How Pols Run Against Syrian Refugees

America's refugee screening process is so tight -- only about half are accepted after a process that can take two years or more -- that it probably would be easier for the Islamic State to sneak a jihadi terrorist in by rowboat.

Yet that reality has not stopped some politicians from exploiting fears instead of calming them since the terror attacks in Paris.

Some even talk about suspending such inconveniences as, say, the Bill of Rights.

Yes, I'm talking about Donald Trump.

The billionaire, who has managed to offend his way to frontrunner status in the Republican presidential race, says the United States will have "absolutely no choice" but to close down some mosques where "some bad things are happening."

What bad things? The Donald does not say. Yet he is not about to let a simple lack of evidence stop him from frightening American voters.

"Nobody wants to say this and nobody wants to shut down religious institutions or anything, but you know, you understand it," he said Tuesday on Fox News' "Hannity."

With that, Trump bumped up the ante on his Monday remarks. In response to last Friday's terrorist attacks in Paris that killed at least 130 and injured hundreds more, Trump said on Monday that as president he would "strongly consider" closing mosques.

Why the shift, asked host Sean Hannity? "There's absolutely no choice," said Trump. "Some really bad things are happening and they're happening fast," he said.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Not.

Among other presidential contenders, Republican Ben Carson warned that fleeing migrants should be treated with the caution we would use with "rabid dogs."

Fellow Republican candidate Mike Huckabee on Dana Loesch's The Blaze talk show compared refugees to the recent outbreak of E. coli bacteria in Chipotle restaurants.

Yet, if you carry his metaphor forward, it's worthwhile to note that Chipotle vetted its meat so the chain can resume normal operations -- much like the government vets asylum seekers.

Since Oct. 1, 2014, the United States has admitted only 1,854 of the estimated 4 million refugees who have fled Syria. President Obama said in September that the United States would accept at least 10,000 in the coming year. But only 187 Syrians arrived in the month of October, according to the State Department, and they were scattered across 17 states.

Yet Democratic Mayor David Bowers in Roanoke, Va., kicked up a firestorm when he cited the use of internment camps to "sequester" Japanese "foreign nationals" during World War II to justify his suspension of the relocation of Syrian refugees to his city.

The threat posed by the Islamic State, Bowers said, "is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then."

For this stance, Bowers was sternly rebuked by his fellow council members and leaders of both major political parties, plus Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

But the most poignant objection came from George Takei, the Japanese-American actor who played Mr. Sulu on the original "Star Trek" -- and spent four years as a child with his family in the internment camps.

In a Facebook post, Takei corrected Bowers' faulty history. "The internment (not a 'sequester') was not of Japanese 'foreign nationals,' " he noted, "but of Japanese-Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens."

His family broke no laws, yet they were imprisoned, Takei wrote, "because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor."

He then invited Bowers to the Broadway musical "Allegiance" in which Takei and other actors reenact his family's imprisonment by their fellow Americans.

About 120,000 Japanese-American men, women and children were detained in the camps, which are remembered as one of our government's most shameful acts.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a law that apologized for the internment on behalf of the government, authorized a payment of $20,000 to each individual camp survivor and admitted that the internment was based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."

That sounds a lot like what's beginning to happen to Syrian refugees who have applied to the U.S. for asylum. Internment camps should not be a model for how we treat Syrian refugees.

Quite the opposite, they illustrate something that governments should never do: Presume an entire group of people to be a threat to national security, simply because they belong to the wrong ethnic group.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)