Let’s welcome refugees

Sitting on my stoop, melting ice cream in hand and rolling Palouse in view, my refugee friend sighed. “This is a life.” Jet-lagged and recuperating in my house, this not yet unpacked patriot fully grasped that America offered his family what a dictator’s death squads denied: the chance not only to breathe free, but to breathe. Not the life, but a life.

Soon, the president will decide how many refugee lives the U.S. will save in FY 2019. Rep. McMorris Rodgers and Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell: Make sure this number is at least 75,000.

For more than a decade, refugees have been my co-workers, clients, friends and housemates. I sip my coffee at a refugee-owned cafe and share with them a communion cup at Mass. They have blessed me with a fuller understanding of familial love, sacrifice, hospitality.

And indeed, of patriotism. Denied the right to thrive at home, refugees flee to Spokane with revolutionary zeal, seizing the chance to remake their lives, their families, their faiths. These non-citizens burn with a patriotic fervor snuffed out in many of today’s Americans, disillusioned with our democracy. Let’s welcome refugees. They may show us how a life saved can become a nation transformed.

Benjamin Shedlock

Spokane