The Atlantic brings a dose of reality to the refugee debate

There's a very good article in The Atlantic discussing the dilemma of admitting large numbers of Middle Eastern 'refugees' to the USA, and examining the successful (or otherwise) assimilation of their predecessors.  Here's an excerpt.

Donald Trump’s noisy complaints that immigration is out of control are literally true. Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize—not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.

. . .

Since 1991, the United States has accepted more than 100,000 Somali refugees. Britain accepted 100,000 as well. Some 50,000 Somali refugees were resettled in Canada; some 40,000 in Sweden; smaller communities were settled in the United Kingdom, Norway, and Denmark.

How’s that going?

[The article examines in detail many aspects of Somali refugee life, and concludes that it's not going well at all.]

. . .

... immigrants to the United States are dividing into two streams. One arrives educated and assimilates “up”; the other, larger stream, arrives poorly educated and unskilled and assimilates “down.” It almost ceases to make sense to speak and think of immigration as one product of one policy. Without ever having considered the matter formally or seriously, the U.S. has arrived at two different policies to serve two different sets of interests—and to achieve two radically different results, one very beneficial to U.S. society; the other, fraught with huge present and future social difficulties. 

How did this happen? Almost perfectly unintentionally, suggests Margaret Sands Orchowski in her new history, The Law That Changed the Face of America. The Immigration Act of 1965 did two things, one well understood, one not: It abolished national quotas that effectively disfavored non-European immigration—and it established family reunification as the supreme consideration of U.S. immigration law. That second element has surprisingly proven even more important than the first. A migrant could arrive illegally, regularize his status somewhere along the way—for example, by the immigration amnesty of 1986—and then call his family from home into the United States after him. The 1965 act widened the flow of post-1970 low-skilled illegal immigration into a secondary and tertiary surge of further rounds of low-skilled immigration that continues to this day.

There's more at the link.

I'm an immigrant myself (a legal one, of course).  I understand something of the challenges of adapting to a new society, different in many respects from the one I left behind.  However, for refugees from a Third World background the challenges of adaptation and assimilation are far greater - so much so that many don't assimilate to their new homelands at all.

This article's a good primer on the reasons why that's the case, and highlights the dangers of simply admitting refugees because we feel sorry for them and want to help them.  I think a very good case can be made for erecting refugee camps and care facilities in safe areas near their homelands (made safe, if necessary, by armed intervention), and then encouraging the refugees to get the education they need to transform their own societies from within.  There's no reason why our national society and its institutions should be burdened by having to deal with their cultural, social and political problems.

Peter