Syrian
refugees on the run, displaced by the 5-year-old civil war.
A group of 14 Democrat senators has written a letter to President Obama
urging him to “dramatically increase” the number of Syrian refugees being
resettled into American cities and towns.
They say the U.S. needs to take in at least
65,000 Syrians as permanent refugees over the next year-and-a-half.
“While the United States is the largest donor
of humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees, we must also dramatically increase
the number of Syrian refugees that we accept for resettlement,” says the
four-page letter to Obama, copied to Secretary of State John Kerry and Homeland
Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.
More than 3.5 million Syrians are registered
with the United Nations as refugees, and the U.N. wants to assign about 350,000
of them to so-called “third-party countries.”
The 14 senators, led by Richard Durbin,
D-Ill., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., cite the
research of the Refugee Council USA to make their case for 65,000 Syrian
refugees by the end of 2016. RCUSA is the main lobbying arm of the nine
agencies that contract with the federal government to resettle refugees in
cities and towns across America.
The more refugees brought into the country,
the more government grants doled out to the nine resettlement agencies. Among
them are the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Lutheran Immigration and
Refugee Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Church World Service,
International Rescue Committee and the National Association of Evangelicals’
World Relief.
More than 90 percent of Syrian refugees will
be Muslim
Of the 843 Syrians resettled in the U.S.
since the start of the Syrian civil war, 92 percent have been Muslim and about
7 percent Christian. Syria’s overall population is 90 percent Muslim and close
to 10 percent Christian.
“The vast majority of these refugees are
women and children, including two million children,” the letter states, using
language similar to what Democrats used to justify the entry of some 60,000
unaccompanied alien children from Central America last year. “An entire
generation of Syrian children is at risk.
“More than ten thousand Syrian children have
been killed, and half of Syrian refugee children are not attending school, more
than one-hundred thousand are working to support their families, and thousands
are unaccompanied or separated from their parents.
“[W]e urge your Administration to work to
accept at least 50 percent of Syrian refugees whom UNCHR [United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees] is seeking to resettle, consistent with our nation’s
traditional practice under both Republican and Democratic Presidents.”
The letter also addresses the security
concerns about accepting Syrians who may have ties to the various Islamic
extremist factions fighting to overthrow and replace Syrian dictator Bashar
Assad. Among them are ISIS, Jabat al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army.
“We fully support your Administration’s
efforts to ensure that any potential security concerns are addressed by
strengthening security checks for refugees with the latest technology and
information,” the letter states.
“Refugees are the most carefully vetted of
all travelers to the U.S., with extensive biometric, biographic, intelligence,
and law enforcement checks involving numerous agencies,” the letter says,
parroting the U.S. State Department talking points about the quality of the
screening process for refugees.
The problem with that argument, however, is
that it has been debunked by FBI counter-terrorism experts who have openly
admitted it is virtually impossible to screen Syrian refugees, precisely
because U.S. agents don’t have access to reliable biometric and law enforcement
data. As WND previously reported, Michael Steinbach,
deputy assistant director of the FBI counter-terrorism unit, admitted at a
hearing before the House Homeland Security committee on Feb. 11 that reliable
records are not available in a “failed state” like Syria.
The House Homeland Security Committee was
schedule to hold another hearing this week on the national security risks
associated with the Syrian refugees, but that hearing was postponed Thursday
until further notice.
The letter being sent to Obama makes the
upcoming House hearing even more pivotal as the battle over this issue heats up
on both sides of the aisle, with Democrats pushing for more Syrians and
Republicans pushing for less.
‘A serious mistake’
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chair of the
House Homeland Security Committee, says resettling Syrian refugees in the U.S.
is a “serious mistake” and should be stopped until safeguards are in place.
“We have no way … to know who these people
are, and so I think bringing them in is a serious mistake,” said McCaul during
a press conference Thursday.
McCaul said the U.S. has “no intelligence
footprint or capability” inside Syria to ensure refugees mean no harm.
“We don’t have databases on these individuals
so we can’t properly vet them,” he added, “to know where they came from, to
know what threat they pose, because we don’t have the data to cross-reference
them with.”
McCaul, who has visited Syrian refugee camps
overseas, said that while there are “a lot of mothers and kids, there are
[also] a lot of males of the age that could conduct terrorist operations.”
“That concerns me,” he added.
‘Give me your tired…’
The U.S. takes in more refugees than any
other country by far. In the current fiscal year it has committed to accept
70,000 and some years it has been as high as 200,000. Almost all of the
refugees coming to the U.S. are selected by United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees Antonio Guterres.
