On February 13, a small procession of about two hundred Christian Iraqi
refugees staged a symbolic demonstration outside the local UN
headquarters in downtown Beirut to demand their requests to travel to
other countries, filed some time ago in the competent offices of several
foreign diplomatic representations operating in the Lebanese capital. The posters displayed by the protesters, and the statements made by some of them to the local press, confirm the impression that most of the exiled Christian refugees from Iraq have no intention of returning to their Country, and do not even intend to take root in Lebanon but are hoping to emigrate as soon as possible towards some Western nation.
According to data provided by the local Chaldean community, difficult to verify, about 8 thousand Iraqi Christians emigrated to Lebanon, especially after the conquest of Mosul and Nineveh Plain by the jihadist Islamic State (Daesh).
US President Donald Trump, who began a tug of war with some US judges to impose provisions designed to limit or suspend immigration from certain countries with a Muslim majority, has instead recognized as a "priority" the granting of refugee legal status to the category of "persecuted Christians".
The idea of preparing a "fast track" open for Christian refugees entering the United States, while doors are closed to non-Christian citizens from Countries with an Islamic majority, "has been defined by Chaldean Patriarch Raphael Louis Sako I a "Trap" for Christians in the Middle East.
"Every host country policy that discriminates against the persecuted and those who suffer on religious grounds", explains Patriarch Louis Raphael, Primate of the Eastern Catholic Church, to which the vast majority of Iraqi Christians belong", ultimately harms the Christians of the East, because among other things provides arguments to all propaganda and prejudice that attack the native community of the Middle East as 'foreign bodies', groups supported and defended by Western powers".