Barring Syrian refugees won’t stop terrorists
Gov. Nikki Haley had all the right instincts in welcoming refugees from around the world to South Carolina in recent months. We hate to see that she has bowed to pressure from state and national legislators and fellow Republican governors to call for barring all refugees from Syria.
“As governor, it is my first and primary duty to ensure the safety of the citizens of South Carolina,” Haley said in a letter this week to Secretary of State John Kerry. “While I agree that the United States should try to assist individuals in such dire situations, it is precisely because of the situation in Syria that makes their admission into the United States a potential threat to our national security.”
More than a dozen state lawmakers called on Haley to block Syrian refugees from relocating in South Carolina. In addition, Haley now joins 31 governors, all but one of them Republicans, in asking U.S. authorities to bar Syrian refugees from their states.
Until Monday, Haley had firmly supported faith groups in the state that have worked to resettle refugees in South Carolina. And, prior to the attacks by Islamic State terrorists in Paris last weekend, she had resisted earlier calls to bar Syrian refugees.
But the pressure to keep Syrian refugees out of South Carolina has been fierce and constant. S.C. Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, R-Gaffney, was among those urging Haley to cancel the agreement her office and the Department of Social Services had made with third-party groups to provide shelter for refugees.
“As Senate Majority Leader, I implore you to protect our state from terrorist activity.”
Preventing a few thousand refugees from resettling in South Carolina or anywhere else in the United States will not protect us from terrorists. Anyone who thinks so is naive.
But naivete is not the likely reason Peeler, fellow legislators, members of Congress and various governors have taken this stand. The more probable reason is the cynical calculation that there is potential political gain to be made from exploiting fears of terrorist activity in the wake of the Paris attack.
And in so doing, they are promoting the false notion that all Muslims are suspect, that anyone who subscribes to their faith is a potential terrorist. That’s both unfair to the millions of moderate Muslims around the world and a bad basis for U.S. foreign strategy.
Terrorists can come from anywhere – Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Nigeria, Charleston, S.C. The idea that we can contain terrorism by preventing residents of a particular country from relocating here is nonsense.
Out of the more than 4 million refugees who have dispersed from Syria – mostly to neighboring countries – the U.S. has accepted 1,829 this year. Of that small group, more than 70 percent were either women or children under the age of 14.
And they were allowed to enter only after careful screening by U.S. authorities. All refugees are first referred from the U.N. office in the country where they are living. Support workers then collect information about the applicants to present to the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services division. That agency decides whether the applicants meet the criteria for refugee status.
After that, they must undergo screening by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defnese and other federal agencies. The process can take at least 18 months, often longer.
President Barack Obama has agreed to accept 10,000 refugees from Syria, a minuscule percentage of those displaced by the Syrian Civil War. South Carolina is likely to see few, if any, of those refugees resettled here, but Haley and other state lawmakers would reject even a few.
We don’t rationally fight terrorists by irrational means. We don’t counteract the Islamic State by demonizing all Muslims. We don’t win people’s hearts and minds with heartlessness.
We hope Gov. Haley will return to her previous policy of openly welcoming the world’s victims of hate, violence and intolerance to South Carolina.
This story was originally published November 18, 2015 at 5:32 PM with the headline "Barring Syrian refugees won’t stop terrorists."