Biden’s Latest Immigration Plan — Gaza Refugees

An internal Biden administration memo, first reported by CBS News, suggests the idea is to offer a ‘permanent safe haven to some of those fleeing Gaza.’

Pool/Mary Altaffer via AP
A protester waves a Palestinian flag above the occupied Hamilton Hall, renamed Hind's Hall, on the Columbia campus, April 30, 2024, at New York. Pool/Mary Altaffer via AP

Had enough of pro-Hamas agitation at Morningside Heights and across the country? There’ll be more to come if President Biden gets his way on a scheme to give Gaza refugees a quick path to American citizenship. An internal Biden administration memo, first reported by CBS News, suggests the idea is to offer a “permanent safe haven to some of those fleeing Gaza.” Senior officials are discussing resettlement here of an undisclosed number of Gazans.

It is not the first time such an idea has been bandied about. In the 1980s, President Reagan’s team — believers in what economists sometimes call human capital — explored easing the much-ballyhooed Palestinian refugee problem by taking in at least some of them. The plan might have had a logic then. The future editor of the Sun, then with the Wall Street Journal, wrote about the plan in 1983, and endorsed it. It failed to prosper.

Much has changed since, as a merger of the leftist and Palestinian Arab causes that began at the Hebron massacre of 1929 now dominates America’s discourse. The Palestinian cause has become ever more nihilistic. Keffiyeh-clad students are schooled by radical veterans of the 1960s anti-war movement. They are egged on by Jew-hating professional agitators from the Mideast. The genocidal concept of “anti-Zionism” is now respectable.   

On its face, the program the Biden administration appears to be exploring  would be a humanitarian gesture focused on those “who have immediate family members who are American citizens or permanent residents.” Yet Republicans in Congress — and maybe not only members of the GOP — are irate that, amid a crisis on our northern and southern borders, the administration is planning to bring in refugees from the Middle East.

There is talk of opening at Doha, Qatar, and Ankara, Turkey, two new immigration field offices to process Mideast refugees. Emir al-Thani of Qatar and President Erdogan of Turkey are the region’s foremost backers of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring, Hamas, whose top officials reside in Qatar and Turkey. The two affect a friendliness toward America, but operate against Israel. What in the world is the administration thinking?

We get — we’re a tribune of the idea — that America’s immigrants are one of our top sources of strength. Yet, one only needs to look at the southern border to realize the pitfalls of an ill-controlled flood of migrants. Venezuela has emptied its prisons and sent its toughest gangsters to our border. Communist China and Mexican narcos unite to flood our streets with fentanyl. Terrorists find a way to  blend with the work-seeking migrants of earnest ambitions.    

Plus also, too, there is Europe, where leaders intent on helping the downtrodden opened their borders to refugees from the last decade’s so-called “Arab spring.” An annual song contest, Eurovision, opened today at Malmo, Sweden. The continent’s largest hub of Mideast migrants, the Swedish city is today awash in crime, misogyny, and bigotry. Anyone looking too Scandinavian could be targeted for violence by the city’s dominant Islamists.    

Mr. Biden’s plan might be designed to appease anti-Israel voters in swing states who threaten to shun “Genocide Joe” in November. Yet, the fate of European politicians who were too eager to open the doors to an uncontrollable flood of Mideast migrants is instructive. Election losses and a sharp political turn to the far right on the continent may yet cause rethinking among Biden-Harris campaign strategists. Yet how about policy makers?

How is it in America’s interest to import Gaza refugees at this hour? Who would even think otherwise amid what’s going on at our universities — and given, since 2007, the record of Hamas in Gaza? A generation of Arabs has been steeped in the antisemitic ideology that is taught in its school system — and, all too often, ours. Add Turkey and Qatar for a national disaster that would make our campus crisis look like the good old days.


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