Turkey: The Business Of Refugee Smuggling & Sex Trafficking

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/04/2016 23:00 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-04/turkey-business-refugee-smuggling-sex-trafficking
Submitted by Uzay Bulut via The Gatestone Institute,

• Professional criminals convince parents that their daughters are going to a better life in Turkey. The parents are given 2000-5000 Turkish liras ($700-$1700) as a "bride price" -- an enormous sum for a poor Syrian family.
  
• "Girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen are referred to as pistachios, those between seventeen and twenty are called cherries, twenty to twenty-two are apples, and anyone older is a watermelon." — From a report on Turkey, by End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT).
  
• Many Muslims have difficulty with, or even an aversion to, assimilating into the Western culture. Many seem to have the aim of importing to Europe the culture of intimidation, rape and abuse from which they fled.
  
• Although the desperate victims are their Muslim sisters and brothers, wealthy Arab states do not take in refugees. The people in this area know too well that asylum seekers would bring with them problems, both social and economic. For many Muslim men such as wealthy, aging Saudis, it is easier to buy Syrian children from Turkey, Syria or Jordan as cheap sex slaves.
  

On International Women's Day, March 8, Turkish news outlets covered the tragic life and early death of a Syrian child bride.
Last August, in Aleppo, Mafe Zafur, 15, married her cousin Ibrahim Zafur in an Islamic marriage. The couple moved to Turkey, but the marriage ended after six months, when her husband abruptly threw out of their home. With nowhere to sleep, Mafe found shelter with her brother, 19, and another cousin, 14, in an abandoned truck.
On 8 March, Mafe killed herself, reportedly with a shotgun. Her only possession, found in her pocket, was her handwritten marriage certificate.

Mafe Zafur is only one of many young Syrians who have been victims of child marriage. Human rights groups report even greater abuse that gangs are perpetrating against the approximately three million Syrians who have fled to Turkey.

A detailed report on Syrian women refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in Turkey, issued as far back as 2014 by the Association for Human Rights and Solidarity with the Oppressed (known in Turkish as Mazlumder), tells of early and forced marriages, polygamy, sexual harassment, human trafficking, prostitution, and rape that criminals inflicted upon Syrians in Turkey.
According to the Mazlumder report, Syrians are sexually exploited by those who take advantage of their destitution. Children, especially girls, suffer most.
Evidence, both witnessed and forensic, indicates that in every city where Syrian refugees have settled, prostitution has drastically increased. Young women between the ages of 15 and 20 are most commonly prostituted, but girls as young as thirteen are also exploited.
Secil Erpolat, a lawyer with the Women's Rights Commission of the Bar Association in the Turkish province of Batman, said that many young Syrian girls are offered between 20 and 50 Turkish liras ($7-$18). Sometimes their clients pay them with food or other goods for which they are desperate.
Women who have crossed the border illegally and arrive with no passport are at high risk of being kidnapped and sold as prostitutes or sex slaves. Criminal gangs bring refugees to towns along the border or into the local bus terminals where "refugee smuggling" has become a major source of income.
Professional criminals convince parents that their daughters are going to a better life in Turkey. The parents are given 2000-5000 Turkish liras ($700-$1700) as a "bride price" -- an enormous sum for a poor Syrian family -- to smuggle their daughters across the border.
"Many men in Turkey practice polygamy with Syrian girls or women, even though polygamy is illegal in Turkey," the lawyer Abdulhalim Yilmaz, head of Mazlumder's Refugee Commission, told Gatestone Institute. "Some men in Turkey take second or third Syrian wives without even officially registering them. These girls therefore have no legal status in Turkey. Economic deprivation is a major factor in this suffering, but it is also a religious and cultural phenomenon, as early marriage is allowed in the religion."
Syrian women and children in Turkey also experience sexual harassment at work. Those who are able to get jobs earn little -- perhaps enough to eat, but they work long and hard for that little. They are also subjected to whatever others choose to do to them as they work those long hours.
A 16-year old Syrian girl, who lives with her sister in Izmir, told Mazlumder that "because we are Syrians who have come here to flee the war, they think of us as second-class people. My sister was in law school back in Syria, but the war forced her to leave school. Now unemployed men with children ask her to 'marry' them. They try to take advantage of our situation."
If they are Kurds, they are discriminated against twice, first as refugees, then as Kurds. "The relief agencies here help only the Arab refugees; when they hear that we are Kurds, they either walk away from us, or they give very little, and then they do not return."
The organization End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) has produced a detailed report on the "Status of action against commercial sexual exploitation of children: Turkey." ECPAT's report cites, from the 2014 Global Slavery Index, estimates that the incidence of slavery in Turkey is the highest in Europe, due in no small measure to the prevalence of trafficking for sexual exploitation and early marriage.
The ECPAT report quotes a U.S. State Department study from 2013: "Turkey is a destination, transit, and source country for children subjected to sex trafficking."
The ECPAT report continues,

