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What to do with Muslim Refugees?
Nicholas Kristof has a heart-rending column in the New York Times about the plight of refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma). Rohingya Muslims are being persecuted by their government and rounded up into concentration camps. Thousands are fleeing by sea, but no government — including ours — is willing to take them in. Often, refugees are sent back to Myanmar to almost certain death. This week, even the Muslim country of Indonesia ordered two vessels carrying hundreds of Rohingya pushed back to sea.
The story is much the same in the Mediterranean as refugees from Libya and Syria desperately try to escape the fighting that is destroying their countries.
Refugees are rarely welcomed even in the best of circumstances and Muslims have made themselves especially unpopular. What can and should be done for these people? What, if anything, should the United States do?
[Photo from Getty Images]
Published in Foreign Policy
The temptation to be careless is ever present for a superpower, but it’s not wise.
I suspect that Italy isn’t having much of a problem with Burmese boat people. I think that this is emblematic of the problems that arise when you formulate your response on a sentence, rather than on even a few paragraphs of information.
I’ve often felt that many long term welfare recipients would be better off (literally; I think it would be good for them, too) being shipped to some place where the cost of living was low, and they could do their makework with a very high degree of supervision. I don’t think that sending them to Syria would be a great plan (I mean, I would like it, because it would mean that we devoted a lot more effort to Syria, but I don’t think that it’s an objectively good idea).
But sending much of Detroit to Nigeria, Bangladesh, or some other English speaking country that would benefit from more US accented labor seems like a useful move.
http://5pillarsuk.com/2015/05/21/gambia-offers-to-take-in-all-rohingyas-fleeing-persecution/
Good news, I think.
Hopefully we had something to do with it. Hopefully someone can let the world know that.
If they came to America and we let them in, we’d be stuck with supporting them for a generation, at least (more if Democrats have anything to say about it). This is a very good argument for not letting them in.
Why? Muslims are the most ungrateful group in the world. If you doubt that, visit Ground Zero. Muslims will suffer one hell of a lot before I consider that scale balanced.
Religion of Peace, my rear end.