The Obama administration announced on Thursday that the US can accept up to 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016, a significant increase from the limit of 1,500 migrants cleared to resettle in the US more than four years ago when civil war broke out in Syria.
However, the White House said the refugees the US would be accepting are those who have already applied for clearance to enter the US, not the thousands flooding Europe, according to Fox News.
The UN refugee agency has referred about 17,000 Syrians to the US for resettlement. About 1,500 are already in the US, while another 300 are expected to gain entry this month. This leaves 15,000 other Syrians waiting for the clearance process to finish, according to the State Department.
Meanwhile, Republican Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz said he is opposed to the acceptance of more Syrian refugees in the US, warning that Muslim terrorists may be posing as Syrian "refugees" to infiltrate the US, according to Charisma News.
Moreover, Cruz said moving the Syrian refugees to the US "doesn't make sense."
"In terms of settling the migrants, if the ultimate goal is to return them to their homes—which I believe it should be—it doesn't make sense from a logistical or a security standpoint to move large numbers of them to far-off countries like the United States," he said.
"Our immediate role should be to support our regional allies who are on the front lines through public and private assistance to the international organisations who are best poised to administer aid," he added.
Cruz said the US should not feel guilty about the refugee crisis. "The blame should be laid squarely at the door of the vicious, radical Islamism that is tearing communities apart from Libya to Syria, and Iraq, creating the terrible circumstances that are causing the migrants to flee their homes," he said. "The failure of the United States has been an unwillingness to name and confront this threat."
Cruz also pinned the blame for the crisis on Iran and its proxies in the Middle East. "The regime in Tehran and their proxies may be Shiite and ISIS and its affiliates Sunni, but they are the cause of this problem. They are branches of the same poisonous tree—radical Islamism," he said.
Cruz said the crisis will only end when American foreign policy leaders "recognise the threat from this savage, twisted totalitarian ideology and develop a coherent strategy to combat it."
Fellow senator and also GOP presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham disagreed with Cruz, saying admitting more Muslims into the United States is "in our national security interests."
Since humanitarian and refugee organisations "are overwhelmed," the US must give "our fair share," Graham said.
Two other Republican bets—Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio—agreed with Graham. "We're a country that has a noble tradition of accepting refugees," Bush told Fox and Friends today.
"We've always been a country that has been willing to accept people who have been displaced," Rubio, for his part, said.
Leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is also in favour of accepting refugees from Syria, although not very enthusiastically. "I think we have to," he replied when asked.
Earlier he asserted that the refugee crisis is Europe's problem, not America's. "We have to fix our own country. Now, Europe is handling it," he said.