"There is a risk of young asylum seekers disappearing from accommodation centres and becoming vulnerable to traffickers.

"It is feared that reports from the UN-run Zaatari refugee camp for Syrians in Jordan are equally true for camps in Turkey: aging men from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states take advantage of the Syrian crisis in order to purchase cheap teenage brides.

"Evidence indicates that child trafficking is also happening between Syria and Turkey by established 'matchmakers' who traffic non-refugee girls from Syria who have been pre-ordered by age. Girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen are referred to as pistachios, those between seventeen and twenty are called cherries, twenty to twenty-two are apples, and anyone older is a watermelon."

Apparently, 85% of Syrian refugees live outside refugee camps, and therefore cannot even be monitored by an international agency.
Many refugee women in Turkey, according to the lawyer and vice-president of the Human Rights Association of Turkey (IHD), Eren Keskin, are forced to engage in prostitution outside, and even in, refugee camps built by the Turkish Prime Minister's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD).
"There are markets of prostitution in Antep. Those are all state-controlled places. Hundreds of refugees -- women and children -- are sold to men much older than they are," said Keskin. "We found that women are forced into prostitution because they want to buy bread for their children."
Keskin said that they have received many complaints of rape, sexual assault and physical violence from refugees in the camps in the provinces of Hatay and Antep. "Despite all our attempts to enter those camps, the officials have not allowed us to."

The Human Rights Association of Turkey has received many complaints of rape, sexual assault and physical violence from Syrian refugees in camps in Turkey. (Image source: UNHCR)

Officials at AFAD, however, have strongly denied the allegations. "We provide refugees with education and health care. It is sad that after all the devoted work that AFAD has done to take care of refugees for the last five years, such baseless and unjust accusations are directed at us," a representative of AFAD told Gatestone.

"The number of refugees in Turkey has reached to 2.8 million. Turkey has twenty-six accommodation centers in which about three hundred thousand refugees live. Those centers are regularly monitored by the UN; some UN officials are based in them."

"Many refugees could have been provided with jobs suited to their training or skills," Cansu Turan, a social worker with the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TIHV), told Gatestone.

"But none of them was asked about former jobs or educational background when they Turkish officials registered them. Therefore, they can work only informally and under the hardest conditions just to survive. This also paves the way for their sexual exploitation.

"The most important question is why the refugee camps are not open to civil monitoring. Entry to refugee camps is not allowed. The camps are not transparent. There are many allegations as to what is happening in them. We are therefore worried about what they are hiding from us."

"At our public centers where we provide support for refugees," Sema Genel Karaosmanoglu, the Executive Director of the Support to Life organization, told Gatestone.

"We have encountered persons who have been victims of trafficking, sexual, and gender-based violence.

"There is still no entry to the camps, and there is no transparency as entry is only possible after getting permission from relevant government institutions. But we have been able to gain access to those camps administered by municipalities in the provinces of Diyarbakir, Batman, and Suruc, Urfa."

