As the war stretches on between Israel and Hamas, the terror group that controls the Gaza Strip, the conflict threatens to displace an untold number of civilians. Last week, in advance of airstrikes, the Israel Defense Forces warned more than one million residents to flee Gaza within the day. Whenever and however the fighting stops, hundreds of thousands of refugees are a likely result.
Meanwhile in the U.S., as Republicans compete for their party’s presidential nomination, candidates are arguing over who is most hostile to refugees.
Last week, speaking to CBS’s Margaret Brennan, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis doubled down on his campaign trail assertion that of the 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza, “not all of them are Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic.”
In response, Haley told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that “half” of Palestinians in Gaza don’t want Hamas in power, adding, “there are so many of these people who want to be free from this terrorist rule.” She stressed that it was important for the U.S. to “separate civilians from terrorists.”
DeSantis countered by telling NBC News that Gaza had a “toxic culture” in which “they teach the kids to hate Jews.” He further accused Haley of “trying to be politically correct” and said that she “would import people” to the United States. His super PAC Never Back Down then tweeted that Haley supported “bringing Gaza refugees to America.”
Haley then told Fox News, “I’ve always said we shouldn’t take any Gazan refugees in the U.S.” and that other Middle Eastern Arab countries should accept them instead. She had previously told Tapper that these countries had so far not accepted refugees “because they know they can’t vet them.”
Finally, speaking with Megyn Kelly, DeSantis credited Haley for “flipping” on the issue but then asked, “Why would you even have the discussion about vetting people…unless you were saying we would import them?”
DeSantis’s use of the verb import to refer to the movement of human beings is unseemly. But the back-and-forth also illustrates the Republican Party’s hostility to refugee resettlement, at which America once excelled.
Indeed, Haley never said that the U.S. should take refugees from Gaza. But when DeSantis stated (erroneously) that she had, she felt the need to clarify that she definitively had not. In fact, she told Fox News that just as Jordan and Turkey took the majority of Syrian refugees during her tenure at the U.N., “the Hamas-sympathizing countries should take these Gazans now.”
But if, as DeSantis claims, Gaza is a “toxic culture” where “they teach the kids to hate Jews,” how would consigning Gazan refugees strictly to Hamas-sympathetic countries be any improvement? Especially since nearly half of all Gazans are under 18, it seems counterproductive to assume both that all refugees are anti-Semitic and that they should only go to countries that are likely to be more receptive to that anti-Semitism.
Haley and DeSantis are not the only candidates touting their own hostility to refugees. Former President Donald Trump announced on Monday that if reelected, he will revive his travel ban and expand it to include Gaza. In a press release this week, Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.), another candidate for president, declared that his policy would be, “no refugees in from Gaza, period. I think that’s the right decision, not because I think they’re all anti-Semitic, but I can’t tell the difference.” (The press release noted that Scott “disagreed with other GOP presidential candidates who considered accepting Gaza refugees,” but it only cited Haley—who, again, stated that she would not.)
Of course, even before any candidate reaches the White House, Gazans face an extremely difficult path to become a U.S. refugee: According to the Cato Institute’s David Bier, “qualified refugees have less than a 0.1 percent chance of being selected for resettlement.” Under Trump’s administration, the U.S. was notoriously stingy about refugee admission, but Joe Biden’s hasn’t been much better, only taking in about 25,000 in Fiscal Year 2022, one-fifth of the total that could have been accepted.
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