While some opponents to settling refugees in the United States are distancing themselves from the comparison to World War II Japanese internment camps, at least one person is embracing it.
Roanoke, Virginia, Mayor David A. Bowers used President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to “sequester” Japanese Americans to justify his decision to cut off assistance to Syrian refugees.
“I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis [sic] now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then,” Bowers, a Democrat, said in a statement released Wednesday, according to The Roanoke Times.
The statement requests that “all Roanoke Valley governments and non-governmental agencies suspend and delay and further Syrian refugee assistance.”
Since Friday’s Paris attacks, some lawmakers at the national, state and local level have come out against President Obama’s plans to settle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S. in the next fiscal year. So far, however, the Paris attackers that have been identified have all been European Union nationals and the Syrian passport found on one of the attackers is a suspected forgery.
Update: Bowers is also a public backer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He joined the campaign’s Virginia Leadership Council in early October, The Roanoke Times reported, and her campaign touted his endorsement in a press release later that month.
Oh, that worked out to be quite fair didn’t it? One of this country’s proudest moments.
Right up there with my family being interred for being of German descent (we came to America in the 1890s long after many west Coast Japanese families had already settled here.)
More appropriate comparison is our barring Jewish immigrants in the late 1930’s. Another high point in American Altruism.
These people are truly and utterly lost. Embracing the shameful history of internment of the Japanese and using it to justify repeating the same kind of bigoted stupidity again?
Sometimes I really want off this planet.
We behaved shamefully and cravenly once, so we should do it again, he says. I bet he calls himself a Christian, too.
Mayor Dude, let me put it this way. Remember those bumper stickers that said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”? The idea was not to suggest that you should actually try ignorance, you stupid yutz.
Autobiographical note: I remember when I first started reporting on municipal meetings I was astonished at how god-damn flat-out dumb a lot of the local elected officials could be. Not all, certainly, and it’s gotten better since then, but some of the them were really, really some dumb SOBs.
This is why Democracy fails. The more educated and intelligent a person, the lower their overall reproduction rate.
The Founding Fathers understood this, that’s why they put in Checks and Balances to ensure that true one-man-one-vote never would take over.
Thank Heavens, otherwise we’d be seeing this crap for an eternity.