[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 184 (Thursday, December 17, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8735-S8737]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            SYRIAN REFUGEES

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, it is amazing some of the people we get to 
meet in our lives as Senators. There is a medical doctor in Chicago who 
I didn't know several years ago, but he and his wife have become dear 
friends in a short period of time. His name is Dr. Zaher Sahloul. He 
asked for an appointment in my office in Chicago a few years back, and 
I agreed to it. He came in to tell me a story and to show me some 
pictures. He is originally from Syria, and he is head of the Syrian-
American Medical Society in the Chicagoland area. Because of the 
tragedy of the civil war in his home country of Syria, he has felt a 
special obligation to help.
  What he has done on many occasions now was to get as close to the 
action as he could in Syria to provide medical assistance to the 
victims. Many times he risked his life to do it. And other doctors--
some Syrian-American and some not--have joined him in that effort. He 
would bring me back photographs of what casualties of war look like in 
Syria. They were heartbreaking--pictures of children who had been 
maimed and seriously injured by the barrel bombs of President Assad in 
Syria and stories about parents killed in the bombings that continue 
day after weary day.
  Dr. Sahloul would ask me: What can you do, Senator? Can't you help 
us? Can't you stop this?
  Of course, that civil war in Syria, which has gone on for 4 years, is 
almost intractable, almost impossible to define. There are so many 
forces fighting one another that at any given moment, your ally today 
may be your enemy tomorrow.
  I tried, since meeting Dr. Sahloul, to do some things: to come out 
for a safe

[[Page S8736]]

zone, a humanitarian zone in Syria, where medical treatment and food 
and a safe shelter could be found for families who are facing these 
attacks. We have had some limited--and I underline ``limited''--success 
in providing these safe zones, but it is a fact that the tragedy of 
Syria continues even to this minute. If anything, today it is worse 
because of the bombing by the Russians, which I am told has gone into 
areas that previously had been protected because of the citizen and 
civilian populations.
  The result is obvious. Millions--literally millions of people in 
Syria over the last 4 years--have fled. They are running for their 
lives, and they are running from war, and they are running from 
terrorism.
  Dr. Sahloul recently wrote an article about his trip to the United 
States. He arrived in 1989. He tells the story of coming to Chicago and 
feeling very much alone. He graduated from medical school in Damascus. 
He had a chance to practice medicine in Chicago, but he wasn't sure 
that he could ever really fit in.
  He tells the story of his first Thanksgiving in Chicago in 1989, when 
a fellow doctor invited him to join her and her family for Thanksgiving 
dinner. It was a gracious gesture--a gesture of hospitality. Dr. 
Sahloul has not forgotten it to this day. This article, which I will 
ask to have printed in the Record at the conclusion of my comments, 
goes into some detail.
  Dr. Sahloul really wrote this article not to just tell his story but 
to tell two other stories--the story of immigration, which is literally 
the story of America, and the story of Syrian refugees.
  His most recent trip to the region was to the island of Lesbos, which 
is part of Greece. I went there a few weeks ago with several of my 
Senate colleagues. Thousands--hundreds of thousands of refugees--are 
flowing into Lesbos from Turkey. They have left Syria and Afghanistan, 
and they are working their way into Greece on their way, they hope, to 
refuge and shelter in Europe.
  It is impossible to describe, if we have not seen it ourselves, what 
is going on here. But imagine for a moment that you were so frightened 
of the prospect of your child or your wife dying in war that you said: 
Tomorrow, pick up whatever you can carry. We are leaving. We cannot 
stay here.
  And if you look at these refugees as they travel--mothers and fathers 
carrying babies, with toddlers and small children walking alongside of 
them--you realize how desperate they must be to leave everything behind 
and to head out on this journey of danger. One of the most dangerous 
parts of it is that trip across the Aegean Sea between Turkey and 
Greece. They have to pay smugglers 1,000 euros, which is over $1,000 
for each adult, and 500 euros for each child. They put them in these 
plastic boats. Some of them are given lifejackets. The infants, too 
small for a lifejacket, are literally given plastic water wings that we 
give to our infant children to play in the wading pools near our homes. 
That is all they have. They cram them into these boats. They strap on a 
Chinese motor. They put just enough gasoline in that engine that they 
think will make it across--but not more--and try to find someone in the 
boat who will steer it. They point to their destination, and they 
leave. Sometimes these boats have 50 or 60 people in them when they are 
only supposed to have 20 to travel safely.
  They are warned that as they come up to the shore in Lesbos, Greece, 
or other islands, they should immediately run into the rocks and 
scuttle the boat so that it sinks. Otherwise, they are told they will 
be turned around and pushed back to Turkey, and they may not have 
enough gas to make it. And that is what happens.
  Dr. Sahloul tells the story of what happens when these boats are 
scuttled as they arrive in Greece. He tells of the drowning of little 
children who don't make it off the boat onto dry land but literally 
drown right there. We saw one of those photos just a few months ago of 
a tiny 3-year-old boy who drowned just as he was about to make it into 
Greece.
  Dr. Sahloul tells that story so that some of us--all of us--will 
understand the desperation of these refugees.
  It is now very popular among politicians to blame the Syrian refugees 
for terrorism in America. We have not accepted that many refugees in 
our country. The numbers are about 2,000. At this point, not a single 
person among those refugees has been arrested and charged with 
terrorism. Yet one would think that these Syrian refugees are the 
greatest threat there is to America.
  I will include the article I referred to in the Record so that those 
who follow this debate and follow the proceedings on the floor can read 
firsthand and for themselves Dr. Sahloul's story and the story of these 
Syrian refugees. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in 
the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                     [From Lobelog, Dec. 14, 2015]

