US Lawmakers Vote to Curb Syrian Refugees Entering Country

President Barack Obama has said he will veto the legislation.

Republican leaders, eager to respond quickly to Friday’s terror attacks in Paris, had described the bill as a middle-ground approach.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, is now blocking progress on a spending bill for transportation and housing programs that is currently on the floor because he is insisting on getting a vote on his amendment that is aimed at preventing Syrian refugees from entering the United States.

“This is common sense”. “If the intelligence and law-enforcement community can not certify that a person presents no threat, then they should not be allowed in”.

So this, and not the fact that MI has a Republican governor, is why the state ranks relatively high in refugee resettlement, he said.

Former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman Fergus Cullen said there is “a little bit of ugliness” around the refugee debate.

Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard tells a House Judiciary Committee panel that refugees face intensive screening by several federal intelligence, security and law enforcement agencies, including the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center.

The FBI director would also need to confirm that a background investigation, separate from the Homeland Security screening, had been conducted on each refugee. Although Syrians tend to be heavily documented, Democrats questioned how that could be accomplished.

“They send them to the Republicans, not to the Democrats, you know, because they know the problems”, Trump said on November 17, 2015. One bill would force Americans who join overseas terrorist groups to renounce their US citizenship; a second would “immediately bar refugees” from any country “including Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen, that contains territory substantially controlled by a foreign terrorist organization”, with exceptions for groups that are victims of genocide, Cruz’s office said. With Democrats, however, 46 percent would continue the program while 36 percent would shut it down. Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren of California and Bennie Thompson of MS said in a joint statement.

The administration announced that goal earlier in the fall after a photograph of a little Syrian boy washed up on a beach sparked calls for compassion, including from a few congressional Republicans. Sen.

“And now, suddenly, they’re able to rush in, in a day or two, to solve the threat of widows and orphans and others who are fleeing a war-torn land, and that’s their most constructive contribution to the effort against (the Islamic State)?” The Obama administration said about half that group is children, while about 2.5 percent are people over the age of 60 and roughly 2 percent are single men of combat age. “That doesn’t sound right to me”. Similarly, World War I turned domestic attitudes about German-Americans from good neighbors to untrustworthy immigrants.

Republicans do not have the votes to override Mr Obama’s veto, but say that their affirmative vote in symbolic.

“To come to the USA, you go through a very troublesome process, but it’s justified because these agencies… are doing their job and doing it very meticulously”, he said, adding that he is “grateful for America, regardless of how long it took” to get here. Many of them are considering pushing the issue in a massive spending bill due by December 11 – a measure that if vetoed would lead to a government shutdown.