GOP candidates vs. the Syrian refugee threat (by CP)

There is a Republican tradition established for several election cycles.

The 2008 elections put on the road the hilariously disturbing McCain and Sarah Palin show and had Republican contenders out-enthusing each other on the practically irrelevant matter of torture, turning the question into a wedge issue (lest Bush era officials be prosecuted). In the 2012 campaign there was Romney vowing to double Guantanamo, just to underline that having set up this institutionalised legal limbo was a splendid idea (lest Bush era officials still be prosecuted). Republicans then went to great length suggesting that having these prisoners in a prison on US soil would spell the end of the world as we know it.

Today we have Republican aspirants express their utter horror at yet another non-issue: America being overrun by the Syrian Muslim hordes. Ben Carson demanded the US screen, thoroughly, for ‚mad dogs‘ amongst the Syrian refugees - as if DHS wasn't already. Ted Cruz, not to be outdumbed by anyone, wants to make a religious test at the border and sort out all Muslims.

It is said that further proposals – throwing the witch in the river to see if she swims, having Muslims wear green pointy hats or armbands – were met with general approval by the Republican conclave but were found to be too difficult to spell.

One could perhaps see a point to all this if there was an actual problem with Syrians in the US.

Well, there isn’t. While the US has, with Saudi-Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, done more than any other nation to destabilise Syria, the US have so far taken the not-so staggering number of 1,854 (give and take) Syrian refugees.

That is still 1,854 times as much as as Saudi Arabia has accepted, but not much more than the average German Kreis (~County) is taking. Even if the US took, as Obama has boldly suggested, 10.000 next year, they are light years away from what Europe is experiencing. Distributed over a 317 million nation, it is probably something that the US could handle easily.

The US can freely choose to take or not take these refugees because the refugees can’t just walk up to the US, as they can in Europe. That is the result of the simple fact that the US is blessed by geography and insulated from the Syrian shitstorm they very actively helped unleash by the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Syria is some 9000km away.

Some Republican candidates apparently didn’t notice yet. To the extent the others did, they wouldn’t let that get in the way of a focus-group approved talking point. So, be afraid, very afraid!

by confusedponderer

Comments

[YT]

Bless you, Kind Sir...

May your offspring inherit the earth.

[confusedponderer]

According to the actual refugee statistics for Germany from the ministry for migration and refugees, the number of cases doubled from 2014.

"In October 2015 the ministry received 52.730 first aplications. Compared to the preceding month (September: 40.487 persons) the number increased by 30,2 %. Compared to the preceding year (October 2014: 18.415 persons) that amounts to a monthly increase of 186,3 %. ... In October 2015 the most common countries of origin were:

* Syria with 28.214 first requests, in the preceding place #1 month 16.544 first requests (+70,5 %), preceding year place #1 mit 4.929 first requests (+472,4 %).

* Albanien with 4.549 first requests, in the preceding month place #2 mit 6.624 first requests (-31,3 %), preceding year place #7 mit 593 first requests (+667,1 %).

* Iraq with 4.047 first requests, in the preceding month place #4 mit 2.454 first requests (+64,9 %), preceding year place #10 mit 551 first requests (+634,5 %).

In the current month more than half first requestees were from Syria (28.214 - 53,5 %).

More than one in ten first requests (13,5 % - 7.137 Persons) this month came from the six dominating Balkan countries (Albania: 4.549, Serbia: 861, Mazedonia: 703, Kosovo: 619, Bosnia und Herzegowina: 308, Montenegro: 97). In the previous month they made up 24,4 % of all first requestees.

The following countries of origin were dominant in the time from January to October 2015:

* Syria with 100.248 first requests, in the preceding year place #1 with 28.661 first requests (+249,8 %).

* Albania with 48.865 first requests, in the preceding year place #5 with 6.118 first requests (+698,7 %).

* Kosovo with 32.163 first requests, in the preceding year place #9 with 4.150 first requests (+675,0 %)."

Here is how I read that: Slightly less than half of the refugees arriving here are so far still from the Balkans - not Syria - given that their numbers have increased dramatically they apparently jump on the Syrian Refugee bandwagon passing through their countries seeking opportunity.

Reporting about the refugee crisis doesn't reflect that reality.

