Syriasly

Governors across the country are urging President Obama to reject refugees.  According to CNN, their stated reason is that they fear terrorists could enter the country disguised as refugees, as one of the terrorists in the Paris attacks had entered Greece in such a manner.  Nevermind that that accounted for only one of 400,000 refugees that have entered Greece, a paltry 0.00025% of all refugees that have entered that country, and nevermind the fact that, according to hyper-conservative Breitbart.com, 1.3 million Muslim migrants have entered the U.S. since 9/11, with no terrorist attack instigated by a foreign terror group (though several domestic terror attacks, some by right-wing Christians, some by U.S. citizen Muslims). 

And on top of that, the president has proposed bringing in an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees.

10,000.

Or less than 1% of the total number of Muslim migrants into the country thus far.

And since the refugee crisis started, the U.S. has already admitted well over a thousand Syrian refugees, who have shown no sign of terror activity.

In my mind, the risk of terrorism from a paltry 10,000 refugees is tiny - so tiny, that we can discount it as a legitimate threat.  That means there are two remaining possibilities for why these governors would move to reject them:

1. The terrorists won - that is, they induced so much fear into these governors that the governors are acting upon their fears and taking actions to make the U.S. a less-free place, as the terrorists want.
2. The governors are pandering - that is, the Republican voters (and only one governor who isn't a Republican has joined this cause) who elected them into office have stated a desire to reject Syrian refugees, and the governors are making an excuse to pander to them in order to win reelection.

At the risk of that being reductive, I'll state that there could be other reasons, but I have yet to encounter them.  Please leave comments with others you can think of.

For that second one, the possible reasons for their Republican bases to reject Syrian refugees are the already-stated fear of attack, xenophobia in general, and a misunderstanding of economics (the "they're taking our jobs" argument that has been proven false time after time, more on that in a moment).  Again, comment if you think of more.

What I've seen from my friends on Facebook points to those three things, but the third one happens in a very unusual way...

The "Why are we helping refugees when we're not helping vets" argument.  I think this is likely the chosen argument (instead of "when we're not helping starving children") simply because we just had Veterans Day, and so veterans are fresh on people's minds. 

That's great!  Let's help vets.  Let's figure out what we can do to get homeless vets off the street and into housing. 

But we won't do that.  Not because of Democrats, who have actively pushed to expand welfare programs that could help vets get off the street, who have actively pushed to expand mental health services for those suffering from PTSD and other mental afflictions that have impacted their abilities to hold down jobs, etc., who have pushed for improved educational opportunities to teach vets skills that can help them land those jobs in the first place.  When such things come up, the GOP blocks them.  Yet, it's the GOP that screams that we can't help refugees until we help vets first. 

We can't help refugees until we help vets, and we won't help vets because taxes. 

We have no problem creating vets by going to war, we just can't help them when they return because that would be too costly.

Republicans, listen closely: your argument that we shouldn't help refugees because we're not helping veterans is not sincere.  Until you move to actually help veterans, 

Syriasly.