New York Times
By Patrick Healy and Julie Bosman
November 16, 2015
Republican
fury over illegal immigration and border security took on a new
dimension Monday as a growing number of governors, presidential
candidates and members of Congress
rushed to oppose or even defy President Obama’s plan to resettle 10,000
Syrian refugees.
Twenty-five
Republican governors vowed to block the entry of Syrian refugees into
their states, arguing that the safety of Americans was at stake after
the Paris attacks
by terrorists including a man who entered Europe with a Syrian passport
and posed as a migrant. Among the governors were those from Illinois,
Massachusetts, Texas and other states that have already resettled
relatively large numbers of refugees from among
the 1,900 Syrians accepted by the United States in the last four years.
One
Democratic governor, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, also urged the
Obama administration to stop taking in Syrians until the federal vetting
procedures for all refugees
are “as strong as possible.”
Echoing
the political debate over immigration and border security, several
governors warned that refugees could arrive without verifiable documents
or slip through the
screening process and that they could pose a terrorist threat once
here. “I’m not interested in accepting refugees from Syria,” said Gov.
Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, a Republican. “We would have to be very
cautious about accepting folks without knowing
a lot more about what the federal government’s plan looks like.”
Graphic: Paris Attacks Intensify Debate Over How Many Syrian Refugees to Allow Into the U.S.
The
governors’ legal standing was quickly challenged by immigration groups
and some Democrats, and Mr. Obama said the resettlement of refugees
would go forward next year.
The State Department said it had not reached a conclusion about whether
states could legally refuse them.
Mr.
Obama, in remarks to reporters at the G-20 summit meeting in Turkey,
said the United States had a moral obligation to accept refugees, as
European nations have done,
and he criticized Republican candidates like Senator Ted Cruz and
former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida who have said the United States should
focus on protecting Christians fleeing warfare and persecution, as
opposed to Muslims.
“We do not have religious tests for our compassion,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not who we are.”
Mr.
Obama did not cite any Republicans by name, but he mentioned that “some
of these folks themselves come from other countries” — a shot at Mr.
Cruz, who was born in
Canada and whose father fled Cuba and settled in the United States.
Mr.
Cruz, campaigning in Charleston, S.C., after Mr. Obama’s remarks,
called it “absolute lunacy” to resettle large numbers of Muslims from
Syria. “Who in their right
mind would want to bring over tens of thousands of Syrian refugees,
when we cannot determine, when the administration cannot determine, who
is and isn’t a terrorist?” he asked.
A
spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz said he would introduce a bill to keep Syrian
refugees from entering the United States, though it was not immediately
clear if the ban would
apply only to Muslims or to all refugees.
The
intersection of the refugee crisis with the nation’s immigration debate
came as political leaders hastened to reckon with security concerns
after the Paris attacks.
Several Republican candidates and congressional leaders have been
calling for enhanced border security, some of them portraying illegal
border crossings as being just as much a potential terrorist threat as
an immigration problem. Mr. Bush, Ben Carson and
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, among others, want to make verifiable
border security a prerequisite to considering a legal status for
undocumented immigrants now in the country.
Speaking
on Monday evening at a Washington forum hosted by The Wall Street
Journal, Mr. Rubio said he would prefer that the United States support
resettling Syrian migrants
in the Middle East rather than here. “Here’s the problem. You allow
10,000 people in. And 9,999 of them are innocent people feeling
oppression. And one of them is a well-trained ISIS fighter,” he said.
“What if we get one of them wrong? Just one of them wrong.”
Many
of the Republican-led states rebelling against the Syrian refugee
program were also among 26 states, led by Texas, that brought a lawsuit
against Mr. Obama’s executive
actions to give deportation protections to undocumented immigrants.
After the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit last week
upheld a district court’s halt to those programs, the White House said
it would appeal to the Supreme Court to try
to get them restarted before the end of Mr. Obama’s term.
