How to help Muslim refugees
The Obama administration is intent on bringing in as many Muslim immigrants classified as refugees as it can before the election. Is the United States the best place to settle those refugees?
First, what countries would be closest to the Muslim refugee’s home culture? Countries with large Muslim minorities almost universally have culture clashes that all too often result in terror attacks. This is common to countries around the globe, as witnessed in the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, India, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya, and multiple countries in Europe as well as the United States. Polling indicates that an unusually large number of Muslims worldwide support extremist groups like ISIS and terror tactics like suicide bombings. It would not be wise to relocate Muslim refugees into a non-Muslim country with this being the case. The host country would in effect be a target-rich environment.
In order to avoid such friction, it would be more prudent to settle Muslim refugees in Muslim majority countries. Consider this:
- The Organization for Islamic Cooperation is composed of 56 Islamic states. It has 26 million square kilometers of land. That is nearly three times that of the United States and over six times the land mass of the entire European Union.
- There are 1.5 billion people in the OIC. Ten million refugees would amount to 0.6% of their population.
- Qatar is in the OIC and has the highest Gross Domestic Product per capita of any country in the world. The top 24 also includes OIC member states Brunei, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. OIC countries have adequate money as well as land area to provide for the Muslim refugees.
- Most if not all OIC countries are in the eastern hemisphere. The eastern hemisphere is where the refugees are from. Therefore, it would be closer to home for the refugees than if we were to bring them to the other side of the planet for settlement in the western hemisphere.
The OIC has the land and money, but how could its members be persuaded to address the problem? The United States in particular spends a lot of foreign aid on many OIC countries. Pakistan and Indonesia both get U.S. foreign aid, and they both have large land masses and large Muslim populations. The U.S. State Department has plenty of diplomats who could persuade such countries to help.
The left should have no objection to this policy. President Obama said recently that racism is “part of our DNA.” Hillary Clinton said, “Racism is America’s original sin.” With this kind of a mindset, why on Earth would any self-respecting leftist want to bring Middle Eastern Muslims to a land like America? I’m sure they would agree that it would be much more harmonious to move the refugees into tolerant, open Muslim societies so they would not suffer the discrimination that awaits them in the U.S. Right?
It is in the best interest of the United States to reduce immigration numbers from historical highs to a more manageable level. The refugees are part of this immigration wave. There are better places for Muslim refugees to settle than the United States. This is to the benefit of the refugee as well as the citizens of the United States.