“Those are spots we can’t give to Syrians or Iraqis”.
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So the Syrians are a unsafe import, and now Obama wants lots more as one of his parting gifts to Americans.
After a collective panic over refugees this year, Obama’s announcement that he would increase the number of refugees admitted into the country in 2017 could have been expected to set of a new round of fear mongering.
President Obama is expected to announce the increase before the United Nations Summit for Refugees and Migrants at the UN headquarters in NY next week.
The country that sent the most refugees to America in 2015, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, was Burma, which has a longstanding ethnic conflict and sent 18,386 refugees that year.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, slammed the Obama administration, saying it “continues to tune out the American people’s concerns on this issue”. Jeff Sessions, who chairs the Immigration and the National Interest subcommittee, said in a statement.
Secretary of State John Kerry announced on August upon welcoming the 10,000 refugee that the us has hosted over 3.2 million refugees since 1975.
Haslam said he met recently with State Department officials and Catholic Charities and is convinced “they’re doing a good job” vetting refugees coming to Tennessee.
The last time the USA set a resettlement goal as high as Obama’s was during Bill Clinton’s presidency in 1995, when Clinton agreed to accept 112,000 refugees.
The move “is consistent with our belief that all countries should do more to help the world’s most vulnerable people”, the official said.
“When it comes to the safety of America, we can’t afford to take a chance”, he said. In 2015, Republican governors in around two dozen states formally requested to not receive Syrian refugees.
Congo has also seen a massive uptick in refugees over the last month, while admissions from Iraq, Bhutan and Myanmar remain strong.
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-Qaeda.
Nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers arrived in Germany, Europe’s top economic power, last year, putting enormous strain on the country’s bureaucracy to process claims and testing confidence in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government.
“My position has been that I just hope they are well vetted before they are brought over”, said Sen.
But the administration does try to make sure refugees are being placed in local communities that are welcoming, said Avril Haines, principal deputy national security adviser. And most of those are likely to be people escaping the brutal Syrian civil war, even as many GOP lawmakers and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump sound the alarm about terrorists in the midst of the refugees.
Jennifer Quigley, an advocacy strategist for nonprofit refugee protection group Human Rights First, said that, with the increased quota of refugee acceptance, the Obama administration is sending a message to other countries to accept more refugees as well. In fact, few voters in the president’s party want any more than 25,000 new refugees allowed in.
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Meantime, Canada, with a little over one-tenth the population of the USA, resettled 25,000 in four months and is processing about 19,000 more applications.
