Keep Your Goddamn Huddled Masses Off My Shores

When Hitler was marching across Europe, fleeing Jews were denied refuge by many countries, including the United States, forcing numbers of them to return to Germany where they were sent to the death camps.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States ordered American citizens of Japanese descent to be rounded up, their property confiscated and entire families relocated to isolated internment camps quickly thrown together for that purpose.

When members of a criminal group of radical Islamists took down the World Trade Center, the United States waged war on and dismantled any semblance of order in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Shock, fear and anger are natural human responses to aggression and terror. If they are not tempered by reason, bad situations tend to be made worse. We do not want to open our doors to Middle Eastern and North African refugees. Neither does Western Europe, although those countries appear less able to hold back the tide (especially since we took out Gaddafi who was holding a buffer zone against the African component).

If we do not want to be inundated by a tide of migration such as the world has periodically seen since human beings first went on the move, perhaps we should be more careful to avoid or prevent the political and economic destabilization of huge swathes of our planet. The strongest drive of any living thing is survival. We have it - it is why we want to close our doors to strangers. It is also why those strangers will sooner or later be pressing at our gates.

Bravado and bigotry exacerbate the problem.

Can we have some serious brainstorming here, please.