Oct 12, 2015 3 min read

On the same day that Pope Francis addressed Congress and urged that the world’s refugees be treated with compassion, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto joined with 17 other mayors of American cities and encouraged the Obama administration to accept more refugees from Syria’s civil war. The mayors further pledged that they would be willing to offer them shelter in their cities.

Peduto should be commended for this gesture, which signals that Pittsburgh is a welcoming and tolerant city. We would go further and say communities surrounding Pittsburgh should also welcome refugees from Syria and other war-torn parts of the world.

First, it is the humane thing to do. While the United States has offered assistance dollars, it has been slower than some of its European counterparts to offer resettlement. Germany has said it will open its doors to half a million refugees, while the United States has said it will take in a little more than half that amount through the end of 2017.

It would also be in keeping with American traditions. Germans, Irish and other Europeans came to this country in wave after wave in the 1800s to escape strife in their homelands and find opportunity here. Moreover, it would be in keeping with our regional heritage – many of those Europeans came to Southwestern Pennsylvania, and brought their rich cultural traditions with them as they labored in the mines and the mills.

If the Pittsburgh region became a home for Syrian refugees, it would provide a much-needed dose of diversity and energy to a region that has become increasingly monochromatic and has struggled with depopulation. Though opponents have suggested that members of ISIS and other terrorist organizations could arrive through a refugee resettlement program, the people aided by these programs tend to be heavily scrutinized and, if you want to commit terrorist acts, flying through the hoops of a resettlement program seems an awfully inefficient way to accomplish that. Peduto told the Pittsburgh radio station WESA-FM, “The whole idea that we are bringing ISIS to Pittsburgh through a Trojan horse is ludicrous.”

He also pointed out that Syrians had a presence in Pittsburgh in the latter part of the 1800s, settling in the Hill District, and “they built the city of Pittsburgh.”

And keep this in mind: Along with being among the most accomplished figures of the last couple of centuries, Victor Hugo, Albert Einstein, Arnold Schoenberg and Friedrich Nietzsche all, at one time or another, were refugees.