More than a 10th of the 10,000 Syrians admitted this fiscal year at the urging of the Obama administration are headed there, according to State Department figures.
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The Obama administration will meet its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year a month ahead of schedule and is working with Congress to increase the target by a few thousand in 2017, the White House said on Monday.
The administration also admitted that the process faced by Syrian refugees is one of the most rigorous and takes about 12 to 18 months to complete. National Security Advisory Susan Rice announced that the goal will be met this afternoon and reiterated President Obama’s commitment to do more to “strengthen the global response to humanitarian crises around the world”.
Jordan, which neighbors Syria, has taken in approximately 660,000 refugees.
Rice acknowledged that there was much more work to be done in the region but called the move a “meaningful step that we hope to build upon”. The top two destinations in the US for the Syrians are MI, which has always been a destination for Syrian immigrants, and California.
Though formerly supported by both parties, the refugee program has become more controversial since the 2001 terror attacks and more recent Islamic militant attacks around the world.
An overwhelmingly majority of the refugees, 80 percent, who have already resettled in the US are women and children under the age of 18, according to the State Department.
“Our 10,000th Syrian refugee will arrive this afternoon”, National Security Advisor Susan Rice said in a statement released by the White House.
Most refugees resettled in the US are first referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Wells said the USA has taken in more refugees from around the world over the years than all other nations combined.
President Obama promised to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the country and now that day has come.
Faced with more than 1 million migrants flooding across the Mediterranean Sea past year, European nations tightened border controls, set up naval patrols to stop smugglers, negotiated an agreement with Turkey to limit the numbers crossing, shut the Balkan route used by hundreds of thousands, and tried to speed up deportations of rejected asylum seekers.
Close to 5 million Syrians have fled the civil war since 2011.
Overall, the US set a goal of accepting 85,000 refugees from around the world in 2016.
NPR reported earlier this month that half of the Syrian refugees accepted into the U.S. over this period have been under the age of 18, and the USCIS said that hundreds of Syrians had been denied refugee status after failing background checks.
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Critics of the resettlement effort – including Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump – have long expressed concern about the potential for ISIS or other terrorist groups to exploit refugee flows to reach the West. “Refugees are the most thoroughly screened category of traveler to the United States”, she said, according to the AP.
