Paris attacks bolster anti-immigration pitch in US
naky
www.diecastingpartsupplier.com
2015-11-17 16:25:22
Just as the top EU official for migration was urging the White House to be “more generous” in accepting Syrian refugees, Paris was struck by a series of attacks that immediately boosted political opposition to his pitch.
As in some other countries, the massacres have been co-opted by critics of refugee policy. The US in September agreed to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year, up from 1,500, under pressure from Europe.
Frank Luntz, a pollster, said the refugee issue and its impact on the immigration debate in the 2016 campaign would be significant, particularly for the Republicans. But he said both parties were “stoking it for their own political purposes”.
Robert Bentley, the Republican governor of Alabama, on Sunday said he would oppose any efforts to place refugees in the southern state.
Ben Carson, the retired brain surgeon leading the Republican field with Donald Trump, said allowing refugees from the Middle East into the US was a “huge mistake”.
“Why wouldn’t [terror groups] infiltrate them with people who are ideologically opposed to us?” he said. “To bring them here under these circumstances is a suspension of intellect.”
“We won’t be able to take more refugees. It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s that we can’t,” said Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American senator. “There’s no way to background check someone that’s coming from Syria. Who do you call and do a background check on them?”
James Comey, FBI director, recently told Congress that while there were challenges screening Iraqi refugees, the process was tougher for Syria. “The only thing we can query is information that we have. So, if we have no information on someone, they’ve never crossed our radar screen . . . it will be challenging,” he said.
It has also forced a wedge between Democrats and Republicans. During the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday, Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state, and Martin O’Malley, former Maryland governor, both said the US should accept 65,000 Syrian refugees as long as they were properly vetted. Mr O’Malley said that was “akin to making room for 6.5 more people in a baseball stadium with 32,000”.
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia politics expert, said the attacks would make Republicans “even more anti-immigration” and force more moderate candidates, such as Mr Rubio and Jeb Bush, to take a tougher stance, which could hurt the party’s standing with non-white voters in the general election. But he said the Democrats also faced a conundrum since it was “hard to see how they can continue to support absorbing 10,000 Syrians into the US”.