US opposition to Syrian refugees sharply rises after Paris attacks

The most senior member of the house of representatives on Tuesday called for a pause in White House plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016, reports Taimur Khan.

Republican presidential candidate, senator Ted Cruz, pictured here, described the plan to resettle Syrian refugees in the United States as 'lunacy'. John Raoux/AP Photo

NEW YORK // Opposition to the planned settlement of Syrian refugees in the US has sharply increased after the Paris attacks this week, with mostly Republican governors of more than half the country’s states saying they will not accept any of the Syrians slated to arrive next year.

The most senior member of the US House on Tuesday called for a pause in White House plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016 while the screening process is reassessed and new legislation is drafted to address the refugee issue.

Paul Ryan joined fellow Republicans who have voiced opposition to the plan after ISIL’s terrorist attacks in Paris

Twenty-six Republicans and one Democrat have either said they would not admit any Syrian refugees or called for a review of the vetting process used by the State Department.

Two senators who are also Republican presidential candidates said on Monday they would introduce legislation that would legally block the resettlement plan, either by preventing them from getting visas or removing funding from the Obama administration’s plan.

The plan is “lunacy” senator Ted Cruz said on Monday. “We can’t roll the dice with the safety of Americans and bring in people for whom there is an unacceptable risk that they could be jihadists coming here to kill Americans,” he added.

Advocate groups condemned the moves by Republicans. “Syrian refugees are fleeing violence — including by ISIS — and are seeking safety for themselves and for their families,” said a statement by the International Rescue Committee. “We deplore the insinuation in the recent banning orders against Syrian refugees that either they are terrorists, or that it is impossible to separate them from those seeking to come here to commit terrorism.”

The US has admitted just more than 1,800 Syrian refugees since 2012, according to the State Department, but as refugees fleeing both ISIL extremists and Syrian military bombardment overwhelmed Europe this year, US President Barack Obama pledged to take in 10,000 Syrians in 2016.

The administration defended the policy on Tuesday, and officials involved in the refugee screening programme were scheduled to brief congress, governors and city mayors on the issue and correct “misimpressions”, a senior administration official said.

Other officials said that the vetting process has benefitted from the experience of screening more than 130,000 Iraqi refugees who have settled in the US since 2007. The process takes between 18 and 24 months for each refugee, the official said, though the administration is working to speed up the process.

The Syrian refugees will primarily come from pools of applicants to the UNHCR in Jordan and Turkey, and will face a tougher screening process called the “Syria enhanced review”, another senior official said. Biographical and biometric data will be checked against classified and unclassified Pentagon, FBI and counter-terrorism databases, and special analysts will also conduct in-person interviews with applicants, among other steps.

Half of the Syrian refugees in the US so far are children, the rest split evenly between men and women, only two per-cent of whom are military-age single males, an official said.

Republican critics have said that the scale of new Syrian refugees will be too vast for a proper vetting process to be carried out, but a third US official said that the national security apparatus already screens “vastly larger numbers than what we are talking about”.

Thirteen Democratic governors have said they will admit Syrian refugees, and other Democratic members of congress backed the plan.

Administration officials have said that state governors cannot block the federal refugee plan, a legal reality some of the Republican opponents recognised, but hoped their calls would increase political pressure nonetheless.

Some of the Republican presidential hopefuls also called on the administration to only allow Christian Syrians into the US as refugees. “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” Mr Cruz said.

Mr Obama, speaking after the G20 meeting in Istanbul on Monday slammed the Republican posturing of Mr Cruz, whose father was a Cuban refugee.

“When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution — that’s shameful,” Mr Obama said.