Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
--Emma Lazarus (The Statue of Liberty)
As a father, I was deeply moved by the images of Aylan
Kurdi, a three year-old boy who washed ashore after drowning in the
Mediterranean Sea during his family's failed attempt to escape the Syrian civil
war. Aylan's mother and four-year old brother also drowned on their journey in search of safety, security, and the dreams of a better life. The faces of the men, women, and
children I see on the nightly news, arriving on the shores of Greece and Turkey
in rubber boats, or walking along the railroad tracks of Hungary, are
heartbreaking. “All over Europe and the Mediterranean world, barriers are being
breached,” write the editors of The Nation. “[T]he natural and man-made
barriers of fear and grief that keep people from fleeing war or poverty until
they have no choice; the barriers of indifference that enable the rest of us to
get on with our lives as if those men, women, and children were no concern of
ours.”
As a nation, as individuals, as empathetic human beings, we
cannot simply sit and do nothing. History has taught us otherwise.
In July 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt convened a conference
at Evian, France, in the hope of convincing our allies and friends in the
international community to accept large numbers of Jewish émigrés desperately seeking
refuge from Hitler’s Germany. In cooperation with Rabbi Stephen Wise, his
friend and close confidant, Roosevelt had advanced an ambitious proposal to
ease the plight of refugees by spreading the burden to friendly nations across
the globe. Although delegates from 32 countries attended, the conference was a
huge disappointment. Only the Dominican Republic offered to admit significant
numbers of refugees. With a deep global recession lingering, convincing
Americans and the world to welcome hundreds of thousands of foreigners was a
hard sell.
At Evian, Roosevelt discovered that the resistance of world
leaders to assuming responsibility for resettling refugees resembled the
opposition he faced on the home front. Back in the United States, Roosevelt
contended with stringent immigration quotas, an isolationist Congress, the
anti-immigrant sentiments of organized labor, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and
a nation weary of engagement with the world. Many of our friends and allies
were equally ungenerous. As described by American University Professors Richard
Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman in FDR and the Jews (Harvard University Press,
2013):
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama stated that they wanted no traders or intellectuals, code words for Jews. Argentina said it had already accommodated enough immigrants from Central Europe. Canada cited its unemployment problem. Australia said that it had no “racial problems” and did not want to create any by bringing in Jewish refugees. Imperial countries such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands said that their tropical territories offered only limited prospects for European refugees. League of Nations High Commissioner Sir Neill Malcom was openly hostile to the idea of a new refugee organization. . . . The Washington Post headlined one story on the conference, “YES, BUT ---” [and] noted . . . “that delegates take the floor to say, ‘We feel sorry for the refugees and potential refugees, but---.’”
Many asked why other countries should absorb hundreds of
thousands of refugees when the United States and Britain failed to do so. It
was a question without a good answer.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., after Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and following the Kristallnacht
pogroms in November of that year, the nations of Western Europe and the
Americas feared an influx of refugees. By the summer of 1939, 309,000 Jewish
refugees had applied for visas in the United States, but existing immigration
quotas allowed for only 27,000 (1939 was the first year the United States attempted even to fill the quota for German and Austrian Jews). Some Jews found refuge in Great Britain and
Palestine, though Britain actively blocked much Jewish emigration to Palestine.
Still others fled to Central and South America. In the end, six million Jews
perished in the Holocaust along with millions of other dissidents and
“undesirables.” Although Nazi fascism was eventually defeated, when given the
opportunity, the international community failed to act with the compassion and
urgency needed to protect the most vulnerable among us.
Four million migrants and refugees have so far fled the
bombs of Assad and the brutality of ISIS. The countries of Jordan, Lebanon, and
Turkey are overwhelmed with migrants, with Jordan and Lebanon having absorbed numbers approaching 20% - 25% of their respective populations. Despite the efforts of the United
Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and international aid organizations, there is a
tremendous shortage of food, water, shelter, and medical care. The conditions
of the refugee camps in these bordering countries are unsustainable. Something
must be done.
President Obama announced that the United States, which to
date has admitted only 1,500 Syrian refugees (out of 4 million), will admit
10,000 more, though with no easing of administrative and bureaucratic restrictions
that typically require two years of paperwork before a family can be admitted.
This is pathetic. I tip my hat to the people of Germany, Sweden, and Iceland,
where extraordinary efforts are underway to ease the plight of refugees, to
offer shelter and a welcome mat to people in need, and to reconcile differing
cultures and religions in ways that offer hope and optimism for the future.
Leadership requires the ability to appeal to the best in
people, to inspire individuals, churches, and institutions to act for the
broader good. “We need to decide right now what kind of Europe we are going to
be,” said Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven. “My Europe takes in refugees.
My Europe doesn’t build walls.” Sweden’s employment minister, Ylva Johansson
added, “To feel empathy with the suffering of another person, a person who is
not like ourselves, is part of being human.”
We can debate forever whether American foreign policy in
Syria and the Middle East is partly to blame for the current crisis, whether we
should have intervened militarily against Bashar al-Assad, or provided more
support to the rebel movements, or sent ground troops to fight ISIS – none of
which, in my opinion, would have been feasible or productive. There are few good
military options in Syria. However one
resolves those issues, it is the responsibility of this country and the nations
of Europe – and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, among
others – to welcome and shelter people whose only crime is seeking safety and
security for their families. The refugees need medicine, blankets, and
food; they also need human warmth and compassion, people who will listen to them and grant
them dignity and respect.
The people of Iceland who volunteered to pay for
the flights of Syrian refugees and provided temporary shelter in their
homes have set the high water mark for this crisis. Thousands have responded to the slogan, “Just because it isn’t happening
here doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” It is encouraging to find idealism alive
and well in one small corner of the world.
Germany and Sweden are also showing the world what it means
to take seriously the obligations of privilege and wealth. Germany will accept 800,000
migrants this year alone, an astonishing figure that should set a moral example
for the rest of us. The German people who have welcomed Syrians with flowers
and food and hospitality can teach all of us what it means to respond to a
humanitarian crisis. Sweden’s efforts, though smaller in total numbers, are
even more impressive in light of the proportional burden that small country has
accepted.
Assimilating refugees is difficult and complex. It can
strain a nation’s economy and requires the acceptance and absorption of people
with different cultural and religious practices, languages and values. It is
true that we cannot save everyone and we cannot solve all of the world’s
problems. But we can and should do more, much more, to stem the tide of human
suffering and despair. As the most powerful and prosperous country on earth, we
should follow the lead of the Germans, Swedes, and Icelanders in welcoming the
stranger and offering hope and shelter to the tired, poor, and huddled masses
yearning to breathe free.
I know we live in cynical times. I can think of a
hundred excuses for why we cannot or will not open our borders to Syrian families
in need of a helping hand. We don’t know these people, it will cost too much, and
it will be too difficult; where will they stay, and work, and go to
school? Practical concerns always obstruct the feasibility of compassionate
idealism. But “without idealists there would be no optimism,” American author
Alisa Steinberg has written, “and without optimism there would be no courage to
achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never
come to fruition.”
The humanitarian crisis that is Syria today is
a stark reminder of the world’s failure to come to the aid of Jewish refugees
during the Second World War. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, German-Jewish
philosopher Hannah Arendt, once a refugee herself, suggested that the political
refugee, more than any other human being, exposes a society’s actual devotion to human
rights; the wandering refugee has no legal status, no home, no state, nothing "except that they [are] still human." In the 1930’s and 1940’s, when confronted with millions of potential
refugees, Europe and America offered insufficient refuge. We say
never again, but do we mean it?
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