People prejudiced against anyone because they’re from a different background make me physically ill. Ever since I was a child listening to my dad rail about the "Negro" (as they were called then) children being killed in the South during the civil rights era of the mid-60’s, I feel sick when I experience this kind of ignorance. People around here still think nothing of calling African Americans “the colored” and worse. I do realize that some of their prejudice is simple ignorance and fear of the unknown and the different. Living in West Virginia, I’ve met people who have never been outside the state. In our medical practice, patients get upset if we send them to a specialist who speaks with an accent because they’re so unused to hearing anything but an American accent. It’s just too much for them. There are pockets of West Virginia where all you see are white people. In fact, according to one study, Tucker County in West Virginia is the least diverse in the nation, with a 100% white, non-Latino population. But is there really any excuse for being ignorant in this day and age? We have TV, movies, the internet, music -- many many ways to connect to people of different cultures and beliefs — if we want to.
The recent suspicion that refugees and migrants might be terrorists, or come over here and sponge all our wonderful entitlements, is rooted in this ignorance and augmented by the hateful puke spewed by Infowars, Fox "News," Sean Hannity and their like. In reality (something those folks know too little about), this threat is magnified out of proportion from the minuscule chance that a Syrian refugee, some of whom have walked more miles than certain West Virginians travel in their whole lifetime, might come over here and put some American out of job….Or that a terrorist will disguise him or herself as a Syrian refugee and come here to wreak havoc. Remember, most of the terrorist attacks on American soil were committed by WHITE AMERICAN MEN.
The argument that migrants are going to sap our resources? First of all, I will ask these unevolved, callous hacks how they think the Native Americans felt about us coming and killing all their buffalo and cutting down all their trees. And then I'd ask them what Jesus would've done with the refugees. You know, just to be the smart ass that I am. I'm talking about Syrian refugees, running, swimming, boating, crawling, from a country where, among other atrocities, 12000 children have been killed. That is, more children killed than people living in my county. I'd love to drop the haters into Syria so they can see what these people are running from. They wouldn't last an hour.
The fact is, migrants might actually be GOOD for the economy. I'm thinking of all the little bodegas, nail salons, and other small businesses started by immigrants. Those businesses are paying taxes and hiring people, which is more than I can say about the top 1% in this country. And listen to this statistic from Time magazine: if rich nations around the world were to admit enough migrants to expand their labor force by a mere 3%, the world would be $356 billion richer.
Considering our leading role in the tragedy that was the Iraq war, the one that caused much of the unrest in the Middle East, we should bear at least part of the responsibility of resettling these innocent refugees whether or not it stretches our vast resources.
There. I'm done.