releases: https://www.kaine.senate.gov/commonwealth-connection/refugees-are-not-foreign-enemies_-the-enemy-is-isil
Data license: MIT · Data source: dwillis/congress-press
This data as json
| url | title | date | year | month | party | chamber | state | member_name | bioguide_id | domain | scraper | source | date_source | text | has_text | collected_at | updated_at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://www.kaine.senate.gov/commonwealth-connection/refugees-are-not-foreign-enemies_-the-enemy-is-isil | Refugees are not Foreign Enemies - the Enemy is ISIL | 2015-12-01 | 2015 | 2015-12 | Democrat | House | VA | Tim Kaine | K000384 | www.kaine.senate.gov | legacy | Tuesday, December 1, 2015 Refugees are not Foreign Enemies - the Enemy is ISIL by Sen. Tim Kaine Full transcript of Senator Kaines remarks on the Senate floor Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015, which was an act passed by the House shortly before we recessed for Thanksgiving. An act dealing with the refugee crisis from Syria and Iraq. And it's an act that is sort of pending before the body now as we try to decide whether to take up the House bill or take up the topic of the House bill as part of other deliberations we're engaged in. First, I think everyone in this body and everyone in the House acknowledges the security needs of America in this challenging time as we're engaged in a battle against ISIL and, as we have seen in recent weeks the reach of ISIL, whether it's a passenger aircraft in Sinai, a neighborhood in southern Beirut or multiple neighborhoods in Paris, ISIL's threat is expanding and mutating, and we have to take those security concerns seriously. I applaud the work that has already been done to try to make sure that the vetting process for refugees that enter the United States is pretty intense. Four million refugees have left Syria during the course of the Syrian civil war. Of those four million who have left and registered with the U.N. after a fairly extensive review process, the U.N. has referred 20,000 to the United States for possible consideration to be refugees, and of those 20,000, after an 18-month vetting process, we have allowed approximately 2,000 into the United States. So the vetting process for refugees is pretty intense. If we can make it better, we need to do that, but it is already fairly significant. I also applaud efforts that the Administration announced yesterday and that other colleagues including, Mr. President [Sen. Flake], you and others are working on to take the visa waiver program that we currently have that allows citizens from 38 countries to come to the United States without visas, to make sure that that program is tight. We've got to do our best in a careful and deliberate way to make sure that our security in the midst of this battle against ISIL is strong. But, Mr. President, I rise today to talk particularly about this act because I think it's problematic and I think it's problematic from the very title of the act. And I think it raises some questions we have to be very careful about. Syrian and Iraqi refugees are not foreign enemies. Refugees are not the enemies of the United States. We have an enemy. The enemy is ISIL. We're coming up on the start of the 17th month of a war against ISIL that Congress has been unwilling to debate, vote on and declare, but they are an enemy, and we would all acknowledge that, but the refugees who are leaving Syria and Iraq are not our enemies. They're victims. They are victims. And I think before we go down the path of quickly -- and this bill was passed in the House in just a couple of days -- of painting with a broad brush these poor people who have suffered so much as enemies, we really need to reflect on what they have been through. This refugee crisis in Syria has been called by most NGOs and other organizations like the U.N. the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II. In a country of between 25 million and 30 million people, 4 million have had to flee their country because of the atrocities of the Assad regime and the atrocities of the civil war carried out by ISIL and other terrorist organizations. 4 million have had to leave their country. 8 million more have had to leave their homes and move to other places in their country where they would prefer not to live because their homes are unsafe because of the civil war. Nearly 300,000 Syrians have been killed in this civil war. And the atrocities are horrible. The Assad regime uses barrel bombs in civilian neighborhoods to kill innocents, without any rhyme or reason as to where theyre going to fall, creating psychological terror as well as physical danger. And ISIL in Syria, it's beheadings, it's the forced subjugation of people and selling them into sexual slavery, it's the oppression of religious minorities. Virtually any religion other than a Sunni extremist that would fit within ISIL's narrow definition of who they think true believers are. And this is what people are fleeing from. You know, Mr. President, I really want to emphasize -- and I just want to emphasize this point, that refugees are not our enemies. Theyre not foreign enemies. They're