Pressure on the United States to accept more of the desperate men, women and children fleeing the deadly chaos of the Middle East has been growing. The flood of refugees streaming into Europe are pushing Republican presidential candidates into confusing territory. Most have taken a stand against immigration. On the issue of Syrian refugees some say we should take them on a humanitarian basis, and some say we should not. Most agree screening out potential terrorists is necessary for purposes of National Security.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker believes the U.S. should not take in more refugees, but instead focus on military solutions fighting ISIS, which “is not” a Syrian problem. Syrians are fleeing a war between Syrian revolutionaries and the Syrian government. Scott Walker has said the United States should not accept additional Syrian war refugees, taking a firm a stand on the issue, after first dodging the question and calling it “hypothetical.”
GOP hopeful Scott Walker said,
“No, we shouldn’t be taking on any more Syrian refugees right now. In the last year, America has received almost 70,000 refugees of which nearly 2,000 are from Syria. We’ve spent something like $4 billion in humanitarian relief in terms of helping the situation in Syria.”
Scott Walker made the statements after being criticized for avoiding the question. In trying to dodge the question, he had earlier told reporters,
“I’m not president today and I can’t be president today. Everybody wants to talk about hypotheticals; there is no such thing as a hypothetical. The core problem is under the Obama-Clinton doctrine America is leading from behind. That has empowered ISIS to take the territory they have in Iraq and continue to have the presence they have in Syria.”
The Syrian Civil War is an ongoing revolution taking place in Syria. It began in the spring of 2011, with protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s violent government crackdowns. The revolutionaries are made up of various groups, but are strongly influenced by the Free Syrian Army. A United Nations report in 2012 described the conflict as being “overtly sectarian in nature”, and between the Alawite “government” forces, militias and other Shia groups, who were fighting largely against Sunni-dominated rebel groups. It has become a religious war that has killed over 310,000.
Criticism of the American response to the Syrian refugee crisis places the blame on the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which displaced thousands of Iraqis and sparked the creation of several militant groups, and the attempted 2011 Arab Spring uprising against Syrian leader Bashar Assad, which a war-weary America has largely ignored.
Republicans complaining about the refugee crisis are quick to blame President Obama for not intervening earlier or more forcefully in Syria. They ignore the 2003 U.S. invasion under the Bush administration and stumble when asked what they would do to calm the turmoil in the Middle East and Syria. Scott Walker’s solution is to declare war in the Middle East.
