Brooks: ‘We Have a Responsibility To Take In More Refugees’ From Syria

New York Times columnist David Brooks argued the US has “a responsibility to take in more refugees” from Syria on Friday’s “PBS NewsHour.”

Brooks was asked, “We just had a segment where we laid out, in painful detail, how difficult it is for a refugee to gain asylum in the United States. And there are several people who say, you know what? If it wasn’t for the United States’ foreign policy of perhaps disbanding the Iraqi army, creating a tremendous amount of regional instability that perhaps in — fueled ISIS, destabilized Syria further, and has caused this migrant crises, is the United States responsible, or should they be more responsible, in taking more asylum seekers?”

He responded, “Yeah, I’d be one of those people. I think, all the things you mentioned. And then, you know, a couple years ago, we had a big debate about Syria and whether we should be helping the moderates — the moderates, such as they are, in Syria, and whether we should arm those moderates. And people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham said yes. Eventually, the current administration did arm them, but with very little, much too late. And so you have this war between Assad’s forces and ISIS. And so I do think it was partially our — the vacuum created by the U.S. and the West, when there was still some sort of moderate solution possible, that helped create this crisis. And, therefore, we have a responsibility to take in more refugees. It’s still, though, bizarre to me that most of the debate is on this side of the pipeline, the flow of people on the receiving end. There are hundreds of millions — not hundreds, but there are a lot of, millions of people in Syria. Are they all going to come? What about dealing with that Syria there, and creating safe havens, creating places where people can go to be safe, when you can have islands of stability inside these two evil forces?”

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