“We all face a choice”, Obama said.
Advertisement
Four months before leaving office, Obama called for a “course correction” to ensure that the unstoppable forces of globalization don’t lead nations to entrench behind their borders and ignore the most vulnerable.
But the focus of his annual state of the world report was on the myriad problems on the global agenda – and the leaders who fail to tackle them.
Ahead of his eighth and final address at the U.N. General Assembly, aides looked back to Obama’s first speech there in 2009, when he laid out a plan to fix the “skepticism and distrust” he believed had built up under President George W. Bush, fueling “reflexive anti-Americanism” that served as an excuse for collective inaction. Other countries at the summit made similar announcements, with their leaders coming to the podium one by one to tell stories about refugee families and proclaim their commitments.
US President Barack Obama has urged world leaders to “open our hearts” to refugees, in his final United Nations speech.
The remarks were the latest attack on Trump by an incumbent president who is extraordinarily invested in electing Democrat Hillary Clinton as his successor.
We also noted that Secretary of State John Kerry revealed during a press appearance a year ago that the Obama administration planned to drastically increase the flow of refugees into the United States, mentioning specifically refugees from Syria.
Mr Obama used the moment to address several global disputes. “It’s a crisis of our shared security, not because refugees are our threat but because refugees are often fleeing war and terrorism”.
In an apparent swipe at U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, Obama said the refugee crisis was a “test of our common humanity, whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls”.
“They’re victims”, he said. His core campaign promise is to build a wall on the southern border of the United States to stop undocumented immigrants from entering from Mexico.
“We see too many governments muzzling journalists and quashing dissent and censoring the flow of information”, he said.
Obama will host a summit on the global refugee crisis on the margins of UNGA later Tuesday, in an effort to galvanize new global commitments to help the refugees.
The UN chief hailed the aid workers on the convoy to Aleppo province as “heroes” and said “those who bombed them were cowards” before calling for accountability for crimes committed in the war. He said so numerous world’s refugees come from three countries ravaged by war: Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. “It’s an ugly lie that must be rejected”, the president said.
The US has agreed to take in 110,000 new refugees in the 2017 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October, compared with the 85,000 refugees it expects by the end of September.
After admitting one million refugees a year ago, Germany pledged to continue welcoming those in search of refuge. “We’ve got to be a bit more serious than this”.
Advertisement
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.
