I wrote about the Syrian refugee crisis for Politico today:
One wonders when Obama begin caring so much about Syrians? If you put those 10,000 Syrian refugees back in their native country, and let them get gassed, barrel-bombed, shelled or shot, would he bat an eye, or would they just be part of the ever-growing casualty count?
The Syrian refugees are most useful to the president as a symbol of his alleged cosmopolitanism and of the supposed backwardness of his opposition.
The fact is that, since our resources aren’t limitless, we are constantly slamming the door in the faces of refugees, as the president puts it. According to the World Bank, there were 2.5 million Afghan refugees in 2014; according to the office of refugee resettlement, in fiscal year 2014 we took 758 of them. There were 616,000 from South Sudan; we took 52 of them. There were 410,00 from the Central African Republic; we took 25 of them.
How can the president face himself every day betraying our values by taking so few refugees from these strife-torn countries? The problem with the argument that our values compel us to take refugees is that it isn’t subject to any limit.