President Obama is ridiculing and scolding more than 30 governors, and the public in general, who are raising questions about his plan to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States.
Lost in his contempt for the public’s concern about the refugees—60 percent of Americans oppose the president’s plan—is the fact that the U.S. accepts more immigrants than any other country in the world. Only Germany even comes close.
So before Obama sets a narrative that the U.S. is xenophobic, the public might benefit from a few facts on immigration.
The U.S. immigration acceptance record — Germany is being praised for accepting 1 million refugees this year—later raised to 1.5 million—the vast majority of whom come from Syria or other Middle Eastern countries. But the U.S. accepts almost 1 million immigrants every year.
According the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) international migration database, well over 1 million people migrated to the U.S. in 10 of the 13 years between 2001 and 2013. Germany had more than 1 million immigrants in 2013, and close to that many in 2012. But for most of those years, Germany accepted about half of what the U.S. took in.
The plurality of refugees have been Middle Eastern — MarketWatch examined U.S. Census Bureau figures and found that 28.1 percent (19,651) of refugees—typically refugees are only a subset of all immigrants—entering the U.S. in the 2014 fiscal year were from Iraq, the largest number from any country. Add another 4,200 from other Middle Eastern countries such as Iran and Afghanistan, and more than a third of refugees coming to the U.S. in 2014 were of Middle Eastern origin.
If the public is somehow fighting to keep all Middle Eastern refugees out of the U.S., as Obama implies, we’re doing a really bad job of it.
Lots of men emigrate to the U.S. — Obama sneers that the 30-plus governors who have raised questions about taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees “are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America.”
If those governors are “scared” of anything, it’s Obama’s penchant for misleading the public.
The State Department says that only 2 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to this country since 2011 are military-aged males with no family. But that’s in the past. Anyone watching the news can see that young and middle-aged adult males make up a huge portion of those currently fleeing Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.
A breakdown of the immigration statistics demonstrates that the U.S. takes in a lot of military-aged males. Of the 991,000 immigrants (i.e., not just refugees) who obtained permanent lawful resident status in 2013, 434,000 were males, and 143,000 were between the ages of 20-35.
But even if the State Department restricted the 10,000 Syrian refugees to “widows and orphans,” as Obama seems to imply, widows have brothers and orphans have uncles. Wouldn’t there be a need to let other family members in, if not now then soon, in order to help provide for the resettled women and children?
The president says that the relevant agencies will do a thorough job of vetting the refugees, but no one believes him because he’s misled the country so many times over the past seven years.
The U.S. has long been a haven for immigrants and refugees. That’s our proud tradition; that’s what the Statue of Liberty symbolizes. And the vast majority of Americans embrace that legacy and want it to continue.
But it is reasonable in a time of increased terror attacks to ensure that those trying to come into the U.S. want to build up the country, not tear it down.
Obama has a history of contempt for voters, as he did in 2008 when he described many of them as a group of “bitter” people “clinging to their guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”
But the fact is that no other country has been as open and welcoming to immigrants as the U.S. Indeed, immigration during the Bush years may exceed that under Obama.
The president is taking a legitimate concern as yet another opportunity to paint the country—his country—as full of anti-immigrant xenophobes. That narrative simply cannot go unchallenged.