Valley legislators running scared in face of terror

Terrorism is designed to inflict fear, and there are few people running more scared right now than our own state legislative delegation.

In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, state senator Mike Dunleavy (R-Mat-Su) led the march of white-flag-waving politicians, calling for Gov. Walker to support a total ban on new immigration into Alaska and the United States. Dunleavy is apparently so scared of terrorists that he wants to completely close the U.S. borders and disallow any foreigners from entering the country.

After Dunleavy sent his letter, his colleagues in Juneau lined up to echo him. By Thursday, Sen. Bill Stoltze and Reps. Lynn Gattis, Shelly Hughes, Wes Keller, Mark Neuman and Cathy Tilton had either sent their own anti-refugee letters or posted on social media agreeing with Dunleavy’s letter. The remaining two local legislators — Rep. Jim Colver and Sen. Charlie Huggins — did not return calls or emails seeking comment.

The fact that the state isn’t even currently taking on refugees from Syria doesn’t seem to have occurred to these legislators in their rush to hide from what they imagine are countless bogeymen hiding among the fewer than 200 refugees Alaska receives from foreign countries each year.

These legislators have chosen to ignore the fact that securing official refugee status is remarkably difficult, or that there is currently an exhaustive vetting system in place to weed out terrorists.

Instead, Dunleavy et al have chosen to use the tragic events in Paris as a political stunt to play on what they hope will be a groundswell of anti-immigrant and anti-Obama sentiment on the part of their constituents. Their hope is that their stance against immigration will be seen as strength by voters, who they hope are either too lazy or too poorly informed to learn the actual facts about the refugee situation.

These legislators have taken this extreme stance despite the fact there is no evidence that refugees present any kind of burden or threat to Alaska. They’re doing so for purely political reasons, knowing full well that by making such brash pronouncements they’ll be able to curry favor with those in Alaska who believe immigrants are a threat to the American way of life.

To claim they are doing so in the interest of public safety is disingenuous, especially considering these elected officials have plenty of public safety issues right here in the Valley that are far more dangerous that they’ve chosen to keep silent on. For example, our area is currently in the grips of a heroin epidemic that is causing bodies to pile up through both violence and overdoses. This multimillion-dollar business is being financed and run by organized criminals who live right here in our area. These local thugs are killing Mat-Su residents and ruining countless lives here in the Valley. Yet to our knowledge, Sen. Dunleavy and crew haven’t sent any letters to the governor about that.

Maybe they’re as scared of local drug dealers as they are of immigrants.

We aren’t. We think Americans should value freedom over fear when challenged by the cowardly acts of terrorists, regardless of how our elected officials feel.