I feel like I need to go on record as saying that, if it stands, this decision by Our Only President to continue the cap on refugee welcome at 15,000 is profoundly wrong and indeed disgraceful.
We could, as a country, accommodate ten times that number—and even the suggestion that we could accommodate 150,000 is a terrible way of thinking about it. We would, as a country, be improved by a hundred and fifty thousand refugees moving to our nation every year. Vastly improved, I would think. We should accommodate as many as we possibly can, or more accurately we should give refuge to as many as we can, even if it were to our nation’s detriment, a drain on our resources without an upside other than using our wealth to some purpose. But the actual situation is that refugees resettling here add resources to our country in the aggregate, and a high cap—and a high number of actual refugees, which isn’t the same thing—should be a matter not just of pride but delight.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
This is nationalism at its worst, thoroughly perpetuated by both political parties. The news media continues to take it for granted that everyone views refugees negatively and unquestioningly views accepting refugees as a burden.
What if we felt called to help people by our faith or by our own internal moral compass? What if we valued the presence of strangers in our midst, and embraced diversity, and welcomed others into our communities? What if we liked helping people? What if we liked people?
What if refugees were people?
I am a third generation refugee. My grandparents were people. Their presence was a blessing, not a punishment. They escaped from a country that had gone down a path of othering and then dehumanizing people who looked or spoke or prayed or loved differently. After my grandparents were released onto the sanctuarial streets of New York City, they got jobs and made a home and bore a child—my mother. They worked and paid taxes and loved their friends and helped others and sent their daughter to good schools and embraced their new country as so many immigrants and refugees have done before and since. And the politicians and media would have you believe that their present-day counterparts are to be feared? Loathed? Resented?
My grandparents are long gone from this world, but their memory continues to be for a blessing. Please, administration officials, torment me and my town and my state and my country with the gift of their present-day counterparts. We will be all the richer for their presence. We will love them, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt. And one day their grandchildren will attempt to give voice to conscience and sanity when nationalist convulsions overtake their time in turn, when never again turns out to be barely longer than 40 years in the desert.