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15,479 Syrian Refugees Have Been Admitted This Year – 98.8% Are Muslims

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In its last full month in office, the Obama administration has admitted 1,307 more Syrian refugees – pushing the 2016 calendar year total to 15,479, a 606.1 percent increase from the numbers resettled in the U.S. in 2015.

Of the 15,479 Syrian refugees admitted by the end of Thursday:

–15,302 (98.8 percent) are Muslims – 15,134 Sunnis, 29 Shi’a, and 139 other Muslims

–125 (0.8 percent) are Christians – 32 Catholics, 32 Orthodox, five Protestants, four Jehovah’s Witnesses, and 52 refugees described only as “Christian” in State Department Refugee Processing Center data

–43(0.27 percent) are Yazidis

(Read more from “15,479 Syrian Refugees Have Been Admitted This Year – 98.8% Are Muslims” HERE)

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A Million Syrian Christians Can Thank Hindu Democrat Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

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This week, Donald Trump surprised the world — and frightened entrenched interests in the GOP ranging from hair-trigger interventionists to military contractors — by meeting with Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. You might not have heard of her, but this Hawaii Democrat has been one of the loudest voices in Congress speaking for the protection of Middle Eastern Christians and other religious minorities. Here is part of Rep. Gabbard’s statement:

President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria], as well as other foreign policy challenges we face. …

I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government — a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.
As The Hill reported: “Gabbard told Trump she opposes a no-fly or safe zone in Syria, calling it ‘disastrous’ for the Syrian people and the U.S.”

Indeed it would be, since such a U.S. intervention — beyond risking war with nuclear-armed Russia — would allow radical Sunni Muslims aligned with al Qaeda to take over Syria and commit genocide against religious minorities numbering in the millions, including Syria’s Christians. You know, the way they did in Iraq. That is why Syria’s Christian leaders have been begging Western Christians since 2013 to avert such a reckless intervention.

Should We Shatter Syria as We Did Iraq?

During the GOP primary campaign this crucial issue got too little play in media. The question, to be blunt, was: Would the U.S. do to the Christians in Syria what the Bush administration did to the ancient Christian communities of Iraq? That is, would they topple the secular dictator who wasn’t singling them out for persecution, with no plausible plan for protecting them afterward from the firestorm of unleashed Islamist hatred?

Several of the Republican candidates repeated the shopworn talking points of the neoconservative wing of the party, and promised to do just that: to confront Putin’s Russia using military force, to stop Russia aiding the secular Assad regime — and offer direct military aid to the “Syrian rebels,” who by that point had been almost completely taken over by radical Islamists funded from nasty Muslim theocracies like Saudi Arabia, and directly connected to al Qaeda.

That was the plan of GOP globalists, who never offered a plan for protecting Syria’s Christians, Alawites, Shi’ites, or other religious minorities, should their “moderate” rebels turn over their guns to al Qaeda (as they did), lose out in the power struggle with radical Islamists (as they did), or fade into irrelevance (as they have). Protecting Christians from ISIS-style persecution wasn’t a priority for these people, as it wasn’t in 2003. Since we have friends who are Middle Eastern Christian refugees from the last careless and catastrophically expensive failed intervention in the region, we took this issue personally — and called out the candidates who endorsed this reckless policy. We did so again after the election, urging Sen. Marco Rubio not to let himself be used as a megaphone for the GOP’s bumbling war party.

On this issue, the election of Donald Trump is unabashedly good news, since he owes nothing to that wing of the Republican party, and is under no illusions that al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias are in any way U.S. allies. They are cats’ paws for Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two countries involved right now in the mass colonization of Europe by Muslim immigrants repackaged as “refugees.” If they take power, they will wield it not much differently from ISIS — though doubtless in a more organized and bureaucratic fashion. In Saudi Arabia, those who “insult” Islam by professing Christianity are only executed after formal trials. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

God bless Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump, and keep them strong in their rejection of another poorly-conceived and callous U.S. intervention in a region we barely understand and should stop pretending we are able somehow to bomb and occupy until it magically turns into Switzerland. (For more from the author of “A Million Syrian Christians Can Thank Hindu Democrat Rep. Tulsi Gabbard” please click HERE)

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Federal Judge Asks Why Obama Administration Isn’t Admitting Christian Syrian Refugees

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In an otherwise unremarkable opinion over the federal Freedom of Information Act, a federal appellate court judge has issued a sharp rejoinder to the Obama administration over an issue that has been discussed in the news—the almost complete lack of Syrian Christian refugees being brought over to the U.S.

The Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center, a progressive liberal advocacy organization “dedicated to ensuring human rights protections” for immigrants and asylum seekers—including apparently terrorists—filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.

The lawsuit claimed that DHS was refusing to release the identity of Tier III terrorist organizations, unlike the identities of what are defined as Tier I and Tier II terrorist groups that are publicly identified.

Tier III terrorist organizations “tend to be groups about which the U.S. government does not have good intelligence, making it essential that [DHS] be able to obtain information about them during screening interviews that are as focused and complete as possible.”

The government argued that Tier III terrorist organizations are exempt from disclosure under FOIA because it would disclose “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations.”

Individuals in Tier III groups are more likely than other asylum seekers “to commit violent or otherwise unlawful acts.” The court accepted the government’s assertion that if immigrants become aware of the identity of these Tier III organizations, which the Heartland Alliance made clear it intended to publicize, then members of the groups would “have a very strong incentive to falsify or misrepresent ” their “encounters, activities, or associations” with the terrorist groups.

If the immigrants don’t know a terrorist organization they have been associated with has been identified by the government, they are “likely to be less guarded in answering questions about [their] activities or associations with the organization.”

All three members of the panel agreed that the FOIA exemption applied, particularly because the Heartland Alliance could not “explain what the government would gain by pretending that harmless organizations are actually terrorist groups.”

The Heartland Alliance also made it clear that “its goal in the litigation” was to “discredit” the government’s classification of terrorist organizations, according to the court. Both “the tone and content” of its briefs “signals its disbelief that the government has secrets worth keeping from asylum seekers and their helpers.”

However, in a spirited concurrence written by Judge Daniel Manion, the judge expressed his “concern about the apparent lack of Syrian Christians as a part of immigrants from that country.”

According to Manion, it is “well-documented” that the refugees are not representative of that “war-torn area of the world.” Ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian and “yet less than one-half of 1 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian.”

President Barack Obama set a goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S., and by August that goal had already been exceeded. But of the “nearly 11,000 refugees admitted by mid-September, only 56 were Christian.”

Yet Christian Syrians have been one of the primary targets of the Islamic jihadists infesting Syria and butchering, murdering, and killing civilians. The Islamic State has made it clear that it is going after Christians because it intends to “conquer Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.”

Thus, one would expect that Christian Syrians would represent a significant portion of the Syrians being accepted into the U.S. as refugees. But that hasn’t been the case, and, according to Manion, the Obama administration has no “good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy.” Thus, we “remain in the dark as a humanitarian catastrophe continues.”

This is also relevant to the complaints of various states about the Obama administration settling Syrian refugees in them without providing any information about the people arriving. As Manion points out, “the good people of this country routinely welcome immigrants from all over the world. But in a democracy, good data is critical to public debate about national immigration policy.”

The courts and the Obama administration “demand high evidentiary burdens for states seeking to keep their citizens safe, and then prevent the states from obtaining that evidence” on these refugees. That creates a catch-22 for state governments.

So while the administration brings Syrian refugees into the country by the thousands, it is concealing basic information about those refugees behind a wall of government secrecy. This, despite the fact that the Syrian refugee crisis has been the catalyst for the infiltration of terrorists into Western Europe.

Yet the administration refuses to tell the American public or the states how it is making its decisions on who it is accepting for resettlement in the U.S., or even what steps it is taking to ensure we don’t have the same infiltration here.

Or why, in a religious civil war where Christians are one of the main targets of the Islamic terrorists engaging in indiscriminate slaughter, it is bringing in almost none of those victims of one of the worst human rights atrocities of the new century. (For more from the author of “Federal Judge Asks Why Obama Administration Isn’t Admitting Christian Syrian Refugees” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Syrian Christian Refugees to US Still in Line Behind Muslims, and Obama’s Just Fine With That

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Ten months ago, Syrian Christian refugees made up about 2.6 percent of the Syrian refugees being accepted into the United States. Today, they make up less than half of one percent.

According to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center, in the last year the United States has admitted only 56 Christians out of 11,157 Syrian refugees granted asylum. But according to the CIA’s World Factbook, Christians make up about 10 percent of Syria’s population. And given how Syrian Christians are being persecuted by ISIS and other jihadist groups, surely they represent at least 10 percent if not more of the would-be refugees from Syria.