victims that deserve compassion. This is a photograph that's a fairly famous photograph one from a suburb in Damascus, Yarmouk, that is filled with Palestinian refugees who have been waiting for food. The Assad regime had cordoned them off and would not allow humanitarian aid because they thought that there were opponents of the regime in this neighborhood. This was a photograph taken in January of 2014 when the U.N. finally could come in to try to deliver humanitarian food aid to these folks. You can see just the tens of thousands of people who are waiting in the midst of their bombed-out neighborhood for a delivery of basic food aid, which has been very episodic during the course of this war. And this neighborhood has gone back under blockade. And it has been extremely difficult to get them the food that they need. These are not enemies. These are people who are worthy of the compassion of any person and especially of a nation as compassionate as the United States. And then more recently I know we were all just stunned to see this horrible photograph of a three-year-old Syrian boy who, with his family and a group of 12 Syrians, tried to make it across water to Greece, fleeing atrocities in the battle between Kurds and ISIL in northern Syria. And 12 members of this family -- 12 members in a boat were killed and drowned, including this three-year-old and his five-year-old brother. These are not enemies. And to have an act that purports to deal with this refugee crisis and to call this an act that's an act about foreign enemies -- they're not enemies. And there's no way we should allow a kind of tar-brush approach that would paint these poor unfortunates who are the victims of the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II as if they're somehow enemies. We should have a compassionate response that protects American security but that is nevertheless compassionate. Mr. President, these photographs really grab me, and the rhetoric surrounding these refugees and the fact that they were called enemies when this act passed really grabbed me. I found myself thinking about it, not so much even in just the policy way. I mean, what is the right policy? What's the right mixture of things we should do to keep the country safe? That's very important, but these kinds of pictures make you think about something just more fundamental: why does this happen? Since the beginning of time, human beings have asked, why is there suffering of this kind? Why must hundreds of thousands be huddled into a bombed-out neighborhood and be nearly starved to death and wait for a delivery episodically from the U.N.? Why would a family have to flee from their home and with their children killed to try to get away from atrocities? Why, if you were a student from California State at Long Beach on a semester abroad program in Paris and youre sitting in a caf and then you get gunned down by ISIL terrorists, why if you're a tourist coming back from a vacation in the Sinai with your family, you suddenly have your plane bombed out of the sky? Humans have asked this question since the beginning of time. Why do these things happen? And there are two conventional answers to the question of why these things occur, and then there's a nonconventional answer that I think is a very challenging one that we as a body and as a country really have to grapple with. The two conventional answers to why there is horrible suffering like this are obviously there's evil in the world and there's evil within. So there's evil out in the world and then there's evil within and we make mistakes. Clearly there's evil in the world. ISIL is evil. Refugees are not evil. You know, I think it's interesting, again, that we -- that one of the bodies here could come up with a piece of legislation, draft it, debate it and vote on it in a couple of days to label refugees as foreign enemies when we've been at war for 17 months against ISIL and we haven't been able to have a debate in this body to authorize military force and declare that they're an enemy? There is evil in the world, and part of what we must do is call it out and be willing to stand against it. The great Irish poet Yeats talked about a situation where the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity. I worry that this body, this legislative body, this Article 1 branch which is the best, we have not shown the conviction to call out evil in the way that we should call it out and mistakenly we're calling people evil who aren't evil but who are deserving of compassionate help from us and from other nations. That's the first explanation of why evil occurs. There's evil out in the world, and there is -- and ISIL is evil. The atrocities of Assad are evil. We ought to call it out. The second explanation is our own weakness. You have to look in the mirror and ask when bad things happen whether to yourself or your country, did we do anything wrong? I have a concern, Mr. President, that when the chapter of this is written, the Syrian refugee crisis, neither the United States nor other nations are going to look that good. It is going to be kind of like looking back at the 1990s and why the