Xenophobic Right - Afghan refugees not welcome here

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As political battles rage over our retreat from Afghanistan, one unsurprising but depressing development is that the nativist contingent of the right has turned its attention to warding off the refugee "invasion."

Amid reports of millions of Afghans terrified by the advance of Taliban militants and seeking to flee — particularly those facing retribution because they have worked with American forces — Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week delivered a diatribe warning that the crisis would be used to expand asylum claims: "We will see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months, probably in your neighborhood." He added that the number may eventually "swell to the millions" and concluded, "So, first we invade, and then we’re invaded."

There are many notable things about this repulsive rant, including the fact that while Carlson denounced pro-refugee Republicans such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as "architects" of the disastrous war who should be "groveling for our forgiveness," he was himself a vocal hawk in 2001. But it’s the clamor against immigration and asylum that starkly exposes the indecency — and, arguably, un-Americanness — of today’s populist right.

Carlson was far from alone in his xenophobic agitation. "Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of potentially unvetted refugees from Afghanistan?" inquired his Fox colleague Laura Ingraham. "Potentially" is doing a lot of work here, since all refugee claims are subject to vetting. On Twitter, former Trump adviser and anti-immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller accused the Biden administration of wanting to "use their catastrophic debacle in Afghanistan as a pretext for doing to America what Angela Merkel did to Germany" by taking in large numbers of Syrian refugees.

Fortunately, this fearmongering is not reflected in public opinion. A CBS News/YouGov poll shows that an overwhelming 81% of Americans support resettling Afghans who were our allies and helpers. That includes 76% of Republicans. And yet the nativist "base" has a disproportionate political influence in the party.

There are fewer than 90,000 pending asylum claims from Afghanistan. (An adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence has said that Trump and Miller actively sabotaged the processing of those claims.) If things go as badly as is feared, that number will undoubtedly grow. But the people seeking to come here will be primarily those Afghans most likely to thrive in America: the most educated, modernized, and interested in freedom.

I hope Tucker Carlson dies of diarrhea, it would be fitting since that is all that comes out of his mouth.

I would like to see what Carlson actually said and understand the tone that he used, before condemning him to terminal gastroenteritis.

BTW, This is coming from a left-wing source, isn't it?

Some people don't have humanity, or, if they ever had any they've lost it long ago.

Yep, its been processed through the SPIN Cycle.

Being human is exactly what makes these people so dangerous.

But there's a difference between being merely human in a biological sense and having humanity.

It's not that the refugee's aren't welcome, its that they aren't being vetted. We don't know who is being air lifted out of Afghanistan. The withdrawal was so rushed and bungled that we now have a huge mass of undocumented and unvaccinated people piling into cargo planes while we have no idea how many are bad actors. Somehow this gets spun into "racism", but we need to know who is coming into the country.