Syria and Iraq War Refugees: Very Few Allowed Into U.S.
How do recent U.S. refugee admissions from the Middle East compare to peer countries?
October 15, 2015
1. More than 50,000 Iraqi refugees have fled the country in recent months, according to the United Nations.
2. Altogether, nearly 3.2 million Iraqis altogether have been displaced by ISIS from their homes since the start of 2014. A fifth are minor religious minorities.
3. In 2014, the United States re-settled 19,000 Iraqi refugees. The total since 2007 has been more than 120,000 – nearly a third of which already had U.S. family or employment ties.
4. Canada resettled more Syrian refugees in just 2014 and 2015 than the United States has over the course of Syria’s entire civil war.
5. The United States settled just 1,500 Syrian refugees from 2011 to 2015. Most of those were admitted only beginning in October 2014.
6. The UN reports that since the war began, more than 500,000 Syrians (of the 4.2 million Syrian refugees overall) have applied for asylum in Europe.
7. Sweden accepted around 10,000 Syrian asylum-seekers in 2013 alone. This followed Sweden’s recurring tradition of conflict resettlements since the 1970s.
8. The EU as a whole permanently resettled some 30,000 Syrian refugees from 2011 through 2014 and several thousand Iraqi refugees during the Iraq War.
9. Permanent resettlement will likely have to be extended to a much greater number in light of the surge of refugees arriving in 2015.
10. By contrast, in some U.S. states (such as South Carolina) where not one Syrian refugee has yet been resettled, opponents are already mobilizing the public against any admissions.
Sources: The Globalist Research Center, UNHCR, The European Union, CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera English