Why Should American Citizens Be Required To Pay For Syrian Refugees? We Are Not The Ones Who Made Them Leave

Who should pay for the Syrian refugees?

Posted on November 23, 2015 by Ron Paul

Last week, the U.S. House dealt a blow to President Obama’s plan to resettle 10,000 Syrians fleeing their war-torn homeland. On a vote of 289-137, including 47 Democrats, the House voted to require the FBI to closely vet any applicant from Syria and to guarantee that none of them pose a threat to the US. Effectively, this will shut down the program.

The House legislation was brought to the floor after the recent attacks in Paris that left at least 130 people dead, and for which ISIS claimed responsibility. With the year-long U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, there is a good deal of concern that among those 10,000 to be settled here there might be some who wish to do us harm. Even though it looks as though the Paris attackers were all EU citizens, polling in the U.S. shows record opposition to allowing Syrian refugees entry.

I agree that we must be very careful about who is permitted to enter the United States, but I object to the president’s plan for a very different reason. I think it is a sign of Washington’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy that U.S. citizens are being forced to pay for those fleeing Washington’s foreign policy.

For the past 10 years, the U.S. government has been planning and executing a regime change operation against the Syrian government. It is this policy that has produced the chaos in Syria, including the rise of ISIS and al-Qaida in the country. After a decade of U.S. destabilization efforts, we are now told that Syria is totally destabilized and that, therefore, we must take in thousands of Syrians fleeing the destabilization that Washington caused.

Has there ever been a more foolish and wrongheaded foreign policy than this?

The American people have been forced to pay untold millions of dollars for a 10-year CIA and Pentagon program to undermine and overthrow the Syrian government, and now we are supposed to pay millions of dollars more to provide welfare for the refugees Obama created.

Who should pay for the millions of people fleeing the chaos that Washington helped create? How about the military-industrial complex, which makes a killing promoting killing? How about the Beltway neocon think tanks that continue to churn out pro-war propaganda while receiving huge grants from defense contractors? How about Obama’s national security advisers, who push him into one regime-change disaster after another? How about Hillary Clinton, who came up with the bright idea that Bashar Assad must go? How about Obama himself, a president elected to end wars, but who has ended up starting more wars than his predecessor? It’s time those who start the wars start paying for the disasters they create. Then perhaps we might have some relief from an interventionist foreign policy that is destroying our financial and national security.

If Obama wants to take in refugees from the chaos in Syria, there are probably plenty of vacant rooms in the White House.

–Ron Paul
RonPaul Institute