The human rights industrial complex must be going nuts right now with the number being tossed out this afternoon from the White House of Syrian refugees that could be admitted to the US starting in 3 weeks (FY2016 starts October 1).
Is your head starting to spin with all the numbers being thrown around? Join the club!
Assuming they will be mostly Muslim Syrians like those already admitted, 10,000 is many more than most Americans want to take care of, but it is still a minuscule number compared with the 65,000-100,000 that the refugee contractors in America are asking for.
And, I bet that German Chancellor Angela Merkel (we will take 500,000 a year!) and the Pope are seeing red!
Someone suggested to me that this latest from the White House is simply to test the waters by dropping the number 10,000 and that makes sense. He still has a couple of weeks before a number for 2016 is due in Congress.
The number is also far short of the number the UN has already placed in a pipeline to America—17,000.
By the way, when you check out this ABC News piece from a few hours ago on the number 10,000, note that Obama is putting it all off on the US State Department, but this decision is all his in the end! Emphasis is mine:
ABC News:
President Obama has directed his administration to accept at least 10,000 more Syrian refugees in the next fiscal year, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said today.
“The president has directed his team to consider how we can further scale up our response and one thing that the United States can do is to begin to admit more Syrian refugees into the United States,” Earnest told reporters. “The president has directed his team to scale up that number next year and he’s informed his team that he would like them to accept, at least make preparations to accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next fiscal year.”
[….]
Obama, acknowledging the crisis today during a conference call with U.S. rabbis ahead of the Jewish New Year, said, “We’ve got to do more.” The president said some of the challenges the United States is confronting are bureaucratic, legal and statutory issues.
Earnest’s announcement came a day after Secretary of State John Kerry proposed that the United States admit an additional 5,000 refugees from across the globe next year, which would increase the total number of refugees allowed in the country to 75,000 in 2016.
[….]
Earnest said the State Department has long considered raising the overall cap on refugees from throughout the globe, but it’s unclear how high that cap may be raised next year.
The current cap on refugees the United States accepts annually from all countries is 70,000, and it’s also unclear whether the 10,000 Syrians next year would be within that cap or in addition to it.
Either way, the nonprofit Human Rights First slammed the numbers as insufficient. “This is not leadership, it is barely a token contribution given the size and scale of the global emergency,” the New York-based advocacy group said in a statement. “The administration’s announcement that it will commit to take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees is far too little. Resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees is only a drop in the bucket toward providing protection to the more than 4 million Syrians who have fled their country due to horrific violence and persecution.”
The organization urged Obama to commit to resettling at least 100,000 Syrian refugees during the next fiscal year.
I’ll have more tomorrow as we have a look at the reaction and what else is happening on the Syrian refugee invasion of Europe.
