It currently takes anywhere from 18 months to three years for a Syrian refugee to be processed for admission to the United States. Eleven state governors, several presidential hopefuls, and around 56% of the American public believe that Syrian refugees should not be allowed into the U.S. at all. The Obama administration has insisted that the current processing time is plenty long enough for government agencies to conduct background checks and screen out any likely security risks.
Well, here’s the other argument to be made: isn’t the current processing time, in fact, much too long? This is the largest refugee crisis since World War II. Given the sheer number of people displaced, the kind of violence they’re fleeing, the chaotic conditions on state borders throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, shouldn’t the U.S. be doing everything it can to admit more people, and faster?
In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, many people claim to be concerned about the risk of terrorist infiltration. (There’s no conclusive evidence linking any refugees to the Paris attacks, by the way.) We know that no Syrian refugee we’ve admitted since the civil war began has been arrested or removed on terrorism charges, but it’s not at all clear that this is because our system is optimally calibrated to screen out threats. How much of that long wait time is actually due to our unwillingness to commit enough resources and personnel to the task, as is the problem in other areas of the immigration system? To what extent do separate background checks by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Department of Defense actually yield usefully complementary results, rather than redundant ones? Could a more centralized system accomplish the same results in a more efficient way? These are all questions worth asking.
Some people, however, will argue that no background check could possibly be thorough and reliable enough. They will say that it is impossible to know the actual security risk posed by individual refugees—that therefore we must assume that it is high, because the consequences of assuming that it is low are too great. But even supposing, for the sake of argument, that admitting a large number of refugees does entail some increased risk of terrorist attack on our soil, this consideration cannot possibly outweigh our overwhelming moral obligation to provide protection and shelter to people displaced by violence.
We could theorize that there is some percentage of risk to our national security that could obviate some percentage of our responsibility to take in refugees. But it would have to be an enormous risk, an immediate and catastrophic risk, a complete and existential risk, to rid of us of the responsibility to take in any refugees at all. And has the present level of risk, as we currently understand it, truly even earned us the license to spend well over a year on every application—when winter is on its way, and thousands of men, women, and children, are left to the mercy of the elements?
Our implicit willingness to allow the deaths of so many of our fellow human-beings, rather than risk any possibility of danger to ourselves, is disgraceful. No doubt our country’s current antagonism towards refugees arises in part from some people’s hatred for immigrants, some people’s anxiety about extremism, and some people’s desire to exploit either of these emotions for political gain. But I think it’s too simple to pin it all entirely on racists, alarmists, and opportunists. I rather suspect that many people are buying into the “refugees are likely to be terrorists” argument because outrage feels less selfish than indifference—and indifference is, in fact, our deeper and more insidious national sin. It was our attitude towards Syria pre-Paris, and even more markedly pre-Aylan Kurdi. It has been our attitude towards refugees closer to home, fleeing gang-controlled territories in Central America. We simply do not care if these people are murdered. We do not care if they drown. We do not care if their children die in refugee camps. We do not care if their children perish from hypothermia on the shores of Greece.
Why this unwillingness to help? Is it because we’re honestly afraid that refugees will murder us all in our beds? I think not. We don’t want to help refugees for the same reason that we don’t want to know where our commodities come from, how our food is harvested, how our clothes and our devices are made: because it’s damned inconvenient. Because when we acknowledge that suffering is taking place in the world, that it is widespread, that it is abetted by our own actions and omissions, we must then think seriously about how to change our national policies and our individual behavior. This process involves risk, uncertainty, sacrifice. If we take some refugees, should we take lots of refugees? If we take lots of refugees, what will be the effect on Americans living here now? Some economists have argued that immigration usually has net positive economic consequences, but what if it doesn’t? Could our standard of living change? Could our cities become more crowded, less safe? Will racial, religious, and cultural tensions become more pronounced?
These possibilities are unpleasant. But they become even more unpleasant when we place them in juxtaposition to the hellish conditions in Syria—because when we do that, we are forced to acknowledge that our own worst-case scenario is still immeasurably better than anything these refugees have had to endure already. And then, perhaps, we may start to feel petty. It is not nice to feel petty. It’s not nice to admit to ourselves and to one another that we are petty. So we try not to think about it at all, and readily latch onto any line of reasoning that seems to absolve us of responsibility. We are, quite simply, morally lazy.
But we don’t have any choice about whether to involve ourselves in the troubles of the world. All of us are already involved. The entire, ordinary-seeming structure of our lives, all the abundances and conveniences which we think of as quintessentially American, and seek to preserve against outside threats: all of it is an edifice borne on the backs of millions of disempowered people throughout the globe. There is agony in the dregs of our coffee and despair in the fibers of our shirts. There is hidden misery metastasized in every area of our lives, so that even our most mundane choices are twitches upon the threads of a vast system of exploitation, exclusion, and waste. The world of refugees and migrants, of slaves and sweatshop-laborers, is not some dark otherworld: it is our world. It exists both within and without our borders. We sustain it, and we allow ourselves to be sustained by it. In this age of information, we can hardly claim that we know not what we do.
We tell ourselves that things are the way they are, that they cannot be otherwise. We hide our cowardice under a veneer of pragmatism, under the cynical pretense that we have made hard choices in the face of hard truths. But the hard truth is that doing the right thing is not always easy, and does not always feel safe.
Brianna Rennix is a 1L at Harvard Law School.