Refugees deserve our compassion
Donald Trump Jr.’s comparison of Syrian refugees to poisoned Skittles was crass and cruel, but unsurprising.
His father’s presidential campaign has relied on fear-mongering to spread a simplistic “America First” message that his eldest son perpetuated by tweeting on Monday an image of a bowl of Skittles with an ominous message about Syrian refugees.
Thankfully, cooler heads are prevailing both across the world and in Tennessee as leaders strive to find a solution to a complicated problem that involves more than 4 million people displaced by war and strife.
Gov. Bill Haslam recently declared — refreshingly — that he no longer opposes the resettlement of refugees in the U.S. or Tennessee. Haslam has met with State Department officials and Catholic Charities and said “they’re doing a good job” of vetting refugees, which can take anywhere from 18 months to two years.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations and pledged to accept 110,000 refugees in 2017. In the past year 10,000 Syrian refugees have been admitted into the U.S. — 240 came to Tennessee.
“In the eyes of innocent men and women and children who through no fault of their own have had to flee everything that they know, everything that they love, we have to have the empathy to see ourselves,” Obama told world leaders. “We have to imagine what it would be like for our families, for our children, if the unspeakable happened to us.”
Tennessee and the Nashville area have welcomed refugees for decades. As the recently released Partnership for a New American Economy report showed, immigrants, refugees among them, are contributing significantly to the state’s economy.
In November, Haslam told the Rotary Club of Nashville he wanted to see a pause to the United States’ plan to accept the 10,000 refugees out of public safety and terrorism concerns, though he acknowledged the vetting process was good.
However, the politics of terrorism and Islamophobia, stoked by attacks like those in San Bernardino, California, and Paris in 2015, persuaded the Tennessee General Assembly in its 2016 regular session to pass a resolution authorizing Attorney General Herbert Slatery to sue the federal government for noncompliance of the Refugee Act of 1980 or to seek outside counsel to do so. They conflated the refugee and terrorism issues unfairly.
Haslam opted to let the bill become law without his signature. Slatery did not bite on the lawsuit. The attorney general had issued an opinion last year saying the Constitution’s supremacy clause required that Tennessee accept the refugees.
A veto from Haslam would have been preferable, but his recent evolution on the refugee resettlement issue is a welcome sign that Tennessee’s famous hospitality isn’t dead.
It also adds credence to a statement from last year’s Rotary Club speech: “The issues we face are really complex. Anyone who tries to answer it with simple answers is misleading you. I encourage you to not settle for the simple.”
The complex truth is that refugees are not Skittles. They are people who deserve our compassion.