“Collectively, our nations are roughly doubling the number of refugees that we admit to our countries to more than 360,000 this year”, Obama announced. He drew a parallel to the Holocaust, calling the USA move to turn away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany a stain on America’s collective conscience.
Advertisement
Obama has also rallied businesses to help address the refugee crisis and met with business leaders just before the summit on Tuesday, who he said had made commitments worth more than $650 million to empower refugees.
Richard Grenel, the longest-serving U.S. spokesman at the United Nations, advising four different U.S. Ambassadors, offered a running commentary on Twitter of Obama’s speech.
Some 65 million people around the world have fled their homes because of war or persecution or to seek a better life, including about 21.3 million considered refugees by the U.N. Refugee Agency.
Today, she said, it is not unusual for refugees to live 20 years in a country that is not their own, she said, citing the 5 million Afghan refugees who have lived in Pakistan for “a very long time”, many for nearly their entire lives.
“At the United Nations today, President Obama took to the podium to once again blame the United States for the woes of the world”, Cruz said. “It’s a crisis of our shared security, not because refugees are our threat but because refugees are often fleeing war and terrorism”.
Obama’s modest plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in the USA in fiscal year 2016 met with stiff resistance, as mostly Republican governors as well as Republican congressmen said the risks of terrorists slipping in as refugees was too great.
“We cannot unwind integration any more than we can stuff technology back into a box, nor can we look to failed models of the past. It’s an ugly lie that must be rejected”, the president said.
“This crisis is a test of our common humanity”.
Yet it will be hard for world leaders to look beyond the pressing problems that are shadowing this year’s United Nations confab.
Ban released years of pent up anger at leaders and countries who have contributed to suffering and conflict across the globe. Germany, for instance, took in 1 million in 2015 alone.
But Ambassador Samantha Power said that was “still only a fraction” of what was needed because the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has assessed that some 1.2 million refugees need to be resettled.
“We can not dismiss these visions”, Mr Obama said.
Rana, a Syrian refugee, works on a handmade loom under Jasmine, a project which hires and trains Syrian refugee women to create handicrafts, in Amman, Jordan, July 11, 2016.
On Monday, a humanitarian aid convoy was bombed in the city of Aleppo, casting further doubt about whether the pact with Russian Federation would survive. “It makes good business sense”, he said.
Private companies were stepping up, too.
Eighty-six percent of the world’s refugees are living in developing countries and it is particularly hard for those countries to meet refugees’ needs and provide them an education and a livelihood, according to a senior policy and legislative specialist at Catholic Relief Services.
In a criticism of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trumps rhetoric, US President Barack Obama said if America turned away refugees simply because they are “Muslim”, it would reinforce the terrorists propaganda and the “ugly lie” that the US is opposed to Islam.
These increases are welcomed by refugee advocates, but the numbers represent only a drop in the bucket compared to what many other smaller countries are grappling with.
Advertisement
Amnesty International “called for a meeting of world leaders two years ago”, Sahil Shetty, secretary general of the human rights group, told The Huffington Post.
