Tomorrow night’s State of the Union speech will provide the nation with what is now a traditional presidential dog and pony show. As has become the accepted practice since Ronald Reagan, President Obama will invite various people whose presence in the gallery of the House of Representatives alongside the First Lady illustrate key points in his speech. Complaining about this is as useless as pointing out that until Woodrow Wilson, presidents fulfilled their Constitutional obligation to make an annual report to Congress by merely sending them a letter. The SOTU is an opportunity that this and all future presidents will always exploit, and the use of human props is a regrettable tradition that we must live with whether we agree with the president’s positions or not.
But the president’s invitation to two particular persons should nevertheless not pass without comment. By seeking to personalize the question of Syrian refugees as well as a Mexican immigrant, the president is mischaracterizing the debate about an issue that deserves a more thoughtful response. Framing the question of whether it makes sense to welcome one particular set of refugees into this country as one of kindness and humanity rather than one in which dangers have been weighed goes beyond the normal disingenuous we have come to expect from our political discourse.
As to immigration, as our Noah Rothman noted earlier, the notion that Mexico provides the majority of our illegal immigrants is no longer true and a fact that Donald Trump’s legion of supporters seem to have missed. But the presence of Oscar Vazquez, who entered the country illegally as a child but then returned to Mexico and then re-entered the United States legally, joined the Armed Services, and is now a citizen, is a particularly unhelpful example of why immigration reform is so controversial.
While Mr. Vazquez’s conduct is exemplary and actually deserves to be held up as an example, his honorable behavior is the polar opposite of the more than 11 million illegals in the country that the president and his supporters wish to give a path to citizenship. Aside from some of the slurs about those who here illegally that have been broadcast by Trump, the question about illegal immigration has never been about whether such persons are not capable of becoming good citizens. The question is whether border security and the laws of the land are taken seriously. By acting unconstitutionally to bypass Congress and legislate by himself and grant effective, if temporary, amnesty to up to five million illegal immigrants, the president has permanently altered the discussion about reform.
Were he to demand that all illegals do as Vazquez has done before any changes in the system be enacted, conservatives and even Trump supporters would have no argument with him. Indeed, the great debate on immigration would be largely settled. But instead, he has acted in such a manner as to forfeit any trust in his willingness to enforce the law.
But while Mr. Vazquez’s presence in the gallery with Mrs. Obama is misleading, so, too is that of Refaai Hamo, a now well-known Syrian scientist who fled that war-torn country with four of his children. Mr. Hamo is supposed to represent the typical Syrian refugee that the president wishes to welcome into the country. Indeed, he seems like exactly the sort of person Americans ought to want to be here as a legal immigrant. As such he may well be a perfect example of why the laws to admit refugees from foreign strife are important. But he is also completely anomalous to the debate about Syrian refugees. Rather than illuminating that situation, citing Hamo, who is an atypical example of the millions of Syrian refugees that now demand entry to the West, clouds the issue and further undermines the credibility of the position articulated by the president and his supporters.
The problem with the Syrian refugees is that, unlike Hamo, almost none of them can be adequately vetted by U.S. authorities prior to their entry (as the head of the FBI admitted in a rare instance of truth-telling from the administration), let alone be held up as an example of a new generation of those yearning to enjoy the fruits of American liberty. While not all Syrian refugees are potential terrorists, it is virtually a given that ISIS and other radical groups would attempt to infiltrate those seeking entry to the United States since they are omnipresent in the refugee camps.
Citing Hamo is also an attempt to distract Americans the fact that those who sought asylum in the West have been among those who committed terrorist outrages in the last year. Also, of great concern is the way refugees have imported their own cultural values from the Middle East rather than adapting to the West, as we would hope. The result is the epidemic of sexual violence in Europe that reached the point where even the liberal mainstream press had to report the mass attacks on women in Cologne and other cities on New Year’s Day.
For those who have attempted to speak of Syrian refugees as latter-day equivalents to Jews fleeing the Nazis during the Holocaust, these are inconvenient facts. To state them is not to imply that all Syrian refugees are terrorists or rapists. But to assert, as the president and his cheering section in the press and among liberal groups have done, that these concerns should not be taken into account when debating whether the U.S. should open the gates to tens of thousands of Syrians is absurd. To claim that anyone who cites these obvious problems is a bigot is, like Obama’s grandstanding on immigration, to undermine both civil debate and any hope of arriving at a reasonable consensus on the issue. In that sense, Hamo’s presence with the First Lady will be another step toward polarization of the debate about refugees.
But in one very real sense, it is appropriate for a Syrian to be present at the president’s last State of the Union address. Though the president has characterized his Syria policy as a success, he is, as much as any person on the planet other than Bashar Assad, the leaders of Iran, and of ISIS, responsible for the fact that the civil war there has dragged on resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and many million being driven from their homes.
By dithering on Syria and vainly calling for Assad’s ouster without taking action at a time when U.S. intervention could have proved decisive in the conflict and prevented the rise of Islamist groups, the president helped create the catastrophe in that nation. The murderous Assad regime benefitted from the fact that Obama was more interested in appeasing Iran (which was Assad’s ally) than in ending the bloodshed in Syria. His “lead from behind” mantra ensured that decisive action by the West didn’t materialize at a moment when it would have mattered. And his precipitous withdrawal from Iraq ensured the rise of ISIS and its domination over much of Syria.
Seen from that perspective, the president has much to account for on Syria. The presence of one defensible refugee can’t cover up for Obama’s blunders that have been and will continue to be paid for in blood by the people of Syria. His willingness to ignore the problems that may result from a mass entry of refugees could lead to more suffering by Americans.
