Their own public Idaho

THIS has not been a great election season for cool appeals to reason. Few public debates have strayed as far from Socratic ideals of truth-seeking as those involving refugees, and in particular whether America is running intolerable risks by granting asylum to Muslims from such terror-wracked regions as the Middle East. Strikingly, some of the loudest calls to bar new refugee arrivals have come from communities that are rarely, if ever, sent refugees from Syria or other high-risk countries.

After terrorist outrages in Paris, California and Brussels, in some cases involving attackers who arrived as asylum-seekers, more than two dozen governors and numerous members of Congress have decried the decision, made by Barack Obama in September 2015, to increase the number of Syrians admitted as refugees in fiscal 2016 to 10,000, up from 2,000 the previous year. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has gone further, calling—loudly but vaguely—for a temporary national entry ban on Muslims “until we find out what’s going on.” What’s going on is that whereas 158,655 Syrians completed asylum applications in Germany in 2015, Mr Obama’s much more modest target may be missed. Between October 1st, the start of the current fiscal year, and May 23rd, a total of 2,235 Syrian refugees were resettled in America.

A distinctively different sort of refugee debate has gripped the small rural city of Twin Falls, Idaho for the past several months. Twin Falls knows more about asylum-seekers than many towns its size. Idaho, with just 1.6m people, has taken over 20,000 refugees since 1970s, with most placed in Boise and Twin Falls. The Twin Falls refugee resettlement centre is managed by the College of Southern Idaho (CSI). Go back to the 1980s and the centre brought Vietnamese boat people and Cambodians, among others. In the 1990s war in the Balkans sent waves of refugees from Bosnia (several Bosnian families stayed, and provide much oomph to the local soccer league). The most recent arrivals have come from Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, as well as from Congo, Eritrea, Nepal and Iran. At the same time residents cheerfully call Twin Falls “ultraconservative”: the city and surrounding county, in the heart of Idaho’s dairy belt, gave the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, more than 70% of their vote in the 2012 presidential elections. Though it is a young town, barely a century old, it has links to dark chapters of history: from 1942 to 1945 there was an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in the high desert 17 miles to the north.

National alarm over Syrian arrivals found an echo in Twin Falls late last year. A group of locals launched a petition drive to put a formal ballot initiative before county voters, asking them whether they wanted the refugee centre closed. Rick Martin, the owner of a small repair service for medical devices, was the prime mover behind the petition. He denies being anti-immigrant, recalling a school friend from his childhood in Twin Falls, a Hmong whose father had fought with the Americans in South-East Asia. But rumours that Syrian refugees might be coming galvanised Mr Martin, who believes that Islam is “a violent religion, antithetical to American values.” His grievances are broad: he says refugees take up much-needed affordable housing and drive down wages, and may have brought polygamy to Twin Falls. But insecurity tops his list: Syrians have already reached Twin Falls, he asserts, and there is a “very, very high potential that [Islamic State] sympathisers are in our community right now.”

What happened to Mr Martin’s campaign was less predictable. His ballot initiative failed woefully. He and his fellow-organisers had six months to collect 3,842 local residents’ signatures, but by the final deadline in early April secured only 894. Mr Martin blames cold winter weather for slow signature-gathering: “Most of our volunteers are elderly,” he notes. He also blames city power-brokers for intimidating the silent majority that he feels backed his cause, notably the city newspaper, the Times-News, which he says falsely portrayed his campaign as “bigoted”. His next plan is to try to have anti-refugee trustees elected to the board of the CSI, a long shot.

City elders and defenders of the refugee centre have a different take. They say that they quelled public alarm with the least fashionable of tools: facts. In particular, supporters of the refugee programme point to the impact of a public forum attended by more than 700 people, organised by the Times-News, and addressed by Twin Falls school, public safety and medical officials, as well as by an invited speaker from the federal government, Larry Bartlett, director of the State Department’s Office of Refugee Admissions.

Patiently, the panellists set out the costs and benefits of receiving a few hundred refugees in Twin Falls each year. Refugees are not a burden on the public purse: they are helped to find work fast, and typically the newcomers pay more in federal taxes in a single year than they receive in their one-off resettlement grants. On average, refugees make over a dollar more per hour than the state’s minimum wage, and provide a useful boost to a healthy local economy. Unemployment in Twin Falls, a city of about 47,000 people, stands at 3.4%, well below the national average, thanks to expansion by such employers as Chobani, a yogurt-maker.

Latter-day saints

Refugees are screened for health problems and commit crimes at an exceedingly low rate, panellists added. Asked for safety guarantees, Mr Bartlett of the State Department assured the forum that, while nothing in life is “100%” guaranteed, background checks for refugees by several security and intelligence agencies are strong, and are under review to become stronger. A less diplomatic speaker might have added that terror groups trying to infiltrate America would find it much easier to send militants who hold European passports, who can visit without visas.

Wiley Dobbs, superintendent of the Twin Falls school district, told the forum how special services for refugees and immigrant children, including two centres that prepare newcomers to learn in American schools, account for 0.42% of his budget. “There was a lot of false information out there,” Mr Dobbs recalls. “The neat thing is, we were just sharing the facts.”

Culture also matters. Perhaps a quarter of the city’s residents are Mormons, and many churches of all denominations have long worked with refugees. Not least because so many young Mormon adults serve as missionaries around the world, Twin Falls families “appreciate having diversity” in their schools and neighbourhoods, says Bill Brulotte, who directs federal programmes in the school district.

Twin Falls may offer some other lessons, suggests the mayor, Shawn Barigar. His is a handsome city, built on the southern edge of the Snake river canyon, a meadow-bottomed gorge which at that moment glows a vivid green behind him in the evening light. The scene is peaceful now, but the debate at times became “Who can scream the loudest?” he recalls, with a “handful of very vocal opponents” shouting at city council meetings about al-Qaeda plots. Mr Barigar is a fifth-generation resident of farming stock, and also heads the local chamber of commerce. Local businesses have long seen refugees as high-quality employees in a sparsely populated corner of the country. But refugee-supporters were “apathetic”, the mayor says. They did not fully realise that helping to integrate newcomers might be their responsibility, too.

Bob Naerebout, executive director of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, an industry group, agrees. Some of his members employ scores of refugees, in dairy farms and cheese plants. To date, no Syrians have actually reached Twin Falls. But Mr Naerebout thinks refugee-supporters could explain Syrian arrivals to the city. They just need to “speak out and do the education”. When those who back the refugee centre stay silent, “we leave a void,” he now realises. And in the present political climate, a void free of facts is a perilous thing.