Re: The immigration and refugee fiasco. And it was a fiasco.
The issue seems to be reconciling a portion of the code passed in 1952 - giving the president the power to restrict entry, if he sees something as a threat, with a new part passed in 1968, restricting restrictions based on country of origin, and another part dealing with Obama's signature of the 2015 act, and its usage for identified countries that are on the bottom of the barrel in terms of passport portability, being involved in war, and what not. Justin Amash has shared a pretty good write up, IMO.
Personally, I believe the real problem is the complexity of all the laws. I also figure since we got involved over there we do bear a measure of responsibility for the outcome.
There are other complexities as well to the issue itself. For example Saudi Arabia is not on the list of nasties, yet there was that memo with their name all over it, in regard to what happened on 9/11, that everyone seems to have forgotten about. Probably the short answer for them not being on the list is we make a lot of money off of them. Dunno. Stop putting gas in your car if it bothers you that much.
Another thing to ask is why do we care about Syria so much anyway. Venezuela seems to have lots of oil and lots of conflict but we're not sending soldiers/drones over there. I don't recall of sending a whole lot of air support / people to Africa to stop all the genocide and what not over there. Personally, I suspect the whole Syrian conflict has something to do with a pipeline project and whether Europe gets all that oil or Russia. What do I know though, just trying to make sense from what I can scrape from the news.
Edit: Recently I reviewed the information at downsizedc.org on this subject and I think they make a compelling argument that immigration is basically unconstitutional. Quoting from their web site: "The Constitution limits federal government powers to just those specifically listed (doctrine of enumerated powers). There’s no specific constitutional power to control or limit immigration. The listed power is naturalization (who becomes a citizen). Thus, the Trump travel ban and the legislation that authorized it are both illegal under the Constitution." See here: https://downsizedc.org/blog/gut-trumps-travel-ban