Betrayed by O
Refugee crisis worsened by bad US policy
NOT since Franklin D. Roosevelt has an American president done anything so cruel and bigoted. And only Barack Obama has exhibited this degree of callous indifference to the suffering of the Syrian people.
President Trump signed an executive order on Friday suspending the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, suspending the US refugee program for 120 days and restricting immigration from parts of the Muslim world. Implementation failures — chaos and screw-ups at various airports as low-level officials wrestled with what the new order meant — compounded the callousness.
The timing was far from auspicious. Friday was Holocaust Memorial Day, and the symbolism was too great to ignore. Commentators flooded Twitter and newspapers with reminders that America had turned away Jewish refugees in the 1930s. This mem- ory haunts anyone who studies America’s past — but attempts to reduce the complicated history of our immigration and foreign policies in the ’30s to a throwaway line do no one any good.
The real problem in the 1930s wasn’t the lack of compassion for Jewish and other refugees; it was the feckless appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the unwillingness to confront him that empowered the Nazi persecution of the Jews and created hundreds of thousands of refugees.
So today the true villain of the Syria story — aside from Syria, Russia and Iran — is the feckless Obama foreign policy that allowed a cyst to metastasize into a cancer, just as Britain, France and America once allowed Hitler to grow into the master of Europe.
The Obama officials and cheerleaders now guilt-tripping the country over “heartlessness” toward Syrian refugees are giving hypocrisy a bad name. Bad foreign policy is the cause of the heartbreak in Syria today, not bad immigration policy.
The Holocaust was not caused by the immigration restrictionism; it was caused by Nazi hatred, enabled by naive liberal illusions about the “arc of history” that prevented the West from mobilizing against Hitler when he was weak and easily defeatable.
What the progressives want to do now is to turn the immigration debate into a morality play with Trump cast not as FDR (who on this point he closely and even eerily resembles) but as Satan. Obama’s role (and the role of non-interventionist Democrats) in making the Syrian mess so intractable can be airbrushed out of the picture.
The national conversation shall be only and always about courageous, compassionate and deeply humane progressives resisting the forces of Republican and especially Trumpian darkness.
The desire to walk away from messy and complicated history with its unwelcome demands and painful choices and into a beautiful but imaginary landscape — a theme park for unicorn hunts — haunted the 1930s as it haunts us now. In this land of make-believe, the great issue of our time is whether we show compassion and morality in immigration policy — not whether we have a sober foreign policy aimed at averting the geopolitical breakdown of which refugee flows are an early and ominous sign.
This country needs a serious and humane immigration and refugee policy that is both enlightened and sustainable. We didn’t have it under Obama; we are un- likely to have it under Trump. Despite deporting hundreds of thousands of illegals, Obama never embraced the cause of defending America’s borders or regulating immigration in ways that clearly reassured marginalized American communities that the US government was first and foremost committed to their welfare and to the defense of their way of life.
And he never took responsibility for the ways in which his own repeated errors of judgment about the Middle East contributed to the mass refugee flows that he then tried to guilt-trip Americans into accommodating.
Bad foreign policy, not bad immigration policy, was the primary American contribution to the global disasters of the 1940s, the Holocaust very much included. This is also true today, and the need for an enlightened but grounded nationalism, as opposed to unicorn-hunting cosmopolitanism and braggadocious jingoism, is as strong and as urgent as it has ever been — but appears as much out of reach as it was in the 1930s.
And so here we are: steering erratically into stormy waters, haunted by the cries of the refugees and the dispossessed, squabbling among ourselves as the clouds grow darker overhead. Not since the 1930s has the world, or American foreign policy, been in this much trouble.