Our Great Pundits solve the problem of indigestible refugees. Their solution will make you vomit.

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman with
Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

The influx of desperate refugees continues to bewitch, bollix, and bewilder our great public intellectual poo-bahs.  

We'll get to their miserable lucubrations shortly, but first we do have to point out that we offered up our humble views on how to solve the supposed refugee “crisis” just last week.

If the problem is that these refugees cannot legally work to support themselves for 180 days due to racist US law, we suggested that states could employ these refugees to do useful work and provide cash grants to those who do so.  

Amazingly enough, this idea appears to be getting some traction, according to a September 12, 2023 story in The New York Times:

Mr. Yale-Loehr and other immigration law experts have called for a different approach that they argue is allowed under federal law: having state governments hire asylum seekers directly. The University of California regents, for example, announced earlier this year that the university system would explore a way to hire students who lack legal status and work permits.

Just remember you read it first in the Spy.

So that's a solution that would lessen the financial burden on cities while giving refugees useful work experience and actually get stuff done that they might benefit from.  Sounds like a win-win-win.

Anybody got any worse ideas?

When we need useless (or worse) conventional wisdom on any topic of great public interest, we turn second to the The Washington Post editorial page (you already know what our first stop is for drivel).

Fareed Zakaria, come on down!

As Jon Stewart used to say, go on.

Actually, before we do, notice the classic Both Siders bloviator setup.  It's not just that your gasbag knows what's best for the country.  The problem is that Democrats need to confess their error and repent.  You could count on the hairs on Jeff Bezos's head the number of columns that are teased with “Republicans need to admit they're wrong on ....”  Only Democrats need to repent.  Republicans are permanently engraved for a blessing in the Book of Bloviating Bull****.

Why is that?  Is it in their manual?

But back to the, um, substance of Fareed the Magnificent's argument:

There is only one solution to this crisis....The president must use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending. The British government has passed a law to this effect.

How does one pundit pack so much wrong into one little sentence?

First the President does not have the power to suspend the admission of asylum seekers, which is a right guaranteed by statute and our international treaty obligations.  The Tangerine-Faced Defendant tried to assert such a right by falsely smearing refugees as public health risks.  After a series of court reverses, the Biden Administration dropped that patently fraudulent pretext.

(Zakaria supports his claim by linking to a piece arguing that the President could lock up all asylum seekers, a non-frivolous but unspeakably cruel and ridiculously expensive “solution.”).

Since Zakaria seems to have trouble doing any of his own fact-checking we'll give him the statute:

Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section.

8 U.S.C. §1158.

There's a lot more but nowhere does the law give the President the power to do what Zakaria suggests.

So Zakaria wants either to turn back desperate refugees at the border or lock them up indefinitely as a tonic to morale.  Seems like a pretty dire solution to a problem that Zakaria characterizes as “indigestion.”  That a supposedly respectable intellectual wrote this swill and that an allegedly great newspaper thought it was worthy of publication is making us nauseous.

To make us feel better, we took a slug of the Pepto-Bismol for sickening ideas: history.

Zakaria's claim that refugees and more generally immigrants cause an intestinal blockage of the body politic is hardly a new diagnosis.

In 1939, with hundreds of thousands of German Jews trapped in Hitler's Germany, Sen. Robert Wagner proposed admitting an additional 10,000 refugee children.  The law was sunk by anti-immigration forces who believed that the nation's vitals were already clogged by immigrants:

Source: U.S. Holocaust Museum

Until the nation solved its immigration problems. To opponents of immigration, that means never.

It turns out that anti-immigration advocates have been troubled by digestive issues for generations:

 

C. Jaret, Troubled by Newcomers: Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Action during Two Eras of Mass Immigration to the United States 18 Journal of American Ethnic History at 11 (1999).

Since that article was published in 1999, we have all seen how the influx of new immigrants to places like New York City have destroyed its art centers, museums and symphony orchestras, right?

Let's see what's in today's New York Times:

Well, give 'em time. 

Another through line of anti-immigrant bigotry is that it's not immigration that causes the intestines to knot, it's the wrong kind of immigrants, as the passage from Professor Jaret states.  In 1939 it was alien Jews like this obvious threat to American values:

whose father tried desperately to obtain U.S. visas for their family, but was frustrated at every turn by anti-immigrant Jew haters in the prewar State Department.

Now, it's scary brown people like this guy:

Wait just a hot minute here?  Are you telling us that the same guy who recycles anti-immigrant tropes from generations of bigots is in fact – an immigrant?

 

Given his delicate anti-immigrant tum-tum, we had assumed he was a descendant of Squanto.

Wrong-o!

He's in fact a member of an elite intellectual family in India, attended the finest schools (like Ron DeSantis!), and now warns of the dangers of allowing in any more desperate women and children from the slums of El Salvador or the small towns of Honduras.

It's bad enough when the grandchildren of German immigrant pimps like Donald Trump tell us about the horrors of immigrants; it's even worse when it's an immigrant who apparently believes that the United States should welcome well-born intellectuals like him, while leaving the poor and persecuted refugee to her fate.

We have a hard time digesting that.  In fact, it makes us want to vomit.