Voices of reason

Let’s make a realistic assessment of the risk in helping Syrian refugees.

Has the American body politic lost its collective mind over last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris? With Republican presidential candidates and officeholders dredging up a metaphorical menagerie of insults — rabid dogs and rattlesnakes among them — and with the shameless Donald Trump calling for some kind of national data base for every Muslim in America, with Ted Cruz demanding a religious test for victims of religious fanaticism, with dozens of governors, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, insisting that we shut the door on desperate Syrians fleeing unspeakable horrors, with the Democratic mayor of Roanoke, Va., calling for World War II-style internment camps, you would think the homeland itself was under desperate and immediate siege from the world’s most formidable military foe.

Those disgraceful responses are in addition to an ill-considered House bill that passed with bipartisan support that seeks to “pause” admission of Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Nevermind that potential terrorists likely already live here or they use some illegal means of getting here; they didn’t use the complicated process that takes up to two years to complete. Co-sponsored by our own Michael McCaul, the Texas congressman who chairs the House committee that oversees the Department of Homeland Security, the bill is election-year pandering at its finest.

May we humbly suggest that we all take a deep breath and then make a realistic assessment of risk? Can we systematically sort out the best way of responding to a barbarian death cult that traffics in terror, without resorting to fear-mongering, demonizing and panicinducing political expediency? Instead of the demagogues among us, perhaps we could pay closer attention to people like Russell Moore, a Southern Baptist minister who has some thoughts about refugees.

“We should remember the history of the 20th century, of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and Refuseniks from the Soviet Union who were largely ignored by the world community,” Moore, who heads his denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said in Iowa last week. “We can have prudential discussions and disagreements about how to maintain security,” he added. “What we cannot do is to demagogue the issue.”

Here’s another voice of reason: “When I served as ambassador to Iraq, I witnessed how the slow pace of processing left Iraqi refugees — including many who worked for the U.S. military — stranded in danger,” Ryan C. Crocker wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week. Crocker, dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, urged the Obama administration to commit to resettling not 10,000 Syrian refugees, the current plan, but 10 times that many. (Most of those 10,000, by the way, are elderly people and women with children; only 2 percent are single men of fighting age.)

The former ambassador made the point that most other public officials knowledgeable about this country’s refugee regimen have made — that is, that the U.S. relies on a vigorous screening process that involves vetting from a number of agencies. Refugees, Crocker pointed out, are also interviewed abroad by officers from the Department of Homeland Security before they are approved for resettlement. Syrian refugees are not washing up on our shores clamoring to get in; those who want to come to this country must apply from abroad.

Crocker made another point that should speak to Texans: “After the fall of Saigon, the U.S. welcomed more than a million Vietnamese refugees, who quickly earned a reputation for achievement. Syrians would do likewise. As a former ambassador to Syria, I know how highly Syrians value hard work and education. They’re precisely the people I’d want living next door to me and attending my children’s schools.”

Texans, and Houstonians in particular, know exactly what he’s talking about. Syrians are valued members of our community and have been for years.

New Syrians would be, as well. In fact, we would suggest that the small, dying communities outside the fast-growing metropolitan areas of this state should switch off right-wing radio and act in their own interests by welcoming Syrian newcomers. Small-town Texans may not want to admit it, but it’s hardworking immigrants who start new businesses, whether a Mexican restaurant or a Vietnamese nail salon. It’s immigrants, eager to get a foothold in their adopted country who breathe new life into tired communities in decline. Syrian refugees, hardworking and well-educated, will do the same.