So, why don’t Christians make up at at least 10 percent of the refugees admitted? And why hasn’t the Obama administration, apparently so eager to welcome Syrian refugees to our shores, corrected the imbalance? There are at least two possible explanations.

Two Explanations for the Missing Syrian Christian Refugees

Some argue that the U.S. intentionally picks Syrian Muslim refugees over Syrian Christian refugees. Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer writes, “This is social engineering, not humanitarian relief.”

Others argue that there is another, more practical reason. The refugees admitted to the U.S. are taken from Syrian refugee camps, and these camps are deadly places for Christians. Christians are regularly kidnapped, tortured, raped and endure all manner of atrocities, so they avoid the camps, said Jonathan Witt, managing editor of The Stream.

Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom concurs. “The Christians don’t reside in those camps, because it is too dangerous,” she said. “They are preyed upon by other residents from the Sunni community and there is infiltration by ISIS and criminal gangs.”

Also, Kiri Kankhwende, senior press officer for the United Kingdom-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), said United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) workers routinely show favoritism to Muslims over those Christians who do choose to live in the refugee camps. “There are reports of UNHCR local staff discriminating against Christians and dissuading them from registering for resettlement,” she said in a statement to the Assyrian International News Agency, adding that her organization “interviewed many Christian refugees who described experiencing threats, intimidation and physical attacks from Muslim refugees.”

Ten months ago, Witt commented, “President Obama should act, but standing up to bullies takes courage and resources. Finding the truly helpless in a system rigged against the helpless takes effort and commitment. There’s still time for Obama, working with Congress, to make that effort and that commitment.”

Ten months later, the Syrian Christians are still waiting for Obama to so much as lift a finger.

Without Refuge

Those who choose to stay in their villages aren’t safe, either. Islamist militants took over Maaloula, Syria, in late 2013 and occupied the town for about six months, CNN reported. Even now Christians in the town are afraid for their lives, and some residents who were kidnapped by ISIS are still missing. One resident, a nun named Sister Antoinette, told The Telegraph that her brother-in-law had been killed by rebel fighters and his son kidnapped. Another villager said that his neighbor was slaughtered in his home and the rebels had tried to force another man to convert to Islam. Sister Antoinette said the Syrian army failed them, leaving the town even as residents begged them to help. “They sold us because we are a minority,” she said. “They abandoned us because we are Christians.”

In June, 2016, jihadists slit the throat of a Christian man in front of his wife and mocked her, saying “Your Jesus did not come to save him from us,” reported Christians in Pakistan. Militants arrived in Maaloula at dawn and shouted that they were from the Al-Nusra Front and aimed to make life miserable for the Christians. The persecution of Christians in Syria has resulted in the enormous refugee crisis, according to Christians in Pakistan.

A Still Declining Number

Overall, the number of Christian Syrian refugees admitted to the United States per month has declined, even after Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement in March that ISIS was indeed committing genocide against minority groups, including Christians. “In my judgment, Daesh [ISIS] is responsible for genocide against groups in territory under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims,” Kerry said, adding that ISIS had committed “crimes against humanity” and “ethnic cleansing.”

The State Department, however, has not changed how it is operating to actively seek out Christian Syrians and give them asylum, leading Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to introduce legislation that would give persecuted religious minority groups priority. “We must not only recognize what’s happening as genocide, but also take action to relieve it,” Cotton said, adding that Kerry’s words were “just lip service on the issue of the genocide.”

Shea told Fox News that it’s not just about helping Christian refugees safely escape Syria, but the survival of Christianity in Syria itself. “This Christian community is dying,” she said. “I fear that there will be no Christians left when the dust settles.” (For more from the author of “Syrian Christian Refugees to US Still in Line Behind Muslims, and Obama’s Just Fine With That” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

As Obama Promised, 10,000 Syrian Refugees Have Been Admitted to the US

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Surprise, surprise: The State Department announced Monday that the Obama administration is not only going to meet President Obama’s goal of 10,000 Syrian refugees before day’s end, but that the actual number by the end of the year may actually be closer to 12,000, according to Joel Gehrke of the Washington Examiner.

“We will meet the 10,000 figure today, and I would fully expect that you will see additional Syrian refugees admitted into the United States between now and the end of the fiscal year,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby on Monday.

