We Should Not Be Resettling Afghan Refugees Before Rescuing American Citizens

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So what happens to you now in a country run by the Taliban? It’s hard to think about that. And yet tonight many Americans are thinking about it and they’re feeling distressed as they do. Americans are kind people and generous. They’re quicker and more eager to help strangers than anyone else in the world. We haven’t seen polling on it, but we bet if you asked one hundred people, should we try to help Afghans who are facing persecution for helping us, most Americans would say, of course, we should. And we should be glad that they say that you should be happy you live in a country where your neighbors love children and dogs and want to help refugees. We are generous and empathetic people and we should be proud.

Unfortunately, there are many in our ruling class who are anxious to take advantage of that, anxious, to take advantage of our best qualities. They see our decency and our weakness, and they exploit those things and they do it relentlessly. Let’s try to save our loyal Afghan interpreters, we tell them. Perfect, they think. We’ll open the borders and change the demographic balance of this country. Of course, that’s exactly what they’re doing right now on our southern border, naturally in the name of human rights and compassion. And they would like to do the very same thing with the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan, the disaster that they created. Look at what this kid on MSNBC said yesterday, and remember, as you watch, that he is regarded with total seriousness in Washington as a foreign policy expert and that his fellow foreign policy experts wholeheartedly agree with him.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: We’re talking about an evacuation of people who helped the wars, and that’s an obligation of the United States but it’s sort of a moral floor that’s functioning as a moral ceiling. The Bush administration, I’m sorry the Biden administration, pardon me, isn’t doing things necessary like increasing TPS access and letting in refugees by the millions to escape their certain fate at the hands of the Taliban.

So we must “let in refugees by the millions,” said the mustachioed foreign policy expert. The millions. Millions is not a handful of loyal Afghan interpreters. That’s not even a fleet of cargo planes full of loyal Afghan interpreters. Millions is a good chunk of the entire population of Afghanistan, brought to our country at our expense to live in your neighborhood at the very moment our national fabric is fraying, in case you haven’t noticed, and the United States is becoming unmistakably poorer.

And that’s not just one man’s eccentric opinion on MSNBC. You should know all the clever people are saying exactly the same thing. “The US should take as many Afghan refugees as it can” demands a recent headline in New York Magazine. As many refugees as we can. How many refugees is that? And is it really a good idea to do that for us? Don’t ask. You’re not allowed to ask that question because asking is racist.

NICOLLE WALLACE: The notion that their sort of horrific fearmongering and racism don’t carve out the men and women in Afghanistan who kept our soldiers alive for two decades is a new level of reprehensible. 

DON LEMON: So, right-wing personality is using the crisis in Afghanistan to push an anti-refugee sentiment. 

CHRIS CUOMO: They’re getting caught up in what I call the “Brown Menace,” which is this Trumper right-wing fear of people coming into the country from Central and South America.  These people seem to be getting swept up into that xenophobia. 

FAREED ZAKARIA: Stephen Miller’s response to the collapse of Afghanistan, the fall of Kabul, the takeover of the Taliban was “Look at Biden, he’s trying to – he’s trying to get Brown people to come into the country.” It’s sickening, and it’s pathetic.

It’s hilarious, is what it is, the right-wing hates Brown people. The only problem is that most Afghans are not Brown. Your average green-eyed Pashtun is as pale as anyone sitting on the set right now. Essentially, they’re bearded White guys. Do the dummies on cable television know that? It’s possible they don’t know it. From their perspective, anyone who doesn’t have access to the New York City subway must be a foreigner. And all foreigners are Brown. We know that. They just are. So maybe they really think that more likely, though, they know the truth. They know that calling you a racist is the fastest way to make you obey.

Do we really need millions of Afghan refugees in Phoenix, you ask? Shut up. Racist. OK, go ahead and do it. That’s how the process typically works. In fact, that’s pretty much how it always works with everything now. At this point, fighting racism is the universal justification for every bad idea. Tear down our statues. OK. Stop teaching math. OK. Get rid of standardized testing. All right. Defund the police, move millions of Afghan refugees to swing states to help the Democratic Party. OK. Oppose any of it, and you’re a racist. So in the end, it always happens. And in this case, it may happen. It probably will.

But what happens then to us? How will this new wave of immigration affect America? Will America be a better country or will it be a little more like Afghanistan, which is to say not really a better country? We can’t be sure of what’s going to happen. We can’t see the future. But for a hint, a glimpse, maybe we ought to pay some attention to what has happened in Europe recently. They just went through this.

So one Saturday night last month, authorities discovered the body of a 13-year-old girl next to a tree in Vienna, Austria. She had been drugged and raped and murdered. It took a few days, but by Monday, authorities announced they had arrested two asylum seekers from Afghanistan for the rape and murder. Shortly after that, the chancellor of Austria identified the problem. The problem is Austria’s refugee policy. “I find it intolerable for people to come to us, say they are seeking protection and then commit cruel, barbaric crimes in Austria.”

Yeah, but now they’re getting used to it because it’s been happening with increasing frequency throughout Western Europe for years now, six years. And every honest person knows that. Maybe the dummies on cable news don’t know it, but people who live there do. Cheryl Benard knows it. Cheryl Benard, by the way, has been an advocate for refugees for decades. She’s not against immigration. She’s for it. But over time, she’s concluded that the West simply is not capable, not doing a good job, of successfully assimilating many Afghan refugees. Some, but many not at all.

By every measure, Afghan resettlement in Europe has been an utter failure. Why is that? Maybe we should pay some attention. Afghan refugees. Benard wrote, are notorious for barbaric attacks, attacks that left-wing politicians in Europe frequently cover up for fear of being called racist. For example, “A gang of 50 Afghans who terrorized women in the neighborhood of the Linz train station were brushed off by a government official with the remark that this was an unfortunate consequence of bad weather.” You could see that happening here, by the way.

In another instance, just last summer, an Afghan migrant was arrested in Germany for raping an 11-year-old girl. Authorities released him from jail in just a few days. They said he was not dangerous and anyone who disagreed with that was a racist, of course. The migrant then proceeded to rape another girl. This time she was 13 years old.

Statistics show these are not just anecdotes, it happens a lot. Ask anyone who lives there who is honest. Germany’s government just conducted a study showing that rates of violent crime in Germany, those rates have been declining for years, by the way, shot up abruptly in 2015. And that was the moment when refugees from Afghanistan and Syria arrived in Germany. More than 90% of the new crimes in Germany, the German government has found, were committed by asylum seekers. More than 90%. This is not a slur. It’s not slander. Those are the numbers, and it’s not just a problem in Europe. Ever been to Pakistan? {snip}

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{snip} A CNN reporter, Natasha Bertrand, just reported that in fact, we are relocating more non-citizens than Americans out of Afghanistan. Around 330 U.S. citizens left Kabul yesterday, Bertrand wrote, along with “about 770 non-American family members.”

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