An Offer You Can't Refuge: A History of Refugees in the United States

Headlines update new stories daily with the refugee crisis in the Middle East. World Vision, a humanitarian organization, 4 million Syrians are considered refugees of the ongoing civil conflict, and are mostly situated in the bordering countries of Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. 700, 000 Syrian refugees have attempted to travel to countries in the European Union. While lesser known, many other refugee crises exist around the world. Amnesty International ranks the next top sources of refugees after Syria as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan.

Refugees are forced out of their homes for many reasons. For example, in Syria, conflict from rebel groups fighting the former president Bashar al-Assad has forced many to flee. In Myanmar, the Council on Foreign Relations reports:

Tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya have fled Myanmar in the past year, many of them taking to the sea in the spring of 2015 to try to reach Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. 

Since independence in 1948, successive governments in Burma, renamed Myanmar in 1989, have refuted the Rohingya's historical claims and denied the group recognition as one of the country's 135 ethnic groups. The Rohingya are largely identified as illegal Bengali immigrants, despite the fact that many Rohingya have resided in Myanmar for centuries.

For a myriad of different reasons, Amnesty International continues that the world is facing 19.5 million refugees.

As a country begun by religious refugees, much like the Rohingya, fleeing from another state, America seems uniquely suited to aid similar peoples.

However, American nativism in the past has been the response to many a group seeking shelter. Bouie of Slate magazine gives a few examples:

...hundreds of thousands of Germans and Irish left their homes to escape political persecution, conflict, and famine. They followed a decade of similar but more modest immigration, stretching back to the 1830s, when the first major waves of German and Irish immigrants reached American shores. 

Despite the end of the Know-Nothings, nativism persisted in national life, as part of the deep ambivalence and fear Americans have felt towards migrants, immigrants, and refugees of various stripes. You saw it in violent form, for example, during the waves of Chinese immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Chinese immigrants faced exclusion, discrimination, and outright pogroms from mobs of angry, resentful European Americans (some, no doubt, descended from Irish and German immigrants).

 You saw it in the late 1930s, when Americans faced Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and had to choose: Would we take the victims of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, or reject them? On the question of refugee children, at least, Americans said no: 67 percent opposed taking in 10,000 refugee children from Germany, according to a 1939 poll from Gallup.

Again and again, when faced with the question of refugees and immigrants, Americans are ambivalent and sometimes hostile. In 1975, for example, 62 percent said they feared Vietnamese refugees would take their jobs. Four years later, just as many said they didn’t want to admit “boat people” from Vietnam, who were fleeing the country’s repressive communist government. Americans said the same for Cuban refugees in the 1980s, Haitians in the 1990s, and most recently, the wave of refugee children from South America, which brought protests and fears of disease and infection.

The American response to the current refugee crisis has become the basis for partisan debates. Unfortunately, this issue is so divisive that individual governors and mayors have declared their views, some saying that they would never accept refugees in their jurisdictions. CBS News reports that the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, has used rhetoric justifying an internment of Syrian refugees, similar to the internment of Japanese Americans under Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. This internment was similarly upheld by Korematsu v. United States, a Supreme Court decision that justified Japanese-Americans being imprisoned in camps, which was later apologized for in 1983.

Looking to the past, America has clearly failed to aid refugees in times of need. Xenophobic hate has been ingrained in other examples, and fear of refugees, in light of the recent Paris attacks, has only increased. Although President Obama has created a plan to accept 10,000 refugees, Tani and Logiurato of Business Insider report that the House has just recently passed legislation requiring each potential refugee to be inspected by intelligence agencies before being admitted to the United States.

With mounting support for anti-refugee movements, the future of refugee acceptance to the United States remains unclear.

Sources:
World Vision, 11-3-2015, "What you need to know: Crisis in Syria, refugees, and the impact on children," http://www.worldvision.org/news-stories-videos/syria-war-refugee-crisis
Amnesty International, 10-12-2015, "Global Refugee Crisis – by the numbers,"  https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/10/global-refugee-crisis-by-the-numbers/
Eleanor Albert, 6-17-2015, "The Rohingya Migrant Crisis," Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/burmamyanmar/rohingya-migrant-crisis/p36651
Jamelle Bouie, 11-17-2015, "We Are a Nation of Immigrants and Refugees. And We Always Fear Who Is Coming Next.," Slate Magazine, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/11/america_s_long_tradition_of_fearing_refugees_the_united_states_has_always.html
CBS, 11-18-2015, "Va. mayor rejects Syrian refugees, refers to Japanese internment camps," http://www.cbsnews.com/news/roanoke-mayor-refers-to-japanese-internment-in-statement-about-refugees/
Toni Konkoly, 2-19-1942, "The Supreme Court . Law, Power & Personality . Famous Dissents . Korematsu v. United States (1944)," PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/landmark_korematsu.html
Maxwell Tani and Brett Logiurato, 11-19-2015, "Democrats just delivered a stunning blow to Obama's Syrian refugee plan," Business Insider, <span class="skimlinks-unlinked">http://www.businessinsider.com/syrian-refugee-vote-house-obama-plan-veto-2015-11</span>