"How can something American law requires be 'not American'?"

That question — intended as a rhetorical question — is asked in a National Review article by Andrew C. McCarthy titled "Refugee ‘Religious Test’ Is ‘Shameful’ and ‘Not American’ … Except that Federal Law Requires It."

McCarthy makes good points in that article: Under U.S. statutory law, religious persecution is one of the grounds for granting asylum.

There is no right to emigrate to the United States. And the fact that one comes from a country or territory ravaged by war does not, by itself, make one an asylum candidate. War, regrettably, is a staple of the human condition. Civil wars are generally about power. That often makes them violent and, for many, tragic; but it does not necessarily make them wars in which one side is persecuting the other side. In the case of this war, the Islamic State is undeniably persecuting Christians. It is doing so, moreover, as a matter of doctrine. Even those Christians the Islamic State does not kill, it otherwise persecutes as called for by its construction of sharia (observe, for example, the ongoing rape jihad and sexual slavery). To the contrary, the Islamic State seeks to rule Muslims, not kill or persecute them.... While there is no question that ISIS will kill and persecute Muslims whom it regards as apostates for refusing to adhere to its construction of Islam, it is abject idiocy to suggest that Muslims are facing the same ubiquity and intensity of persecution as Christians....

So, there is a basis for making the process different for Christians and Muslims: They are differently situated with respect to their exposure to persecution. There is still, however, a serious question about whether the U.S. government should openly adopt a policy of sorting the refugees into Christian and Muslim and treating them radically differently. Obama has articulated his position in terms of what it means to be an American:

When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.

Obama calls us to what he portrays as a higher standard of compassion and nondiscrimination. We are — perhaps you've noticed — always in the middle of a debate about what America means. McCarthy's side of the debate reminds us of a statutory choice to provide refuge for those who face religious persecution and of the factual differences in the persecution experienced by the Christians and Muslims who are fleeing Syria. 

We don't have to answer immigration questions by deciding which approach is most American, but the culture here in America is to be endlessly immersed in a process of defining American values. We don't hear any serious politicians saying: I don't care what America supposedly means or what American values theoretically are, I only care about protecting the lives of American people. They might think that, but they don't speak in those terms. We wouldn't accept that.

Does McCarthy, with his rhetorical question — "How can something American law requires be 'not American'?" — really mean to suggest that once something happens to make it into the United States Code it is immune from arguments that it is inconsistent with American values? I'll bet there are many American statutes that conflict with McCarthy's idea of what is American.

So, let's move forward and look closely at what kind of discrimination based on religion we want to support. It's one thing to say we want to offer asylum to those whose lives are in danger because of religious persecution. It's quite another to propose that when thousands of people are fleeing from one place and all are exposed to religion-fueled violence, that we will, at the outset, crudely sort them into 2 groups, depending on which religion they espouse.

Is that who we are?