House passes bill to delay resettlement of Syrian refugees

The vote came after 27 governors, including Tennessee’s Bill Haslam, objected to President Barack Obama’s plans to accept 10,000 refugees from war-torn Syria during the next year.

“These are values we must never forget or relinquish, but we also have a responsibility to all of our citizens, and all those looking for safe harbor, to protect our shores”, Pearce said.

“We just can’t say, you know, ‘let everybody in, ‘ and we can’t say ‘reject everybody, ‘ because, you’re right, we lose the human faces on this”.

Testifying alongside the officials, Seth Jones, the director of the RAND corporation’s global security and defense policy center, said that while the US has a “long standing tradition” of providing sanctuary to refugees, “the Syrian battlefield is of a few concern because of the USA collection gap that exists compared to other battlefields”. In the meantime, lawmakers would be wise to follow our own Senator Dan Coats’ proposal and consider additional humanitarian aid that would allow the United States and our global partners to serve displaced persons near their home country.

“This is an urgent matter and that is why we’re dealing with this urgently”, Ryan said. Behind the scenes, Republicans are preparing several bills that are more drastic, aiming to close American borders to asylum seekers.

It wasn’t clear, though, that the fight would grow into the kind of battle waged often between conservatives and former Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who left Congress last month. Democrats are urging their Republican colleagues not to risk a government shutdown by tying the funding bill to the refugee issue.

The threat of national security has been much debated since governors began publicly refusing Syrian refugees.

Senate Democrats are trying to shift the focus to other issues regarding travelers from overseas, and Minority Leader Harry Reid predicted the bill would not be approved.

Next week Americans will sit around overflowing dinner tables and stuff themselves in celebration of how Native Americans greeted the Pilgrims, who came here as religious refugees from England. “All of us were shaken by the events … but the world community will rally together and terror will not prevail”. Forty-seven Democrats voted in favor of the measure, while just two Republicans voted against it along with 135 Democrats.

Obama said while attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Manila that he expects his plan to settle Syrian refugees will go through.

In a statement assuring a veto, the White House said the GOP bill would not improve Americans’ security. “We are smart enough to bring thousands of people into this country and make sure they are not going to hurt is”.

NY Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney told reporters that he thought the bill represented a simple improvement to the process. “And yet, what we did really achieves nothing”.

The mayor of Roanoke, Virginia cited Japanese internment as a reason for rejecting Syrian refugees; the leader of Tennessee state House Republicans called for jailing refugees; Syrians are being stopped in various locations and suspected of being terrorists; and polling now shows that most Americans oppose Syrian refugee resettlement.

Where’s Gov. Cuomo? New York’s a top target for terrorists, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation scores more arrests for ISIS terrorism plots here than any other state.

The bill still has to sail through the Senate before being sent to Obama.