             Today's Syrian Refugees Are Yesterday's Irish

                           (By Zaher Sahloul)

       Immigrants have built the United States--and that includes 
     Syrians.
       Four months after I arrived to Chicago in 1989, my 
     colleague at the hospital, Dr. Nancy Nora, invited me to her 
     family's Thanksgiving dinner. I was homesick in a new country 
     after graduating from medical school in Damascus. Nancy Nora 
     was an Irish American from a large Catholic family. Her 
     father was a respected local physician.
       Nancy told me that it was a tradition in her family to 
     invite a newcomer to the city. After all, Thanksgiving, I 
     learned, celebrated Native Americans welcoming European 
     refugees who fled their homelands due to religious and 
     political persecution. I came to Chicago from the ancient 
     Syrian city of Homs to pursue advanced medical training. 
     Syrians look to the U.S. as the best place to pursue this 
     training. In fact, almost half of one percent of American 
     doctors are of Syrian origin. There are also famous Syrian 
     actors, playwrights, rappers, chess players, entrepreneurs, 
     scientists, businessmen, and even Republican governors. Every 
     Syrian American is proud that Steve Jobs is the son of a 
     Syrian immigrant. Syrian immigrant Ernest Hamwi invented the 
     ice cream cone during the St. Louis World Fair in 1904.
       ``Everyone who enjoys ice cream and an iPhone should feel 
     indebted to Syrian immigrants,'' I remind my children. All 
     three have been born in Chicago. The eldest, Adham, ran his 
     first marathon this year--to raise awareness about domestic 
     violence--and aspires to a career in politics. Mahdi is 
     involved in his university's Students Organizing for Syria 
     (SOS) chapter as well as the Black Lives Matter campaign. 
     Marwa, a high school freshman, is a budding pianist and ran 
     for her school's cross-country team. They all volunteer in 
     local charity events and for Syria. My wife, Suzanne, the 
     daughter of a Syrian civil engineer and Canadian mother with 
     Irish-Scottish roots, founded the Syrian Community Network 
     (SCN) to help support newly resettled Syrian refugee families 
     in the Chicago area.


