Americans Have A Long History Of Opposing Refugees. But Most Support Afghan Asylum Seekers.
It didn’t take long for prominent voices on the political right to begin stoking fears about Afghan citizens fleeing the Taliban’s takeover of the country and coming to the United States.
Former President Donald Trump inaccurately claimed that there’s “NO VETTING” of these evacuees, asking, “How many terrorists will Joe Biden bring to America?” “Hillbilly Elegy” author and 2022 Ohio senatorial candidate J.D. Vance similarly suggested that the ostensibly insufficient screening of Afghans would result in the U.S. harboring “a bunch of people who believe they should blow themselves up in a mall because someone looked at their wife the wrong way.” Afghan refugees have been frequently depicted as economic, cultural and national security threats on Fox News too, with Tucker Carlson even branding efforts to relocate Afghan evacuees in the U.S. as “Operation Change America Forever.”
This fear-mongering is neither surprising nor new. There’s a long history of politicians erroneously representing refugees as economic burdens who pose cultural and/or national security threats to the U.S. In fact, the same arguments against Afghan asylum seekers were also deployed in 2015 and 2016 against resettling Syrian refugees displaced by their country’s civil war. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump regularly railed against the refugee policies of then-President Barack Obama’s administration, proclaiming at the Republican National Convention, “We don’t want them in our country.” Trump’s administration made this point even clearer, banning Syrian refugees and cutting the total number of refugees allowed in the U.S. by more than 80 percent.
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The more welcoming context is one important reason why we’re now seeing stronger support for Afghan refugees than previous asylum seekers. Despite that high-profile fear-mongering, early polling on the issue shows relatively weak opposition to resettling Afghans in the U.S. The majority of voters in an August Morning Consult poll supported relocating Afghan refugees in the U.S., while just one-third were opposed. Support was even stronger in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, where 68 percent strongly or somewhat favored the U.S. taking in Afghan refugees after security screenings. And Americans are especially supportive of Afghans who helped U.S. forces during the 20-year war, with a whopping 81-percent of those surveyed by YouGov/CBS News saying we should help Afghans who worked with American troops come to the U.S.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-have-a-long-history-of-opposing-refugees-but-most-support-afghan-asylum-seekers/
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