America's Anti-Refugee Hysteria Proves Ignorance and Fear Is Nothing New

By Carol Morgan



If George Santayana were alive today, I’m certain he would be shaking his head in disgust. Americans are perfectly capable of discerning mistakes in hindsight, but the light bulb moment never seems to transfer to the present. With all the blustery pontification about Syrian refugees burning up the media, we seem incapable of applying the lessons of history from America’s past.

A hundred years ago, anything German was disdained. German Americans changed their names and even German-sounding places like Berlin changed to Libertyville. In an incident very close to home, shortly after World War I, a German priest, Father Joseph Keller was tarred and feathered in Slaton, Texas.

In Illinois, German immigrant, Robert Prager was lynched by a hysterical mob with ties to the Knight of Liberty.

Billy Sunday, a former sports hero who became a popular radio evangelist fomented the World War 1 German phobia, calling upon God to damn the Germans and screaming that if Hell were turned over it would be stamped, “Made in Germany.”

Today, we look back at the Jewish Holocaust of World War 2 and self-righteously proclaim “Never again!” but in July of 1938, fewer than 5 percent of Americans believed we should take in those fleeing from Hitler’s genocide.

Fast forward to the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor and the newest enemies of America were the Japanese. A .html" target="_blank">“Jap Hunting License” with a bucktooth squinty eyed caricature wound its way throughout the media and a Life magazine article by Henry Luce on how to distinguish a “Jap” from a Chinese.

That sounds crass and ignorant today, but Americans were serious about it at the time. Those writings and pictures were benign in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans rounded up and placed in internment camps because they “might” be a threat to our national security.

As a matter of fact, one of those who resisted this blatant violation of civil liberties will be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, this month. In 1942, Japanese American attorney Minoro Yatsui deliberately violated the military curfew placed on all Americans of Japanese descent and demanded to be arrested. And he fought for his rights until the day he died.

Remember the Vietnamese boat people of the seventies? After the fall of Saigon, they faced imminent danger at sea, in tiny boats, in order to come to America. Southeast Asians fled to America at the rate of 25,000 per month during the movement’s peak. And if you read their stories here, America didn’t exactly put out the welcome mat for them, even though we were the gas that fueled their desperate departure.

The same with the refugees who fled Honduras, Guatemala, and Colombia...we partnered with Dole pineapple, made wholesale regime changes with great regularity to benefit America’s corporate country club without thinking of the long-term consequences. America likes to break things in other countries, but cleaning up the mess? Not so much. Unless, we’re talking about the 43 million dollar gas station in Afghanistan that enriched some Congressman’s political donor.

The Syrian refugee crisis is just one more American foreign policy mistake in a long line of the same, and as usual, we abandon the victims after we’ve finished our national agenda. Since we’re the ones who stirred up the hornet’s nest in the Middle East, we owe them some assistance.

Americans in all their predictable fear and ignorance mistaken believe that every Syrian refugee is a terrorist. You can’t rein them in and bring them back to rational thinking--despite a study by Pew Research that most countries with Muslim populations disdain ISIS, despite the fact that all refugees going through a rigorous vetting process and despite the fact that it takes 18 months to process even one refugee.

Since 2001, America has resettled 781,000 Middle Eastern refugees and out of those only three have been jailed for terrorist activities—and all three of those were detained before they could put their plans into action.

With all these facts and statistics, most Americans still run around in panic like Chicken Little. We see terrorist everywhere…no evidence needed.

Worst of all, Republican politicians (and some Democrats) are using this as an opportunity for political point-scoring as we drift into an election year. Americans forgot the basic tenet of Tyranny 101: The more scared the citizens are, the easier they can be controlled and enslaved.

The 31 Republican governors, one of whom is our own Governor (who thinks his primary role is to sue the government), mistakenly believe they can usurp Federal law and be the ultimate deciders of who can enter and who cannot. They are oblivious to the fact that they are playing the role of useful idiot to the ISIS. The ISIS themselves are using this same type of rhetoric against America and the GOP echoes in return.

Keeping refugees locked up in camps and bottled-necked at borders is a key ingredient to radicalize those who were not radicalized before. Living in a tent in a crowded diseased environment, with no water or electricity, no medical care, and very little food will guarantee a new generation of jihadists.

There is no Republican who’s more on the wrong side of history than Ted Cruz. He’s been insisting that if we do admit Syrian refugees, they can only be Christians. There’s nothing more un-American than having to submit to a religious test to come to America. It’s eerily similar to the ISIS, who require prisoners to convert to Islam or die.

Look here…no one is saying that refugees, from anywhere, should simply be allowed into the country without being screened. That’s what’s being done right now, despite what Calgary Ted would have you believe. Cruz’ legacy will be thrown on the ash heap along with other failed ideologues and demagogues like Billy Sunday, Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. Ted Cruz is a pitiful and pathetic fool who will be ridiculed by future historians.

Ignorance and fear is nothing new. Pundits claim that the knee-jerk reaction of barring all refugees fleeing a war zone does not represent “who we are” as a nation.

But...when we look at America’s history, apparently it does. Whether or not that will apply to the future will be determined by how we manage this temporary crisis.

We keep doing the same things over and over again; expecting a different result. And that, my friends, is the true meaning of insanity.

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Carol Morgan is a career/college counselor, freelance writer, and former Democratic candidate for the Texas House. She is the award-winning author of two books: Of Tapestry, Time and Tears and Liberal in Lubbock. Email Carol at elizabethcmorgan@sbcglobal.net , follow her on Twitter and on Facebook or visit her writer’s blog at www.carolmorgan.org

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