Jordan is in a tough spot with regards to Syrian refugees, but they’re handling it gracefully, unlike the rest of the world.
Jordan has always been a haven for refugees from various Middle Eastern conflicts, and they’ve handled it very well for decades. It helps a great deal that the ruling family there is moderate, and that the country is stable and has a solid infrastructure. Aid agencies are welcomed and supported, which in turn means refugees are much better supported than in other countries in the region.
Imagine what it would look like if America took in 80,000 Syrian refugees and resettled them in various places around the country, with maybe 5K-10K people in each place (to make it easier to provide them services and let them support one another in the earliest days of resettlement). If these people are growing crops, creating businesses, running restaurants and shops, and generally building lives from nothing in the middle of a desert, think about how successful they could be here, given some support to begin with and the promise of opportunity for themselves and (more importantly) their children.
But of course Conservatives will cry “But they’ll come here all dirty and poor, suck off our welfare system, refuse to learn our language and become criminals! They will make their own little Islamic country inside America and never be productive contributors to society!”. This is, of course, bullshit. We don’t even need to look all that far back in history to find proof that it is bullshit. From 1975 to 1982 nearly half a million Vietnamese refugees were admitted to the United States and resettled across the country. 40 years and 2-3 generations later Vietnamese immigrants have had one of the more successful large-scale integrations into America society of any immigrant group since Europeans in the 1800’s. The vast majority of Vietnamese immigrants learned English, sent their kids to school, became employed, opened businesses and generally integrated into American society.
Why does Conservative America think the Syrians of 2017 are any different than the Vietnamese of 1977? Oh right, 'cause they’re Muslims.
I agree that refugees from sectarian violence should be seen as less culpable and less susceptible to radicalization. OTOH i think progressive people are too eager to sort of turn the other cheek when it comes to radicalized Islamic violence, and the backlash against the Syrian refugees is part of a larger cultural backlash against Islamic culture in general.
I mean, ISIS just “declared war” on Egypt’s Coptic population. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/why-isis-declared-war-on-egypts-christians/522453/ and you hardly read a thing about it, pushing the idea that they are idolaters that can be killed at will (thanks al-Ghazali!). I think people who are progressive are too eager to worry about overall narrative, about not providing ammunition for nationalists/racists/religious bigotry, and therefore don’t really have an answer to this kind of thing other than shrug and compare it to deaths by accidents and carry on like no big deal, because the alternative is a confrontational defining of values they don’t want to have. But that’s certainly not a shared opinion by the population at large. It’s bull that refugees are getting the flak from the clash of civilization crap everyone wants to push, but that bigotry isn’t just coming out of nowhere though, and if we had a coherent, long term plan about what values are worth defending, where the lines in the sand are, ect., i think the population would feel more comfortable with large population migrations. It’s not fair they’re having to suffer the consequences of bigotry that ISIS and Al-Qaeda have been fostering against Islam in the west, but that’s really been their whole plan all along anyway.
I agree. I think if we had outsourced our Middle East policy to King Abullah II this century we would be in far better place as would the region. Everytime I hear the guy interviewed, I find myself mostly nodding my head in agreement, and sometimes saying “gee I hadn’t thought of that.”
It’s kind of amazing how stable and successful Jordan has been given the conflict in the region and the fact that they border Syria, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. They have an upper-middle class economy, a highly educated and trained workforce, and are almost glaringly progressive in a lot of areas compared with the rest of the region. They are easily one of the strongest allies the Western world has in the Middle East. When ISIS is destroyed, Assad sent packing and Syria free once more, it should be Jordan that takes the lead in negotiating new borders in the region and as liaison between the West and whatever the new Middle East will look like in terms of humanitarian, military and infrastructure aid.
Jordan has less than 10 million people, yet they have over 50,000 of their military troops assigned to U.N. peacekeeping forces. They’ve also accepted over 1 million refugees from Syria and the surrounding areas, and yet they don’t seem to have any issues with terrorist attacks. Hmmm…
And funnily enough, the US was a major contributor to both events; although you could probably put some blame on the colonial powers (France, UK) for both.
Several diplomats said that early Trump meetings with Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and British Prime Minister Theresa May also raised concerns over Trump’s unorthodox style of working largely without detailed notes and speaking off the cuff.
“He doesn’t have a paper in front of him. . . . It’s up to the visitor to declare the agenda,” one said. “He just sits there. It’s like you are in a bar, and you just start talking to him.”
That’s the scariest shit I’ve heard in a while. So, just as when he speaks. If we get through 4 years of this shit without a major foreign policy disaster it will be a miracle.
New spending bill. Trump loses basically in every way imaginable.
Yeah, I read that. Huge disconnect between White House wants and Congress gives. It’s like they are beginning to really not take him seriously. It makes me wonder how long he can last if they are turning against him.
Well, this is something.
[quote]
Steve Bannon, now President Trump’s chief strategist, once co-wrote a rap musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” set in South Central Los Angeles during the 1992 riots after the LAPD beating of Rodney King.[/quote]
I barely even know how to respond to that.
I had to scroll down to read that Now This staged that table read. At first I thought it was actual footage from a table read Bannon organized or some such, and 30 seconds in I was like “How is nobody standing up and walking out on this?!!”
In the end though, this only serves to further confirm that the people occupying the White House today, Trump, Bannon, Kushner, Miller, Ivanka, etc., have no fucking clue how government or even the world at large actually work. The longer these people control the White House, the greater the chances that we are all royally screwed.
I’m not under any illusion that Trump will leave the WH before his term is up. But I do think it’s become fairly obvious to everyone that Trump is easy to roll. All he seems to know how to do is bluff, and now Washington (and, one presumes, the rest of the world) is on to it.
Hmmmm
He is a true Cuckservative.
It’s a pity Trump never read that book.
Yep… the new budget agreement contains nothing for the wall, doesn’t cut EPA funding, doesn’t impact ‘sanctuary cities’ and leaves Planned Parenthood’s budget in-place. It’s also likely that his health care plan is going nowhere.
The unfortunate part is that there is only one area where the President can act unilaterally. Heck, Nixon was reported to have bragged that “all I have to do is pick up the phone, and 70 million people die.” And while I’m not suggesting he’ll nuke Russia to prove a point, I’m not sure I would plan any travel to Korea in the near future. If he acts out, I think that will be ground-zero for the tantrum.