Kirby told reporters he “couldn’t predict” how many more refugees would be coming into the United States, but that the influx “would be roughly on the same pace that we have achieved over the course of the late spring and summer, which has been about 2,000 per month.”

Furthermore, according to CNS News, it is likely that fewer than 50 of the incoming refugees will come from Syria’s Christian population, which has experienced an internationally-recognized genocide at the hand of the Islamic State.

As Conservative Review noted in April, this milestone for the president’s unconstitutional refugee program was achieved thanks in large part to the “surge operation” processing center in Amman, Jordan, which allowed the administration to process thousands of applications every single month — meaning that the majority of the 10,000 were processed in the last few months alone.

This, naturally, has been happening in direct contradiction to the 18- to 24-month vetting process that the American people were promised when the crisis became major international news last year. If you like your national security and public order, you can keep it, right?

This points to one of the biggest problems with Obama’s refugee program — namely that it predicates itself on abuse of statute by treating people who aren’t persecuted religious or ethnic minorities as such (like the administration has also done with Central America), at the detriment to victims who have actually been targeted for their beliefs and/or ethnicity. While Christians made up about 10 percent of pre-war Syria, they’ve made up less than one half of 1 percent of the Obama administration’s admissions.

According to data from the administration’s illegal center in in Amman, just 47 of the 9,902 admitted to the U.S. before Monday were Christians. Members of other faiths include 14 displaced Yazidis (also genocide victims), four Jehovah’s Witnesses, and five listed as “other.”

Aside from the sweeping security concerns posed by bringing in migrants from a war-torn region with a known threat of infiltration — and the fact that it is virtually impossible to screen anyone coming out of the camps specifically for jihadist sympathies — this is simply a program that the American people never voted for and that President Obama has gone well outside of his constitutional authority to enforce. But even though the program has hit its first major benchmark, it isn’t too late to stop it going forward.

Congress currently has the opportunity to stop this by the end of September, when House Speaker Paul Ryan’s failure to bring the budget process back to regular order will once again necessitate a continuing resolution. In effect, the legislative branch will then be able to prohibit the State Department from operating the program.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely, given that it’s a difficult election year. And while stalwart conservatives will be willing to go to bat against this refugee program, most Republicans are going to try to hide from anything that might even remotely resemble controversy until after election day in November. (For more from the author of “As Obama Promised, 10,000 Syrian Refugees Have Been Admitted to the US” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

America NEVER Voted for This Type of Refugee Program

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How is it that nearly 50 percent of our refugee intake this year, and for most of the past decade, is Muslim when most of the people being persecuted are other religious minorities at the hands of Islamic factions? And how is it that so many Muslim refugees are being settled in an overwhelmingly Christian country when the wealthy Muslim countries of the Persian Gulf have declined to take in a single refugee?

This is especially salient given the fact that it costs 12 times as much to resettle refugees in America as it does to resettle them in neighboring Middle Eastern countries. Put another way, we can save 12 times the number of people caught in the Syrian civil war by paying to resettle them in Saudi Arabia and Qatar than in America.

According to a Pew analysis released today, 46 percent of all refugees admitted to this country for FY 2016 are Muslim. Using data from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center, Pew found that 28,957 Muslims were admitted as refugees for the first ten months of this fiscal year, slightly more than the 27,556 Christians.

religion Refugees

Here is the breakdown of Muslim refugees by country of origin:

Syria – 8,511

Burma – 2,554

Somalia – 7,234

Afghanistan – 1,948

Iraq – 6,071

Other countries – 2,639

These numbers do not include other categories that are similar to refugee status, such as Special Immigrant Visas (SIV). Several thousand SIV’s are admitted from Afghanistan and Iraq each year, and Congress is in the process of approving another 4,000 from Afghanistan in the upcoming defense authorization bill. While it is hard to ascertain the exact number of Muslim immigrants overall, given that other categories are not tracked by religion, Pew cites its own 2013 survey which pegs the number at roughly 100,000 per year. Several months ago, I cited Census data that indicates the number has likely grown to 150,000 per year.

As Europe has taught us, numbers matter when it comes to Middle Easter immigration, cultural assimilation, and security risks. Why would we repeat their mistakes? When did the American people ever vote for such radical social transformation? So many small towns and counties are being seeded with refugees from radically divergent cultures with values that are often hostile to our constitutional republican political values and enlightened views on human rights.

religion Refugees origin

It is quite evident that if the American people ever had a chance to vote on these policies — if Congress had to renew refugee resettlement policies every year —
this fundamental transformation would be rejected.

