The Faces of Our Failure
By Thoreau
There’s a very good opinion piece in this morning’s Washington Post, by somebody who helped bring Vietnamese refugees to the US, calling on the US to accept more Iraqi refugees. I think the problem is best summed up in this tidbit:
Although members of his administration claim to have made Iraqi refugees a top priority, admission numbers tell a different story. Only one Iraqi refugee made it through our process to safety in the United States in May, and only one made it the month before. The United States has committed to reviewing 7,000 cases and admitting 3,000 refugees by the end of this fiscal year, in September. That is as many as our team processed in a single day back in 1975.
I suspect that, aside from laziness and incompetence, a big part of the problem here is a bigoted presumption that Arab Muslims should be treated as possible security risks.
The problem is put in the context of the bigger clusterfvck:
Administration officials say that the best solution to the Iraqi refugee crisis is a stable homeland to which refugees can return. No one wants that solution more than the refugees themselves, but conditions in Iraq are not heading in that direction. The humanitarian crisis must not become a pawn in political pronouncements about the state of our efforts in Iraq. This was true with respect to our rescue of Vietnamese refugees, and it is true now. No matter your view of the war, welcoming the persecuted and standing by our friends is the right thing to do.
So denial (not just a river in the Middle East) is another part of it:Â Admitting there’s a refugee crisis means admitting that our policy in Iraq has failed utterly.
Bring the refugees here. With the troops. Now.
P.S. While I am pleased that the Kurds have carved out a relatively stable, secure, and prosperous region, it’s worth noting that Kurdistan is not an option for most Arab refugees. As Jim has observed, our Kurdish client state is basically a hothouse flower that enjoys a patron who turns a blind eye toward all manner of discriminatory policies. In a way, the Kurdish attitude toward Arab refugees is probably not so different from our own. Which is sad.
Comment by Mona —
June 24, 2007 @ 10:25 am
Some months ago, Ted Kennedy wrote a moving Op-Ed in Wapo or NYT insisting we had a moral obligation to let Iraqi refugees into this nation, and that our failure to expedite getting them safely here was a violation of justice.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
June 24, 2007 @ 11:01 am
What aspect of the Bush administration isn’t? It’s all of a piece.
Comment by Tom Scudder —
June 24, 2007 @ 2:05 pm
At least they’re admitting that the refugees exist. I wonder if they’re being officially classified as such by UNHCR now. For a long time, the UNHCR people in Jordan and Syria were unwilling to do so, creating a new label, “people of interest to UNHCR” or some such.
Comment by bryan —
June 24, 2007 @ 3:19 pm
I remember sitting through a presentation given by a Kurdish refugee on his homeland, carved out of bits of Iraq and Turkey because that was basically where all his people lived and none of those other types of people lived.
It didn’t actually make me feel this was a good model for a democracy.
Comment by carolita —
June 25, 2007 @ 11:24 am
While I agree that we should be doing much more for Iraqi refugees, there are substantial differences between this and the Vietnamese relocation. I worked intake during the relocation on Guam, at Camp Pendleton, and finally at Camp Chaffee and my sister was a manager for the Red Cross relocator services.
The Vietnamese refugees were brought into the US enmass after the war was over. We brought in the ones who had cooperated with us and would, therefore, most likely have been killed by the Viet Cong. There was zero public discussion–it was just done. But there was quite a bit of anti-immigrant bias in some communities when it came to actually moving them into the communities. Churches, including many evangelical churches, often sponsored immigrants, either as a good deed or for recruiting, which mitigated the resistance to some extent. Sadly, today it is more likely fundamentalist churches will be protesting Iraqi immigration, not helping. And your commenter was correct — there were many days we processed more than 3000 people.