Well, look no further than the mirror. You'd have to come away thinking America has gone crazy and you wouldn't be all that wrong. The truth is, we are guilty of a kind of peculiar sin: we idealize ourselves. Now and then a little squirt of Windex on our mirrors wouldn't be a bad idea --certainly better than slamming the door in the faces of refugees. Don't forget: America played a significant role in creating the situation in the Middle East that dislodged those refugees.
Here we go again ...
The most notorious example of American hostility to vulnerable outsiders came on the eve of the Second World War, when the U.S. government refused to admit many Jewish refugees from Hitler. The voyage of the ship called the St. Louis, which left Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with nine hundred and thirty-seven mostly Jewish refugees on board, provides the most heartbreaking example of the consequences of American policy. After a stop in Cuba (which didn’t want the refugees, either), the ship was turned away from Florida when it was so close that passengers could see the lights of Miami. Back in Europe, two hundred and fifty-four of those passengers ultimately died in the Holocaust.
In cutting off the refugees, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government was only doing what the American people wanted. A Fortune magazine poll at the time, recently highlighted on the Historical Opinion Twitter feed, indicated that eighty-five per cent of Americans opposed relaxing restrictions on Austrian, German, and other political refugees; sixty-seven per cent wanted to “try to keep them out” entirely. ...JeffreyToobin,NewYorker
So no, we're voracious when it comes to prospective immigrants who match our labor needs and pocketbooks, but as humanitarians "reaching out"? Uh, well...
As Rick Perlstein pointed out in his 2014 book, “The Invisible Bridge,” the Vietnamese boat people, who were refugees from a war that the United States conducted, were widely despised and feared when they arrived in 1975. Perlstein quotes the famous Harvard sociologist David Riesman, who said at the time, “The national mood is poisonous and dangerous and this is one symptom—striking out at helpless refugees whose number is infinitesimal.” Sound familiar? ...JeffreyToobin,NewYorker
As Toobin says, we have moments of generosity as a people or as individuals. But, if you're willing to face the facts, we're far from being able to claim that generosity is in our nature as a nation. We just like to think it is. And we could do better...