by Consider a country with a vicious ongoing multi-sided Civil War which includes some amount of deliberate large scale civilian extermination. You know the sort of thing: Syria today is just the most recent example, but there are other well-known examples from the last few decades. To keep things generic, let us refer to the various sides in the Civil War as A, B, C, etc. Militias from each group have been caught massacring civilians from the other group. Or maybe the evidence points toward only one side being responsible for such atrocities. Truth to tell, nobody in the US really has a firm and unbiased grasp of what is going on. If this sounds like the vast majority of wars since 1945, it should. Now, let us say that the US has a pre-existing immigrant population from Group A. For whatever reason, they have mostly settled in Lincoln, NE. (I picked Lincoln completely at random. I understand some Thai and Burmese refugees have settled in Lincoln, but I would say that for the most part, the city doesn’t have a strong connotation with refugees among the general public.). Lincoln now has a neighborhood called “Little X” where “X” is the capital of the country with the ongoing Civil War.
Topics:
Mike Kimel considers the following as important: immigrants, refugees, Uncategorized
This could be interesting, too:
Dean Baker writes Health insurance killing: Economics does have something to say
Lars Pålsson Syll writes Debunking mathematical economics
John Quiggin writes RBA policy is putting all our futures at risk
Merijn T. Knibbe writes ´Extra Unordinarily Persistent Large Otput Gaps´ (EU-PLOGs)
Consider a country with a vicious ongoing multi-sided Civil War which includes some amount of deliberate large scale civilian extermination. You know the sort of thing: Syria today is just the most recent example, but there are other well-known examples from the last few decades. To keep things generic, let us refer to the various sides in the Civil War as A, B, C, etc.
Militias from each group have been caught massacring civilians from the other group. Or maybe the evidence points toward only one side being responsible for such atrocities. Truth to tell, nobody in the US really has a firm and unbiased grasp of what is going on. If this sounds like the vast majority of wars since 1945, it should.
Now, let us say that the US has a pre-existing immigrant population from Group A. For whatever reason, they have mostly settled in Lincoln, NE. (I picked Lincoln completely at random. I understand some Thai and Burmese refugees have settled in Lincoln, but I would say that for the most part, the city doesn’t have a strong connotation with refugees among the general public.). Lincoln now has a neighborhood called “Little X” where “X” is the capital of the country with the ongoing Civil War.
If the Civil War results in more people from Group A are admitted to the US as refugees, it is natural to relocate them or at least encourage them to live in Lincoln. But what if refugees from Group B are also admitted in not-insignificant numbers? Groups A and B have a long history of distrust, and are vicious enemies in the current Civil War. And if there is one thing Americans have managed to figure out about the ongoing war that is accurate, it is that there are some horrific atrocities going on.
So… should it be the policy of the US government to try to settle the new refugees from Group B in Lincoln, NE? There would be scale economies due to similar language, culture, food, and possibly even religion. Or should it be the policy of the US government to try to get the refugees to settle somewhere far away from Lincoln, NE to minimize the possibility of conflict and ill will? And does your answer change if we manage to learn that both sides are not equally at fault? For example, do we make the same decision vis a vis Lincoln, NE if Group B was responsible for all or most of the atrocities and committed them against A, or vice versa? You can assume that all the refugees are properly vetted and that none of them are known to have been involved in committing the atrocities.