A cautionary tale
Afghans began arriving this week at Fort McCoy in rural Wisconsin, one of four military installations selected to process thousands of refugees lucky enough to land in the United States after escaping the Taliban.
The last time this Army post hosted such an influx was 1980, when thousands of Cubans arrived via the Mariel boatlift.
It feels like a safe bet that some Republicans who are rightly hammering Biden this week for not doing enough to get more Afghan allies out will cynically criticize him next month for letting in too many.
Former president Donald Trump is already saying this, and some modern-day Know Nothings in places such as Wisconsin are following suit. The Biden administration must pre-empt this disingenuous line of attack before it catches on.
History is rhyming again. In 1980, Fidel Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans to leave the struggling communist island. President Jimmy Carter, posturing amid the Cold War, said he welcomed them with “an open heart and open arms.”
The problem was that, along with pro-freedom activists, Castro’s regime loaded the boats with people who had either criminal records or mental illnesses.
In early October that year, the Carter administration transferred about 500 Cubans from Wisconsin to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. This proved politically toxic for the state’s Democratic governor, 34-year-old Bill Clinton.
Clinton privately pushed the Carter White House to put the refugees on an aircraft carrier off the Florida coast or to hold them at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. In his 2004 memoir “My Life,” Clinton recalled a tense conversation during which Carter rejected his pleas. “Send them to a fort in some warm place out west you’re not going to win in November anyway,” Clinton said he told Carter.
Carter carried Arkansas by 30 points in 1976, but lost the state to Ronald Reagan in 1980 by 5,123 votes. Clinton lost re-election that year but won the governorship back in 1982.
By one estimate, more than 80 percent of the Cuban refugees had no criminal record. But Castro, eager to save face, claimed that he had emptied out the dregs of his jails—and conservatives in the United States were all too eager to amplify this message.
Biden was already a second-term senator by then, and perhaps he’s been overly cautious for most of this year toward refugees because he remembers the episode and knows how that line of attack can be used against him.
Indeed, there was Trump on Tuesday: “You can be sure the Taliban … didn’t allow the best and brightest to board these evacuation flights,” he said, falsely claiming that none of the Afghans arriving in the United States are being vetted. “How many terrorists will Joe Biden bring to America?”
The Afghan refugees of 2021 are dramatically different than the Cubans of 1980. There’s not a criminal element among those being airlifted out of Kabul.
Still, we’ve seen the danger in letting disinformation like this go unchecked. Biden needs to talk more about not just the rigorous vetting process but also why it’s so important that the United States welcomes Afghans at places such as Fort McCoy. That may be a tricky balancing act when he’s leaving so many deserving people behind, but it’s politically vital.