(Flag of the American Party- the “Know Nothings,” who opposed all immigration in the mid-19th Century. Photo WikiComons).

Nope- if you expected me to analyze what the French police are likely to do now that they are going to have State of Emergency powers for three months, I am not going to cooperate. The French are pretty good at kicking in doors and dispensing rough justice, like they did in the Battle for Algiers. Of course they lost that one, and Algiers wound up moving to Marseilles.

There is anxiety abroad in the land this morning. Several of my pals woke to unease this morning, since News-and-Traffic on the Eights was murmuring about gunfire in Paris for a second time this week. This time it was law enforcement on the offensive in the north suburb of St. Denis. The operation started before dawn and continued for hours as at least two terror suspects were killed and seven were detained.

A woman detonated herself with a suicide belt. That sort of terror diversity is rare but not unprecedented, since Chechen women long ago struck a blow for diversity and inclusiveness in suicide bombings. It could be a new feature of the current ISIS offensive.

Nor am I going to launch off on a tirade about the strange system that administers refugee transport to the United States. It is what it is, and has been this way for a long time. Still, there seems to be a misunderstanding about what Americans think about immigration- legal, illegal, or that covered by the legislation about Refugees.

Despite those who quote the plaque on the Statue of Liberty about huddled masses, the public view has always been more nuanced. Back in the day, it even caused the rise of the American Party, a group better known now as the “Know Nothings.” You might even say it is back right now, since there is rising concern about the evidence that a Syrian passport discovered near the partial remains of one of Friday’s suicide bombers may mean they were deliberately infiltrated to France to conduct the attack.

In simpler times it was about jobs. In the middle of the 19th Century, the Know-Nothings strongly opposed immigrants in general and Roman Catholics in specific. Hell, I remember when that was an issue in JFK’s campaign against Dick Nixon. Seems kind of quaint now, the notion that the American President would be more loyal to the Pope than to the United States. More radical members of the Know-Nothing Party believed that the Catholics intended to take over the United States of America. The Catholics would then place the nation under the Pope’s rule. If anything sounds familiar, I am sure it is a coincidence.

Of course, ISIS says that is exactly what they intend to do, and I am inclined to take them at their word.

In the here-and-now, the Administration has said it has a goal of bringing in 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year, that number being in addition to the 60,000 already in the pipeline under the provisions of Ted Kennedy’s Refugee Act of 1980. You may have heard that dozens of State Governors, mostly Republican though not all, wanted to know a little more about who is coming and where they are going to be placed.

Sorry, Governors. That is not how it works.

I don’t have time to get bogged down in the details of what Teddy did to us- but it was certainly a lot. In a nutshell, the Act of 1980 raised the ceiling for refugees from 17,500 to 50,000, put the criteria for being designated a legitimate ‘refugee’ in the hands of the UN High Commissioner for those sorts of things. Currently that is a former Portuguese prime minister named António Guterres, who is the tenth official to head the UNHCR, and has been on the job for ten years.

(Elected Official Guterres. He is elected by the UN, that is.)

I am a little foggy on how the UNHCR got inserted into the process of bringing people we may- or may not- like to have as neighbors, but everyone is saying the “vetting” process is robust, and can take two years, so it is perfectly safe. And that is perhaps true, though in addition to the Tzarnaev brothers, the Daily Mail reports that 66 other people have been arrested over the last 18 months for ISIS-related plots in the US. There were several who arrived via the refugee resettlement program.

Once the list of names arrived here in America, the Departments of State and Health and Human Services swing into swift and decisive action: they turn the settlement process over to contractors. This is who they are, at the moment, with links to their organizational home pages:

Church World Service (CWS)
Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) (secular)
Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM)
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
International Rescue Committee (IRC) (secular)
US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) (secular)
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS)
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)
World Relief Corporation (WR)

The interesting feature of the Act is that the local municipalities that will be receiving the refugees are not notified who they are, where they came from or where they are going.

Bloomberg reported there was a conference call Tuesday night between the Administration and the Governors who have to answer to their constituents. Several of them “demanded they be given access to information about Syrian refugees about to be resettled by the federal government in their states. The White House officials refused.

The administration officials participating included White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, State Department official Simon Henshaw, FBI official John Giacalone, and deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, John Mulligan.

On the call were several Republican governors and two Democrats: Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and noted California conservative firebrand Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown. The governors repeatedly pressed Administration officials to share more information about Syrian refugees entering the United States. The governors wanted notifications whenever refugees were resettled in their states, as well as access to classified information collected when the refugees were vetted.

According to a state participant on the call:

“There was a real sense of frustration from all the governors that there is just a complete lack of transparency and communication coming from the federal government.”

I don’t blame them. I just discovered that our Governor McAuliffe supported the resettlement of six Syrians in Falls Church, just up Rt 50 from Big Pink, a dozen more in Fairfax County, and another group down by the farm in Charlottesville. I thought perhaps I ought to go down and welcome the one in Falls Church. You know, just say “howdy.”

Anyway, this is going on all across the country, essentially without comment, without the participation of the local entities that are going to wind up hosting them, or the knowledge of the citizenry.

But I am not going to get into it. Speaking from the Philippines, the President told us that “We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic. We don’t make good decisions if they’re based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks. That’s how you defeat ISIS, not trying to divide the country or suggesting that our tradition of compassion should stop now.”

What exactly is exaggerated about the risk of getting hit- again- by Islamic Radicals? No one I know is anything but fatalistic about the likelihood that it is going to happen again, and next time right here in DC. I am as compassionate as anyone, but the President invoked the memory of what happened after the Tzarnaev brothers blew holes in the Boston Marathon, and how we courageously went on with life after they killed women and children and maimed hundreds. Wouldn’t it have been easier to go on with life without anyone dying for it?

Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with having a discussion about the best way to handle refugees in what is plainly a war of religions. Just ask the opposition. They are perfectly frank about explaining what they are up to.

And why do they have to come here, anyway? The European experience suggests that permitting large numbers of Middle Easterners into their societies might have a couple of real and significant problems beyond people producing Kalashnikovs and belt bombs. Some cultures do not share our values, and that is a plain fact.

I mean, why would Sunni refugees not want refuge in a primarily Sunni nation near their original homes in the Middle East? Where are their co-religionists on the whole compassion thing?

It’s puzzling, but as Sergeant Schultz used to say on “Hogan’s Heroes:” I know nothing!

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303