Why is it politically helpful to call for a ban on all Syrian refugees? Because people have seen the government lie to them just in the last few months about “widows and children”.

Americans don’t distrust refugees. They distrust the federal government, because they have seen the federal government’s deliberate failures and deliberate lies about illegal immigrants.

No politician would be calling for blocking Syrian refugees if the Obama administration had not bypassed all normal entrance procedures to let in South American refugee “children” who were 18, 19, 20 years old and older.

It wouldn’t be politically feasible.

No politician would be calling for blocking Syrian refugees if we weren’t still looking at sanctuary cities going out of their way to not help track down and deport seriously criminal illegal immigrants who murder, rape, and steal.

If San Francisco’s and the President’s response to Kate Steinle’s murder had been “we have to do better to separate good immigrants from dangerous ones” instead of “you’re racist for thinking this murder has anything to do with illegal immigration” it probably wouldn’t be politically feasible to now oppose Syrian refugees.

We have an immigration system. But Americans justifiably don’t trust it to weed out the dangerous from the refugees because Americans aren’t stupid. They see, as President Reagan asked them to, what they see.

Should we be refusing Syrian refugees? No. But there is no alternative as long as the federal government refuses to do its job. This is what happens when people don’t trust the government.

We should have reformed the legal immigration system as soon as South American refugees started pouring into the country.

We should have reformed the legal immigration system as soon as it became more popular to break the law to get here than to follow the legal procedures.

We should have tightened our border security at the same time

Instead, in a world where every American goes into a database when they are born, when they get a drivers license, when they get a job and pay into social security, when they sign up for the Affordable Care Act, when they just get on a fucking airplane, the DC establishment is telling us it’s racist to want a database of refugees who are bypassing the normal immigration process.

It’s racist to ask refugees to go through the same sort of no-entry system that every American goes through when they get on a plane.

When liberals and the liberal media complain that simply trying to apply a no-fly-list-style procedure to immigrants who we are allowing to bypass the normal immigration procedure is racist, it isn’t surprising that people just give up and decide they don’t want to let anyone in. The Obama administration, and for that matter the DC establishment of both parties, have proven that they cannot be trusted with leeway.

If you want the country to support letting refugees in, you need to stop lying about who the refugees are. No more trying to tell us that mid-twenties men are children. Start paying serious attention to border security and current illegal immigration laws. No more trying to tell us that immigrants who break the law are not breaking the law, and for crying out loud no more trying to protect illegal immigrants who actually do break more laws once they get here. And set up a working, efficient, and reliable legal immigration system that is better at detecting the terrorist needle hidden in the refugee haystack.

Once people see that the government is able to do its job to protect them from external threats, allowing refugees in will no longer be controversial. If Americans know they can rely on the administration to try to keep terrorists and criminals out of the country; if they thought they were even going to try, that would probably be enough. But instead, they can say from experience that the opposite will occur: that violent criminals will be let in, and that they will be protected once here.