Spinning this off of the main Trump thread in Elections, since it’s turning into a hijack. One of the Trumplings tweeted a refugees=Skittles meme which kicked off a debate over how dangerous refugees actually are. I feel like I kicked off the hijack with this post, which I made in response to another poster saying that they found the Skittles meme accurate, though in poor taste. I’ll admit that I drew an incorrect conclusion from the cited statistic, and I’ll dive deeper if I have time and don’t get ninja’d. I still believe that the Skittles meme is inaccurate, but I concede that I don’t have a sufficient cite for it yet.
So let’s move the discussion over here and let the Trump thread return to its regularly scheduled incredulous despair.
AFAIK, there are no reliable crime numbers on US refugees as distinct from other immigrants. Immigrants as a whole have lower crime rates than citizens.
Beyond the simple white nationalism element, a lot of the xenophobia is based on perceptions of refugee crime in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. We do actually have some numbers there, and they don’t support the xenophobes. Moreover, the US screening is much more intensive than what refugees receive as migrants to the EU.
Of course, it’s also always worth noting that Trump is taking a huge shit on American values by declaring that we don’t accept people fleeing hell because we’re too scared of the demons who might be following them. We might as well just knock down the Statue of Liberty and replace it with a statute of Trump cowering in a corner.
It doesn’t have overall crime numbers for immigrants either (as Richard Park said, I don’t think there’s a good source of those numbers for the various classifications of immigrants), but instead focuses rather heavily on the terrorist attacks attempted or committed by immigrants, their likelihood of killing Americans, etc between 1975 and 2015.
My anecdotal contribution to this thread: I work in an Irish law firm that does both refugee and criminal law. Very very few (as in almost none) of the clients of our refugee practice become clients of our criminal practice. I saw Trump made a comment about Somali refugees - we have a lot of those here and they don’t seem to commit many crimes.
Actually, here is a recent article about the languages we need court interpreters for. Hardly any of these are languages of refugee-producing countries.
I don’t understand the Skittles analogy - it’s broken out of the box.
Three Skittles won’t actually kill me. If you told me three of the Skittles in your bowl would kill me, my first inclination would be to presume you are not telling the truth.
If you managed to convince me that you did indeed have a bowl of poison skittles on your desk, I might then start to wonder if you were a dangerous lunatic. So what the hell does the skittles thing mean anyway? As an analogy, it backfires by design.
I live just blocks away from one of the largest Afghan communities in the US. I’m not sure they count as refugees any more, but judging from police reports no one from that place commits any crimes. They and other immigrant/refugee communities seem more victims than perps. Just anecdotal.
Check out how many clearances are required to enter your country as a refugee. It’s an onerous amount checking and every layer of security service having scrutiny.
If you’re a terrorist it’s a zillion times easier to come into the country as a tourist.
The problem with this is that not every terrorist enters the country with the desire to become a terrorist. The Boston Bombers entered the country as children as political refugees. When they grew up they were radicalized and decided to become terrorists. Many of the terrorists behind the recent spate of european terrorism had similar arcs, entering the country at a young age or being the son of immigrants and then are radicalized years after their parents arrived in the country. How do you check someone to see if their kids are one day going to be radicalized?
In regards to the OP and the Syrian refugees, if the US is going to take in tens of thousands at onetime the amount of checking is necessarily going to be reduced and the amount of reduction is going to be scale along with the number of refugees accepted.
The same way you do with children of American-born citizens, of course.
Criminals of all ethnic and national backgrounds don’t like dealing with the police. Victims of criminals usually do. So why would immigrant-committed crimes be any less likely to be reported than native-committed crimes?
We don’t check American born citizens, but since they are already here and have constitutional rights we can not do anything about that. If they turn radical later then that is something we have to deal with because we live in a constitutional republic. I think that occasional terrorism by american citizens is a small price to pay for our constitutional protections.
However, recent experience suggests that when you increase immigration from muslim countries you also get a commensurate increase in the number of terrorist attacks. The question is the increased immigration worth this price? Since immigration mainly benefits the immigrants and terrorism affects everyone, it is not unreasonable for people to oppose the policy of accepting more immigrants.
The premises “immigration mainly benefits the immigrants” and “terrorism affects everyone” are false. And you’re missing any discussion of values. Saving kids from barrel bombs and beheadings is worth some risk to most Americans. Some Americans would only save them if they’re white and Christian, but that’s not a majority view yet.