A representative at AFAD, however, told Gatestone that "the accommodation centers are transparent. If organizations would like to enter those places, they apply to us and we evaluate their applications. Thousands of media outlets have so far entered the accommodation centers to film and explore the life in them."
"The number of current refugees is already too high," said the lawyer Abdulhalim Yilmaz, head Mazlumder's Refugee Commission. "But many Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, have not taken in a single Syrian refugee so far. And there are tens of thousands of refugees waiting at the borders of Turkey."
If these women and children knew what was possibly awaiting them in Turkey, they would never set foot in the country.
This is the inevitable outcome when a certain culture -- the Islamic culture -- does not have the least regard for women's rights. Instead, it is a culture of rape, slavery, abuse and discrimination that often exploits even the most vulnerable.
The horror is that Turkey is the country that the EU is entrusting to "solve" the serious problem of refugees and migrants.
The international community needs to protect Syrians, to cordon off parts of the country so that more people will not want to leave their homes to become refugees or asylum seekers in other countries. Perhaps many Syrians would even return to their homes.
The West has always opened its arms to many beleaguered individuals from Muslim countries -- such as 25-year-old Afghan student and journalist Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, who was beaten, taken to prison, and sentenced to death in 2007 for downloading a report on women's rights from the internet and for questioning Islam.
It was Sweden and Norway that helped Kambaksh to flee Afghanistan in 2009 by helping him get access to a Swedish government plane. Kambaksh is now understood to be in the United States.
Several European countries, however, have become the victims of the rapes, murders and other crimes committed by the very people who have entered the continent as refugees, asylum seekers or migrants.
Europe is going through a security problem, as seen in the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. Many Muslims have difficulty with, or even an aversion to, assimilating into the Western culture. Many seem to have the aim of importing to Europe the culture of intimidation, rape and abuse from which they fled.
It would be more just and realistic if Muslim countries that share the same linguistic and religious background as Syrian refugees -- and that are preferably more civilized and humanitarian than Turkey -- could take at least some responsibility for their Muslim brothers and sisters. Although the desperate victims are their Muslim sisters and brothers, wealthy Arab states do not take in refugees. We have not seen any demonstrations with signs that read "Refugees Welcome!" People know that asylum seekers would bring with them problems, both social and economic. For many Muslim men such as wealthy, aging Saudis, it is easier to buy Syrian children from Turkey, Syria or Jordan as cheap sex slaves.
Women and girls are not, to many, human beings who deserve to be treated humanely. They are only sex objects whose lives and dignity have no value. Syrians are there to abuse and exploit. The only way they can think of helping women is to "marry" them.

"It's Our Damned Duty": Merkel, Turkey Make Last Ditch Effort To Save EU At Key Summit

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/07/2016 10:46 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-07/its-our-damned-duty-merkel-turkey-make-last-ditch-effort-save-eu-key-summit

On Monday, officials from the EU and Turkey are gathered in Brussels to do some talking about the refugee crisis that threatens to tear Europe apart at the seams. And make no mistake, “talk” is probably all they’ll do.

Last year, Europe and Turkey agreed on a so-called “joint action plan” which essentially amounted to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan extorting €3 billion from Brussels in exchange for a promise to curb people smuggling and stem the flow of migrants into Western Europe. As The Guardian notes, “several months on, the pact remains little more than a piece of paper.”

Although the check has been cut, it’s not entirely clear where the money went (surprise) and now that the effective closure of the Balkan route has created a severe bottleneck of refugees in Greece, Athens is very near to losing its mind.

As of Sunday, as many as 14,000 men, women, and children were stranded on Macedonia’s border which has been sealed and which migrant men have at various times tried to breach with homemade battering rams.

Now, Macedonia wants to extend the 19-mile, Orban-style razor wire fence to a 200-mile barrier complete with guards armed with tasers, a plan unveiled in Brussels over the weekend detailed.

Needless to say, Alexis Tsipras is at wit’s end.

First Brussels forced Athens to accept a third sovereign bailout that carried draconian terms and all but guaranteed the country will remain a debt serf of Berlin for the next five decades. Now, Austria has effectively conspired with the Balkan countries to close the route north to Germany leaving Greece on its own to handle the influx. “Europe is in the midst of a nervous crisis, primarily for reasons of political weakness,” said he said on Sunday.

(A man looks at the Greek island of Lesbos from the Turkish coastline)

“About 13,000-14,000 people are trapped in Idomeni, while another 6,000-7,000 are being housed in refugee camps around the region,” Al Jazeera reports, citing Apostolos Tzitzikostas, governor of Central Macedonia province.

"It's a huge humanitarian crisis. I have asked the government to declare the area in a state of emergency," he said during a visit to Idomeni on Saturday to distribute aid to the Red Cross and other non-governmental organisations.

