Will they be screened in any way for jihadist associations and sentiments? Almost certainly not. (The point of such screening, by the way, would not be naively to accept the answers given as honest. It would be to make any activity that showed the answers not to be honest into grounds for deportation. This elementary point seems to be beyond the grasp of some critics of this proposal.)
Will they bring their worldview to Detroit, and will that lead to conflict there? Well, we have already seen Sunni/Shi’ite clashes there. That may have been just the prelude.
Immigration Madness Update: “Detroit Expects Half of Iraqi Refugees,” by Jeff Karoub for The Associated Press, with thanks to Morgaan Sinclair:
Immigration aid workers here expect that as many as half of the nearly 7,000 Iraqi refugees who will be brought into the United States by the end of September will settle in the area….
The Department of Homeland Security said this week it has approved the refugee applications of 59 Iraqis who should be arriving in the coming weeks. The department provided no details about where they would settle but said it has already completed interviews in refugee cases involving more than 700 men, women and children.
What do they ask in those interviews? How do they verify the answers?
The Bush administration announced in February it would allow up to 7,000 Iraqis into the U.S. by the end of September up from 202 in 2006. It would be the largest Iraqi influx since the 2003 invasion….
Iraqi community leaders in Los Angeles and Orange County, Calif., which also have large Iraqi populations, said they hadn’t yet heard of any refugees being settled in the area. They also complained about the small number of refugees being allowed to enter the U.S. compared with the 2 million who have fled Iraq.
“Fifty-nine people is too little, too late,” said Imam Mostafa Al-Qazwini, leader of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County. “What’s the big deal about 59 coming here when we have hundreds of thousands of people in Syria, Jordan, Iran and others displaced inside Iraq?”
Mosques in Southern California helped resettle refugees after the 1991 Gulf War, he said. They provided English classes, health services and financial help to new arrivals, he said, and would be ready and willing to do so again.
How nice. Will they conduct programs to disabuse them of the tenets of political Islam, and the importance of the non-establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution?
Tennessee also is bracing for refugees. Nashville is home to the nation’s largest community of expatriate Kurds, estimated at 8,000. They were a persecuted minority under Saddam Hussein’s rule.
“Frankly, we’ve got so many Iraqis … (they’ll) be easy,” said Holly Johnson, director of refugee and immigration services for Nashville-based Catholic Charities of Tennessee. “They’re the least of our worries.”
Yes, Holly, they’ll be easy. Nothing to worry about at all.