The United States was founded on an idea, we hear (usually unspecified). Whatever it was, over the course of time and happenstance another idea arose to meet it: we are a nation of immigrants. Like so many other traditional American ideas — like, say, the desirability of democracy and peaceful transfer of power — the “nation of immigrants” notion now is a contested one. As previous waves of immigrants and refugees have found, there is an unwritten caveat to that idea: certain kinds of Americans only support certain kinds of immigrants.
Now that a military airlift is bringing 50,000 Afghan immigrants to the United States, tensions will surely arise. Especially among those Americans particular about the kinds of immigrants we welcome or, in some cases, any at all.
The Associated Press reports:
As Republicans level blistering criticism at Biden during his first major foreign policy crisis, some are turning to the nativist, anti-immigrant rhetoric perfected by Trump during his four years in office. It’s causing dismay among others in the party who think the U.S. should look out for those who helped the Americans over the last two decades.
On the one hand are partisans who still hold to the notion that America should be a reliable ally to our allies. On the other are those for whom principles are transactional and wedge issues are election-winners. Count the immediate past president among the latter.
“How many terrorists will Joe Biden bring to America?” he asked days after issuing a statement reading “civilians and others who have been good to our Country … should be allowed to seek refuge.”
Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican pollster, said the rhetoric reflects “a general, overall increase” in concern in the country over the risk of terrorist threats after Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban — not just in the short term from those who may not have been properly vetted, but a year or two down the road.
“There’s just a sense that we are less safe as a country as a result of this,” he said.
Others think we should evacuate Afghan allies, sure, but dump them somewhere else. But while some in Congress look askance at bringing Afghans here, the effort to resettle the refugees “is the rare undertaking that is consuming legislative offices of members of both parties,” AP reports.
But immigration remains a go-to wedge issue for others on the right, as precious as abortion and race, and one they will not easily let go.
On the Fox Business Network, Republican J.D. Vance, candidate for Senate in Ohio, accused the Biden administration of prioritizing Afghan refugees over American citizens:
“They put Americans last in every single way, but Americans pay for it all,” echoed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who has shot to prominence with incendiary statements.
Trump and his former policy adviser Stephen Miller, along with conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, have taken things even further, using the same anti-immigrant language that was the hallmark of Trump’s 2015 speech announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination.
“You can be sure the Taliban, who are now in complete control, didn’t allow the best and brightest to board these evacuation flights,” Trump said. “Instead, we can only imagine how many thousands of terrorists have been airlifted out of Afghanistan and into neighborhoods around the world.”
Carlson has warned about Afghans invading America.
Considering the evacuees the Kabul airport suicide bombers saw before detonating themselves, David Frum counters in The Atlantic:
These were not randomly selected men, women, and children either. These were people with technical skills: medicine, computers, electrical engineering. These were people who spoke foreign languages. These were people who could navigate the modern world and its complex demands. These were people who could do work that could fetch dollars and euros and yen and rupees from the world outside Afghanistan.
[…]
Offering refuge in the West to tens of thousands of Afghan allies is a dramatic humanitarian act. It’s a display of power, too—not only the organizational and economic power involved in moving so many people so fast and so far, but also the cultural and social power of the superior attractiveness of the modern world that so appalls the Taliban. Afghanistan needed the people now leaving. The systems that the Western alliance left behind in Afghanistan—computer networks, roads and railways, even the helicopters and munitions the Taliban has inherited from the Afghan armed forces—will rapidly break down without the people whom the Western alliance is removing.
Sorry, Taliban Proud Boys.
Slate’s Aymann Ismail interviews Suzy Cop, executive director of the International Rescue Committee’s Dallas office, about resettling immigrants in Texas. The current wave is neither unprecedented nor out of the ordinary for her organization. She’s worked in immigrant resettlement for 20 years.
And what of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, Ismail asks:
Do you interact with the fear that rhetoric represents in people at all?
I don’t see it here on the ground and haven’t heard it from folks. I’ve heard the opposite when people have met refugees. They’re hard workers, they’ve gone through a lot, they persevere, and they want the same hopes and dreams for themselves and for their families as the rest of us. And so once people see that, it’s a totally different mindset that they get into. That initial fear is just because they haven’t come in contact with someone before. It’s something that disappears when they confront someone and see them how they are.
Cue Neil Diamond.