According to Global Citizen, only an astonishing 1 percent of the 5 million refugees that have fled Syria since 2011 have been resettled in the United States in Canada.
This year, the wave of Syrian refugees dwindled to an even smaller number. In 2018, according to the State Department statistics, only 11 Syrian refugees have been resettled in the United States.
Considering it is already mid-April, this number means there has been a serious decline since last year. In 2017, the United States admitted 3,024 refugees from Syria. To put the numbers into perspective, according to NPR, 790 Syrian refugees were admitted into the US by mid-April of 2017—that is 779 more refugees than this year.
If the United States continues their acceptance of Syrian refugees at the current rate, less than 40 refugees will be admitted in 2018.
In comparison, under the Obama administration, in 2016 over 15,000 Syrian refugees were resettled in the United States.
The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, claimed that these numbers are not due to the United States being more exclusive but rather because Syrian refugees aren’t interested in coming to the United States right now. Haley said, on Fox News, “Not one of the many [Syrians] that I talked to ever said we want to go to America…They want to stay as close to Syria as they can.”
Her statements are intriguing, considering that the amount of asylum applications that the United States gets every year are overwhelming. Just because she claims she did not meet Syrians interested in coming to America does not mean that none exist.
According to the Pew Research Center, over one million Syrian refugees have been admitted in Europe since 2011. Seems unlikely that the staunch decline from 790 admitted mid-April 2017 to the 11 in 2018 can be blamed on Syrians’ lack of interest.
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