Also playing against the Democratic senators
argument is the recent string of arrests of Somali refugees and children of
Somali refugees. Just last month six Somali young men were arrested and charged
with trying to leave the country to fight for ISIS. Two of them used their
college student loan money to pay for plane tickets to Turkey.
Dozens of others have gone to fight with
al-Shabab in Somalia and still others have been arrested, charged and convicted
of providing money or other material support to overseas terrorist
organizations.
Somalia, like Syria, is a failed state where
the U.S. has no military presence and no access to reliable law enforcement
data.
“This issue has obviously come up before.
We’ve had a bunch of people who have come in as refugees and committed
terrorist acts, or tried to commit terrorist acts,” said Steven Camarota,
director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies. “But I think the
underlying question is, one, the ability to vet people from a war-torn country
that had poor record keeping to begin with is virtually nonexistent now.
There’s simply no way to know what people have done in the past from a country
like Syria.
“All we know about Syria is that powerful and
well-organized terrorist groups operate throughout the country,” he said.
Lessons learned or mistakes repeated?
Even if they could be adequately screened,
experience proves that the children of Muslim immigrants are sometimes more in
danger of being radicalized than their parents, Camarota said.
Hoda Muthana was born in the U.S. to Muslim
immigrant parents from Yemen. She left her comfortable middle-class home in
November to join ISIS.
He points to numerous recent cases like that
of Hoda Muthana, the 19-year-old daughter of Muslim parents who emigrated from
Yemen more than 20 years ago and settled in Birmingham, Alabama. She left to
fight for ISIS in November after being recruited over the Internet. Her parents
have been “traumatized” by losing their oldest daughter, according to an article by AL.com.
The fact that some arrive as “children” is
also no guarantee against radicalization. Some are radicalized in American
mosques after they grow into teens and young adults.
That’s what happened to the Tsarnaev
brothers, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing. They came as asylum
seekers as young boys with their parents from war-torn Chechnya.
“Unfortunately, a number of people who have
come as refuges became radicalized after they arrived in the United States,
including the Tsarnaev brothers. The younger brother, who just got convicted,
was a young boy when he arrived with his family,” Camarota said.
Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were caught on
camera before the Boston Marathon Bombing in April 2013
“We’ve had a number from Somalia who have
gone to fight for ISIS or al-Shabab who came to America at young ages,” he
added. “Unfortunately, we’ve also seen a number of cases where people have been
radicalized after they got here from Somalia.”
There is an alternative that low-immigration
advocates such as Camarota say could be more effective in helping the plight of
true refugees.
“We can help countries in the region resettle
these folks, provide resources to countries like Jordan, and countries like
Saudi Arabia, which is a rich country with lots of space,” he said. “And
because they would be close to their home countries they could return once the
war is over.”
Resettling refugees costs the American
taxpayer $1.5 billion a year, and that does not include the cost of social
welfare benefits. Unlike other immigrants, refugees immediately qualify for
government benefits such as food stamps, temporary assistance for needy
families, or TANF, subsidized housing and Medicaid health care.
“Instead, that money could be used to help a
lot more people resettle in the Middle East region, making it more likely that
their life would be less disrupted and they would be more likely to return
home,” Camarota said. “We could help more people and make it more likely rather
than bring a tiny number here at huge costs and bring these risks to national
security.”
Clare Lopez, vice president for research and
analysis at the Center for Security Policy, said taking in more Syrian refugees
poses risks that must be balanced against humanitarian concerns.
“Welcoming more Syrian refugees to the U.S.
would be a generous move to make, so long as they can be vetted to exclude any
who identify with a jihadist ideology or worse yet, are jihadis themselves,”
she said. “It would also make sense to be sure we select for those who will
most easily assimilate to America’s Judeo-Christian-based legal system and
Western-style democratic society.”
While the lobbying organization National
Council of Refugees USA, refers to itself as nonprofit and bipartisan,
refugee watchdog Ann Corcoran doesn’t buy it.
She said conservatives shouldn’t be fooled by
the “church sounding names.”
“Looking at this list they all appear to be
from the hard left,” said Corcoran, who follows the refugee movement at her
blog, Refugee Resettlement Watch.
The senators’ letter closes by saying: “[I]t
is a moral, legal, and national security imperative for the United States to
lead by example in addressing the world’s worst refugee crisis of our time by
greatly increasing the number of Syrian refugees who are resettled in our
country. Thank you for your time and consideration.”
http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/democrats-call-for-flood-of-muslims-to-u-s/
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