Not surprisingly, you didn’t find at Tuesday’s CNN Republican debate a lot of support for accepting refugees from the deadly four-year civil war in Syria.
A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more displaced, 1,800 resettled here, maybe 10,000 more next year, unless a Republican is elected president, then they can all go to hell.
“Two Iraqi refugees came to my town. Their fingerprints were on a bomb in a database. We got them on food stamps and began to provide for them but didn’t have adequate security.”
This was Sen. Rand Paul, the voice of reason on a couple of issues in the debate, giving a version of the welfare momma buying groceries on food stamps and driving away in a brand-new Cadillac.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, himself often a voice of reason among the GOP candidates, told his own welfare momma story.
“We had Central American miners placed in Ohio. Some of them may have been human trafficked. When the administration tells me we have a great vetting process, they sent the miners to us, the schools were disrupted. We didn’t know where they were, and bad things happened to them and now they tell me we ought to admit the Syrian refugees. People accuse me of having too big of a heart. But I also have to say I must keep the people of my state safe. So we take a pause,” Kasich said.
Keep them all out, was the message from Sen. Marco Rubio.
“It’s not that America doesn’t want to accept refugees we may not be able to. This is an issue we have to be 100% right on,” Rubio said. “If we allow 900,000 in but one who is an ISIS killer. We get one person wrong and we have a serious problem. There is not a single person in the national defense apparatus of the country that can guarantee you will be 100% right.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered the “security first” platitude.
“The American people, we on the stage need to open our ears. The American people are not whispering to us. They are screaming to us that it’s our job to make this government work,” Christie said. “It’s so dysfunctional. It’s so ineffective. It’s so ineffectual. And it was widows and orphans by the way and we now know that women can commit heinous acts against humanity just the same as men can do it. When the FBI director tells me that he can vet those people, then we’ll consider it and not a moment before because your safety and security is most important to me.”
It’s a lot to to-do for 1,800 refugees from the humanitarian crisis of our young century.
– Story by Chris Graham
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