Following Friday’s attacks in Paris, the American jingoist machine has begun whirring to life. Monday’s headlines were dominated by the rhetoric of American governors declaring their state would not play host to displaced Syrians. As of press time, governors or state officials of more than 20 states, including Florida and more traditionally liberal states, such as New Hampshire, have released statements saying as much.
Good for them. What our esteemed elected officials have neglected to consider is the possibility that sewing legislative discord may have very well been a desired goal of the Islamic State group. As we noted in Monday’s editorial, terrorist attacks, random or single-minded as they may seem, are often committed with specific political or social objectives in mind. If the perpetrators are lucky — and we use the word with the utmost reluctance — the effects of their actions will ripple far beyond the initial devastation they wrought.
It is no secret ISIS possesses a very loud and visible social media presence. A great deal of said presence has been directed toward recruiting Muslims from Western societies to leave their lives behind and fight for the ISIS caliphate in the Levant. Those who do leave feel disaffected and shunned by the societies from which they hail, finding ISIS’ promises of glory, power and a rent-free home to call their own too tantalizing to pass up.
If ISIS has successfully capitalized on the alienation of young Muslims to bolster their ranks, what possible good can come of ostracizing more? This is not to ignore the inherent problems of accepting an influx of immigrants, regardless of race, creed or color: America already has a bevy of infrastructural problems, all of which require vast amounts of money and resources to rectify. As history has shown time and again, effectively integrating foreign individuals into a culture is not only difficult but also more than likely cannot be done without incident.
Even though Florida Gov. Voldemort (that was a Rick Scott joke) and others do not possess the power to overrule the federal government on matters of immigration, their declarations speak to a debate that will dominate American discourse: Do we shun Syrian refugees and other Muslim communities, or do we work to integrate them into American society? Neither option is a particularly "easy" one; it just so happens one requires patience and the other xenophobia. And for those citing the presence of a Syrian passport near a terrorist’s body in France as proof that America shouldn’t accept Syrians… we hate to break it to you, but odds are it’s fake.
When compared to the rest of the world, the number of Americans who have defected to ISIS is considerably smaller. The Syrian refugees at the center of this crisis have already voted with their feet and put the chaos and awfulness of ISIS-imposed rule behind them. Do American leaders really want to push them back in, in turn further jeopardizing the lives and safety of their constituents? Time will tell.
