“President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America—it is nothing less than lunacy,” Ted Cruz said on Fox News, the day after the attacks on Paris. If there are Syrian Muslims who are really being persecuted, he said, they should be sent to “majority-Muslim countries.” Then he reset his eyebrows, which had been angled in a peak of concern, as if he had something pious to say. And he did: “On the other hand,” he added, “Christians who are being targeted for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them. But President Obama refuses to do that.”
The next day, at a middle school in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Cruz spoke even more openly about those whom he considers to be the good people in the world. He told reporters that we should accept Christians from Syria, and only Christians, because, he said, “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.” This will come as a profound surprise to the people of Oklahoma City and Charleston, to all parties in Ireland, and to the families of the teen-agers whom Anders Breivik killed in Norway, among many others. The Washington Post noted that Cruz “did not say how he would determine that refugees were Christian or Muslim.” Would he accept baptismal certificates, or notes from pastors? Does he just want to hear the refugees pray?
On Monday, President Barack Obama reacted to this suggestion with some anger. “When I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims, when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefitted from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful,” Obama said. (That last bit, about “families who’ve benefitted” when fleeing persecution, was an unmistakable reference to Cruz and Marco Rubio.) Obama continued, “That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.” The question is whether Obama can put that compassion to use, in this precipitous moment after Paris, when so many bad choices will seem appealing, including attacks on our fellow-citizens. (On Monday, Donald Trump said that, though he’d “hate to do it,” as President he would “seriously consider” closing mosques that were viewed as centers of radicalism.) The real criticism is that the United States has taken so few Syrian refugees of any religion—just about fifteen hundred, all of whom have been screened by a process that can take up to two years.
Cruz is cruder than some, but he is not alone among Republicans. On Sunday, Jeb Bush also said that, although he isn’t entirely opposed to helping refugees who’d been screened, “I think our focus ought to be on the Christians who have no place in Syria anymore.” (Christians were ten per cent of Syria’s population when the civil war broke out.) On Monday morning, Bush spoke about how “we should focus on creating safe havens for refugees in Syria rather than bringing them all the way across the United States”—a life in no-fly zones, while, according to a vision Bush also laid out over the weekend, a major land war involving U.S. troops was launched around them. He quickly added, “But I do think there is a special, important need to make sure that Syrians are being protected, because they are being slaughtered in the country and, but for us, who—who would take care of the number of Christians that right now are completely displaced?” Others, like Rubio, have avoided the Christian question by saying that they don’t think we should take refugees at all. Ben Carson, speaking to Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” said that taking in refugees “from that area of the world, I think, is a huge mistake. … To bring them over here, under these circumstances, is a suspension of intellect,” and would ignore “the reason the human brain has these big frontal lobes, as opposed to other animals.” (He then talked at greater length about “brain stems.”) Trump, in the past, has claimed that Syrian Muslim refugees can get into America “easily” (they cannot), while “if you’re from Syria and you’re Christian you cannot come into this country” (again, not the case). But, mostly, Trump doesn’t want to let anybody in, at least not anybody of the tempest-tossed type. Indeed, it’s not clear that the talk of Christian refugees is meant, even by the loudest Republicans, to translate into the appearance of Syrian Christians in America, as opposed to being an acknowledgment that some of the crowds that cheer when they hear anti-immigrant rhetoric might have qualms of conscience. The problem, they can be told, is just that our Muslim-sympathizing, cowardly leaders would bring in the wrong refugees.
Christians are in danger in Syria. Their danger is distinct but not unique. The Yazidis, an even more isolated religious minority, have been a particular target of ISIS. Shiites and Alawites have been targeted, too. Refugee policies have at times rightly recognized the urgent danger that certain religious or otherwise distinct groups are in, and have properly responded. This is something quite different than saying, as Cruz does, that being a Muslim should be a basis for exclusion. Would he let in atheists, for that matter? It seems strange, when moderate Muslims are trying to distance themselves from a milieu of terror, that we would insist that such a thing is impossible. There are international and American laws that recognize people who need protection. There are principles of common decency which do the same. What they do not do is use faith, or the lack of it, as a basis for rejection. (America should have let in more Jewish refugees during the Second World War; that wouldn’t have meant turning away Thomas Mann.) And it is a brutal insult to Syrians who have gone through four and half years of carnage to say that the fact that they are Sunnis gives them some sort of immunity from ISIS or from the Assad regime. There are four million Syrian refugees outside of the country now, and many more inside it. There will likely be some bad people among them. That fact does not obviate their suffering. Taking more of them in can be an unpopular position at a moment when the news is full of speculation that one of the Paris attackers had passed through a refugee camp in Greece with a Syrian passport. But their desperation will not disappear if we lose interest in it; it may just take a different and more destructive form. We have a role in deciding where they will go next.
One of the more dishonest aspects of Cruz’s comments on Fox was his characterization of who the Syrian refugees are. He mentioned an estimate that, in the “early waves” of refugees entering Europe, “seventy-seven per cent of those refugees were young men. That is a very odd demographic for a refugee wave.” Perhaps it would be, if the number were accurate. A bare majority of the Syrian refugees are women, as FactCheck.org noted in September, when Ben Carson and Scott Walker raised similar alarms. About twenty-two per cent are men between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine—a broad definition of “young.” Cruz is smart enough to know this. He may be referring to a number given for migrants who arrived in Europe, from nine different countries, by taking a specific, dangerous Mediterranean sea route in 2014 (seventy-two per cent). Among the two million Syrian refugees the United Nations has registered in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon, a full thirty-eight per cent are under the age of twelve.
For that matter, why shouldn’t there be young men among the refugees? In stories about why people emigrate, like the one told by Nicholas Schmidle last month in The New Yorker, one reason young men give as a motivating factor for leaving their countries is the fear of being conscripted by one side or the other. They don’t want to be killed, and they don’t want to be killers. Is it Cruz’s view that a nineteen-year-old, just out of high school, should head for the hills, looking for the moderate Syrian opposition that even the C.I.A. has been unable to find? Or should he languish in a camp, with no prospects of really settling anywhere, as a target for the wrong type of tutor? That is not going to make Europe or the United States any safer. What Cruz and the others are saying is that the threat people are living under, which has been enough to drive them from their homes, should not matter. What does matter is whether we feel threatened by them.
The other insinuation that Cruz and others are making is that Obama doesn’t like Christians, and refuses to acknowledge the Islamic character of terrorism—maybe, they suggest, because of his character, or because of who he is. “I recognize that Barack Obama does not wish to defend this country,” Cruz said. And saying that was shameful, too.
