Officials: No, states can't reject Syrian refugees
Pamela Constable · 3:52 PM
Several states shut doors to Syrian refugees
More than a dozen governors have said in the wake of the Paris attacks that they do not want their states to accept Syrian refugees.
But officials at several American refugee resettlement agencies said Monday that state and local officials cannot physically prevent refugees from being resettled in their areas. They said that all refugees who arrive in the United States must first be approved for legal entry by the federal government after a lengthy screening process and that their housing arrangements are made through long-term contracts and relationships with city, county and state governments.
“Governors and state officials do not have the capability to prevent a refugee who is here and admitted lawfully to the U.S. from residing in their state. It is not something they can do,” said Lucy Carrigan, a spokeswoman for the International Rescue Committee. “There is a close collaboration with governors and mayors and community leaders about the capacity of the area for refugees and where they can go, but once they have legal status, you cannot impede their transit between different states.”
A total of about 1,900 Syrian refugees have been resettled in the United States in the past two years, all of them brought directly from camps and settlements in countries surrounding Syria. Carrigan and others said none of them had been part of the wave of migrants coming through Europe. The 1,900 are a tiny fraction of the 200,000 living near Syria who have been approved for resettlement in the United States. The International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit based in New York and one of several that resettle refugees after they have been given legal status in the U.S., has resettled about 250 of these Syrian refugees.
Asked about declarations being made by some state governors since the Paris attacks that they would not allow Syrian refugees in their states, Carrigan said this was the result of “misinformation and lack of information about the process. Every refuges goes through extremely rigorous security screening to get here, and it takes a long time.”
One former resettlement agency official, who asked not to be named, said there have been instances when some state governors declared they would not accept any more refugees, including some from Iraq, and that in those cases the agencies found them housing in a more welcoming region. “It has happened before,” the former official said.
Carrigan said her agency hopes that Americans will “look at what happened in Paris and recognize that this kind of terrorism is exactly what the Syrian refugees are fleeing. They are the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable.”
Matthew Soerens, president of World Relief, noted that refugees sent to the U.S. for resettlement are “completely different” from those “showing up in huge numbers at the borders of Europe.”
They have been vetted by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and have to wait at least 18 months – sometimes years — before being admitted.
“It would be very short-sighted for a terrorist who wanted to do harm to the U.S. to try and come through a refugee resettlement program,” Soerens said. “They wouldn’t make it in.”
Soerens, who is based in Chicago, said he disagreed strongly with the position of Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, who announced Monday that the state would suspend accepting new refugees from Syria. Soerens said that Chicago has one of the largest Syrian-American communities in the U.S., making it a logical place to resettle new refugees.
If they were sent to next-door Wisconsin instead, he said,” they would just move to Chicago to be with their relatives and friends,” he said. “It would be ludicrous to put up a border between Wisconsin and Illinois, and it would be a tragedy to stop the welcoming process from churches and communities here.”
This post has been updated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews-live/liveblog/live-updates-attacks-in-paris/#829bbce5-2386-4949-afe8-e7cf8b648f97