Moreover, the entire prevailing practice of bringing in predominantly Muslim refugees from the Middle East violates the spirit of the refugee statutes.

According to existing law, a “refugee” means “any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality … and who is unable or unwilling to return to … that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of … race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion …[.] [Section 1101(a)(42)(A) of Title 8, U.S. Code]. Refugee laws were designed to protect persecuted religious and ethnic minorities, such as Iranian Jews or pro-democracy dissidents in the former Soviet Union.

In Syria and other places in the Middle East, on the other hand, it is Muslims who are doing the persecuting. The laws were not designed to invite in any person caught in a sectarian civil war. Take Somalia, for example. It is almost exclusively a Muslim country. Much like Syria, it is a miserable place to live and is marred in endless civil wars. However, most of the people coming from these countries do not qualify as refugees since they are not personally being persecuted because of their religion, ethnicity, or political views.

What is really going on? Democrats are pushing a Muslim resettlement program on America in order to repeat the mistakes of Europe for their own political gain. It makes no sense from a security or cultural standpoint, or from a humanitarian standpoint to do so, especially when no pressure it being placed on Muslim countries to take in people with similar backgrounds. Rather, this social transformation is being perpetrated on our society without the proper input of the people and their elected representatives, as I note in chapter 8 of Stolen Sovereignty. Much of this is being done at the behest of private taxpayer-funded resettlement groups who have everything to benefit from illegally expanding the definition of a refugee. Given that there aren’t enough Christian or Jewish refugees to pay their salaries (because most have already been driven out of these countries), these groups felt compelled to transform refugee resettlement into a Muslim resettlement program — a program for persecuted minorities into a wholesale population transfer of countries engulfed in civil war.

As I write in Stolen Sovereignty:

[G]iven that the policies are all set by the private refugee resettlement agencies, which see their taxpayer-subsidized salaries and revenue grow commensurate to the number of refugees admitted to the United States their goals will always be to bring in as many refugees as possible – no matter the cost, security risk, the underlying need, or the prudence of settling them here rather than in their regions.

How does the scheme work? More from page 175 of my book:

As far back as 2000, David M. Robinson, a former acting director of the refugee bureau in the State Department, described the insidious power of the contractors as follows: The agencies form a single body [that] wields enormous influence over the Administration’s refugee admissions policy. It lobbies the hill effectively to increase the number of refugees admitted for permanent resettlement each year and at the same time provides overseas processing for admissions under contract to the State department. In fact, the federal government provides about ninety percent of its collective budget. If there is a conflict of interest, it is never mentioned.

If Republicans ever win back the White House, they must reform the Refugee Act of 1980 so that it expires every other fiscal year. As a result, our nation;s default position would be such that no refugees are resettled unless the people’s representatives pass a new law. Local governments also need to be empowered to veto any resettlement within their respective jurisdictions. For now, Republicans at least hold the power of the purse and when they return in September, they must cut off funding, at a minimum, for Syrian and Somali refugees. Obama already unilaterally expanded the refugee cap by 15,000 for the current fiscal year and is planning to increase it by another 15,000 — to at least 100,000 total in FY 2017. Congress can and must refuse to fund it.

It’s time vulnerable GOP senators get off the mat, uncurl from their fetal position, and hang this unpopular transformation around the necks of their opponents. If Democrats really want to shut the government down in order to follow in the footsteps of Germany, that is an election fight Republicans should embrace. (For more from the author of “America NEVER Voted for This Type of Refugee Program” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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Syrian Refugees Admitted to U.S. More Than Doubled in June; Only 3 per 1000 Were Christian

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The “surge” of Syrian refugee admissions first announced by the State Department last spring hit a new peak during June – 2,381 refugees, or more than double the number permitted to resettle in the United States in May.

Of them, eight (0.3 percent) are Christians and 2,364 (99.2 percent) are Sunni Muslims. The remainder comprise eight other Muslims, and one refugee giving no religious affiliation, according to State Department Refugee Processing Center data.

In comparison, 1,069 Syrian refugees were admitted during May, of whom two were Christians and 1,060 were Sunnis. The other seven were other Muslims.

With the more than doubling of the number of admissions between May and June, the administration now looks, after a sluggish start, to be on track to meet President Obama’s target of 10,000 Syrian refugee admissions during fiscal year 2016.

