Barring refugees
Locking out those who desperately need help is not the Texas way.
It’s sadly ironic that a state founded by polyglot groups of people from everywhere imaginable, a state sustained throughout the 19th century by refugees from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Italy and elsewhere, a state enriched throughout the 20th century and into the 21st by refugees from Southeast Asia, the Middle East and other nations around the globe has to tolerate smallminded elected officials who seek to lock the door in the faces of men, women and children desperately seeking refuge.
Attorney General Ken Paxton is the latest. Someone needs to remind Paxton that’s not Texas. That’s not who we are.
His efforts to bar refugees from war-ravaged Syria and Iraq have been unsuccessful, so far, but he keeps on trying (maybe to detract attention from his own legal morass.) This week he issued a nonbinding legal opinion claiming that Texas can withhold federal funding to nonprofit refugee resettlement groups if these groups ignore the state’s security verification program for Syrian and Iraqi refugees being brought to the state.
Earlier this year, Dallas Federal Judge David Godsby denied the state’s request to halt the federal refugee resettlement program in Texas because of security concerns cited by Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott. Godsby ruled that the state failed to show proof that there is any credible threat linking terrorist groups to refugees that have been screened and sent to Texas. Since then, several dozen Syrian and Iraqi refugees have relocated to Dallas, Houston and elsewhere.
Certainly security is a valid concern, but the Syrian and Iraqi refugees underwent months of screening, even before they got to the United States. Subject to the highest level of security checks of any travelers to the U.S., they have been investigated by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center and the departments of Homeland Security, Defense and State. They are arguably less of a danger than refugees arriving from countries not torn by war. They’re here to rebuild war-torn lives, educate their children, find meaningful work.
Houstonians in particular are well aware that refugees make good, productive citizens. Thus, we share the exasperation of Houston immigration lawyer Gordon Quan with officials such as Paxton who continue, in Quan’s words, “to look for boogeymen, whether in rest rooms, voting booths or with women and children fleeing terrorism. What a waste of time.”
As Quan points out, “We are better than this.”
And so we are. In the proud tradition of our Texas forebears, we are bigger, stronger and more open to a wider world than our fear-mongering elected officials would suggest. We would encourage Texas refugee agencies in Houston and around the state to continue their good work, despite the attorney general’s ruling.