US to resettle 5,000 additional refugees but advocacy groups call for more action

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/09/us-resettle-more-refugee-advocacy-groups

Version 0 of 1.

The Obama administration is planning to increase the number of refugees it resettles by 5,000 people, but advocacy organizations have warned that the number is not enough to relieve the migration crisis triggered by the Syrian civil war.

A senior State Department official told reporters on a conference call on Wednesday that secretary of state John Kerry and other administration officials had met with members of Congress to ask them to increase the number of refugees the US would accept for resettlement from a ceiling of 70,000 each year.

The State Department declined to specify how many additional refugees it had asked for, but the Associated Press, citing administration and congressional sources, reported that the figure under discussion was 5,000 additional refuges, a fraction of whom would be from Syria.

Related: 'Everyone wants to leave': death of hope drives young Syrians to Europe

“The thinking all along this year was that we could move to increasing it, some sort of a modest increase,” the State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on the conference call. “Given what’s going on in the world today, there’s a lot of people outside the administration, and inside the administration too, who would like to increase it significantly.

“The question becomes will Congress support that? Can we move this process that we have – it doesn’t turn on a dime – to start bringing larger numbers sooner? That’s hard.”

Refugee advocacy groups, however, said the refugee crisis had grown sufficiently urgent that it was time for the US to accept tens of thousands of additional refugees.

Shannon Scribner, humanitarian policy manager at Oxfam America, said the organization has been pushing for the US to resettle 70,000 Syrian refugees.

“The expectation that Oxfam would have, and would hope for, is that the ceiling would be much higher” than an additional 5,000 refugees, Scribner said. “Because in addition to the Syrian refugees that have to be resettled, we also need to resettle people from other parts of the world as well.

“So if that is a 5,000 increase over the 70,000, that would not be enough to meet the needs of refugees from around the world.”

Earlier this month, International Rescue Committee president David Miliband called on the US government to resettle 65,000 Syrian refugees before the end of 2016.

“We do have the capacity to do this; we know how to do it in the United States,” Anna Greene, IRC’s director of policy and advocacy for US programs, told the Guardian last week.

The top three source countries for refugees accepted for resettlement in the US are Burma, Iraq and Somalia, according to the State Department.

One stumbling block to the US accepting additional refugees is stringent security checks put in place after 9/11. Processing a new refugee case takes from 18 to 24 months between referral and arrival, according to the State Department.

As it slowly chooses whom to resettle, the US faces little of the pressure felt by potential host countries in Europe, where asylum seekers from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere arrive on foot or by boat across the Mediterranean.

“We’ve all along been planning to bring more to the United States,” the state department official said. “But the number that we bring under this program is careful and by design. And what’s happening in Europe is that people are walking out, and walking to Europe, and getting there on their own energies and showing up.”

Germany has said it expects 800,000 refugees to arrive this year. British prime minister David Cameron has promised to take in 20,000 refugees. Near the end of last year, Lebanon, a country the size of Connecticut, took in 10,000 Syrian refugees a day.