The world is currently facing the greatest refugee crisis since the onset of World War II. The failure of the Syrian state, emergence of the Islamic State and civil war have caused the region to reach new levels of instability, and the citizens there are paying the price. We’ve heard the horror stories on the news about families forced to flee across the sea as they are being smuggled by boat toward a clouded future. Many of them aren’t breathing by the time they reach land.
Last Monday, the White House announced that they had granted asylum to the 10,000th Syrian refugee this year. While that number certainly brings joy to my heart, knowing that countless humans have been given safety and a future, I’m utterly dismayed at how low that number still is.
To put this in perspective, there are an estimated 5 million total refugees coming from Syria. 1.1 million have already been settled in Europe, a continent that witnessed its own refugee crisis during World War II. Europe remains 2.5 times smaller than the United States, but has a population that is two times larger than our country. Compared to France, Britain, Germany and even other countries within the Middle East, our efforts are minimalistic. Canada, which has 10 percent of the population of the United States, has resettled three times as many refugees since last fall.
The White House’s goal for the next fiscal year, beginning on Oct. 1, is no different than the goal of this year. The White House has agreed that we should only take care of 1 out of every 500 refugees over the next year. Former Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley noted that if the United States welcomed 65,000 refugees, it would be the statistical equivalent of adding 6 and a half seats to a baseball stadium of 32,000. The most historically prosperous nation is doing miniscule work to help the lesser of these.
Part of the problem stems from the political rhetoric. Even though refugee screening processes are intensive, people are still terrified that the Islamic State is infiltrating refugee resettlements, even though most refugees are women and children. Xenophobia toward the Middle East is never-ending. We’re letting fear trounce love and humanitarianism. While there’s no foolproof way to ensure that every individual isn’t radicalized, refugees receive one of the heaviest screenings for people travelling into the country. The whole process takes up to 24 months, and just over 50 percent of refugees even pass the screening phase, according to Time Magazine.
Love for others cannot simply stop at American citizens. Those who scream “All Lives Matter” typically seem to renege on that view when the topic of refugees exists. Apparently Syrian women and children aren’t actual people, according to that blasphemous standard. While the lack of acceptance and love for asylum seekers is most prominent on the right, as mentioned earlier, the left isn’t doing a tremendous job of ensuring that those facing persecution are given the safety that they deserve. Ten thousand is simply too low of a number for a nation of our magnitude.
It is time to defeat the xenophobia and the fear that ISIS could be smuggling one radicalized individual in the flood of thousands of helpless people. Despite the fact that only two of the 750,000 refugees admitted into the U.S. since 2001 have been brought up on terrorism charges, there is much more fear over violent individuals entering the country from outside our borders, as opposed to any individuals living in the U.S. for their whole life. Let us not forget that Dylann Roof, Omar Mateen, Adam Lanza and James Holmes were all citizens who were born in the United States.
We’ve witnessed thousands of refugees and immigrants entering our country in the past, and while they faced similar scrutiny at the time, they ultimately have benefitted our society in tremendous ways. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Vietnamese and more brought contributions to our nation, and it is imperative that we give more Syrians not just that opportunity, but the human right that they have to live in a free society without fear.