Border
enforcement and vetting systems were repeatedly cited by Republican
politicians opposed to admitting more Syrian refugees into the country.
Some Republican voters
have made a link between the two as well, expressing fear about shadowy
foreigners entering the country for uncertain purposes.
Some
of the fiercest opposition to the refugees came from the Republican
presidential candidates who are the sharpest critics of Mr. Obama’s
immigration policies. Donald
J. Trump, who elevated immigration as a campaign issue with his
proposal to build a wall on the border with Mexico, on Monday called for
deporting refugees who have already been accepted into the United
States and said that federal counterterrorism agents
should consider closing some mosques if evidence of “absolute hatred”
for Westerners was found.
Mr.
Carson sent a letter to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan on Monday urging
legislation to cut off any money to resettle refugees and migrants from
Syria. Senator Rand Paul
of Kentucky introduced a bill to halt issuing visas for refugees
fleeing Islamic State militants. And two Republican governors running
for president, John R. Kasich of Ohio and Chris Christie of New Jersey,
said the United States should stop accepting Syrians
because of safety and vetting concerns.
The
three Democratic candidates for president support resettling Syrians,
with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Martin O’Malley both saying they
supported accepting 65,000.
The third candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has said he
would accept more refugees but has not specified how many. No other
Democratic governor has come out against accepting Syrian refugees
besides Ms. Hassan, who is in a highly competitive Senate
race against a Republican incumbent, Kelly Ayotte. The Democratic
candidate for governor of Louisiana, State Representative John Bel
Edwards, who faces a runoff election on Saturday, also called for a
“pause” on the influx of refugees there.
Mark
Dayton, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, where nine Syrian
refugees have settled, said the White House had assured him “that all
refugees are subject to the
highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the
United States.”
But
many Republican governors, who have been frustrated for years about
porous borders and the financial consequences of illegal immigration,
said they did not want the
added burden of monitoring Syrian refugees for signs of terrorist
activity. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas released a letter to Mr. Obama on
Monday saying that Texas “will not accept any refugees from Syria”
because of security concerns. In Indiana, Gov. Mike Pence
said that while his state “has a long tradition of opening our arms and
homes to refugees from around the world,” his “first responsibility is
to ensure the safety and security of all Hoosiers.”
Opposition
to the refugee plan intensified as governors and congressional
Republicans issued statements by the hour. Gov. Terry E. Branstad of
Iowa took conflicting positions
hours apart: In the morning he had only urged the president to exercise
caution in vetting refugees, but by the evening he had cited the safety
of Iowans in saying that no Syrians should be resettled there.
Speaking
in the Senate on Monday, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of
Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Mr. Obama should call
a “timeout” on his
plans to admit Syrian refugees. “We need to figure out how we can
better screen these refugees and ensure that terrorists among them are
not evading proper screenings,” Mr. Grassley said.
A
State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said the administration was
“steadfastly committed” to accepting 10,000 Syrians but had not reached a
conclusion about the legality
of the states’ position.
Governors
can ask the State Department, the primary agency managing the refugee
program, not to send Syrians to their states. But some legal scholars
were adamant that
the governors’ efforts to bar Syrians on their own were
unconstitutional.
“This
is an exclusively federal issue,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor
of constitutional law at Harvard University. “Under our Constitution, we
sink or swim together,”
he said.
Yet
many Republicans cited language in their state constitutions that they
said justified blocking refugees, while others challenged Mr. Obama’s
motives.
Representative
Steve King of Iowa, a fierce critic of the nation’s immigration system,
used his endorsement of Mr. Cruz on Monday to draw a connection between
Mr. Obama’s
refugee plan and his executive orders to block the deportation of
undocumented immigrants.
Both
actions, he said, were intended to counter low fertility rates of
native-born citizens and “fill America up in a fashion that has kicked
sideways this thing that
we’ve embraced for my lifetime, which is called assimilation into the
American dream, the American civilization.”
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