President Barack Obama defends stance on accepting Syrian refugees:
Caution on Refugees: Open Hearts, Not Open Borders
The Editors – New Hampshire Union Leader
More than half the nation’s governors, including Maggie Hassan, have asked President Obama to pause his plan to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees into the U.S. next year….
They point out that the Syrian passport found on one of the Paris terrorists was a forgery, but that should raise a louder alarm. It shows specific intent from ISIS to hide its soldiers under the wave of refugees flooding into Europe….
Americans are rightly proud of our tradition of welcoming immigrants, particularly those with nowhere else to go. That does not obligate us to ignore an enemy that has declared its intention to attack American cities, and whose preferred tactic is to camouflage itself among innocent civilians.
French fire brigade members aid an injured person near the Bataclan concert hall after the fatal shootings in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. (AP)
Admitting Syrian Refugees Is Good Economics
Noah Smith – BloombergView
Immigrants of all stripes obviously increase a country’s total gross domestic product. More people equals more production overall, which also means a larger tax base.
Its effect on per capita GDP is more ambiguous, since that depends on whether the immigrants have higher or lower skill levels than the native populations that they join….
Economist David Card famously researched this in the 1990s, when he looked at what happened to Miami’s economy after the Mariel boatlift in which about 125,000 Cubans came to the U.S. He found that the flood of refugees — which increased Miami’s labor force by about 7 percent — had no adverse impacts on the local labor market.
If that pattern holds throughout the U.S. — if Miami is typical — then it means an influx of refugees is actually good news for a region.
An undated photograph of a man described as Abdelhamid Abaaoud, believed to be the architect of the Paris attacks, that was published in the Islamic State’s online magazine Dabiq and posted on a social media website. (AP)
No, It Is Not Un-American to Prefer Christian Refugees to Muslim Refugees
Ben Shapiro – Townhall
The West has good reason for skepticism toward Muslim refugees.
While Muslim refugees who stay in the Middle East split evenly between males and females, the vast majority of refugees entering Europe are males of fighting age. Muslim immigration has already led to massive increases in crime from France to Sweden, and cultural fragmentation from Great Britain to Austria.Terrorism is only the latest threat — and even that threat is obviously not exaggerated. Vetting refugees from Syria is nearly impossible given its status as a failed state. Vetting Muslim refugees is totally impossible given the fact that radical Muslims can easily masquerade as less-radical Muslims.
Can Terrorists Really Infiltrate the Syrian Refugee Program?
Russell Berman – The Atlantic
In the 14 years since September 11, 2001, the United States has resettled 784,000 refugees from around the world, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C. think tank. And within that population, three people have been arrested for activities related to terrorism. None of them were close to executing an attack inside the U.S., and two of the men were caught trying to leave the country to join terrorist groups overseas….
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees initially chooses which refugees to refer to the U.S. after doing its own check. U.S. officials then conduct multiple in-person interviews and verify a refugee’s story with intelligence agencies and by running background checks through several government databases, including DHS and the National Counterterrorism Center. As a result of that extensive process, only around 2,000 Syrian refugees have been resettled in the U.S. since its civil war broke out in 2011—a much lower number than many previous refugee crises.