If you're from the Balkans odds are slim you'll be accepted as a refugee or asylum seeker in Germany. About 95% of all requests fore refugee status and asylum from the Balkans are rejected. The Balkans are for years the most numerous source of refugees to Germany - given the lack of persecution or war there, very clearly for economic reasons.

[jonst]

"Europe doesn't have a choice really...", if Europe, whatever precisely that is (it seems Poland and other European nations HAVE a choice) it is because those nations do not have the will to MAKE a choice. That is their business. And there fate. It is most certainly their choice to decide they have no choice. That is different than having no choice.

[Babak Makkinejad]

"Assad Must Go" is the code phrase that means "Iran must be pushed out of Syria, Hezbollah destroyed, and Iran contained and Shia diminished."

As I said before, US is taking side in yet another religious war; the Orthodox already have chosen their side.

[kao_hsien_chih]

Please tell me if I'm wrong, as this was my reaction to your post:

One fundamental problem with politics is that simplistic answers that require little thought sells, especially if they are couched in simple black-and-white morality, even if they add up to self-contradictory paradoxes if you think just a bit. With regards Syria, the Borgista (not just Republicans) meme has been a litany of things we (US) don't like: we don't like Assad, we don't like the Jihadists, we don't like Russians, we don't like the Iranians, we don't like whoever. The Republcians add (and, lets face it, most "Democrats" secretly agree) we don't like their refugees. That they are all part of the same problem and that if we need to "solve" them, we have to start unliking some of them does not receive attention, not least because, as CP notes, very few Syrian refugees ever make it to the US. They don't cause "real" problems, not just yet, so we can continue with our infantile "we don't like everything we don't like and we don't have to think about them" antics" without being "responsible."

Contrast this with Mexico: the fundamental problem with Mexico and much of immigration issues is that, at least for a century, Mexican politicians of all stripes have cynically decided that all their "problem children" should be sent to live with the Big Sugardaddy up north (Yes, others get in via Mexico, too, but that's "collateral damage" from Mexico's cavalier attitude towards their own immigrants.). Actually "dealing" with this problem is vastly simpler in practice than Syria: the only thing that is required is to somehow force the Mexican politicians to start dealing seriously with their own problems. Nobody really talks about this because this narrative runs counter to a lot of convenient political propaganda in the U.S. from all sides and the practicality of "reforming" Mexican politics from outside is complex enough--and the long term cost of doing so would have to be borne by us.

Honestly, if we are so powerful that we can make and break governments abroad to our liking, why can't we get a gov't into power in Mexico city that'd actually do something about their "problem children" at their own expense?

[Babak Makkinejad]

I think, empirically speaking, the most successful country in the world in the creation of other countries has been the United Kingdom.

No other state, or combinations of states, has come even close to the successful record of that Island Theocracy called UK.

By comparison, US has been an abject failure in Nation-Building; she has many strengths but reforming Mexico is not among them.

[bth]

"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage...." - Excerpt from the sermon on Jonah and the Whale from Moby Dick.

[different clue]

kao_hsien_chih

NAFTA added a whole new layer of Mexicans beyond just the problem children moving into America. NAFTA was designed to destroy vast swathes of modest-survival peasant economies within Mexico, and NAFTA succeeded in doing that exactly as it was deliberately designed to do. For example, one feature of NAFTA was the de-protectionizing of Mexico's agricultural sector, so that Corporate Subsidy Corn from the American Midwest could be dumped into Mexico's market for a lower price than what 3 million or so Mexican peasant corn farmers were able to charge for their own hand-grown peasant corn. The deliberate purpose of that dumping was to destroy the ability of these peasant corn farmers to make a living selling corn . . . so that they would be forced to abandon their land and move to a vast zone of thousands of maquiladoras envisioned for the Mexican side of the border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of California.

But when Clinton signed MFN for China into law, he set in motion the vast sucking sound of American bussiness carpetbaggers moving to China instead of into the Mexican maquiladoras the way the NAFTAcrats had planned for the American bussiness carpetbaggers to do. So since the economically displaced Mexicans had no maquiladoras to move into at the border, they kept on moving into the United States. Illegal immigration increased vastly AFter the signing of NAFTA from what it had been right up to the day before NAFTA was signed. That is why I have suggested understanding these new millions of Mexicans as economic exiles and referring to them as "naftastinians". There is no Mexican economy left for the naftastinians to go back to. The only way to solve that part of the problem would be to abolish NAFTA and help Mexico re-protectionize its own agriculture and re-exclude under-priced commodity corn/soybeans/etc from America currently still drowning the Mexican market. (We would also then be free to re-protectionize our own vegetable/fruit agriculture against semi-slave-labor subsidized fruits and vegetables coming in from Mexico and underpricing our own fruit and vegetable growing.)

