NY Gov. Cuomo declares support for accepting Syrian refugees

President Obama would like the United States to admit 10,000 refugees over the next year, he said in September.

The co-ordinated bomb and gun attacks at a number of sites in Paris on Friday night killed 129 people.

Yet despite GOP hopes that Democrats would support the bill in large numbers, Democratic leaders turned against it Wednesday, complaining of changes to the legislation they said would have the practical effect of keeping refugees out of the USA entirely.

A non-governmental resettlement agency had planned to send the family of three, selected from a United Nations refugee camp in the Middle East and vetted by USA security agencies, to start a new life in Indianapolis.

We are the country of refuge.

This is a possibility that must be taken into account, but there are protocols and an intensive vetting process to ensure that anyone coming in from Syria is not a threat to the country. But by Tuesday afternoon, McCrory was one of 30 governors – nearly all Republicans – who said they want to close the door on future Syrian refugees.

“Article 6 in the United States Constitution clearly states that Foreign Policy, which this would be a part of, is exclusively governed by the federal government”, Democratic Representative of the 91st District in Eau Claire, Dana Wachs says. The fact that such decisions are made at the federal level has not prevented the governors from indulging the worst fears of their constituents. As Stephen Legomsky, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and former Obama administration official, told USA Today, “The one thing I feel very comfortable saying is there is absolutely no constitutional power for a state to exclude anyone from its territories”.

House Speaker Paul Ryan yesterday called for a pause in Syrian refugees coming to the United States in the wake of the Paris attacks and said the House will vote on the issue this week. There’s not a high likelihood that they would ever come here.

The country has accepted fewer than 2,000 of the millions who have fled Syria since the beginning of the war in 2011.

But the difference between Chicago and Paris, the United States and France or Belgium, is that the open borders of Europe make it much more hard to screen refugees for terrorists, whereas the system we have in place requires a long and tedious vetting process before any refugee is allowed in.

“They can refuse to spend state money on extra programs for refugees in general”, said Roederer.

No process is foolproof.