The United States has pledged to help resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2016.
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“The truth of the matter is, there is no effective means or magical litmus test to assess prospective terrorists hidden among the throngs of refugees applying for entry into the United States”, Nathan Catura said.
Americans are sharply divided over the Syrian refugee situation.
Some Democrats told the Washington Examiner that the administration needs to bolster the program now in place for investigating the background of each refugee before they enter the country.
US Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson has compared refugees fleeing Syria’s war and Islamic State extremists to rabid dogs and called for “screening mechanisms that allow us to determine who the mad dogs are”. After the president drew his pink lacy line in Syria, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on the very same refugees that are now supposedly in dire straits.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has called for an “immediate halt” to the intake of migrants and refugees.
What’s perhaps most troubling about this controversy is that it’s not at all clear that the Paris attacks are linked in any way to the Syrian refugee crisis.
In Cuyahoga County, four agencies work together directly with the State Department to process up to 800 refugees a year. The House then passed a bill on Thursday to severely restrict the admission of refugees from Syria and Iraq.
“Some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution; that’s shameful”, Obama said in Antalya, Turkey, on Monday on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
At the same Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on October 8 Nicholas Rasmussen, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), testified, “The intelligence picture we have of this particular conflict zone is not as rich as we would like it to be so that would give us – obviously, when you screen and vet you screen and – and vet against available intelligence holdings”.
The attacks in Paris shined a spotlight on the Obama administration’s announcement in September that the USA would accept 10,000 refugees over the next year. Were we to lift up the drawbridge and hide behind our walls, we would be shutting out heroes like Muhammad Gulab who risked everything to save American lives.
If Obama wants to take in refugees from the chaos in Syria, there are probably plenty of vacant rooms in the White House.
Still, many people are asking about the possibility of terrorists making it into the country through the refugee program, and who should be held accountable if they do.
US immigration law states that people seeking asylum have to show a “well-founded fear” for becoming a refugee and can not have serious health, moral, or criminal issues facing them. We’ve already seen too much of the latter.
“This should not just fall to the United States”, this USA official said.
“Tier III is a giant hole for refugees because if any officer thinks someone fits into this quasi definition of a group they’re disqualified”, Macinski said.
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Above and beyond this, there were attacks by Islamic splinter groups stretching from the Philippines and Indonesia to the U.S. The Chattanooga military recruitment office shooting was perpetrated by Muhammad Abdulazeez who was from Jordan but was a self-described Palestinian refugee.
