What Is Known About the Syrian Passport Found at the Paris Attacks

The process is restrictive – in the four years since Syria’s civil war started, about 2,000 Syrians have been admitted – and expensive.

“The difference is, through the years, the world’s conflicts change and, consequently, the waves of refugees needing resettlement… always is changing and shifting”, she said. “Now Obama’s sending Syrian refugees to Louisiana…John Bel Edwards has pledged to work with Obama”.

A second senior official, again speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the United States already screens millions of travellers and “can certainly scale” the relatively smaller number of Syrian refugees.

In Europe, officials from Poland’s new conservative government used the attacks as a pretext to reject the European Union’s plan to distribute refugees more equitably among member states.

But early reports that one attacker entered Europe on a refugee boat to Greece, with a Syrian passport (now believed to be fake), have prompted an immediate and fierce backlash from Republicans across the U.S.

As of Tuesday, about half of the governors, all but one of them Republicans, had promised to block Syrian refugees from being resettled in their states, a position that shames America’s long tradition of offering a haven for the desperate. Still others think other nations should help shoulder the responsibility for the Syrian refugee crisis.

“I am now requesting that the president and the federal government cease sending refugees from Syria to North Carolina until we are thoroughly satisfied with the effectiveness of the federal background checks and security checks on such refugees entering our country”, McCrory said at a press conference in Charlotte. “Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values”. We can not allow terrorists to seep through a porous refugee screening process to kill Americans. “There is no one who has ever suggested … that we should be bringing refugees from Syria or anywhere into the country without carrying out thorough, effective security screenings”.

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson speaks during a campaign rally at the Henderson Pavilion in Henderson, Nevada, on Sunday. “We can and must do both”.

“Filling your country up with people who have a completely different belief system… and expecting they won’t rise up against their benefactor is foolish”, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, a leading immigration hardliner, said in an interview. Even if the USA or Europe bars migrants, Skopec says, Syrians are going to continue to flee barrel bombs and fighting at home.

And, in the wake of the Paris attacks, opponents of the scheme argue that speeding arrivals as Obama has promised will lead to a loosening of security standards – a claim dismissed by the administration’s experts.

“It’s really hard to see exactly what this is other than political”, Nezer said.

“It therefore remains to be determined whether it was a refugee sent by IS to Europe to carry out an attack, or whether it is a cunning chess move by the IS, which laid this trail in order to scare people”, the minister said.

Reducing or cutting admissions because of fear, Mitchell added, “is only feeding into what the attackers want“.