GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson made a comparison between Syrian refugees and rabid dogs at a campaign stop in Mobile, Ala., on Thursday.
Carson, a retired neurologist, said during the campaign event in Alabama that the country should be cautious about allowing an influx of immigrants from that part of the world.
We want leaders who are not only smart but who care about other people. Now, at the same time, we must balance safety against just being a humanitarian. For instance, if there’s a rabid dog running around your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog and you’re probably going to put your children out of the way.
Doesn’t mean that you hate all dogs by any stretch of the imagination, but you’re putting your intellect into motion and you’re thinking: ‘How do I protect my children? At the same time, I love dogs and I’m going to call the Humane Society and hopefully they can come and take this dog away and create a safe environment once again.’
By the same token, we have to have in place screening mechanisms that allow us to determine who the mad dogs are, quite frankly, who are the people who want to come in here and hurt us and want to destroy us. Until we know how to do that — just like it would be foolish to put your child out in the neighborhood knowing that that was going on — it is foolish for us to accept people if we cannot have the appropriate type of screening.
President Obama is moving ahead with a plan to accept as many as 10,000 Syrian refugees fleeing from civil war, while the House passed a bill Thursday to halt the admission of Syrian refugees into the U.S. until they undergo a more stringent vetting process.
Though other GOP candidates have not made a similar canine comparison, Carson’s stance is not different from his rivals, who oppose the president’s plan especially amid concerns that at least one of the Paris terrorists entered Europe as part of a group of Syrian refugees.
“We need to immediately declare a halt to any plans to bring refugees that may have been infiltrated by ISIS to the United States,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in a statement following the attacks. “We need to redouble our efforts to prevent ISIS agents from penetrating our nation by other means.”
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who was once open to the idea of taking in more refugees, says the door must now close because it’s impossible to vet them properly
“It’s not that we don’t want to,” he told ABC’s This Week. “It’s that we can’t because there’s no way to background check someone that’s coming from Syria.”
Businessman Donald Trump, who has made halting immigration a keystone of his presidential campaign, went further. He told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday he would consider shutting down mosques in the U.S.
“I would hate to do it but it’s something you that you’re going to have to strongly consider because some of the ideas and some of the hatred — the absolute hatred — is coming from those areas,” he said.
And Trump told Yahoo News this week he would not rule out making American Muslims carry special identification cards so they could be more easily tracked.
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