U.S. was able to intervene and stop atrocities in the Balkans and chose not to in Rwanda. The answer to why we did in one instance and not the other, I dont think that looks that good in retrospect. I worry, with respect to this refugee crisis 4 million, 8 million people killed, these children and their families, I think we do have to look in the mirror and we do have to ask ourselves whether we have done enough or whether we can do more. But lastly, Mr. President, and I will a say this, there's a nonconventional explanation of why suffering occurs that is a challenging one and it is in the Book of Job. Youve got a Bible up there on your desk. The President has it right there because it is such a great book of wisdom, and I know you know the story, but its an interesting one as we grapple with suffering like this and we have to ask why it occurs. So Job was an upright and righteous man. He was a blameless person, a person of integrity. And the storytellers -- this story was written about 500 B.C. -- posit this debate between God and Satan, where God is talking about how great Job is, and Satan says, Job is only great because he is wealthy, has a great family, hes healthy. If he lost that, he would cease being so faithful. God says, no I think he'd be faithful anyway. Satan says, let's have a little wager, and lets see what happens. That's how the Book of Job begins. This upright and blameless man who has everything proceeds to very quickly lose everything. He loses his wealth. He loses his family. He loses his health. Not because of his own sin or his own weakness or his own error or his own mistake. Not because of evil in the world. He suffers because he's being tested. That's the reason he suffers. And as the story goes on, he's tested, he's tested. He argues with God, he fights with God, but he doesn't let go of his faith. And in the end of the story, this Book of Job -- this is a book that is not only in the Old Testament, and studied by Jews and Christians alike, it is in the Koran -- this is a story that all the Abrahamic faith traditions have grabbed onto because it has a fundamental piece of wisdom to it. Sometimes when suffering like this occurs it is not just because of evil in the world or our own sin, it is because bad things happen to test us as individuals. Bad things happen and sometimes test us as a country. I look at this refugee crisis as a test. It's a test about whether we, like Job, will be true to our principles or whether well abandon them. Job was true to his principles and then things came back to him multiplied. Are we going to be true to our principals? My state of Virginia began when English, who were starving, were helped out by Indians down near Jamestown Island. There was an extension of a hand to strangers in a strange land that enabled them to survive unlike earlier parties that had been wiped out by starvation or battle with Indians. My people came from Ireland in the 1840s. They were chased out by oppression, they were chased out by hunger. My people have the same story that virtually everybody who came to the United States had. Some came under much worse conditions, brought over in slavery and servitude. The nation of France recognized the United States for what it was, this beacon of liberty people from around the world -- when France gave to the United States the Statue of Liberty, which we planted in New York Harbor right next to Ellis Island where so many people came into this country, and nobody who came here had it easy. People faced signs, "no Irish need apply" or they faced discrimination or oppression, but they didnt face a door being shut on their face and being told they were foreign enemies when they were really refugees looking for a better situation in life. So as I think about what we're grappling with and what we may be called to vote on in the next ten days in this body, I really think about this massive scale of human suffering that's going on with respect to Syria and I think about that wisdom from the Book of Job, which is sometimes suffering and adversity is to test us. Are we going to abandon our principles? Not going to be the Statue of Liberty nation? Not going to be the nation that will extend a hand of welcome or friendship to people who have suffered? Or are we going to be true to our principles? And again and again in our nation's history and in the history of other nations, it's been shown that if you are true to your principles, especially true to them during times of adversity, then you're worthy of respect. You teach important lessons to your kids and to the generations that follow, and usually things work out. I think our nation's principles are solid. They are rock solid. And in the heat of the moment, we shouldn't abandon them. And we shouldn't abandon people who have suffered and are suffering with the kind of hot legislative language that would label them as "foreign enemies" when they are just refugees in the same way that people throughout history have been refugees needing a compassionate response from others. Thank you, Mr. President. With that, I yield the floor. | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |