Despite the relatively small number of refugees from the Middle East coming to America, images of asylum seekers in Europe in 2016 loomed large in the American imagination. The story of refugees in Europe played a central role in framing the Syrian civil war to the American public. But the stories of mass migration and human suffering were overshadowed by the 2016 U.S. election season that yielded unusually sensational headlines of the Democratic and Republican primaries. During this time, the figure of the refugee had a principal role at the electoral-political level, factoring into debates on national security, immigration, and humanitarianism. Drawing on the political theorist Anne Norton’s discussion of the “Muslim Question’ (2013), I show how the refugee question prompted responses and discourses that reveal he limits of America's relationship with its foundational principles. For Donald Trump, the refugee question became the rationale for ‘America First’, while for Clinton and Sanders it became an opportunity to personalize the current crisis with migration narratives from the turn of the century. But the political fault lines produced by the figure of the refugee were not exclusive to the campaign stage; its tensions were mirrored by the increasingly polarized electorate at the time. The insights in this paper draw on 172 interviews with residents of San Antonio. I examine how Americans from diverse political, ethnic, and religious backgrounds evoked refugees in discussions we held during the 2016 presidential election. Prior research in media studies suggests that audiences have responded to images of refugees with a combination of empathy and suspicion (Gross et al., 2012; Nyers, 1999). Media research on news images suggests that images of migration and suffering evoke strong emotional responses and produce feelings of responsibility (Chouliaraki, 2006). This paper claims that these feelings of responsibility became mobilized in the social and political life of American citizens. Drawing on theories of discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) and contemporary political theories of Islam in the liberal secular age (Norton 2013; Asad 2003), I analyze how the rhetoric surrounding refugees elicits what seem to be competing nativist and pluralist claims about American nationalism. In this regard, I argue the narrative of refugees, specifically refugees from Syria, was a factor in the outcome of the presidential election.