"Give
me your tired, your poor,
Your
huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The
wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send
these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I
lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
I am
descended from a man who came to this country as an indentured servant. He overcame these humble beginnings by
marrying a rich widow. I've never been
clear on whether her previous husband was his master or not. 150 years after that there was a revolution
(I suspect we were on the wrong side of that one) and 329 years and 13
generations later I was born here.
My quick
internet search reveals a range of less than 1% to as much as 10% of current
American citizens being descended from colonists. I'm not "proud" of descending from
the original land grabbers, but I don't lose a lot of sleep over it either.
I find the
current squawking over Syrian immigrants deeply offensive. 90% of YOU are descended from people my
ancestors wish had stayed home. And 99%+
of us are folks the first residents could have lived without. We forget how deeply suspicious
"we" were of the Irish, the Poles, the Italians.
I thought
being American meant doing the decent thing, even if it killed you. I don't think we are ACTUALLY at any risk
from Syrian refugees, mind you. But even
if we were?
The libertarians
say that:
Of
the 859,629 refugees admitted from 2001 onwards, only three have been convicted
of planning terrorist attacks on targets outside of the United States, and none
was successfully carried out. That is
one terrorism-planning conviction for every 286,543 refugees that have been
admitted. To put that in perspective,
about 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014.
I cannot imagine having to live in Syria as it
is today. I looked up the population at
one point, it's too large for the US to take it all in, and at some point the
rest of the world needs to be a better place to live, but we can continue to
take the few, highly vetted, refugees we do take.
