U.S. response criticized
Despite pledge from Obama, U.S. effectively doing ’nothing,’ groups say,
WASHINGTON— The list of villains in the Syrian refugee crisis grew longer by the day.
There was unwelcoming Hungary, building a four-metre fence along its border. The wealthy oil states of the Persian Gulf, near Syria but sheltering nobody. The stingy conservatives of the Commonwealth, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Escaping the harshest spotlight, for once, was the stingy United States. The superpower run by a liberal, deeply entwined in the Syrian civil war, with 321 million people and the world’s biggest economy, will accept a mere 1,500 to 1,800 Syrians this year, possibly fewer than Canada.
The wrenching photos of dead 3year-old Alan Kurdi and the mounting despair in Europe finally deepened the pressure on U.S. President Barack Obama. On Thursday, the Obama administration pledged to accept “at least”10,000 Syrians in the 2016 fiscal year, which begins in October.
That is a sharp increase. It is also far short of the 65,000 or more per year that leading refugee organizations and some Democratic lawmakers say is the U.S.’s fair share. Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, a major Jewish refugee resettlement agency, said many agencies agree that the U.S. is prepared to take in 100,000 Syrians in 2016.
“It’s the biggest refugee crisis of my lifetime, the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War, and 10,000 is nothing,” Hetfield said in a Thursday interview. “And that’s seven times the number we did this year. This response is three years too late and extremely inadequate. If it were Finland, I would be impressed.”
The International Rescue Committee expressed “dismay” at Obama’s announcement. Oxfam America vice-president Paul O’Brien called the pledge “a start,” but he said “it just scratches the surface.”
In 1980, Hetfield said, U.S. organizations resettled 200,000 refugees, largely from Southeast Asia, “and we had no infrastructure in place.” One year in the early 1990s, during the crisis in the Balkans, the U.S. admitted more than 130,000.
But fewer than 30,000 people per year were accepted in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. While the number has bounced back up, the attacks and their aftermath created a lasting change in the politics of U.S. migration from the Mideast.
Obama gets to raise the refugee caps more or less by himself. Congress, though, gets to decide whether to spend the money to aid additional arrivals. This Congress is controlled by a conservative Republican caucus that has emphasized the threat of Islamic terrorism in general and the Syria-based Islamic State extremist group in particular.
In May, House Homeland Security Committee chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, said bringing in Syrians was a “mistake”: while Syrian refugee camps house “a lot of mothers and kids,” he said, there are also “a lot of males of the age that could conduct terrorist operations.” On Friday, New York Republican Rep. Peter King said accepting 10,000 Syrians would “put American lives at risk.”
“We do not want another Boston Marathon bombing,” King said. The bombing was committed by Chechen-American Muslims.
The ongoing war in Syria has produced four million refugees in all. There are more than 1.2 million in neighbouring Lebanon, which started with a population of less than five million, and nearly two million in neighbouring Turkey. Germany, the European economic powerhouse with a population of about 80 mil- lion, says it could accept 500,000 migrants per year, from all countries, for “several years.”
By contrast, Obama’s cap on refugees from all countries this year is 70,000, down from the 80,000-peryear ceiling of 2008 to 2011. And he has decided against offering Syrians the speedy processing granted to some refugees from the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Their resettlement is slowed by a strict background-check process that usually takes 18 to 24 months.
On Thursday, Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, said Germany is “demonstrating tremendous generosity and hospitality.” He declined an opportunity to say the same thing about his own country.
“The challenge that is facing Germany right now is different than the challenge we’re facing,” he said.