                           Darkness in Syria

       To many Syrians, America symbolizes the values that we lack 
     at home: freedom, rule of law, and the respect for human 
     rights. In Syria, my generation knew only one president, 
     Hafez al-Assad, who ruled for 30 years with ``iron and 
     fire,'' as they say in Arabic. He detained and tortured 
     thousands of people who dared to speak out against his rule. 
     He committed massacres, the worst of which in the city of 
     Hama the same year I graduated from high school.
       I still remember the atmosphere of fear in Syria. We dared 
     not speak. We were told that the ``walls have ears.'' My 
     family even prevented me from going to the mosque to pray. 
     Many of my high school friends and relatives disappeared into 
     the dark cells of the infamous Palmyra prison, the site of 
     another infamous massacre by Assad's ruthless security men.
       When Hafez died in 2000, his son Bashar, a classmate of 
     mine from medical school, was appointed to the presidency by 
     a token parliament. People expected change. After all, Syria 
     had a well-educated middle class, a diverse economy, and a 
     reasonably vibrant nonprofit sector. It also had a tradition 
     of democracy, which had its ups and downs between 1920 and 
     1970. Bashar, inexperienced but equally ruthless, 
     disappointed us all. When hundreds of thousands of young 
     Syrians demonstrated peacefully in 2011, thinking naively 
     that the Arab Spring had turned at last to Syria, Assad and 
     his cronies responded with what they knew best: brutality and 
     oppression. More than 250,000 people have been killed. Tens 
     of thousands have disappeared into the prisons. Half of the 
     population has been displaced. And barrel bombs, cluster 
     bombs, and all kinds of weaponry have leveled entire cities 
     and neighborhoods.
       Besides meager humanitarian assistance and empty rhetoric, 
     the international community has stood by mostly idle, 
     watching darkness descend on Syria. It has become one of the 
     worst humanitarian crises in our lifetime. In the ensuing 
     chaos, extremist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) 
     and Hezbollah filled the vacuum. But the snowballing refugee 
     crisis only captured the world's attention when it reached 
     the shores of Europe. With the drowning of the Syrian toddler 
     Aylan Kurdi, who tried to flee with

[[Page S8737]]

     his family to Greece from Turkey across the Aegean Sea, 
     suddenly Syrian lives mattered.


                           With the Refugees

       I just returned from my last medical mission with my 
     organization, the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), to 
     the Greek island of Lesbos. Tens of thousands of Syrian 
     refugees are making the desperate boat trip from Turkey to 
     Lesbos and other Greek islands. The unfortunate ones are 
     drowning, while the lucky ones must carry on through another 
     1,200 miles of borders, humiliation, and misery to reach 
     whoever opens the door to them. Germany and Sweden have been 
     the most hospitable, while others are building walls and 
     barbed wire fences along their borders. The Syrian refugees I 
     met were fleeing the recent Russian bombings and Assad's 
     barrel bombs, while some are fleeing the brutality of the 
     Islamic State. I saw several women, some with toddlers 
     Aylan's age, who lost their husbands to the war. One woman 
     was crying as she described a public execution by IS that she 
     was forced to witness with her five-year-old son. He has had 
     nightmares since then.
       I heard from a Syrian volunteer doctor about a boat with a 
     capacity of 30 people that was stuffed with more than 80 
     refugees. Each refugee had to pay the smugglers 1,000 to 
     2,000 euros. It was a cold night when the boat crashed onto 
     the rocky shores and split in half. Children got stuck 
     underneath the boat. Many simply drowned. The Syrian doctor, 
     himself a victim of Assad's torture and now a refugee in 
     France, described to me how he performed CPR on two small 
     children. One was dead, and one died later. The U.S. 
     presidential candidates and governors who slammed the door in 
     the faces of helpless Syrian refugees should hear these 
     stories. These refugees deserve our sympathy and hospitality.
       Since 1975, Americans have welcomed over 3 million refugees 
     from all over the world. Refugees have built new lives, 
     homes, and communities in towns and cities in all 50 states. 
     Since the war began, however, only 2,034 Syrian refugees have 
     been resettled in the entire United States. This is a 
     shameful number, considering that there are 4.2 million 
     Syrian refugees. The House of Representatives has passed a 
     bill that would impose additional security measures on 
     refugees from Syria, making it nearly impossible to accept 
     more refugees from Iraq and Syria. A similar bill is awaiting 
     a Senate vote.
       Nancy Nora's father, surrounded by his large extended 
     family at the dinner table on that Thanksgiving many years 
     ago, explained to me how Irish Americans were demonized when 
     they first arrived to the United States as refugees. They 
     were maligned by politicians and by the public, and were 
     perceived as a threat. During dark times in our history, the 
     United States has treated newly arriving Jews, Italians, 
     Japanese, and Latinos as a threat.
       As I was leaving the Nora household after that memorable 
     evening, her family wished me good luck with my studies and 
     my new life in America. Suddenly, the cold Chicago night felt 
     very warm. I felt at home.

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I have several colleagues on the floor who 
wish to enter into a colloquy, and I yield the floor for that purpose, 
and then I will wait until they are finished to reclaim my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.

                          ____________________