John Oliver makes the complete, unvarnished case for accepting Syrian refugees

John Oliver has the perfect (or really, perfectly terrible) response when your elderly relatives start sniping at you during Thanksgiving dinner. "When your grandmother is complaining about your new piercing, saying your generation is terrible, simply reply, 'Okay, Nana, but at least we didn't send Jews back to Europe in 1939.' Then break off a turkey leg, drop it like a microphone, and you've just won the dinner." Oliver is talking specifically about the U.S. turning away a boatload of about 900 Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939, a quarter of whom then died during World War II. More generally, he's discussing the raging debate about accepting Syrian refugees in the U.S., and he isn't on the fence about what the U.S. should do.

Last week, Oliver shot off a profanity-laced tirade at the Islamic State, and on Sunday's Last Week Tonight he took much more measured aim at politicians using ISIS to argue against admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees next year, as President Obama will likely do anyway. Oliver countered the anti-refugee arguments emotionally, morally, and logically — walking through the laborious refugee process, for example: "This is the most rigorous vetting anyone has to face before entering this county. No terrorist in their right mind would choose this path, when the visa process requires far less effort." But he finished with a dose of realism.

Requiring the FBI director to personally vouch for every refugee let in, as the House voted to do Thursday, is ridiculous, Oliver said, "but the really hard truth here is no one can promise that someone dangerous still might not slip through. And while that risk should not be denied, it also should not be wildly inflated." He used Mike Huckabee as an example of bad math or maybe good scare tactics. But "any rational person knows you cannot completely eliminate risk, you can only manage it," Oliver concluded, noting we still drive, swim, eat peanuts, and allow cows in the U.S., even though far more Americans have died from each of those things than from the 700,000 refugees admitted to the U.S. since 2001. For Oliver, the risk-to-benefit ratio of accepting Syrian refugees is easily worth it, and if you disagree, he wants to talk to you about France. Watch below (but be warned, there's a mildly NSFW bit about, of all things, FDR). Peter Weber

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