They might remember Saddam Hussein had killed as many as a million of his own people, fostered equally devastating war with Iran and financed terrorists.
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The worldwide Organization for Migration is among the leading relief agencies that are responding.
We agree with Murphy and support him and the other members of Congress pushing to bring more refugees into the U.S. As Murphy said, there is “something very dark about the United States” if it doesn’t.
Laura Thompson: It’s extremely positive to see a shift in the logic and approach with regard to refugees. Europe has not received, historically and traditionally, a lot of refugees to resettle – unlike for example the United States, which has a large resettlement program. While this is a dramatic increase for the US , it seems incredibly weak considering German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that there is no legal limit for the amount of refugees that can enter Germany. One quarter of Lebanon’s population are Syrian refugees.
The rationale is to provide enough humanitarian aid in countries bordering Syria and inside Syria itself so that people feeling the violence and mayhem would not have to abandon the region. In the meantime, everybody has to realize, Syrians have been out of Syria for five years now.
And they are fleeing everywhere – Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq and to any nation that will accept them. Only about an estimated 12% of the foreign assistance budget goes to humanitarian support for refugees caught in the crosshairs of war. He likened the request to having a baseball stadium full with 32,000 people and asking to accommodate six or 10 more.
But these host countries aren’t a permanent home.
This great movement of people can’t be sustained, yes, we all sympathise with these people, yet I feel that some European countries such as Germany and Austria are wrong. However, the USA response has been woefully lacking when it comes to refugee resettlement, something that does not jibe with this country’s reputation as a leader in this field. If you want to have something that is really sustainable, you have open the possibility as well for the Syrians and any refugees to become economically independent.
According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees only half of the migrants who have landed in Greece and Italy come from Syria. A crisis summit on Wednesday must see them do better. And it’s the closest one.
“I can also continue working on all the good things we have planned for the town”. The United States has been traditionally extremely generous with refugees.
The U.S. government must do more.
Several reasons help explain this reluctance, and majority are missing from the coverage. Unless Syria gets stabilized, it is only going to increase. But these stories omit the hardship, the camps, the long wait, the bureaucracy, the animosity, the prohibition to work whilst still in process, the negative decisions on their case to be appealed and often lost.
When we talk about numbers, we have to realize 1.9 million Syrians are in Turkey.
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“This 10,000 is basically the number we could do in our sleep”. But amid all the pressures we daily confront, we have offered to help the refugees. It’s part of the complexity of the situation – how to differentiate, and what measures address which categories. None of this is to say that central and eastern Europe should not accept a bigger share of responsibility. On Friday, Kerry said the United States was prepared to resume negotiations, and implored Russian Federation to convince Assad join transition talks.
