U.S. President Barack Obama gestures to journalists following a news conference at the end of the G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, Monday, November 16, 2015.
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Here’s how the refugee process works. ALEA and the U.S. State Department continue to monitor any possible threats.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, the refugee resettlement process takes 18 to 24 months of checks and screenings, compared to 4 months in Canada. He said that no refugees should be permitted into the USA from Syria “unless they be Christian refugees that are facing genocide”, and said that the spending bill should contain language specifying as much.
In a statement released Sunday, Bentley said he will oppose any attempt to relocate refugees to the state, following Friday’s terrorist attacks throughout the city of Paris, France. Mark Toner, spokesperson for U.S. State Department, says the department now has lawyers looking into whether it is legal for states to ban refugees.
Such comments drew criticism from refugee advocates and from a few Democrats, even as most agreed on the need to redouble security and vetting efforts.
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey hit on the issue at a congressional hearing last month, when he told lawmakers, “If someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them”.
The rush to stop the influx of Syrian refugees escaping Mideast violence troubled several Democrats, including Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who likened the reaction to the USA government turning away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and placing Japanese in internment camps during World War II.
The USA has admitted fewer than 2,200 Syrian refugees since October 1, 2011 and the process for entering this country as a refugee is lengthy.
The administration has acknowledged that processing resettlement applications is a slow and laborious task, which has kept the US from accepting as many applicants as it would like to. Since then, governors of dozens of other states have refuesd to accept Syrian refugees.
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California has accepted the most Syrian refugees (252), followed by Texas (242) and MI (207). The executive order signed today orders all state agencies to prevent the resettlement of Syrian refugees in our state.