For her part, the Iron Chancellor claims “rumors” that the Balkan route has been closed “do not conform to the facts” (to quote China’s NBS):

Coming back to Monday’s summit, “the crucial point is to know if Turkey is a player on our side, because up to now they declare they are on our side, but they don’t do anything to prove that,” Miltiadis Kyrkos, a Greek MEP who is the vice-chair of the European parliament’s joint committee with Turkey, said.

As for Turkey, you can say what you will about Erdogan’s belligerence, but the country is not only on the frontlines of the refugee crisis, but on the frontlines of the war itself. The pressure is palpable to say the absolute least.

Take the tiny town of Kilis for instance, which has more than doubled in size from the refugee influx. Incidentally, the town (which WSJ notes was previously “best known as a place for truckers to pick up pistachio-encrusted pastries before crossing the nearby Syrian border”), is up for a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

“To encourage refugees to stay, Ankara is now allowing millions of Syrians to legally work in Turkey, ending a policy in place since the start of the war. But the new regulation comes with restrictions,” WSJ goes on to document. “The restrictions, along with the often-convoluted bureaucratic challenges, make it hard for Syrian families to stay.”

In other words, some Turkish towns with big hearts are doing their part (and more), but Ankara hasn’t even begun to implement the type of measures that will stop refugees from fleeing to Western Europe and besides, Turkey isn’t that much safer than Syria these days. “Using Turkey as a ‘safe third country’ is absurd,” said Amnesty’s director for Europe and Central Asia, Gauri van Gulik. “Many refugees still live in terrible conditions; some have been deported back to Syria and security forces have even shot at Syrians trying to cross the border.” And that’s if they don’t get blown up by the very same groups blowing them up in Syria, groups that are armed and funded by Erdogan.

As The Guardian goes on to say, “resettlement was Angela Merkel’s last gambit for solving the refugee crisis. In mid-February, the German government confidently presented a plan in which a “coalition of the willing” – including Austria, Germany, Sweden and the Benelux trio – would take 300,000 refugees from Turkey a year [but] the renegade actions of Austria and the western Balkan states have forced Merkel into a rethink.”

“It’s our damned duty,” she insisted last week. “And no I don’t have a Plan B.”

Well, she had better get one, before the German electorate goes with “Plan B” for chancellor.

As for whether Erdogan will suddenly step up to the plate - don’t hold your “damned” breath. “Turkey’s diplomacy [is like] an eastern bazaar,” the aforementioned Miltiadis Kyrkos said. And it's not just money Ankara wants. Turkish PM Ahmet Davutoglu is looking to trade concessions on migrants for fast-track membership to the EU. "I am sure these challenges will be solved through our cooperation and Turkey is ready to work with the EU," Davutoglu said. "Turkey is ready to be a member of the EU as well. Today I hope this summit will not just focus on irregular migration but also the Turkish accession process to the EU."

But Europeans aren't exactly thrilled about Ankara's latest move away from democratic norms. "Media freedom is a non-negotiable element of our European identity," European Parliament President Martin Schulz said he had told the Turkish Premier, referring to Erdogan's move to seize control of The Daily Zaman.

And sure enough, as FT reports, Turkey is asking for more concessions: "Ahead of crunch summit between EU leaders and the Turkish prime minister on Monday, Ankara has called for an increase on the €3bn in aid previously promised by the EU, faster access to Schengen visas for Turkish citizens and accelerated progress in its EU membership bid." One imagines a long list of eleventh hour demands could well cause the whole thing to collapse.

Perhaps Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte put it best: “[This] is not the summit that will change anything.”

Sweden To Deport 80,000 Refugees Amid Security Fears

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/28/2016 11:26 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-28/sweden-deport-80000-refugees-amid-security-fears

Sweden is concerned about migrants.

In the wake of the sexual assaults that rocked Cologne, Germany and several other cities across Europe on New Year’s Eve, Nyheter Idag‎ accused prominent daily Dagens Nyheter of conspiring to cover up a wave of similar attacks allegedly perpetrated by Arab refugees at a youth festival in central Stockholm’s Kungsträdgården last August.

Subsequently, Dagens Nyheter claimed it was actually the police who attempted to conceal the crimes from the public in an effort to avoid triggering an anti-migrant backlash among Swedes.

