The Number of Syrian Refugees Coming to the US Just Shot Up

After a slow start to the resettlement program, there’s been a surge.

<a href="http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/u-s-department-of-homeland-security-logo-gm177031426-20132279">VIPDesignUSA</a>/iStock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


After a slow start, the Obama Administration is more than halfway to its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees by the end of September. The number of Syrian refugees who have resettled in the United States rose significantly in May and June, bringing the total to 5,186 since October 2015. If refugees continue to be processed and admitted at the current rate, the target could be met by the end of the summer.

Syrian refugees resettled in United States

In the first seven months after Secretary of State John Kerry announced the plan to bring in 10,000 Syrian refugees last September, only a few hundred trickled in each month. After six months, fewer than 1,300 had entered the country. In May, the nonprofit Human Rights First issued a statement saying the United States was “alarmingly behind” in meeting its goal. Twenty-seven Senate Democrats wrote to President Obama saying they were “deeply concerned” by the slow pace of resettlement, noting that Canada had already admitted more than 26,000 Syrians.

However, by the time the senators criticized the delay, efforts to speed up refugee screening were already under way. The State Department and Department of Homeland Security worked to increase their staffing levels in Jordan, which currently hosts about 660,000 Syrian refugees. Normally, DHS sends teams of 13 to Amman every few months. But from February to April, it sent 40-person teams to interview and fingerprint asylum seekers. The State Department also rented a facility in Amman to accommodate extra staff members.

At the same time, smaller efforts were underway in Turkey and Lebanon, which have taken in 2.7 million and more than 1 million Syrians, respectively. DHS has been sending teams of 15 to 20 people to Turkey. In Lebanon, the United States resumed screening asylum seekers after a two-year hiatus. However, the refugee screening efforts have been notoriously slow. For security reasons, US government employees in Lebanon must live and work inside the embassy, which can only accommodate five DHS staff at a time.

Still, the overall pace of screening efforts has been on the rise. Before the DHS staffing surge, 3,500 Syrians were interviewed between October and December. Between January and March, more than 9,000 Syrians were interviewed. A spokesman for the State Department told Mother Jones that he expects the rate of arrivals to increase through the end of this fiscal year.

However, even if the United States meets its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees, that will help only two percent of the total number of Syrians in need of resettlement. Oxfam has estimated that based on the size of its economy, the United States should accept 160,000 Syrian refugees. If the United States can meet its moderate goal of accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees this year, it may signal that the administration will raise the threshold for the rest of 2016 and 2017.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate