Wall Street Journal
By Thomas Burton
September 20, 2015
Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for a sharp increase in
the number of Syrian refugees the U.S. accepts, up to 65,000 from the
current level of
between 5,000 and 10,000.
The
former secretary of state’s appeal to raise the cap on Syrian refugees
came as Secretary of State John Kerry announced in Berlin that the U.S.
will increase the number
of refugees it accepts to 100,000 in fiscal year 2017, up from 70,000 a
year currently.
“I
want the United States to lead the world,” she said during an
appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “The United States has
to do more,” she said. She said
the U.S. needs to react more vigorously to the stream of millions of
refugees from Syria pouring into Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and more
recently into Europe.
“We’re
facing the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II,” she
said. “I would like to see us move from what is a good start with
10,000, to 65,000, and begin
immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the people
that we would take in, looking to really emphasize some of those who are
most vulnerable,” she said.
She
added that the U.S. should be accepting “a lot of the persecuted
religious minorities, including Christians, and some who have been
brutalized, like the Yazidi women.”
Estimates
are that as many as four million Syrians have fled the violence, and
that as many as half the citizens of Syria have fled their homes amid
violence by the self-described
Islamic state, and civil uprisings against the regime of Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad.
Mrs.
Clinton also called on the United Nations to convene a conference in
which major nations would have to commit to taking in an allotted number
of people fleeing Syria.
She called on the U.N. secretary general to hold such a meeting and
“literally get people to commit, putting money in, helping the
front-line states, like Jordan and Turkey and Lebanon, who have absorbed
a lot of refugees. “Everybody,” she said, needs “to
make a contribution.”
Her
call for a significant rise in the U.S. commitment to refugees comes as
humanitarian groups, various U.S. senators and another presidential
candidate, former Maryland
Gov. Martin O’Malley, have called for such a sharp increase.
Earlier
this month, Mr. O’Malley called on the U.S. to take in 65,000 Syrian
refugees in response to the humanitarian crisis. “We are a nation of
immigrants and refugees,”
he said, “and we cannot forget what it means to struggle and toil and
yearn for a better life beyond the next horizon.”
In
her comments Sunday, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that the
administration’s efforts to train and equip fighters to oppose the Assad
regime haven’t worked. “We have a failed
program,” she said. “A lot of what I worried about has happened.” The
Obama administration is considering dropping the program, amid
disclosures by senior U.S. commanders that it has produced few fighters
on the battlefield.
No comments:
Post a Comment