US to meet target of settling 10,000 refugees this year: Kerry
The United States will welcome 10,000 refugees from Syria this fiscal year as it promised, Secretary of State John Kerry says.
“Tonight, I can announce proudly that we will meet President Obama’s goal of welcoming 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States in the current fiscal year,” Kerry said Tuesday night at a dinner in Washington to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
The US State Department previously had said that it planned to let in 1,500 Syrian refugees each month by September.
Up until April, the department had placed some 1,300 in the US and said it was way behind the projected schedule that was first set by Obama last September.
“Those are refugees, which is different from normal process of migration and green card and becoming a citizen and so forth. It’s a very different category,” Kerry said. “It’s also representing six-fold increase over what we did the year before.”
“I'm proud to say that the United States is by far the largest contributor of emergency aid, but we all recognize that still more needs to be done,” he said.
Activists have criticized the Obama administration for acting too slowly to settle the refugees, while Obama's opponents have been warning of the implications for national security.
On April 14, US House Speaker Paul Ryan denounced Obama’s refugee program, citing a lack of adequate screening that puts the country at risk of terrorism.
“It's clear that ISIL (Daesh) wants to, has planned on attempting to infiltrate refugee populations. This is a problem. If one person gets through who is planning a terrorist attack in our country, that's a problem,” Ryan said.
Also, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said “a lot” of Syrians accepted for asylum in the US are members of Daesh.
Trump said the number of refugees and immigrants is increasing in the US and if presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “gets in, it will be massive and we won’t even have a country anymore.”
Syria has been gripped by foreign-sponsored militancy since March 2011. UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura has said that over 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
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