Idaho REPUBLICAN senator pushing bill to ‘prioritize’ more unvetted Syrian & Iraqi refugees

The answer to any and every geopolitical problem, to the political elites in Western countries, is more mass migration from the third world. In the U.S., that position is shared not only by Democrats controlling the House but even by Senate Republicans, including Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch, R-Idaho, who hails from a state Trump carried by 32 points. The latest example is S. 2641 – the Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act of 2019.

Well, with a mellifluous-sounding name like that, who could oppose such legislation? Promoting American national security? Preventing the resurgence of ISIS? Definitely!

The problem is that to all political elites in both parties, especially in the Senate, national security means the opposite of its core goal of homeland security. They believe that to promote our national security, we must get involved in every Islamic civil war overseas, and then, counterintuitively, they believe the solution is to bring in unvetted volatile Islamic tribes from all sides of the civil war to our homeland – the exact opposite of the lessons we should have learned from 9/11.

S. 2641, which has six GOP co-sponsors including Chairman Risch, is touted as a sanctions bill against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a way of protecting the Kurds. Conservatives certainly don’t disagree that Erdogan is a problem and that now might be a good time to threaten his membership in NATO, but in the very way we should be sanctioning him, his influence on our homeland, the bill is silent. What the bill does contain, in section 202, is a provision to harm our homeland and, you guessed it, bring in more refugees. This bill is scheduled for a markup next Wednesday.

Section 202 of the bill forces the Trump administration to “prioritize” the resettlement of Syrian Kurds and also “stateless persons who habitually resided in Syria, and other Syrians who partnered with, or worked for or directly with, the United States Government in Syria” along with all their relatives. Not only are we to override other considerations and vetting for these people our government stupidly worked with, including some very shady organizations, we are to bring in anyone “employed in Syria by”:

(A) a media or nongovernmental organization based in the United States;

(B) an organization or entity that has received a grant from, or entered into a cooperative agreement or contract with, the United States Government; or

(C) an organization that—

(i) was continuously physically present in Northeast Syria between 2011 and the date of the enactment of this Act; and

(ii) has partnered with an organization described in subparagraph (A) or (B);

This bill’s mandate to prioritize these refugees will essentially override vetting procedures, especially once the courts get hold of it.

For years, I’ve been making the point that our national security modus operandi is to bring in people from both sides of multifaceted Islamic civil wars and call it homeland security. This bill overtly proves that point. Syria is a dumpster fire full of multiple bad actors. All sorts of bad groups are fighting either the Assad regime or ISIS, both, or neither, but would not serve America well were they to be imported into our communities. Even if one regards all Kurds, including the Marxist PKK-backed Syrian Kurds in particular, as sacrosanct, this bill is written so broadly as to rope in nearly anyone we worked with (or any entity that received money in the fight) against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Subsection 6 includes resettlement priority status for: “citizens or nationals of Syria or Iraq, or stateless persons who habitually resided in Syria or Iraq, who provided service to United States counter-ISIS efforts for an aggregate period of at least 1 year.”

That could include Iranian-backed Shiite militias, on behalf of whom we often had Marines and special operators stationed in the Sunni triangle fighting ISIS together with Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qassim Soleimani, as well as terrorist groups in Syria who had nothing to do with the Kurds. Remember when the Obama administration had the CIA arming one group that was fighting other rebels, including the Kurdish forces, backed by the Defense Department? Both groups would now be eligible for a hero’s welcome and mandated refugee resettlement with no vetting. And all their relatives.

On top of it all, this bill carefully ensures that none of the mandated refugees from Syria and Iraq count against the general cap on refugees, which for fiscal year 2020 was set at 18,000 by the Trump administration.

This bill appears to be written by Ranking Member Bob Menendez, D-N.J., with Risch just serving as a Republican figurehead. Six other Republicans signed on to the bill: Cory Gardner, R-Colo.; Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; John Barrasso, R-Wyo.; Rob Portman, R-Ohio; Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.; and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.

The justification for this bill defies logic. We punish Erdogan by bringing in multiple Sunni and Shiite players from the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars to our country, so he can turn them against us on our own soil in all the mosques he funds? A true Turkey sanctions bill rooted in homeland security and America-first priorities would ban Erdogan from funding religion on our soil until he provides freedom of religion in Turkey. It would also sanction groups like CAIR and ISNA who work with him. As I’ve noted before, Erdogan is the global Muslim Brotherhood leader who has funded the lion’s share of radical mosques in this country, in his own words, for the purpose of “spreading Islam’s values embracing the whole of humanity, and our Prophet’s message of love and compassion.” Except his message is not love and compassion, as crafters of this bill, must concede, as it’s implicit in their own motivations for the bill.

Moreover, with record legal immigration, record illegal immigration, and record levels of humanitarian relief in Temporary Protected Status, asylum, and U-visas, is enough ever enough?

We’ve spent nearly 20 years since 9/11 promoting homeland security by endangering homeland security with more Middle East migration. This bill perpetuates and exacerbates this backward view of America’s national security in order to appease the pagan gods of mass migration. Let’s never forget the admonishment of the 9/11 commission staff report:

 It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

Yet in our elite circles, Republicans from Idaho agree with Democrats from New Jersey that the best way to deal with an immigration national security problem is to bring in more immigrants from the most volatile Islamic civil wars – and ban vetting.

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