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According to the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, the United States has an exceptional history of welcoming refugees.
Since 1975, it has welcomed more than three million refugees for resettlement from all over the world. Nevertheless, despite the efforts of the United States and 29 other countries that accept refugees for resettlement, less than one percent of the world’s 21.3 million refugees are resettled.
The United States conducts its own vetting process to decide which refugees it will accept, and this is in addition to the screening UNHCR does on the refugees. The entire process is conducted abroad. It can take up to two years to complete, but the processing time has been severely reduced on at least one occasion.
The United States reduced the processing time to three months last year to meet President Barack Obama’s goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees here by September 30.
And the value of security screening depends on the availability of information from a refugee’s country.
The threat of terrorism has caused many people to become suspicious of the refugees. In the minds of many Europeans, for instance, the current refugee crisis and the terrorism in the European Union are very much related to one another.
Read more at --
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blo...orthern-border
Published initially on The Hill.
About the author
Nolan Rappaport was detailed to the House Judiciary Committee as an Executive Branch Immigration Law Expert for three years; he subsequently served as the immigration counsel for the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims for four years. Prior to working on the Judiciary Committee, he wrote decisions for the Board of Immigration Appeals for 20 years. He also has been a policy advisor for the DHS Office of Information Sharing and Collaboration under a contract with TKC Communications, and he has been in private practice as an immigration lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson.
This ignores the fact that both countries have had an intensive screening process, taking up to two years on the US side...
Roger seems to be saying that there must be information from within Syria or our government would not take two years doing background screening on Syrian refugees. That reminds me of the joke about the little boy searching through piles of crap in his backyard. When asked what he was looking for, he said, "With all this horse ****, there must be a pony somewhere."
We don't have an embassy in Syria, and Obama didn't start the two year screening process until the FBI director, the director of national intelligence, and the DHS secretary told the public that they had no one in Syria and therefore no access to information from within that country. Ordinarily, such information is gathered through our embassy in the foreign country, and we don't have an embassy in Syria.
My guess is that Obama thought the American public would react the way Roger has to the two year screening process. Must be a pony in there somewhere.
Nolan Rappaport
Nolan Rappaport
We are not talking about a president to whom facts matter. If Trump wants the public to believe that Canada is full of "unvetted" Syrian refugee terrorists who are only waiting to set off mushroom clouds over the US at their earliest opportunity, truth and reality are not going to stop him.
What is the point of picking at and sniping away at alleged shortcomings in screening processes, which, by nature can never be perfect? And suppose they were perfect? How can anyone be sure that a given refugee won't have children or grandchildren who might one day be radicalized?
We are talking about banning people because of race and religion here, not national security, which is just a pretext. America once banned Jewish refugees from Hitler too, based on imaginary fears that they would be "spies" and "saboteurs", and thereby adding to the Holocaust toll of victims.
Are we repeating that history now?
And is Trump looking for an excuse to invade Canada, just as he recently threatened to send troops into Mexico? If that is what he wants to do, he will find an excuse, Syrian refugees or no.
Many, many years ago, an acquaintance of mine who happened to be an East European refugee (having defected from his then Communist country) told me about an old proverb from his country:
"If someone wants to beat a dog, he can always find a stick."
Of course, I am not referring to refugees or anyone else as dogs, here. I am only talking about the stick.
Roger Algase
Attorney at Law