Conservatives are rightfully outraged at President Joe Biden’s disastrous handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The backlash to the poor execution is all the more justifiable after a terrorist bombing attack in Kabul left 13 U.S. service members dead. Yet some conservatives are also reflexively opposing the idea of opening our doors to Afghan refugees amid the chaos. In this, they’re mistaken.
“Bringing potentially hundreds of thousands of Afghanis [sic] to America — this is a terrible idea,” Newsmax host Steve Cortes argued. “We should learn from the disastrous experience Europe had with Afghani [sic] men and systemic sex crimes against women.”
Meanwhile, Fox News host Tucker Carlson similarly argued that Afghan refugees could be a security and crime threat. He claimed that we are “living through the biggest influx of refugees in history.”
While it’s understandable and legitimate (not racist like some woke liberals insist) to have concerns about refugee resettlement, these arguments miss the mark.
For one, we simply are not living through some massive “invasion” of refugees. As this graph from the Migration Policy Institute shows, the United States accepts far fewer refugees now than it did in past decades.
Just tens of thousands of refugees are admitted each year. Yes, the Afghanistan chaos is projected to create 400,000 to 2 million new refugees. But most will seek refuge in neighboring countries, not the U.S. We are only talking about tens of thousands or at most several hundred thousand refugees possibly coming to the U.S. — a nation of 332 million people.
Conservatives should realize that we actually do have a moral obligation to help the Afghan people — after all, our military contributed significantly to the destabilization of their country. It is both compassionate and conservative to open our doors to those fleeing religious persecution and violence.
And, while security concerns certainly are legitimate, there’s no actual reason to be afraid of refugees.
We already know that accepting refugees from Afghanistan is safe and that the U.S.’s extensive vetting process works — because we’ve done it. We’ve accepted tens of thousands of Afghan refugees and tens of thousands more immigrants through other visa programs. Yet there have been zero deaths in terror attacks from these immigrants. According to the Cato Institute, “[F]rom 1975–2017, the annual chance of being murdered by an Afghan terrorist in an attack on U.S. soil was zero and the chance of being injured was about one in 398,828,510 per year.”
As for the supposed waves of crime that some predict would accompany Afghan refugee resettlement, recent history suggests the opposite. The same Cato research notes that native-born U.S. citizens are 11.6 times more likely to be imprisoned than Afghan-born immigrants! Refugees simply aren’t dangerous criminals, despite what alarmist rhetoric would have you believe.
They’re also not a net drain on the economy. While refugees do use more welfare programs than most immigrants at first, they’re a net positive in the long run. One study found that refugees work at higher rates than natives, even though they don’t earn as much. So, too, they typically pay $21,000 more in taxes than they consume in benefits over their first 20 years in the U.S.
The facts simply don’t support the narrative that accepting Afghan refugees would hurt the U.S. Holdout media personalities should give up on their bad arguments — and wake up to the reality that compassion for Afghans and American interests are not in conflict.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and a Washington Examiner contributor. Subscribe to his YouTube channel or email him at [email protected].
