“Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers the administration wants to admit 110,000 worldwide refugees in the fiscal year that begins October 1”, as NPR’s Scott Horsley tells our Newscast unit. It is also a more than 57 percent jump since 2015 “and is consistent with our belief that all countries should do more to help the world’s most vulnerable people”, a State Department official told NBC News.
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Kathleen Newland, co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute, said the large numbers from Burma and Congo are to some degree vestiges of US policy after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when lawmakers halted refugees from countries with links to terrorist groups such as al-Qaida.
“We have 20 million visa waiver visitors to the United States each year”, he said. “The president also continues to ignore warnings from his own national security officials and plans to bring in even more Syrian refugees over the next year”.
The refugee policy has also been the top issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Ninety-one percent of Middle Eastern refugees go on food stamps, according to Office of Refugee Resettlement, and 68.3 percent need cash assistance from taxpayers.
An estimated 40,000 refugees will come from parts of the Middle East and southwest Asia — a portion of whom will come from Syria. A November 2015 Washington Post and ABC News poll found that 54% of respondents opposed taking in refugees, with 52% saying they believe the screening process would be insufficient to weed out potential terrorist. “As the secretary has said, this is who we are; this is America at its best”. The administration has yet to determine targets for specific countries for the coming year. The number isn’t a cap, merely a goal, but it has long served as a marker for where the USA hopes to be at the end of each fiscal year. The Syrians were nearly all Sunni Muslims, according to federal Refugee Processing Center statistics.
About 30 governors past year, including Gov. Nikki Haley, objected to the resettlement program after the terrorist attacks in Paris because they feared refugees – especially those from war-torn Syria – posed security risks.
The United States’ refugee policy has led to contentious debate in the 2016 presidential election, particularly over Syrian refugees and the threat posed by the Islamic State.
The ethnic conflicts are on the agenda Wednesday when President Obama meets with Burma’s state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader, who arrived in Washington for a two-day visit.
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Haslam said there aren’t many times he trusts the federal government, “but I trust that they are doing a good job with refugees’ resettlement”.
