That’s prompted many governors here in the U.S.to object to Syrian refugees settling in their states.
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“They want to form their own little country within your country”, says Carl Levitan, a retired machinist in Williamson County north of Austin.
Refugees whose applications for US resettlement receive approval from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service are matched with an American resettlement organization.
The 14 states that have admitted no refugees are Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming, as well as the District of Columbia. Only 2% are single males of combat age. Almost every Republican presidential candidate called for a halt to all or most Syrian refugees entering the country.
The White House sought to reassure USA governors concerned about accepting Syrian refugees following the attacks in Paris, explaining during a conference call how the refugees are screened and prioritized for entry.
In Washington, the House easily passed a bill Thursday that would suspend the program allowing Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the USA until key national security agencies certify they don’t pose a security risk.
“We should focus our efforts as it relates to refugees on the Christians that are being slaughtered”, Bush said. Tuesday night, they introduced legislation to change the Obama administration’s program. “We have a very secure vetting process for refugees coming into the USA, while in Europe these are people who have already lived inside of their country”. And this week, a few members of Congress have called on the Obama administration to stop or at least pause the resettlement program until refugees can be properly vetted.
The Obama administration has announced plans to steadily increase the number of refugees accepted in the United States for the next two years. “ZERO have been arrested or removed on terrorism charges”.
Their identity is run through databases maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Defense, and the intelligence community, and their stories are compared to what is known about places involved in the conflict, the officials said.
Half of the applicants so far have been denied, but many of those require further vetting and are still pending, Toner said.
But while much of the battle has centered on the moral argument of rejecting the refugees, another major question has been raised, do the governors have the legal authority to block the refugees? If they move from a state where they are settled, they could lose any funding directed to them through that state, Toner said.
“When I hear folks say that maybe we should just admit the Christians and not the Muslims (refugees), when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted – when a few of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution – that’s shameful”.
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Refugees are given money when they arrive to help them get set up in this country. “We need to do our part”.