In addition to the alleged sexual assaults, Moroccan migrant children have reportedly “taken over” the central train station in Stockholm where “gangs” of all-male pre-teens and teenagers drunkenly attack guards and accost women.

And then there’s 22-year-old Alexandra Mezher who was stabbed to death by a refugee while working at an asylum center for unaccompanied youth migrants.

Now, amid the turmoil, the country’s Interior Minister Anders Ygeman says Sweden will likely deport as many as 80,000 of the asylum seekers who entered the country last year. 
Some 163,000 refugees came to Sweden in 2015. That's a record for the country of just under 10 million and it's the highest per capita number in Europe.
"We are talking about 60,000 people but the number could climb to 80,000," Ygeman said on Thursday."We have a big challenge ahead of us. We will need to use more resources for this and we must have better cooperation between authorities," he told Dagens Industri.

"Over the past few years Sweden has rejected about 45 percent of claims for asylum, but with last year's record influx the greater numbers are putting an increasing strain on immigration and police authorities," Reuters notes, adding that "the Swedish government fears many people whose applications for asylum are rejected will go into hiding."
Like many other countries, Sweden is rethinking its open-door policy in the wake of the refugee influx that's spooked many Europeans who increasingly see the mass migration as a threat to Europe's Christian culture. The backlog of applications for those seeking asylum in Sweden means recent arrivals will need to wait between 15 and 24 months.
"The level of new arrivals has plunged since the beginning of January, when Sweden introduced systematic photo ID border checks, after stating that it has hit its limit in terms of receiving asylum seekers," RT recalls before noting that in addition to Alexandra Mezher's death, there was another recent "incident" wherein police were chased away from the Vasteras refugee center by an "angry mob" while attempting to relocate a 10-year-old boy who had allegedly been subject to "repeated rape."
“Even more people appeared behind us. I was mentally prepared to fight for my life. We were 10 police officers in a narrow corridor. And I hear someone yell that there is an emergency exit,” one officer said, recounting the event.
The news of Sweden's plans to deport some 45% of those who entered the country last year comes as Denmark passes legislation which makes it legal for police to confiscate cash and valuables from migrants and as Austria suspends Schengen in a desperate attempt to stem the flow of people across its southern border with Slovenia.
As we put it on Wednesday, "if European politicans do not find an effective way to get the situation under control, the public will remove them - either with the ballot or with the torches and pitchforks."
It appears as though Sweden has gotten the message although Ygeman's press secretary Victor Harju, told CNN not to put too much stock in those figures because they are "vague, hypothetical estimates based on last year's numbers."
Yes, "vague, hypothetical estimates based on last year's numbers" - much like the estimates of how many refugees will come banging on Western Europe's doors in the new year. 
The question for Sweden is how many of the planned 80,000 deportees will go peacefully back to a Mid-East warzone and how many will fight for their "right" to remain a member of polite Western society.

Fifth Circuit rules for Texas: Executive Amnesty ‘Unlawful’

http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/pearland/opinion/fifth-circuit-rules-for-texas-executive-amnesty-unlawful/article_76fce6c3-86d5-51c7-a907-fab52e6cd4f9.html

Posted: Monday, November 9, 2015 8:06 pm

PRESS RELEASE

AUSTIN – The Texas Attorney General’s Office today secured a major victory against the Obama Administration’s illegal attempt to unilaterally change national immigration law. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court decision halting the president’s executive amnesty plan, ruling in favor of the Texas-led coalition of 26 states. The Court ruled that the president has “no statutory authority” to take his unilateral action.“Today, the Fifth Circuit asserted that the separation of powers remains the law of the land, and the president must follow the rule of law, just like everybody else,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said. “Throughout this process, the Obama Administration has aggressively disregarded the constitutional limits on executive power, and Texas, leading a charge of 26 states, has secured an important victory to put a halt to the president’s lawlessness.
“I commend Gov. Abbott for his leadership on this issue, as well as the talent and hard work of Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller, who along with his team has so eloquently and expertly argued our case.”
Keller argued on behalf of the states in front of the Fifth Circuit on July 10. The 5th Circuit upheld the preliminary injunction granted by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas on February 16. Texas Attorney General's Office lawyers who attended the arguments were First Assistant Chip Roy, Cam Barker, Alex Potapov, April Farris, and Angela Colmenero.
As President Obama said himself shortly after announcing the program, he “took an action to change the law,” when he signed the executive action on immigration. Texas has argued that any sweeping change in immigration policy should be up to lawmakers, not the unilateral action of the executive branch.
Texas leads a 26-state bipartisan coalition fighting the president’s attempt to unilaterally grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. Joining Texas in the lawsuit are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The Forced Collective Suicide Of European Nations

