U.S. inaction with Syrian refugees is embarrassing at best

Living in the U.S., it’s easy to glance past headlines about Syrian refugees. After all, they are way over in Syria, no? What are we supposed to do: Put them all on planes and fly them over here?
At the Advocate, we would like to hope that the U.S. and its all neighboring countries do exactly that.
On Sept.10, the White House announced that the U.S. would accept 10,000 refugees into America. A gracious move, right? Considering the actual number of displaced refugees is closer to 4 million, and it takes about a year to get those proposed 10,000 refugees through the application process, it may be not so gracious. Fourteen members of Congress instead suggested that 65,000 refugees should be granted asylum, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked the U.S. to take on 100,000.
The U.K. recently announced a plan to take 20,000 refugees while Germany is the big stack after pledging to accept 800,000. It’s easy for Americans to take in so few refugees when you can’t see the full scale of the problem. One-fifth of Syria’s population is displaced (with over half of those under age 18) and 250,000 people are dead as a result of the four-year Syrian civil war.
Iyad El-Baghdadi, an activist who got his slice of the limelight during the Arab Spring uprising in 2010, published this on Twitter: “The Syrian catastrophe was very preventable if the world’s red line was “killing protesters,” rather than “drowned refugee toddlers.”
And Baghdadi is right. Anytime 250,000 people die from the same cause, it should be pretty evident that the world leaders dropped the ball. And after clear negligence on our part, do we in the U.S. really want to accept refugees only as a PR move? These people need places to stay now. They’re sleeping in border camps on the ground, without very basic necessities. About 1.1 million of these people are in Lebanon, a country of only 4 million people itself, which has stretched its infrastructure as far as it can go.
This whole scenario has highlighted another failure in U.S. immigration law. Under current rules, it is illegal for any refugee who supported a rebel group in another country to enter the U.S., even if the U.S. supported that rebel group itself.
If there’s one theme these problems keep pointing to, it’s that people are people, way before they are any specific nationality. We are the richest, most technologically advanced civilization the planet has ever seen, and all we’re doing right now is a drop in a bucket, because we don’t want to spend the money to save more toddlers from drowning.