Gov. Parson says yes, we’ll welcome refugees in Missouri. It’s the least we can do
At least a little bit of good news to start the new year: Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has said that yes, Missouri will continue to accept a small number of refugees for resettlement. An embarrassingly small number, actually, but not zero.
As of 2019, an unprecedented 70 million people — more than at any time since World War II — had been forced by war, drought and persecution to leave their homes. Most are women and children, and more than half of these refugees and displaced people come from Afghanistan, Syria and South Sudan.
Whether we should take some of them in, after years of vetting and waiting, should not even be a question in the United States of America. Nor should it be up to any governor to decide whether or not we’ll be true to our values or block all resettlement of the most vulnerable, and most carefully screened, immigrants on the planet.
But it is up to governors and local officials now to give a sporting thumbs up or down, and Parson could have been the very first to put out the “refugees not welcome” sign. Thankfully, he decided to pass on that distinction, though the Associated Press reported that Republican governors like him are in a tough spot, having to decide between the hard-line Trumpian view on all things immigration and that of some Christian constituents that Jesus — himself a refugee in Egypt as a child — at no point urged his followers to think only of themselves.
Under the current president, the number of refugees has been cut year after year after year. Last September, the ceiling on refugees was lowered once again, to the lowest in U.S. history, at 18,000. (These include 5,000 slots set aside for people fleeing for religious persecution, 4,000 for Iraqis who fought alongside our troops, and an outrageous 1,500 total for those from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, whose refugees we’ve made it all but impossible to reach us.)
In the last three years, local refugee resettlement has fallen by 65%, and as elsewhere, the infrastructure that makes this possible has been all but wiped out.
Morally dead and economically dunderheaded, did somebody say? Yes, and the 6.7% population growth rate for the country as a whole during the most recent decade is expected to be the lowest since the government started counting heads in 1790.
Ignoring refugees also ignores history. The word “refugee” was first used in English after the Huguenots — Calvinists persecuted for their dissent in Catholic France — fled to England, Ireland, America and the Netherlands and Prussia, among other places in the 16th and 17th centuries. That brain drain was a serious, self-inflicted blow to France, where some cities lost half of their workers, but a big assist for places like Berlin and Boston, where the son of Huguenot Apollo Rivoire, aka Paul Revere I, rode to Lexington to sound the alarm about approaching British forces.
Refugees have always brought innovation and entrepreneurship with them, and helped make America what we say we are.
Irrational fear of refugees is nothing new either, though. President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned away the almost 1,000 Jewish passengers on the German ocean liner St. Louis from the port of Miami in 1939, and hundreds of those who were sent back to Europe as a result died in the Holocaust. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger on the boat explained that all aboard must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”
So, next time you decide to be driven out of your country by a Hitler or an Assad, or a mere Salva Kiir — the president of the world’s youngest and most dangerous country for humanitarian workers and other humans, South Sudan — maybe think ahead?
In Parson’s letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo affirming that the state would take some refugees, he said “Missouri has a long and rich history of immigration, dating back to America’s earliest explorers, fur traders, and missionaries. Today, Missouri’s population includes thousands of refugees who have become vital members of our communities.”
He said that as many as 500 refugees could arrive in Missouri in 2020, mostly in St. Louis and Kansas City, where only a handful of Somali refugees have settled in the last year.
“Our open arms and vacant jobs remain empty,” KC for Refugees founder Dr. Sofia Khan wrote in an Star guest commentary in August.
We need them just as they need us. And welcoming them is the very least we can do.