Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were refugees from brutal Chechen conflict

[Jesus Malverde]

With their baseball hats and sauntering gaits, they appeared to friends and neighbors like ordinary American boys. But the Boston bombing suspects were refugees from another world — the blood, rubble and dirty wars of the Russian Caucasus.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was a southpaw heavyweight boxer who represented New England in the National Golden Gloves and talked about competing on behalf of the United States. His tangle-haired 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, was a skateboarder who listened to rap and seemed easygoing to other kids in his Cambridge, Mass., neighborhood.

Tamerlan is now dead, killed in a shootout with police. Police said Friday night they had taken Dzhokhar into custody after he was cornered in a boat stored in a back yard in Watertown, Mass., after a massive manhunt . Hidden behind the lives they had been leading in Massachusetts is a biography containing old resentments that appear to have mutated into radical Islamic violence.

The brothers who are alleged to have planted bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday reached the United States in 2002 after their ethnic Chechen family fled the Caucasus. They had been living in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan and were prevented from resettling in war-racked Chechnya.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/details-emerge-on-suspected-boston-bombers/2013/04/19/ef2c2566-a8e4-11e2-a8e2-5b98cb59187f_story.html

The Russians alerted the FBI to their extremism, they were interviewed prior to the bombing and passed scrutiny.

[Blue_In_AK]

1. According to Snopes,

they weren't refugees in the sense that the fleeing Syrians are refugees. The Tsarnaev brothers' parents came to the US on a tourist visa and sought asylum once here. At the time, the boys were young. The screening of incoming refugees, from what I understand, is much more stringent than for a tourist visa.

[MisterP]

4. a lot of nationalism and radicalization happens far abroad, where they hear only how their

Motherland is being outraged by traitors and oppressors (Air India 182, IRA support against the wicked English)

[MADem]

2. No, they weren't.

They were the children of an asylee.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bier/the-boston-bombers-were-n_b_8584016.html

Detractors of refugee resettlement, however, point to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev -- the Boston Bombers -- as evidence to the contrary. The pair of brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013 were not, however, refugees. They were, on the contrary, children of an asylee, according to the State Department, and the distinction is crucial.

Asylees and refugees share one thing in common: a fear of persecution in the their country of origin. But they differ in important ways. Most importantly, an asylee is self-selected--he arrives in the country from which he's seeking status and applies for asylum. Under international law, people with a well-founded fear of persecution cannot be returned to their country of origin.

By contrast, refugees undergo a much different process. First, they must receive designation as a refugee by U.N. officials, most often in refugee camps. The United States selects only the most vulnerable cases for resettlement, such as those with almost no hope of ever returning to their home country or those who have been tortured.

This selection process and the subsequent vetting undertaken to verify the applicant's biography takes a long time -- up to 3 years -- and is normally exhaustingly thorough. Refugee officers at the Department of Homeland Security travel throughout the region in order to verify claims of persecution and facts about the victims' biography.

If the person claims to have been in a certain place at a certain time, DHS checks. If they claim their house was bombed, DHS confirms that bombs were dropped there (it often uses satellite and drone surveillance for this). The Paris bomber with his fake Syrian passport would have had a very hard time navigating that process.

[Jesus Malverde]

3. Thanks MADem