On Nov. 19, the House of Representatives passed a bill that, if passed by the Senate, won’t allow Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the country until national security says they are not a security risk. The vote was passed 289-137. Because of the majority vote, it could override President Obama’s veto power. On whitehouse.gov, Obama announced a plan to bring in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. next year. The plan is to have each refugee go through high-level security checks, and priority will be given to what the U.S. government defines as most vulnerable, including survivors of violence and torture, those with severe medical conditions and women and children. The following statements were made by presidential candidates regarding the refugee debate.
- “Turning away orphans, applying a religious test, discriminating against Muslims, slamming the door on every Syrian refugee ― that is just not who we are…It would be cruel irony, indeed, if ISIS can force families from their homes and then also prevent them from ever finding new ones.”—Hillary Clinton, via CNN
- “The United States honestly, sadly, cannot relax our entrance criteria. We are having to be very careful about who we let enter this country from these war-torn regions to ensure that terrorists are not coming here. I think the Europeans need to continue to step up here both in terms of the amount of money they provide for humanitarian relief. They have not done as much as the United States has done on that front.”—Carly Fiorina, via NPR
- “I was the first person on this stage to say that we should accept the 65,000 Syrian refugees that were fleeing the sort of murder of ISIL, and I believe that that needs to be done with proper screening.” –Martin O’Malley, via The New York Times
- “What the magic number is, I don’t know. Because we don’t know the extent of the problem. But I certainly think that the United States should take its full responsibility in helping refugees.”—Bernie Sanders, via The New York Times
- “But we have so many problems of our own…We have border problems that are big league that I exposed…We have so many problems to solve…We have to fix our own country. Now, Europe is handling it. Germany has been very generous so far, which is very surprising to me, to be honest with you. But there’s a huge problem, and we should help as much as possible, but we do have to fix our own country.”—Donald Trump, via CBS news
- “That’s [inadequate background checks are] one of the reasons why I said we won’t be able to take more refugees. It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s that we can’t. Because there’s no way to background check someone that’s coming from Syria. Who do you call and do a background check on them.”—Marco Rubio, via ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”
- “If we’re going to be bringing 200,000 people over here from that region ― if I were one of the leaders of the global jihadist movement, and I didn’t infiltrate that group of people with my people, that would be almost malpractice.” –Ben Carson, via The Washington Post
- “People talk about the large influx of people leaving the Middle East, going to Europe and some of them wanting to go to the United States, that it may not be a benign thing to accept so many tens of thousands of people coming from the Middle East because many of them actually wish us harm.” – Rand Paul, via The Boston Globe
- “The one thing I’ve learned from Paris is that we need to have a timeout on bringing refugees into this country until we have a system that we think will work.”—Lindsey Graham, via The New York Times
- “There should be really thorough screening [of refugees coming to the U.S.], and we should focus on creating safe havens for refugees in Syria rather than bringing them all the way across to the United States.”—Jeb Bush, via The Huffington Post
- “No, we shouldn’t be taking on any more Syrian refugees right now. In the last year, America has received almost 70,000 refugees, of which nearly 2,000 are from Syria. We’ve spent something like $4 billion in humanitarian relief in terms of helping the situation in Syria. So we’re doing more than any other country in the world, and it’s got to be clear that the problem that has to be addressed is not the refugee issue ― that’s a symptom. The real problem is this administration fails to deal with taking on ISIS.”—Scott Walker, via NPR
- “Our immediate role should be to support our regional allies who are on the front lines through public and private assistance to the international organizations who are best poised to administer aid…In terms of settling the migrants, if the ultimate goal is to return them to their homes, which I believe it should be, it doesn’t make sense from a logistical or a security standpoint to move large numbers of them to far-off countries like the United States. Ultimately, we need to address the cause of this crisis or we will just have more and more migrants displaced.”—Ted Cruz, via CBS News
- “I’d sit down with [our allies] and say let’s look at what the flow of the refugees is going to be and the United States should play their role in it along with other allies.”—Chris Christie, via NPR