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/11/2015 19:00 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-11/forced-collective-suicide-european-nations
You are witnessing what will be shown to future generations as the reason for the fall of an Empire. At current immigration levels and disappearing birth rates native Europeans are destined to become a minority in their own countries within decades. This is already the case for many of Europe's largest cities.

Because of this injustice, far-right parties everywhere in Europe are gaining astonishing amounts of support, becoming the biggest parties in some countries.
The following brief documentary lays out the rising fear across Europe of the so-called "refugee" crisis, as the narrator concludes,  "patriotism, the most basic and fundamental trait of any nation that wants to survive, has become something to be ashamed of."

Syria: Imperial Responsibility, Imperial Conscience

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/07/2015 19:55 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-07/syria-imperial-responsibility-imperial-conscience
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Come on, America. We could better and should do better.
I am not an unbiased observer of the Syrian refugee crisis, for we have a Syrian friend. She is a young woman, with legal residency in the U.S. She is completing her university studies in computer science. Her uncle served honorably in the U.S. Army for many years in theater (Iraq) and recently retired in California's Central Valley.
Her brother is completing his medical studies and wants to practice medicine in the U.S.
If you've been to a major hospital in the U.S. recently, you know that if all foreign-born doctors vanished, the current shortage of physicians would be much, much worse.
This is to remind us all that not every immigrant or refugee is a terrorist or welfare recipient.
We have a number of young Vietnamese-American friends who are the children of Boat People who fled Communist oppression after 1975. Those who were unable to escape often served years in re-education labor camps, i.e. concentration camps, for the heinous crime of working for the Americans during the American war in Vietnam.
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese risked their lives and the predations of pirates as they attempted to reach freedom in overloaded leaky craft. Uncounted thousands lost their lives in the process.
Today, it is self-evident that the Vietnamese-American community has paid back the help extended by the U.S. to those who bore the brunt of our Imperial meddling in Vietnam many times over.
In 1975, the U.S. did not wait for the full catastrophe to strike before accepting tens of thousands of refugees. Tiny Wake Island, an atoll in the middle of the Pacific and home to a mere 251 U.S. military and civilian personnel at the time, processed 15,000 Vietnamese refugees. (Tens of thousands of others were processed through Subic Bay and Guam.)

With the imminent fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces, President Gerald Ford ordered American forces to support Operation New Life, the evacuation of refugees from Vietnam. The original plans included Subic Bay and Guam as refugee processing centers but due to the high number of Vietnamese seeking evacuation, Wake Island was selected as an additional location.

In March 1975, Island Commander Major Bruce R. Hoon was contacted by Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) and ordered to prepare Wake for its' new mission as a refugee processing center where Vietnamese evacuees could be medically screened, interviewed and then transported to the United States or to other resettlement countries. A 60-man civil engineering team was brought in to reopen boarded-up buildings and housing, two complete MASH units arrived to set up field hospitals and three Army field kitchens were deployed. A 60-man Security Police team, processing agents from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and various other administrative and support personnel were also on Wake. Potable water, food, medical supplies, clothing and other supplies were shipped in.

On April 26, 1975, the first C-141 military transport aircraft carrying refugees arrived. The airlift to Wake continued at a rate of one C-141 every hour and 45 minutes, each aircraft with 283 refugees on board. At the peak of the mission, 8,700 Vietnamese refugees were on Wake.