As of the end of June – and the number did not change on Friday, July 1 – the total number of Syrian refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S. stands at 5,186. With three months of FY 2016 to go, the administration will need to admit an average of 1,604 Syrian refugees each month in July, August and September, to hit the target. (Read more from “Syrian Refugees Admitted to U.S. More Than Doubled in June; 0.3 Percent Were Christians” HERE)

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Obama Administration Fails to Screen Syrian Refugees’ Social Media Accounts

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21076344700_8b92235c67_bThe Obama administration isn’t vetting the social media profiles of all Syrian refugees despite promises made last year after the San Bernardino terrorist attack, which exposed holes in the U.S. immigration screening process.

Concerns over refugee screening spurred Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, on Tuesday to cancel his state’s cooperation with federal authorities trying to resettle Syrians.

It was another blow to the administration’s attempts to reach President Obama’s goal of accepting 10,000 Syrians this fiscal year.

With a little more than five months left in the fiscal year, the government is 8,370 refugees short of its goal. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill say they fear the administration will reduce screening even more to speed up the process. To meet the president’s target, immigration officials would have to approve about 75 applications every workday for the rest of the fiscal year — nearly seven times the average so far.

“What is far more important than the arbitrary number of 10,000 is whether these refugees can be properly screened. If the answer is no, which is obviously the case given testimony by the FBI director and homeland security secretary, then we should not let a single one into the country,” said Rep. Vern Buchanan, Florida Republican. (Read more from “Obama Administration Fails to Screen Syrian Refugees’ Social Media Accounts” HERE)

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Report: U.N. Pressing for ‘Alternative’ Ways to Admit More Syrian Refugees to U.S.

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21238173466_b97a203635_bUnited Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is considering “alternative” ways to admit more Syrian refugees to the United States, beyond the current refugee resettlement program, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The legitimacy and transparency of these new ‘alternative pathways,’ aimed at admitting increasing numbers of Syrian refugees into the United States without calling them ‘refugees,’ remain to be seen,” CIS senior researcher Nayla Rush wrote in a report Monday. “They might even amount to convenient admissions detours at a time when the U.S. refugee resettlement program is under tight scrutiny.”

According to Rush, facing a target to resettle 480,000 Syrian refugees over the next three years, U.N. representatives have already been laying the rhetorical groundwork for pursuing such alternatives to resettlement. During a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution in February, Rush detailed, Beth Harris, Research Professor at Georgetown University and adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on humanitarian refugee policy noted the possibility of alternative paths.

Refugees and government officials are expecting this crisis to last 10 or 15 years. It’s time that we no longer work as business as usual … UNHCR next month [March 2016] is convening a meeting to look at what are being called “alternative safe pathways” for Syrian refugees. Maybe it’s hard for the U.S. to go from 2,000 to 200,000 refugees resettled in a year, but maybe there are ways we can ask our universities to offer scholarships to Syrian students. Maybe we can tweak some of our immigration policies to enable Syrian-Americans who have lived here to bring not only their kids and spouses but their uncles and their grandmothers. There may be ways that we could encourage Syrians to come to the U.S. without going through this laborious, time-consuming process of refugee resettlement.” (Emphasis Rush’s).

At the UNHCR March “high level” meeting in Geneva, Rush detailed, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi called for “alternative avenues” for countries to admit more Syrian refugees. (Read more from “Report: U.N. Pressing for ‘Alternative’ Ways to Admit More Syrian Refugees to U.S.” HERE)

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Syrian Refugees Have Not Been Vetted for National Security

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20643299043_fbca1fb8e9_bRep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) says that “a gaping hole in our national security apparatus” means that Syrian refugees “have not been vetted” before they are resettled in the United States.

“Of course the major problem there is that they have not been vetted in terms of national security,” Brat told CNSNews.com. “We just want to [send a] message to the American people that the issue has not yet been resolved.”

“ISIS has made it very clear in their documents that their intent and their goal is to bring radicalized folks from around the world in through the southern border and to use the refugee program to do so,” Brat warned . . .

The first of the Syrian refugees have begun to make their way to the U.S. in what the Obama administration has described as a “surge operation” to speed up the refugee resettlement process from the usual 18-to-24 months to just three months.

CNSNews has reported that of the 1,075 Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. since the Paris terror attack last November, 1,070 are Muslims and just four are Christians. (Read more from “Syrian Refugees Have Not Been Vetted for National Security” HERE)

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