We were once strangers too

In the book of Exodus, the God of the Jewish people states: “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” In this passage, God recognizes the pain Jews experienced as slaves in a foreign land, but he adds an addendum: they must not do the same to foreigners among them.

While I recognize that any text can be used for a political purpose, I believe this verse speaks to Jewish values today because of its invocation of collective memory. We live in a world where many have homes and where many have been uprooted. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, by the end of 2014, 59.5 million individuals worldwide had been displaced due to violence or conflict. And even while the majority of the Jewish population today lives settled in Israel, the United States and the European Union, Jews have fallen victim to violence and displacement many times throughout history—in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa and more. Thankfully, my Jewish ancestors immigrated to the United States from Germany before the regime became lethally anti-Semitic, but I also have distant relatives who were not ultimately able to make it out of Europe’s death trap. Immigration quotas and xenophobic public attitudes also made it difficult for Jewish refugees’ immigration. For example, in 1939 more than 80 percent of Americans stood against a bill permitting 20,000 Jewish children in Nazi Germany to immigrate to the U.S.; the bill was subsequently defeated.

If these kinds of collective memories are embedded in the consciousness of the American Jewish community, then how can we condone rhetoric that blames Syrian refugees from the very crises that are fleeing? How can discourse in an intellectual environment claim that ethnic refugees are more valuable than national refugees, ignoring the fact that, in Syria, nationality was imposed by the French during the partition of the Ottoman? How can we also forget that, for centuries, Syria was home to thousands of Jews?

The recent dominant discourse in America claims that American Jews, along with Asian Americans, are a so-called “model minority,” working hard in a not-so-welcoming environment and eventually achieving the American Dream. While most people would certainly love to be called model citizens, how does this label benefit Jewish or Asian Americans who currently live below or near the poverty line? Furthermore, how can it benefit Jewish Americans or other “model minorities” if their rags-to-riches narratives are used to negate the suffering of other groups of people, such as Black Americans or Syrian refugees seeking asylum? I think so-called “model minorities” should protest the problematics of the label, but I also hold fault with the dominant social group for creating the label in the first place.

I don’t believe that history always repeats itself in the same way, and thus I don’t find it productive to demonize policymakers who want to limit the entry of Syrian refugees in the interest of national security in the wake of the recent Paris terrorist attacks. But I believe that our anger against oppression should be combined with all the facts available in order to create compassionate, realistic policy. Although the majority of the Paris attackers were European citizens, French prosecutors claim that two perpetrators crossed into the European Union through Greece posing as refugees, a claim that Greece has yet to confirm.

The Syrian crisis is a tragedy whose scope we as Americans can hardly imagine. Approximately 250,124 people have died since 2011, 7,600,000 people are internally displaced within Syria, and 4,000,000 have become refugees. With thousands of lives threatened and millions facing statelessness and a lack of adequate resources, lawmakers cannot simply dismiss the massive humanitarian concern by invoking national security.

While compassion drives us to claims that all refugees have good intentions, unfortunately reality is more complicated. However, two potential terrorists out of 150,000 refugees who are currently seeking asylum in the European Union is a strikingly small statistic from which to propagate the idea that all refugees harbor extremist ideology. Compare this statistic to death-by-firearm in the United States: in 2013, there were 33,636 deaths resulting from firearm use, including those that were the result of mass shootings, homicides and suicides. In a span of 1,004 days leading up to Oct. 2, 2015, there were 994 mass shootings reported in the U.S., making them an almost daily part of the American experience. Lawmakers don’t want to admit Syrian refugees for fear of a few bad apples, but it seems like quite a few bad apples already exist within this country’s borders.

One of the last things I want to mention is the rampant Islamophobia that plagues our lawmakers’ rhetoric, as well as the rhetoric of campus dialogue. The world is home to 1.6 billion Muslims, 2.77 million of them Americans. As any other social group, Muslim Americans are ethnically, culturally and politically diverse; requiring this entire group to apologize for the small fraction that commit atrocities in the name of their religion is shameful and a form of profiling. Donald Trump said the other day that he would require Muslim Americans to register in a database. But the Syrian conflict is a conflict specific to one region of the world, with many players (including the U.S.) involved. Simplifying the morbid extremism of ISIS or the hawkish Assad regime to the religion of Islam is merely, in a word, stupidity. Senator Ted Cruz asserted that the U.S. should only take in Christian, not Muslim, Syrian refugees, making it seem that he cares more about what religion people have than their basic living conditions.