“I understood the best way to act against Putin’s regime would be my emigration from Russia,” Yevgeny Lyamin told a BBC reporter in Georgia in March.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians were leaving back in those days. Six months later, mass emigration from Russia has resumed. For fear of being conscripted into Vladimir Putin’s mad war against Ukraine, tens of thousands of Russian families and single men are fleeing the country.
But unlike Ukrainian refugees, who have been welcomed with enthusiasm by the West, Russian refugees are having a harder time finding open arms.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on the West to reject all Russian emigres. Latvia has said Russians aren’t welcome there. European nations earlier this year were banding together against allowing Russians fleeing Putin to enter their country.
But whatever Europe’s reasoning and emotion on this issue, the United States should be a city on a hill. President Joe Biden should personally state loudly in Russian and in English that any refugees fleeing Russia will be welcomed in the U.S.
Those fleeing Putin’s Russia are refugees, and many of them will have a strong case for asylum. Russia arrests and persecutes political dissidents. It is conscripting men to fight an unjust and possibly unwinnable war. It is sending these men into combat without training.
Immigration policy in the U.S. is complicated. We need better border security, and there are fair debates to have over the proper number of legal immigrants.
But the most straightforward moral question on this is whether the U.S. should accept refugees fleeing oppressive regimes and war zones. The answer is yes. As long as we have the capacity — as a nation, we have lots of capacity, although not necessarily that much at our southern border — we should take in people who face unjust persecution and punishment from their governments back home.
Why? For starters, it’s one of the clearest commandments from the Old and New Testaments to take in strangers and refugees. Also, because the U.S. is richer than the rest of the world and we have the most livable open space of any country in the world.
On a bigger scale, the U.S. should be looking for ways to lead the free world without entering into war. Accelerating the exodus from Russia could weaken Putin economically and militarily while also striking a morale blow to those who remain.
Could some Russian spies or terrorists sneak in among the refugees? Yes. We can mitigate that risk by carefully screening those who enter. But even so, the risk is worth it, considering the good we can do.
