Chris Christie Gets Tough on Syrian Refugee Orphans Under the Age of Five
As the GOP presidential hopefuls compete to see who can strike the toughest, most macho-looking anti-immigrant pose, we’ve witnessed Donald Trump’s “Operation Wetback,” thrilled to Ben Carson’s plan to Make Mexico Great Again, and heard Marco Rubio say “We can’t. We just can’t.” But here comes swaggering dicknose Chris Christie to deliver the hard truths those other pussies won’t: Not even an orphaned Syrian four-year-old would be allowed into the U.S. on his watch.
“The fact is that we need for appropriate vetting,” he told Hugh Hewitt Monday, “And I don’t think orphans under five should be admitted into the United States at this point. They have no family here, how are we gonna care for these folks?”
Christie’s position, shitting on young orphan children notwithstanding, isn’t exactly outside the Republican mainstream. As of Tuesday morning, 27 states had announced they won’t accept any Syrian refugees—26 of them have Republican governors. Popular xenophobe and candied yam with marshmallows Donald Trump has even suggested fleeing refugees might be a terrorist “trojan horse.”
As recently as April, Christie had positioned himself as a immigration moderate, skeptical about mass deportations or building a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border. But as Trump’s single-issue anti-immigrant campaign proved wildly popular, the party swung right, and Christie swung with it.
By August and September, he was proposing tracking immigrants to the U.S. “like FedEx packages.”
The attacks on Paris and the Syrian refugee crisis have presented Republicans with yet another opportunity to distance themselves from the Obama administration and dick-wave about keeping scary brown people out of the U.S., and Christie has seized that, too.
It’s horrible, but history tells us that what the GOP field is doing is politically expedient. Even at the outset of World War II, a majority of Americans felt that “we should keep out” political refugees fleeing Europe, including 10,000 Jewish refugee children from Germany.
The more things change.
