The United States has officially achieved President Barack Obama’s goal of accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees in fiscal year 2016 with more than a month to spare.
Advertisement
“On behalf of the President and his Administration, I extend the warmest of welcomes to each and every one of our Syrian arrivals, as well as the many other refugees resettled this year from all over the world”, Rice wrote in the statement.
A month ahead of schedule, the Obama administration has announced that it has met a goal set a year ago to welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees.
“By committing additional resources to our refugee admissions process and maintaining our rigorous screening process and commitment to the security of the American people, we have reached that goal”, Kerry said in a statement, but acknowledged more work remains to resolve Syria’s humanitarian catastrophe.
Obama’s resettlement benchmark is a six-fold increase from the prior year, according to National Security Advisor Susan Rice.
“The president would like to see a ramping-up of these efforts but he’s realistic”, said Earnest.
“Refugees are the most thoroughly screened category of travelers to the United States, and Syrian refugees are subject to even greater scrutiny”, she said.
Now the USA has already admitted more than six times the number of refugees from the civil war-torn Mideast country it took in the previous fiscal year.
Nearly half of the new Americans are 14 and under and 62 percent are under age 20, the feds said.
None of the terror attacks in the US have been perpetrated by Syrian refugees.
“Thousands of families from Syria have found safety on our shores, and that is a wonderful thing”, Tarah Demant, senior director of the USA branch of Amnesty International, said in a statement. “But so many are still trapped in horrific conditions in refugee camps or war zones”, said Amnesty International Senior Director Tarah Demant.
Lina Sergie Attar of the Chicago-based Karam Foundation agreed.
A pro-refugee counter-protester shouts during another group’s protest against the United States’ acceptance of Syrian refugees at the Washington State capitol in Olympia, Washington November 20, 2015. “Unfortunately, I’m not optimistic about the current political climate”. A month later, after the ISIS attacks in Paris, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said allowing Syrian refugees into the country could be a “Trojan horse” that would grant terrorists entry to the U.S. Last December, Trump called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the U.S.
“We would like to see the USA demonstrate more leadership on this”, Smyers added, referencing the fact that the USA took in hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese refugees during and after their civil war.
The administration will admit at least 85,000 refugees in total this year, from countries including Burma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Ukraine.
Advertisement
National security concerns also dog the debate over admitting Syrian refugees. The brutal conflict has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
