Yesterday, Obama was in Malaysia promising that our doors were open to Burmese Muslims known as the Rohingya.
Here are some numbers for you. I went back ten fiscal years. The vast majority of the refugees we take from Burma (aka Myanmar) are Christians. See data base here (you will have to choose your parameters). I ran data for FY2006 to FY2015.
We took 149,020 total ‘refugees’ from Burma, presumably because they were being persecuted by the majority Buddhist nation. The largest number we’ve taken in are Christians of various sorts, but we did take over 22,000 Buddhists (I thought the Buddhist nation was throwing out their minorities so this doesn’t make sense to me).
What I really wanted to know was how many Burmese Muslims/Rohingya we have been admitting.
By the way, when Trump and other candidates mention their worries about Syrian Muslims they need to be educated on the FACT that hundreds of thousands of other Muslims are being admitted as refugees—such as the Somalis and the Iraqis (now both over 100,000 each).
In the last ten fiscal years we have admitted 14,695 Burmese Muslims to the US.
Here is the year-by-year breakdown:
FY ’06: 33
FY ’07: 2,034
FY’08: 2,816
FY’09: 1,273
FY’10: 910
FY’11: 771
FY’12: 759
FY’13: 1,064
FY’14: 1,209
FY’15: 3,809 (looks like they have kicked into high gear)
And so far in FY’16 we have admitted 17
For everything you want to know about Rohingya, click here for archive with 183 previous posts on this Muslim ethnic group. See especially here in 2013 when we reported that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was lobbying the US State Dept. to admit more Rohingya.