by Nancy Kass, ScD
There are different political philosophies about the responsibilities of states regarding whether to accept refugees. While there is a political philosophy that might be called Nationalist in perspective that says, essentially, “Not my Problem,” the predominant philosophy globally is different. That philosophy says that the refugee crisis is a global problem, people are in need, and we have the capacity to help. The reasoning behind this latter view recognizes that the benefit to others in accepting refugees is a matter of life and death, and the sacrifice to countries who accept them is, in the long run, minimal. In such cases, ethics says, we should act. And while states will vary in the degree to which they will take in those in need, there is global consensus that if countries with the capacity to help do not, an unfair burden is imposed on the countries who do. As the Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman said, “Humanity is in crisis. There is no exit from that crisis other than the solidarity of humans.”

Ethics is both a method—analyzing the ethical acceptability of a policy or program based on morally relevant criteria — and ethics is a set of moral values shared by a community. In this essay, I will analyze the Executive Order in terms of two criteria central to moral acceptability: the Order’s effectiveness and the Order’s fairness.
Effectiveness means measuring, with rigor, the extent to which a program meets its intended goal. This Executive Order is entitled: “Protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States” with the stated goal of “Keeping out radical Islamic terrorists” and “Ensuring that we are not admitting into our country the very threats that our soldiers are fighting overseas.”

A study by the Cato Institute analyzed data demonstrating that nationals of the seven countries singled out in the Order have killed zero people in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2015. Indeed, the likelihood of being killed by any refugee from any country is 1 in 3.64 billion a year. And one might argue that– to the extent risks exist among some people from these countries, such risks are reduced, if not eliminated, through an approach in place for years, an approach we might, in retrospect, have called “extreme vetting”. Susannah Cunningham, a legal advisor who has conducted interviews with refugees seeking asylum in the United States, published some of the questions she has asked refugees: “What kind of knife was the man that killed your father holding?”; “Can you remember how many stars were on the jacket of the military officer that raped you?”; “How many hours were you on the boat that night –before the smuggler shot your brother and threw him overboard?”; and “How did you survive if you couldn’t swim?”

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Image: By Ggia – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45303281

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