The Obama administration announced Thursday that next fiscal year the US will be accepting at least 10,000 Syrian refugees.
The cohort will be derived from the overall number of refugees admitted by the US in the 12 months after Oct. 1, State Department Spokesperson John Kirby said.
The sum of all refugees slated to be admitted could also increase. The AP reported on Wednesday that the US will plan on accepting 75,000 refugees next fiscal year. This year, it took in about 70,000. Kirby noted that the final overall number for next year has not yet been set.
Republicans in Congress could try to stop this effort. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told the AP that he had concerns the White House is “opening the floodgates and using emergency authority to go above what they proposed to Congress in today’s consultation.”
Either way, the number of Syrian refugees that the administration wants to admit next year pales in comparison to the amount already welcomed by some Western European countries. Sweden and Germany have already admitted about 65,000 and 10,000. Germany expects to offer entry to 800,000 refugees this year, and the country’s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said Tuesday it could take “half a million for several years.”
Since the conflict broke out in 2011, the US has only given refuge to 1,300 Syrians.
The minimum number of Syrians the US expects to admit next year is also dwarfed by those who fled America’s oldest foreign war for Europe this year alone. The UN High Commissioner on Refugees said that more than 16,000 Afghans have tried to seek refuge in Europe via boat in the first six months of 2015.
In 2014, according to the UNHCR, only 277 Afghans applied for asylum in the US. The same year, almost 60,000 Afghans sought refuge in over 44 industrialized countries.
According to the most recently updated Department of Homeland Security data, the US accepted fewer than 774 asylees and refugees from Afghanistan in 2013.
On Thursday, Kirby said the US takes many approaches to assisting refugees beyond resettlement, and said that the vast number of Syrian refugees currently in Lebanon and Turkey shows how many hope to return home (similarly, there are 2.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and 1 million in Iran).
He also defended the US record on granting asylum after one reporter described the number announced Thursday as a “paltry” increase on a prior proposal to accept up to 8,000 Syrians next year.
“No other country admits more refugees from around the world than the United States,” Kirby responded. “No other country is more generous about accepting refugees for resettlement than this one,” he also said.
In a background briefing on Wednesday, however, one senior State Department official suggested that Americans’ attitude to accepting refugees changed dramatically in the War on Terror era.
“The program really got started in the ’70s during the Vietnam era. And the high point around that time – it went from 150,000 to 200,000, so much higher than it is today,” the official said. “But then it’s gone up and down over time and it completely dropped and stopped after September 11th, 2001.”
In 2013, the US had the 22nd lowest refugee per capita population in the 34-member strong Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. There were about 830 refugees per million residents in all OECD countries, and 210 in the US.
