A Brookings Institute Watcher [Email him]

The Brookings Institution is at it again with their insistence that we must invite the world to our shores willy-nilly.  What prompted their open-hearted generosity this time is the nomination of current CIA director Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State.  They are appalled by Mr. Pompeo's history on this issue as he is on record as viewing our current refugee policy as too lax.  He once even went so far as expressing the wrong think view that the simplest way to solve the problem would be to ban all refugees (no discrimination there!).

The nominee also apparently traveled to Scandinavia once, saw things with his own two eyes, and concluded that Europe has a migrant problem.

Pompeo has a history of expressing deep distaste for refugee policies he views as lax. While in Congress, he cosponsored a bill calling for an immediate ban on the entry of all refugees, regardless of their country of origin. The measure would have gone farther than then-candidate Trump’s controversial proposal to bar Muslim immigration. Later that year, after returning home from a study tour focusing on the migration crisis in Europe, he argued in support of Trump’s instincts on these issues in the Wall Street Journal.

 

5 questions for Mike Pompeo regarding refugees, by Jessica Brandt, Brookings Institution, April 11, 2018

The right-thinking folk at Brookings are also worried that a tough refugee policy would affect the trajectory of populism in Europe.  Well, the decent folk can only hope.

James Fulford writes: The WSJ article (subscriber link) is called What We Learned in Scandinavia About Migrants | Sweden failed. Norway succeeded—in part because it did what Trump does: Listen, By Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo, September 26, 2016.

The zeroing out of refugees is something we’ve suggested here—you can’t be accused of racism in your selection of refugees if there are none of them. (Just kidding—you can always be accused of racism.) Most people think of Refugee Policy as set by the State Department as the least important thing they do. It’s not. State foreign policy blunders may lead to small wars, but refugees are an ongoing invasion.