Chicagoland Russian-Jewish media reacts to Trump’s travel ban executive order
As the news of President Trump’s executive order temporary banning all citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries and indefinitely suspending the admission of Syrian refugees, alliancesjr (who is Jewish) went on long tangents on Twitter drawing parallels between the executive order and United States turning away Jewish refugees in the 1930s. As someone with a Jewish grandfather, it was hard for me not to be moved. I mean, I would have objected to this even if I didn’t have any Jewish blood (for reasons I wrote about at the time, to say nothing of the general moral awfulness of slamming the door on people who are trying to flee very literal genocide), but that point just made it even more personal.
And, as the day went on, I couldn’t help but think - how would the Chicagoland Russian-language media react?
As I’ve written before, a significant portion of the Russian-speaking population of Chicagoland came here during the Soviet era waves of immigration. And many (but not all) were so disgusted by Soviet socialism that they overcompensated, adopting stringent conservative attitudes that balked at anything that had even a hint of socialism. And, since a pretty significant portion of Russian-Americans are Russian Jews, you also get a lot of fear of not just groups like Daesh and Al-Queda, but anything that comes from the non-Israeli parts of the Middle East. Most Russian-language periodicals in Chicago area tend to reflect that.
I could practically see the headlines already. And yet, I hoped that they would surprise me. After all, many of the same people came to this country as refugees. They know what it means to get a Green Card, and how awful would it be to have its protections tossed away. Maybe there would be some empathy. Christianity Today, a normally conservative-leaning Evangelical magazine, surprised me by speaking out against the executive order. Maybe this would happen here, too.
So, as Friday came around and the new issues of two major Russian-language weeklies hit the streets…
The front page of 7 Дней (7 Days) didn’t beat around the bush. For those who can’t read Russian, the headline says “Americans Need Protection, Not Protests.”
The article goes on to basically give the same talking points I heard around conservative news outlets - the ban is temporary, and the threat of terrorism is so great that we must decrease the likelihood of terrorists coming into United States, and the only way to do that is stop travel until stronger vetting could be put in place. It doesn’t address the fact that none of the terrorist attacks in the past 16 years were perpetrated by the citizens of the seven countries the executive order applied to, nor does it address the whole “the executive order blocked permanent residents” thing. It uses Germany as an example of what might happen if US lets too many refugees in, ignoring the fact that most refugees traveling to Europe arrived by boat/land, whereas refugees coming into America have to fly in by plane, which makes it easier to control who comes through.
Reklama (“Advertisement”), which may be the biggest Russian-language weekly in Chicagoland, put the interview with singer Vadim Kazacheko on the cover. But an introductory editorial, editor Faina Kraveno didn’t leave any question about where the paper stood.
The president signed orders that regulate the stream of immigrants from seven Muslim countries, where terrorist groups are based and where there’s civil war. Furthermore, there are more than forty countries with majority Muslim populations that these orders don’t touch. It is only natural that not everybody is happy with these limitations, even if they are temporary. The leaders of European countries are especially unhappy. “You can’t divide the Muslim would into good and bad countries,” they scold. “The Voice of America” transmits words of one of the Iraqi soldiers, whose relatives live in Texas: “I should have the right to visit them whenever I want. I know that these orders were issued because of terrorist groups, and there are many of them in Iraq. But most Iraqis are peaceful people.” I read this and I am surprised: could a several-month delay, which would give us the ability to strengthen the vetting system, really justify the destruction of this country’s unity.
But the paper also printed an letter of solidarity from a group of Russian-speaking Jews who came to United States as refugees from the Soviet Union. And it took an entirely different tact.
For non-Russian speakers, here’s the translation of the letter in its entirety.
We, the undersigned 1,194 Soviet Jewish refugees, want to express our support for the US refugee resettlement program and the opposition to President Trump’s executive order to close the doors of our country to refugees who are in an especially vulnerable position and urgently need our protection. The United States of America doesn’t have the moral right to refuse help to people who are fleeing violence and persecution - just as our families were forced to flee from the former Soviet Union. We, the citizens of United States, don’t have the right to renounce our fundamental national values and the demands of basic human decency.
While we acknowledge the issues of national security, we must emphasize that USA already has a strict security vetting system for individuals coming into our country. The people who are crossing the borders refugees must already already go through an extensive process that includes interviews, biometric scans, medical exams, and background check for multiple agencies including FBI, The Department of Homeland Security, the US State Department, The Immigration and Naturalization Service, et cetera. Furthermore, a group of former Secretaries of State high-level Department of Defense and Homeland staffers heads of NATO, CIA, and joint chiefs of staff signed a letter that states that the existing system of refugee vetting is “comprehensive and reliable” and that the United States needs to “stay true to its national values and continue to provide shelter for the most vulnerable people regardless of their religion and nationality.”
Those of us who came to the United States as refugee children feel a deep personal pain when they see photos of drowned Syrian babies or imprison Salvadorian children. They are humans just like us and they deserve no less protection than we did. As members of a religious minority group, we must protest against signaling out Muslims as the only group that doesn’t deserve our protection. We are proud of the fact that the Hebrew Immigration Assistance Society, which helped so many of us to leave the former USSR remained a vanguard in the fight against the current refugee crisis working hard to resolve the current immigration crisis-the biggest and the most serious since World War II.
The Jewish cultural tradition teaches us that as immigrants and refugees compels us to create a society based on mercy and the defense of immigrant rights. “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” Again and again, the holy books of Judaism teach us “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”
Based on the traditional Jewish values and a personal experience, so be it Jewish refugees, we want to express our solidarity with people who are fleeing Syria and Central America and are subject to violence and mortal danger all over the world.
So we cannot allow the fear of “the other” dictate our actions. Many of us are children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Unfortunately, we know all too well that it is xenophobia that prevented the United States of America to actively respond before and during World World II to the disaster that caused Jews to flee genocide. The modern system of the protection of refugees is a direct result of recognizing that great moral fiasco. We cannot repeat that mistake!
President Trump, we urge you not to forget the reasons why refugees flee their homes and the great contributions the immigrants made to this country’s prosperity. Guided by that spirit and the questions of moral responsibility, we urge you to repeal your order as soon as possible and do everything you can so that the United States of America continues to protect refugees and people who need political asylum now and forever.
The Jewish Refugees from USSR.
The introductory editorial actually touches on that letter.
In this issue, we published a letter of solidary from the Soviet Jewish refugees. It calls for cancelling all restrictions against entry of refugees from Syria and other countries. We respect the opinions of everyone we gives space to in this newspaper. But don’t you think that, by allowing people who don’t share American values into this country, we are simply destroying it?
To which… first of all, the part about “cancelling all restrictions” is simply disingenuous, because the letter says nothing of the sort. In fact, it goes through pains to point out that a fairly extensive vetting process already exists, and it says nothing about cancelling that.
But I also want to address that last sentence. Every simple immigrant group that has ever arrived in United States was accused of having values that were simply too different from American values, and that they would never, ever assimilate. Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, you name it. And it never, ever turned out to be true.
And speaking of Russians…. Talk to Russian immigrants, Jewish or otherwise, you came to United States before the Soviet Union collapse, and you’ll hear stories of kids being picked on because they were supposedly Communists, and adults being treated with suspicion because they were Communists. Not ever single time, sure, but it was there. The fact that they fled the country didn’t matter - the fact that they came from a Communist country was enough to make them suspect, at least to some people.
One would think people would learn something from that.
One would think.
But, as my mom wants put it, they may have left the Soviet Union, but they never really left it. For the ghosts of the Soviet Union, and the fear they inspire, haunt us all to this day.