Criticized for not doing enough to help desperate people fleeing their countries because of war and or for other reasons, Obama was hosting a refugee summit Tuesday with the leaders of Jordan, Mexico, Sweden, Germany, Canada and Ethiopia, along with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
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“Newton Supply Company, a small business in Texas that makes handbags, is going to make 90 percent of their bags with local refugees”, Obama said.
President Obama announced Tuesday the US will accept 110,000 refugees from around the world in the coming year, a almost 60% increase in the number of refugees that were welcomed over the past year.
“The UN’s plans for the new “Global Compact” on refugees must agree a step change in finance for vulnerable people, not more giant cheques that bounce”.
“It is the moral obligation of all countries to meet this challenge and it serves their security and development interests”, said Li when delivering a speech at the USA -initiated Leaders Summit on Refugees at the United Nations Headquarters in NY. A number of states participating in the summit have engaged in rights-violating policies and practices aimed at preventing refugees and migrants from reaching their own borders.
And this week, one of Trump’s sons triggered an online storm with a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl containing an assortment of tainted and untainted sweets.
The 85,000 figure included 10,000 Syrian refugees, a figure advocacy groups had criticized as inadequate given the wealth of the US and the fact that other countries, such as Canada and Germany, were welcoming far greater numbers of Syrians fleeing the civil war there.
Obama said he called the summit because the refugee crisis is “one of the most urgent tests of our time – our capacity for collective action”.
“As we have seen in the past, countries have a bad habit of promising things during conferences and not fulfilling them”, said Samantha Power.
During the summit, the American president highlighted that the refugee crisis represents a ‘test for our global system, where all nations must share collective responsibilities given the majority of the refugees are welcomed in 10 countries’.
He added it was not fair that a handful of countries, mostly with limited resources, are bearing the burden of hosting the maximum refugees.
The refugee issue, meanwhile, was for the first time the subject of a daylong United Nations summit on Monday.
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Obama, who in his address at the General Assembly urged to do more, promised that the over 50 nations taking part in the summit will double the number of refugees welcomed from war zones, welcoming 360,000 this year. He said the United States are determined to play their part, increasing the number of refugees resettled to 85,000 this year and 110,000 by 2017 and that everyone needs to do more.
