As many as 470,000 people have died in Syria’s civil war, and there’s no end in sight. Between the cruelty of the IS and the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas carried out by the regime and Russia, it’s no wonder 4.8 million people have fled the country and another 6.6 million people remain displaced within its borders. The West’s response to such acute suffering has been feeble and indecisive, allowing the conflict to escalate and drive record immigration.
This August, the U.S. met President Obama’s goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees, most from the U.N.’s registration program. So far, so good, right? We’re getting people out of dangerous conditions and giving them a chance at a new life in Western countries.
But what if there was a religious group of significant size that was genocidally targeted by the IS but massively underrepresented by the U.N. migrant registration? Furthermore, what if someone in a high position in that organization acknowledged that far fewer members of the threatened religious group were eligible for relocation to the West than there statistically should be, but he claimed in response that members of that group should not be encouraged to leave the area?
This hypothetical situation is in fact true, and the U.N. leader who owned up to religious discrimination in refugee registration, António Guterres, now holds the U.N.’s highest position.
Guterres is a Christian, and his differing treatment of Syrian Christians might indeed be as he said, that they should not be uprooted after thousands of years because they are the “DNA of the Middle East,” or because Lebanon’s Christian president asked him not to encourage Christians to leave. This treatment might well be motivated out of goodwill toward Mideast Christians, but it is condescending and callous in practice.
Aren’t we for democracy and personal autonomy? It should bother us that an unelected U.N. official is making life-or-death decisions for hundreds of thousands of people in a vulnerable minority group. It is hypocritical and grossly negligent to say that because of their heritage in a region, a demographic should stay when they face extermination. People don’t want to leave the land their ancestors have inhabited for millennia. Given their long history of living in the region, the fact that so many Syrian Christians are trying to flee is indicative of the perils they face in staying.
In March, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution labeling the atrocities of the IS against Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims as genocide and crimes against humanity. This designation makes it easier for members of these groups to meet the criteria of a legitimate refugee as defined by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: a person "of special humanitarian concern to the United States” who “demonstrates that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 6 that “of 12,587 Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, only 68 were Christians and 24 were members of the Yazidi sect.” The vast majority of accepted refugees were Sunni Muslims, who, while subject to the horror of a bloody civil war, have not been threatened because of their “race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.” Only a fraction of 1 percent of accepted refugees are Christians, despite them composing 10 percent of Syria’s population. Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, told Fox News that Christians don’t reside in those camps because it is too dangerous: "They are preyed upon by other residents from the Sunni community and there is infiltration by ISIS and criminal gangs.” Official U.N. refugee registration is done at these camps, and the U.S. has been accepting refugees through the U.N. registration, meaning that Christians have been effectively cut out.
Even if this "de facto discrimination" is unintentional, it shows a lack of common sense to disproportionately take in members of the ethnic/religious group that forms a majority in the country in question and is one of the only groups there not being targeted specifically for their ethnicity or religion. I’m not for barring Syrian Sunnis from the U.S., but threatened minority groups should be given privileged status. You might cry "discrimination," but the U.S. has been doing this for years, most recently in Iraq.
During the tumult following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many Iraqi Christians were killed or kidnapped by Islamist groups, leading to a mass exodus. Since 2003, the Christian population in Iraq has declined from 1.4 million to a mere 275,000. In response to the targeting, the U.S. accepted approximately 127,131 Iraqi refugees between 2007 and the present, 37.5 percent of which were Christian, much higher than the less than 4 percent of the population Christians composed in 2003. Because Christians in Iraq were of “special humanitarian concern” and were persecuted for their religion, they met the criteria for refugee status. Thus the disproportionately large acceptance rate for Iraqi Christians shows U.S. refugee policy working properly.
The U.S. is not obligated to take in all of the world’s refugees, but it has committed itself to providing asylum to vulnerable groups. The U.S. has already demonstrated that it can prioritize the acceptance of members of threatened ethnic or religious groups; let’s continue this commonsense and life-saving policy.