now lives in Chicago." Copts are Christian. They even have their own pope who covers the Oriental Orthodox church.
What I am advocating goes against common liberal thinking so on a liberal board (right forge mostly ran away) it seems natural fellow liberals would not exactly rush to embrace the idea. I do think our immigration policy should focus on people with needed skills where we have a deficit in such skill catagories, people who are most likely to intigrate into American culture instead of clash with it, and people with money to invest who are likely to be net tax payers instead of net tax consumers. Further more we need to not be blind about real dangers like terrorism, who commits such acts on average, and apply very diligent screening to weed out candidates if there is even a whiff of sympathy for such activities. Like I said, that clashes with the liberal open door way of thinking about everyone holding hands and singing kumbiyah but I think a lot of people will eventually come around to see its value even if it is an uphill struggle.
Perhaps if they thought of it in different terms. One of the problems is that too many liberals reflexively thought that if George Bush is bombing someone, that someone must be a liberal ally who they should defend. American imperialism and all that. What if instead the reason for the conflict was that Muslims don't even meet fundamentalist Southern Baptist standards of tolerance and open-mindedness? They should try reading ex-Muslim blogs, where writers talk about how they have to get by in a culture where deviance=death and free thought is not to be expressed because it can get you killed, and will certainly get you ostracized and disowned by your family. Thus almost no Muslims have ever even heard the suggestion that every word in the Koran isn't the absolute truth. A year or so ago I was chatting with three Iraqis about religion and told them the story of how the Jewish writer of the Old Testament took an ancient Iraqi story about Enki and turned it into Noah's ark. One of the Iraqi's said "No, that story is true because it's in the Koran!" To them, the set of things that are false and the set of things that are in the Koran and sunna do not intersect. That's a problem because the sunna is full of commands to slaughter the infidel where ever he is found and take his women as sex-slaves.
The hard reality is it is no longer the 19th century, the country is no longer half empty desperately trying to find people to settle the west, we are moving to a post industrial economy so there simply is not much demand for low skilled labor. The days where a man could just show up on a boat not speaking English yet land a job in a factory are long gone. The needs of the country have changed and we shouldn't hang on to bad policies which no long fit the country's needs simply because that is the way it has always been done. All too often, these days, mass immigration, especially illegal immigration is just used by big corporations to break unions and drive down pay and benefits. In 1980 your average meat packing plant was unionized, workers made an average (inflation adjusted) of $20 an hour with health, dental, and vision benefits plus after 20 years he got a union pension. Virtually all of the workers were American born and it was seen as a trade where, if he worked hard, a man could live a good life, own a home, care for his family, buy a new car every four or five years, and retire with reasonable security. Now, those jobs are held almost exclusively by illegals, the unions are long gone, pay is a few cents per hour above minimum wage, there are no benefits. The big companies love this and even advertise in Mexico that they will hire anyone papers or no with no questions asked. Most of the workers get public assistance (getting around the no illegals on welfare rule by saying it is for their American born kids) just to survive. Tell me, is that a good policy for your average blue collar American worker trying to make an honest living?
When I was putting in automation systems at Dell Nashville about half the workforce were Somali Muslims who were fired en mass every few months (and then rehired), so they wouldn't qualify as full-time workers. While I was there some of the angry men stirred up a bunch of outrage because they weren't getting enough prayer time, even though absolutely none of them prayed on their breaks, they just sat around texting and smoking. They threatened action in the usual Muslim ways and when I was finishing up with the project, Dell was considering getting rid of them permanently because they were far too much trouble to deal with. Yeah, there was a day when Tennesseans would have done the work, but who needs borders when the world is full of cheap illiterate labor?
But anyone within the state is liable for militia service, and thus the refugees can be sent to fight in Syria.
Europe could do a damn sight worse then requiring all of those military aged males to report for military service and then dropping their happy asses back off in Syria. It won't happen but it would be a great thing if it did.