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The Public Record: Little Lord Lorigo vs. the Syrian Refugees

by / Nov. 17, 2015 2pm EST

On Saturday afternoon, while the world was learning details of the slaughter in Paris the night before, Erie County Legislature Majority Leader Joe Lorigo took to social media to lend his diminutive voice to the chorus of conservative xenophobes around the country:

“In light of the horrific terrorism in Paris,” Lorigo tweeted, “I call on CE Poloncarz to reverse his stance on accepting Syrian refugees into Erie County.”

He was referring to plans by federal agencies to resettle as many as 300 refugees from the civil war in Syria in Western New York, part of the Obama administration’s commitment to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year. (More than four million Syrians have left their homes snce 2011.) Lorigo kept up the Twitter offensive all evening and eventually got what he wanted: coverage on TV, on the radio, and in the Buffalo News, and a stream of benighted responses on social media, the lowlight of which may have been an angry, middle-aged white man promising Poloncarz that, should the man’s family come to harm at the hands of one of these refugees, “I WILL come after you.”

Poloncarz has embraced the possibility of Syrian refugees settling in Western New York but he has nothing to do with it, no say in whether they come here or where they will live. There are nine agencies that have contracted with US Department of State to help to resettle the Syrians at 400 sites across the country. State governments receive federal funds to pay for the attendant programs; in the case of New York State, those funds flow through county social service agencies and local nonprofits. Erie County administers federal policy as an arm of state government; it has no say in the policy itself.

Neither do individual states, really, as is surely understood by the 27 governors (all but one of them Republican) who so far have declared their unwillingness to accept Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris disaster. The federal government has plenary power to determine who is allowed residency in this country and in the dispensation of refugee status. It is beyond the power of governors to say that this or that legal resident of the United States, based on ethnicity, may not reside in their states. The only power they have is to refuse the federal funds that would support refugee resettlement programs, though it seems impossible that they could refuse just some of that money—they could not say, for example, “We’ll take the money for Burmese and Sudanese but not for Syrians.” Such a policy could not withstand a legal challenge.

The whole position is absurd fear-mongering, in any case: The vetting of refugees to this country, already intense, has been heightened for incoming Syrians. They are fingerprinted and photographed, their names run through databases maintained by numerous security agencies; they are then interviewed in person to determine that they are who they say they are. The whole process takes 18-24 months, sometimes longer. In the history of this country’s refugee resettlement programs, there has never been a case in which an ill-intended refugee has slipped through the vetting process and done violence. The US has already settled Syrian refugees and none has turned out to be the ISIS warrior that Joe Lorigo fears will terrorize his district’s shopping plazas should Poloncarz fail to condemn the federal refugee resettlement program he does not control. 

There are far easier ways for a criminal to get into this country than through the federal refugee resettlement program. That is perhaps why all but one of the known Paris attackers were homegrown threats, citizens of France and Belgium. (Do Lorigo and his supporters imagine we should prohibit the French and the Belgians access to the US?) One of the attackers was identified as a refugee. He did not pass through the US vetting system. We know nothing when, where, or why he became willing to murder civilians.

Lorigo’s position betrays a complete and utterly unsurprising lack of understanding of—and curiosity about—the refugees he is discussing. His position is also inhumane: Were political opportunists like Lorigo to win the day, they’d be signing virtual death warrants for tens of thousands of Syrians. It also demonstrates that he is a lazy thinker: Not only is there no credible threat attached to accepting refugees, there is a tangible benefit, especially for a region whose population continues to diminish. Germany is taking in far more Syrians than the US, and not just because they feel morally obliged to do so. The Syrians who are able to flee tend to be educated; they are people you want to welcome into your community if your region’s birth rate is stagnating (as it is in Germany) or if you have a problem retaining your youth (as we do in Western New York). 

Lorigo owes his office to his father, Ralph, who runs the Erie County Conservative Party and hosts a weekly Saturday breakfast Daisy’s in Lackawanna where politicians and their operatives gather to chat, petitioners beg favors, and sycophants kiss the elder Lorigo’s ring. It is no doubt at one of those tables on Saturday morning that the little lord of the Conservative Party was fed this puffery: Stupid and small-minded as the position is, he is nonetheless unlikely to have arrived at it on his own. (Lorigo’s landmark accomplishments as majority leader are bans on legislature staffers wearing jeans and fiddling with cellphones while in chambers.) He has reached the pinnacle of his abilities, though probably not of his career in public service: He is exactly the kind of mediocrity whose family connections this region’s political establishment will one day reward with a judgeship. 

In the meantime, he will muddle along as a county legislator, made nearly invulnerable to an election challenge by fear of his father and the formidable advantages of incumbency. I hope that he will be remembered for this stance: a small man, small-minded and ill-informed, trying to win valueless political points on the back of a tragedy, while denying strenuously that the vile ideas he is parroting are racist, xenophobic, and stupid.

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