“[Obama] set a goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year… a six-fold increase from the prior year”, Rice stated.
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The Syrian refugee resettlement program aimed to accept 10,000 refugees for the entire 2016 fiscal year.
Alice Wells, the US ambassador to Jordan, said Sunday that keeping Americans safe and taking in some of the world’s most vulnerable people are not mutually exclusive.
Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, more than 4.8 million fled their homeland, to neighbouring Middle Eastern countries like Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and many more to the shores of Europe in search of safety and security.
The U.S. ambassador to Jordan, Alice Wells, shakes hands with Syrian refugees Sunday ahead of their departure to the United States. With hundreds of Syrian refugees expected to depart from Jordan over the next 24 hours, officials expect to reach the resettlement milestone as early as Monday.
More than 4.8 million Syrians have fled since a civil war began tearing their homeland apart, but just one-fifth of one percent of them have landed in the US, according to the State Department.
Washington will reach its target on Monday of taking in 10,000 Syrian war refugees in a yearlong resettlement program, Jordan’s USA ambassador says.
The topic has also been a focus of the presidential campaign, with Republican nominee Donald Trump warning that the refugees could be potential terrorists. “As President Obama prepares to gather world leaders next month, the administration should make clear that aid alone is not the solution to the ongoing global refugee crisis. But so many are still trapped in horrific conditions in refugee camps or war zones”, said Amnesty International Senior Director Tarah Demant.
Hoyt says many Syrian refugees who have come to Rochester are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and fear what the future holds for them because of recent political rhetoric.
US officials say that the refugees have gone through extensive vetting, which not only involved numerous interviews but also intelligence-driven vetting and reviews of their social media accounts.
Double U.S. resettlement numbers, with at least 40 percent of the total coming from Syria.
Two of the Syrian refugee families coming to the US this week will live in San Diego through the International Rescue Committee, one of the agencies that handle resettlement.
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Merkel’s comments came nearly a year after her decision to allow the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants stuck in other European countries.
