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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

Is targeting religious groups in refugee admittance actually a bad thing? How would this guy feel about favoring Jewish refugees in the 1930's?

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>In a highly publicized event in May–June 1939, the United States refused to admit over 900 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the St. Louis. The St. Louis appeared off the coast of Florida shortly after Cuban authorities cancelled the refugees' transit visas and denied entry to most of the passengers, who were still waiting to receive visas to enter the United States. Denied permission to land in the United States, the ship was forced to return to Europe. The governments of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium each agreed to accept some of the passengers as refugees. Of the 908 St. Louis passengers who returned to Europe, 254 (nearly 28 percent) are known to have died in the Holocaust. 288 passengers found refuge in Britain. Of the 620 who returned to the continent, 366 (just over 59 percent) are known to have survived the war.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/mobile/en/article.php?ModuleId=100...

Presumably you are smart enough to see the difference between those two cases, given that one group was actively fleeing state-sanctioned oppression and eventual genocide. I would hope that no one has to explain that to you.

I'm not in Syria and thus can only repeat what other people say, but I've heard that ISIS is committing genocide against Christians, Yazidis, and Shiites. The source of this information is John Kerry.

Exactly. Doesn't it make sense to prioritize those people who are under the most persecution in those countries?

Again: Trump campaigned very specifically on a ban on Muslims. The religious minority directive is obviously an attempt to scope the restriction to adherents of Islam. It is worded in the way it is, again obviously, to make it more likely to withstand the pending legal challenges.

This isn't a tortured or biased interpretation of the directive. It is precisely the description Trump used over and over and over again on the campaign trail.

Yes, and those under the most persecution are primarily Muslims who oppose Assad, or just happen to live in areas of Syria that oppose Assad.

> Of course, one plausible explanation is that Democrats don't like Christians

That's a conspiracy theory with no evidence, not a plausible explanation. Refugees can't vote for a long time. There are too few to make any substantive electoral difference.

And if they did, they'd probably lean Democrat, like Hispanics for example.

From another comment thread: "Refugees are referred to the US by the UNHCR.". You're also comparing the percentage to the total population of the country, rather than those who applied for asylum/refugee status. This is not a meaningful comparison. Finally, you provide no year-over-year data; it's possible that they fled first in previous years, or are residing in areas that are protected by pro-Assad forces.

Citizens of other countries are not our problem. This insane modernist belief that all humans are entitled to protection on our dime is poisonous.

It's not modernist to me, in my opinion it dates back to the 1st century. And refugees generally aren't "on our dime." They get jobs.

I agree. If people are being persecuted for their religious beliefs then there should be a process to accept those refugees in a timely manner.

I don't think the United States is in a supply-limited triage situation right now, though. What's effectively been done is to cut off all non-Christians in certain countries – by issuing a blanket prohibition based upon a highly-religious-correlated country of origin, then an eventual exception for the religion that the president likes. This arrangement isn't prioritization, it's a ban.

What's worse: the rationale given for these countries – the September 11th attacks – isn't even supported by fact. The plot did not originate in these countries. That is reckless and dangerous policy.

Given a fixed number of refugees to be accepted, prioritization of one group means a near total ban on another. If there's a justifiable reason for that prioritization, then that's what you'll get. For example, if you had a refugee admittance process in the 1930's that was limited to N people (being a time traveler that knows the future), I might kick out a Jewish refugee in exchange for a nuclear physicist, but not some rando Lutheran. So what you'd get is a mix of Jewish people, Jehovah's Witnesses, disabled people, etc, with prioritization towards the young.

Obviously, this is not Trump's rationale, and there's the whole other angle of blocking reentry of permanent residents.

But for the general concept of religious based refugee admittance? I can't imagine the ACLU going back in time and arguing prioritizing Jewish refugees is unconstitutional.

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