The New York Times reports President Obama had come under increased pressure to show that the U.S.is joining European counterparts in efforts to help resettle refugees. On the other hand, the most vulnerable Syrian refugees do not even have these options.
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An online petition asking the USA government to do exactly that has garnered more than 54,000 signatures.
“Refugee resettlement is a strategy that’s been the last resort”, said Stacie Blake of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. “But in the four years of the Syria crisis there has been inertia rather than leadership”, said David Milliband, the head of the worldwide Rescue Committee, in a statement sent to Quartz.
“As Syria’s civil war has dragged on, the direction of forced migration for many Iraqi refugees has reversed”. The State Department said some but not all of those additional refugees would be Syrian.
However, the senior official noted that when they talk about increasing the number of refugees that US would take in, they are talking about increasing the number of refugees from around the world.
His comments came a day after GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio, a US senator from Florida, told Boston Herald Radio he would be open to the United States taking in some of the refugees, as long as they are not connected to any terror organizations. “And stepping back for a second, the main United States of America involvement has been to provide the $4 billion in assistance, which has largely supplemented refugee camps“.
Pope Francis, in an eloquent plea for mercy for refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, said, “May every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary in Europe host a family, starting with my Diocese of Rome”.
“The United States has to be at the table, has to be leading it”, she said Wednesday in Washington. Forty per cent of people thought we should take more people into the country whilst 57% thought we already take the right number or too many.
Human Rights First notes that United States has a rigorous system for vetting refugee resettlement cases, which includes extensive background and security checks.
Congress can not block the administration from setting limits on the number of refugees it admits from each region.
Why aren’t we doing more to help Syrian refugees?
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the US accepted more than 1 million refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. “The American people would expect that”, he said. “But today our policies are falling short of those values”.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Obama hasn’t acted strongly enough during the Syrian crisis and “has allowed these folks to be slaughtered”.
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Bashar al-Assad has ruled Syria for 15 years with intimidation and murder, tens of thousands of murders that his Shia Alawites have committed against not just the Sunni Arabs who oppose him, but against innocents. “And now we’re seeing those results”.