When the airlift ended on August 2, a total of about 15,000 refugees had been processed through Wake Island as part of Operation New Life.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how America once acted: with responsibility and conscience, not with tepid half-measures but with presidential orders that mobilized the U.S. government to alleviate the suffering of tens of thousands of people.
If you want a taste of frenzied fear and hatred of immigrants, please refer to the response of native-born Americans to the flood of Irish immigrants in the 19th century. It was feared the nation could not survive the onslaught of poor Irish, who brought with them a full spectrum of destruction: drunk, prone to criminality, ready to use their fists at the drop of a hat, typically Catholic--the list of horrors appeared endless.
Now might be the right moment to mention that I'm 38% Irish, and one branch of the family (Scots-Irish) immigrated to the U.S. in the Great Potato Famine. (As for rest of my mongrel mix: 37% Scots/English, 14% Viking, oops I mean Scandinavian, and 11% French, i.e. everything that mixed it up in France. Oh, and let's not forget the 2% Neanderthal buried in the mix... that 2% might have kept me in one piece after many an injury.)
I wonder how many of the mealy-mouthed congress critters who oppose aiding Syrian refugees have relatives who arrived in the U.S. as immigrants or refugees (or slaves). Shall we hazard a guess that it's 100% if we set aside traces of Native American heritage?
The hypocrisy is self-evident. That the U.S. has covertly supported the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria is an open secret. That there are no American boots on the ground (at least officially) does not absolve the U.S. of partial responsibility for the refugee catastrophe unleashed by the Syrian war.
Of an estimated 4 million Syrian refugees, the U.S. has accepted a mere 1,500. We're told Many Obstacles Are Seen to U.S. Taking in Large Number of Syrian Refugees. I am sure President Ford was told the same thing: it was "impossible" to absorb hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees.
Fortunately, President Ford (a Navy veteran himself) rejected both the defeatism and the implicit wish to wash our hands of any responsibility for our decisions and actions.
Our friend has told us of her childhood visits to relatives in Old Damascus, one of the most ancient cities in the world. Rather than reprint photos of the horrific destruction that has been wrought on Syrian cities, I want to share a photo of Old Damascus by photographer Hasan Bryiez:

According to our friend, a cosmopolitan mix of ethnicities and religious faiths co-existed peacefully in Old Damascus.
Now that world is no more. The social order that enabled peaceful co-existence has been shredded by the war. Though Old Damascus may appear materially undamaged, it too has passed the point where the previous pluralism can be re-established.
Syria: The Chaos of War:

This is the bargain that Damascus and Syria made: live under an iron fist in exchange for a social safety net and a space for religious and cultural, if not political, pluralism. Then Syrians took peacefully to the streets in early 2011, claiming that a family mafia oppressed not only the Sunni majority but all citizens. The government responded with overwhelming force, and its opponents turned to arms.

The war in Syria is being fought on multiple levels. One is the Great Game, the geopolitical chess game that I have often addressed: Oil, Empire and Playing the Great Game (October 1, 2014).
It's clear that the goal of ridding the region of the Assad regime will eventually succeed; what is much less clear is what will be made of the torn battlefield.
The U.S. has around 317 million residents. How much of a burden would 50,000 or 100,000 Syrian refugees place on a nation of 317 million, a nation that once airlifted supplies to West Berlin for over a year in defiance of a Soviet blockade, a nation that airlifted 15,000 refugees to a remote atoll in the Pacific in hundreds of C-141 sorties?
Empire comes with responsibilities, and it should come with conscience. The U.S. is not a passive observer in Syria. Those of us outside the Deep State have no idea what's been done or supplied or promised in the name of the American people.
Shall we accept 5% responsibility for events in Syria? That equates to 5% of 4 million refugees or 200,000 refugees.
There are many Syrians already here who are willing to sponsor relatives and friends. There are Christian churches willing to sponsor refugees of any faith, because they seek to walk in the path of Jesus.
There is no shortage of good will in the U.S., only a lack of political will. Sadly, we no longer have presidents or congresspeople who make the "impossible" happen to alleviate the suffering of civilians fleeing war zones.
So every refugee has to be interviewed, screened, and possibly receive medical care. How could the U.S. do so for tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees in a matter of months, yet now we are so crippled we can only manage to process 1,500 refugees from the Syrian war?
Politico toadies who like to pin American flag buttons to their lapels while ignoring our Imperial responsibilities and the conscience that should go with it are beneath contempt.
Come on, America. We could better and should do better. If we feel no obligation to the refugees from Syria, we owe it to those Americans who stepped up and did their part for refugees from wars past.