Considering the excessively harsh coverage over the past two weeks, I’m surprised these numbers aren’t a lot worse. I suspect that while Trump and his media minions will continue to rewrite history and flog this story as the greatest humiliation the world has ever seen, but the rest of the country will settle down and this will not end up being a long term burden for his administration.
The settlement of the refugees is likely to replace the withdrawal as the big story. I wrote about that last week for Salon as it became obvious early on that they were headed in that direction. It’s only gotten worse:
[D]uring his Fox News show on Monday night, Tucker Carlson framed the arrival of refugees from Afghanistan in terms that his show’s viewers would find familiar.
“They’re just using a crisis to change our country,” he said at the end of an interview, casually referring to a component of his toxic long-running White replacement theory rhetoric. “They’ll never lose another election. That’s the point, as you know.”
This is the esoteric side of the story. The rubes are all about this one. Dan Pfeiffer notes in his newsletter today:
According to the New York Times, even Kevin McCarthy, who voted to expedite the SIV program only weeks before, told fellow members of Congress that bringing Afghan refugees to the U.S. means:
“We’ll have terrorists coming across the border.”
McCarthy’s comment is notable because his only talent is sensing where the Republican base is headed and getting there before he gets left behind.
There are three ways Republicans will square the circle of their initial visa support and their criticism for Biden not evacuating more Afghan translators and others out of the country:
The first approach was previewed by J.D. Vance, the Ivy League-educated venture capitalist running for Senate in Ohio on a platform of performative MAGA-ism. Last week, Vance tweeted:
Vance is gross, but not dumb. His focus on the competence of the vetting allows him to merge two Right-Wing narratives: muslims are dangerous and Biden is incompetent. He uses this focus to justify his opposition to the resettlement.
The second approach is Miller’s. He argues for resettling these refugees in the region instead of the United States because, in Miller’s words, we will adopt “an immigration policy that has brought the threat of jihadism inside our shores.” In an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Miller made an argument that you can easily see being in one million ads next year:
“Those who are advocating mass Afghan resettlement in this country are doing so for political, not humanitarian, reasons. It is extraordinarily expensive to resettle a refugee in the United States. They get free health care, they get free education, they get free housing, they get free food, they get cash welfare. For the price that you could resettle refugees in America, you could resettle 10 times more, 15 times more, in their home region — in this case, primarily in Pakistan. Resettling in America is not about solving a humanitarian crisis. It’s about accomplishing an ideological objective to change America.”
This idea is both absurd and impossible. These Afghans helped our country and we promised them help in return, but other countries are not going to accept large numbers of Afghan refugees if the country that started this whole thing refuses to do so.
Finally, Republicans will rely on nativist NIMBY-ism as a political cudgel. Historically, a lot of people — and politicians — are okay with helping refugees as long as that help happens in some other city or state. The downfall of Obama’s efforts to close Gitmo was when the idea went from theory to practical reality. There was a massive political backlash when it came out that the Obama Administration wanted to resettle a small number of Uighurs — Chinese Muslim separatists — in Northern Virginia. It did not matter that the Uighurs were in Gitmo largely by accident, had no real ties to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and had been determined by the Bush Administration to pose no threat to the United States. Members of Congress (from both parties) — even staunch supporters of closing Gitmo — revolted at the idea that any of those prisoners should end up in the United States. Mitch McConnell accused Obama of trying to “bring terrorist-trained detainees into American cities.” A similar dynamic existed when the Obama Administration attempted to hold a trial for alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in New York City. Throughout the Bush years, Democrats were ardent opponents of the military tribunal system set up to try terrorists, but their tune changed as soon as the Article One trials were slated to happen in the United States. There is no place in the country better equipped than New York City to handle the logistical, security, and political challenges that would come from such a high-profile event. But Obama’s Department of Justice backed down when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Schumer came out in opposition. It’s easy to imagine ambitious and cynical Republican governors, and even some vulnerable Democrats, immediately declaring that they will not accept Afghan refugees in their states and districts.
He says that Democrats shouldn’t accept the premise or try to avoid the argument. They should have Vets tell the stories of Afghan heroism on behalf of the Americans and most of all they should stick together instead of running like a herd of gazelles as they did when Obama tried to close Gitmo.
Sounds good but I’m not holding my breath, especially the last point. Democrats are very easily startled.