Vice President Kamala Harris said in a meeting Saturday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi that Washington will not allow for the forced relocation of Palestinians or any redrawing of the current border of the Gaza Strip.
“Under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, the besiegement of Gaza, or the redrawing of the borders of Gaza,” Harris said, according to a statement from the vice president’s office.
This is not a direct response to your comment, it just triggered a thought: The notion that neighboring Arab countries should take in Arab refugees, because Arab, is super-racist when one stops to think about it. The flip side of that argument is that Europe has no responsibility to take in African refugees because they’re “not like us,” and the United States is justified in turning away Central American migrants because “we have too many of ‘those people’ here already.”
I don’t think it’s racist to acknowledge that it’s easier for a country to take in refugees who share the culture, religion, and language of the majority of the population. Europe’s integration of refugees who don’t have these things in common hasn’t gone very well. The USA generally does better, but that may just be because most of the refugees showing up here can integrate into the large existing community of Spanish-speakers.
I’m not making this argument myself, but I can see how someone could argue that “we have too many of ‘those people’ here already” without being racist if “those people” are poor foreigners who don’t have the skills (language and higher education) necessary to thrive here.
First, I know you’re not making the argument, the issues you raised made me think of related issues.
But to explain myself further, language and cultural differences are actually really minor, in the grand scheme of things. Minnesota has 13% of the U.S. refugee population. Wisconsin took in the Hmong. Dearborn, MI has a large Muslim population. It largely is not a problem. But, then, we’ve taken them in slowly.
The big issue is economic. It’s costly for countries to integrate large numbers of people all at once, what with the need for housing, food, jobs, et cetera. The issues in Europe, as I understand them, occur in refugee populations mired in poverty without support from the society to integrate.
Those same problems would bedevil any country, even if the refugees have the similar language and culture. Especially a couple million flooding in all at once. The racist part is overlooking those facts, and blaming Arab countries for not doing what we are not willing to do ourselves.