I absolutely agree that we should be vetting refugees/immigrants. I fear that even the monolith of the Department of Homeland Security, years after its creation, is not as well equipped to do this as the glossy brochure leads us to believe. But it's the Department we have, so their work will have to do. Until it doesn't.

I have to say I don't agree that things are so different in America now that we can no longer honor the inscription on the Statue of Libery. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." (Emma Lazarus)

In fact, if anything, I think we're returning to a previous point in American history, the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century, when a small number of families held the money and the power and the 99% scrabbled for what they could get. That circumstance did not stop the flow of Irish, Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Russians, Italians, and others. I'm not saying it was easy on any of the immigrants. (I can only imagine how I would fare, dropped in a country in which I did not know the language or the customs.) Yet these people are part of what made America what it is. They became restaurateurs, plumbers, maids, farmers, skilled tradespeople. They learned English to some degree, and their kids learned better English and became actors, doctors, lawyers, the next generation of electricians. They strove to become citizens and, like any immigrant group, wondered how to keep old customs alive among the new order of America. I cannot believe we want to collectively roll up the docks and keep people out unless they're highly-paid or geniuses. And I cannot see myself letting my ox get gored because the city I live in is expanding around me.

Will it cost money to absorb an influx of people like this? Sure. I'm no more thrilled than anyone else to see my taxes go up. But at least I'll see what my taxes are buying me. I see it in the Hmong and Eastern Africans who moved to Minnesota. It hasn't been a bowl of cherries for them. There is a problem in Minneapolis with Somali and Eritrean kids being recruited into Islamic extremism. The Hmong in the Twin Cities do have their own gangs. But, by and large, they're assimilating as well as any previous group. All this has happened since the 1980s. How different is the country now? Or maybe it's just that Minnesota is more progressive than many places and we just have found a way. *shrug*