Given the Canadian Ruling Class's very major role in the NAFTA conspiracy, I believe that Canada should be forced to accept 1 million of the 11 million naftastinians now living in the US. Mulroney's role in the NAFTA conspiracy should not be forgotten.

[Babak Makkinejad]

My understanding was that the jobs in the maquiladoras were some of the best jobs in Mexico.

I mean, even in the United States, millions of peoples left the farms to work in factories.

Seems to me that you have a rather rosy picture of life as a farmer - in most of the world it is hard, brutal, back-breaking, and filled with boredom and misery.

Nowhere in the world substantial numbers of people have left cities and manufacturing plants to go back and live like peasants in the village.

[differenc clue]

Babak Makkinejad,

It is true that as a suburbia-brat from a zero-farming-background family, I would have no knowledge of the personal hardships of farming. But it is also true that the Mexican peasant corngrowers did not mass-abandon their land until AFter NAFTA was passed. They had endured peasant corn-growing hardship up until that point. They only left AFter the deliberate bankruptcy engineered for them by NAFTA on purpose.

About mass farmland abandonment in the US, again all I can know is what I have read. Charles Walters and many other writers locatable through Acres USA offer a parallel counter-mainstream narrative as to why that happened here. That narrative tells a tale of carefully engineered rolling price-breaking and market destruction through carefully engineered Free Trade Invasion of foreign commodities designed to break price structures and bankrupt millions of America farm families and drive them into urban exile. One can read about that in books such as Holding Action!, Angry Testament, and Unforgiven: the American Economic System SOLD For Debt and War. And also books like Night Came To The Farms Of The Great Plains by authors other than Charles Walters. Also numerous articles down the years in the pages of Acres USA itself. Regretably, these are nowhere on line. One would have to find them in libraries ( if any) or at Acres USA's own mothership archives.

Also there is a chapter in the book New Roots For Agriculture by Wes Jackson called Accidentally or On Purpose? about the depopulation of much of farmland America and evidence that it was achieved by deliberately antifarmeritic policy.

[Babak Makkinejad]

I think that perhaps these authors are laboring under the ideological hegemony of Thomas Jefferson and his vision of free yeomen as the basis of the American Republic.

One must consider the fact that in US land was given out for free by the State - and farming and ranching in many areas of the United States was subsidized also by the state; say in Nebraska.

Once the state could no longer give those hand outs, farming sector started contracting, just like everywhere else in the world.

You can watch the same process in Iran during which in spite of state subsidies in the form of cheap credit and below cost water supplies, farms and villages have been abandoned in favor of cities and larger villages so much so that the urban/rural ratio now stands at 60/40 and still increasing.

I think farming is just a very tough work, even in US with all the mechanical conveniences.

I once read reminiscences of this US Naval Officer who came from a farming family; he had to get up early each day - including the dead of Winter - before dawn to go take care of the pigs. He hated all of that an the first chance he got he left home and enlisted in US Navy. When asked about the secret of his success - for having reached Flag Rank - he observed that no matter how bad things got for him in the Navy, he was never ever about to give up and go back to the pigs.

[different clue]

Babak Makkinejad,

The books and articles I have referrenced amount to several million words. It would take a long time to read them all. I can't reprise them in a comment in a thread. I believe they are worth reading, step by step, to gain a parallel-narrative insight into just how "it happened here".

[glupi]

Yes, farming can be a back-breaking, soul-destroying way of life, made intolerable by the comparison with TV-promoted lifestyles. Also, to be successful at it, you need a continuity of family traditions/ local knowledge - it's really hard to recreate this chain once broken

However, once, in the ex-Soviet block, the farming villages had hospitals, kindergartens, schools, law enforcement facilities, sport/community centers, churches, shops, etc (you get the idea) - all the prerequisites for a dignified human experience

Nowadays, more and more people long for a non-urban, cleaner life