Senate judiciary immigration subcommittee chair Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said that refugees seeking asylum in Europe in record numbers aren’t actually moving there to flee war.
At a hearing Thursday afternoon, Sessions accused up to 75 percent of migrants of being motivated by financial concerns.
“It has also been reported that as many as three in four of those seeking entry into Europe are not refugees from Syria, but economic migrants, many from many different countries,” he said in his opening statement.
While Sessions did not cite his source during the speech, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees’ most recent findings show that the overwhelming majority of the 520,957 refugees that have already crossed the Mediterranean Sea this year have fled countries beset by conflict.
Fifty-five percent come from Syria, UNHCR said. The next largest migrant cohort, at 14 percent, has come from Afghanistan—another country embattled by war; some of which has been overseen by Sen. Sessions, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The remaining 31 percent have traveled from Eritrea, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan—all countries that are currently playing host, at least partially, to significant conflicts or oppressive governments.
In a separate report published in early July, UNHCR noted at the time that “more than 85 per cent of those arriving in Greece are from countries experiencing war and conflict, principally Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.”
When asked by email about the source for Sessions’ claim, a press aide, Stephen Miller, replied that the senator “read directly from the source in his opening statement.”
The only verifiable source mentioned by Sessions in relation to his claim about economic migrants posing as asylum seekers in Europe, however, was a Sept. 23 Washington Post article that contains anecdotes of economic migrants pretending to be Syrian war refugees. The article offers no statistics on the prevalence of false asylum seekers.
When this was pointed out by The Sentinel, Miller replied with two links: one to a Daily Mail article, the other to a Wall Street Journal article citing an unsourced claim made by Italian far-right xenophobic politician, Northern League leader Matteo Salvini.
The Daily Mail report was no less problematic, according to some observers. It concluded that an analysis of EU data showed 80 percent of all asylum seekers in Europe weren’t from Syria. The conclusion was roundly panned by The Guardian, which said it lumped intra-European migration data with figures about arrivals from outside of the continent. The Guardian also said the study contained too narrow a time frame and too significant of a faulty assumption–that Syria is the only current source of legitimate war-weary refugees—to be taken seriously in any capacity.
A critic of the Obama administration’s plans to accept at least 35,000 additional refugees during the next two fiscal years—10,000 of them from Syria—Sessions made an identical claim in a Sept. 21 press release.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) echoed some of Sessions’ concerns about the legitimacy of asylum claims, in a statement for the record submitted before the hearing. But while Grassley suggested that some victims of decades-long conflicts are not worthy of asylum, he, at least, cited a source.
“The International Organization for Migration reports that only 40% of those showing up at Europe’s borders are Syrians. Some suggest that people from Iraq, Afghanistan, and sub-Saharan Africa are fleeing their homelands and taking advantage of the crisis,” he said.
In his opening statement, Sessions’ counterpart, the subcommittee’s ranking member, Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), appeared far from amused by the Republican’s claims.
“More than half of Syria’s 23 million people have been forced from their homes. More than 4 million Syrians are registered as refugees, including almost 2 million children. More than 10,000 Syrian children have been killed, thousands are unaccompanied and separated from their parents,” Durbin said. “They’re not economic migrants, they’re refugees fleeing for their lives.”
UPDATE: This story now contains a second response from Sen. Sessions’ office that was received by The Sentinel after publication–a clarification about the origins of his claims.
