The U.S. ambassador to Jordan, Alice Wells, announced on Sunday that the 10,000th Syrian refugee will arrive in the U.S. this week, meeting the goal set by the Obama administration for its year-old resettlement program. The Associated Press reports that the number will be reached after a group of several hundred Syrian refugees leave Jordan for America sometime in the next day, after having clearing the U.S. screening process. The comprehensiveness of that process has been repeatedly called into question by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others who oppose the immigration of Muslims, but refugees already face the highest level of security checks of anyone who is allowed to travel to the U.S, and Syrian refugees face even more scrutiny, on top of that, than any other group.
NPR reported earlier this month that half of the Syrian refugees accepted into the U.S. over this period have been under the age of 18, and the USCIS said that hundreds of Syrians have been denied refugee status after failing background checks. In addition, there is no evidence that terrorists are able to make it through the USCIS screening process.
While the 10,000 refugees resettled in the U.S. is 25 times more than the number accepted in the previous fiscal year, they still represent only a fraction of the more than 5 million people who are estimated to have been displaced by the five-year-old Syrian conflict. Some 660,000 refugees live in Jordan alone, and considering the violent ongoing disaster that is still most of Syria, no one will be going home anytime soon.
