Amid rampant violence ensuing in Europe and the Middle East, the United States remains uncertain as to how it will handle the fight against ISIS and Syrian refugees.
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Last week’s vote by the House of Representatives to impose additional restrictions on the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States was a bad idea.
The fact that so numerous terrorists involved in the Paris attacks were French and Belgian citizens who had fought in Syria or were supporting that effort, at least one of whom appears not to have been on US government watch lists, is the key fact to focus on from a USA national security perspective, not the fact that one of the attackers had posed as a Syrian refugee.
Senate Majority Leader John J. Flanagan agreed, saying the attack on Paris should reinforce the priority to protect USA soil.
-A determination of an appropriate resettlement site in the USA by the State Department and the Health and Human Services Department. Pausing our Syrian refugee resettlement program, while an important step, will not act as a silver bullet in the war against ISIS and radical Islamist extremism. CNN reported that the individual, along with one other unnamed attacker who may have been carrying a fake Syrian passport, were also European nationals.
This action comes on the heels of 31 governors asserting that they did not want Syrian refugees resettled in their states. American officials have called the Syrian refugees the most scrutinized group entering the country today.
If you’re a refugee, first you apply through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which collects documents and performs interviews. “If they won’t define the enemy then they don’t acknowledge the simple reality that they can’t vet whether the people they’re bringing in are terrorists and it is profoundly risky”.
The State Department checks the refugee’s name against databases used for fighting terrorism, as well as law enforcement and intelligence databases.
Yet this entire kerfuffle doesn’t make much sense – because pretty much the last approach that any sensible ISIS terrorist would take would be to infiltrate the United States as a Syrian refugee.
An in-person interview is taken after photographs and fingerprints are taken from an applicant, he said.
“Gov. Baker believes that MA has a role in welcoming refugees into the Commonwealth and in the wake of recent, awful tragedies overseas is working to ensure the public’s safety and security despite the limited role state governments play in the process”.
Since the inception of the US refugee program in mid-1970s (post-Vietnam), nearly three million refugees have been relocated to 180 locations in almost every state across the United States, to include almost every state, according to the State Department. For 48,000 of those 71,000 refugees in 2013, the United States was that third country.
The administration plans to increase the number of Syrian refugees it accepts from 1,682 to 10,000 this fiscal year. The letter from Kerry and Johnson noted Canada plans to accept 25,000 refugees.
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The department’s Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on a conference call Monday that he is confident the governors’ concerns will be adequately addressed. The push suggests a conflation of Muslims with members of the Islamic State, on the part of these politicians – not only a discriminatory notion, but one that ignores the reality of why these refugees are attempting to enter the United States: because in many cases they themselves are fleeing terrorism.
