Syrian refugees and national security

1. Many aren't from Syria

Europe, which is dealing with the brunt of the Syrian-refugee crisis, is contending with massive amounts of fraud committed by its refugee population. Many aren't even "refugees." Rather, they are "migrants" as defined by international law. A recent United Nations report indicates that only about half of the people entering Europe in this flood are from Syria. Europeans officials have raised concerns that about one-third of these self-identified refugees are lying about being Syrian in order to win residency.

2. Most are not widowed women and orphaned children

President Obama has sharply criticized resettlement opponents, saying they were "scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America." Military-age males were the "forefront of the human torrent flowing into Europe from Syria," however, according to Time magazine. In to a Pew Research Center review of Eurostat data, 72 percent of asylum applicants are male, and over half are men under the age of 40.

Syrian passports are highly sought after by people hoping to enter Europe. For as little as $250 and a few days of waiting, you can buy a fake Syrian passport. Syrian passports are effectively worthless as identification, because of the thriving black market and a lack of records from the Syrian government.

3. Those in charge of ensuring our security don't think that the refugees can be properly vetted

To substantiate their argument that bad people aren't coming into the country, refugee proponents often highlight the screenings, interviews, and length of time that the vetting process takes. Security screening involves our government's checking documents, provided by the applicants, against the records of foreign government. But this has led many to ask, "How do you screen people from a war-torn country that has few criminal and terrorist databases to check?"

Senior officials from the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have echoed this concern regarding checks, indicating that we have very little data and lack the intelligence necessary to properly vet Syrian refugees. How good can this vetting process be if, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, more than 90 percent of Syrians applying for refugee status are approved despite the lack of reliable data to verify their identity?

4. Most are not from the minority groups ISIS targets for persecution

America evaluates refugees using a tiered system with three levels of priority. First priority is granted to those who have suffered compelling persecution. As Andrew McCarthy points out, under federal law we are "expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum."

It is estimated that 16 to 23 percent of the estimated 3 million Syrian refugees who have fled the country are Christians. Even though ISIS has specifically targeted religious minorities (notably Christians and Yazidis) for persecution, less than 3 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far are Christian, and 96 percent are Muslim.

5. Some have ISIS sympathies

In a recent poll conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, respondents were asked, "Do you have a positive or negative view of ISIL?" Of those who were Syrian refugees registered, 13 percent answered "positive" or "positive to some extent."

The bombshell was dropped by the head of the House Homeland Security Committee Monday during a speech at the National Defense University.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, declined to go into detail about the disclosure, the Hill reported.

But the revelation will add ammunition to critics of the White House's refugee plans who have warned that the program is vulnerable to infiltration by adherents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

"ISIS members in Syria have attempted to exploit it to get into the United States," McCaul said during the speech...

McCaul has been warning since January that he believed the refugee program, which has been sending 60,000 to 150,000 or more foreign refugees to American cities per year over the past 35 years, could be exploited as a "back door for jihadists" into the U.S...

...ISIS took over parts of Syria because its government willingly allied with it to help its terrorists kill Americans in Iraq. That support for Al Qaeda helped lead to the civil war tearing the country apart.

The Syrians were not helpless, apathetic pawns in this fight. They supported Islamic terrorism.

A 2007 poll showed that 77% of Syrians supported financing Islamic terrorists including Hamas and the Iraqi fighters who evolved into ISIS. Less than 10% of Syrians opposed their terrorism.

Why did Syrians support Islamic terrorism? Because they hated America.

Sixty-three percent wanted to refuse medical and humanitarian assistance from the United States. An equal number didn't want any American help caring for Iraqi refugees in Syria...

A poll this summer found that 1 in 5 Syrians supports ISIS. A third of Syrians support the Al Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. Since Sunnis are 3/4rs of the population and Shiites and Christians aren't likely to support either group, this really means that Sunni Muslim support for both terror groups is even higher than these numbers make it seem...

In the places where the Syrian refugees come from, support for Al Qaeda groups climbs as high as 70% in Idlib, 66% in Quneitra, 66% in Raqqa, 47% in Derzor, 47% in Hasakeh, 41% in Daraa and 41% in Aleppo...

First of all, the U.S. does not even choose its own refugees. That is done by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

And the private contractors who resettle the refuges in more than 180 American cities and towns do not ask the cities and towns if they will accept them. The refugees are brought there secretly without so much as a single public hearing or even an ad in the local newspaper. As soon as they arrive, they are signed up for food stamps, Medicaid and temporary cash assistance, as the families are placed in subsidized housing and their children educated for free in public schools. The refugees are placed on a fast track to full citizenship, including voting rights, within five years...

While the United States and Europe argue over how many Syrian refugees to allow in, the richest Persian Gulf states have accepted exactly zero.

The Muslim countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council that include Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates steadfastly refuse to accept any Syrian refugees. Amnesty International, USA (AIUSA) tells The Daily Caller News Foundation they have not accepted a single refugee since the armed Syrian conflict erupted years ago.

If there is a refugee "crisis," it most certainly is no fault of ours: For example, the U.S. took in two-thirds of the world's refugees resettled in 2014, with Canada a distant second, admitting about 10 percent... Tens of thousands of what are called "refugees" have come to our shores from Muslim-majority countries. From Iraq alone, the number is 120,000 since 2007, notwithstanding the thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars sacrificed to make Iraq livable....

Recep Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed that pressuring Muslims to assimilate in their new Western countries is "a crime against humanity."...

Responsibility for vetting the immigrants rests with the Department of Homeland Security. As the ongoing controversy has illustrated, however, a background check is only as good as the available information about a person's background. In refugee pipelines like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan, such information is virtually nonexistent...

For nearly a quarter-century, our bipartisan governing class has labored mightily to suppress public discussion of the undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine and terrorism...

Yes, I can already hear the slander: "You are betraying our commitment to religious liberty." Please. Even if there were anything colorable to this claim, we are talking about inquiring into the beliefs of aliens who want to enter our country, not citizens entitled to constitutional protections...

Unlike the Judeo-Christian principles that informed America's founding, classical sharia does not abide a separation of spiritual from civic and political life. Therefore, to rationalize on religious-liberty grounds our conscious avoidance of Islamist ideology is to miss its thoroughgoing anti-constitutionalism...

Sharia rejects the touchstone of American democracy: the belief that the people have a right to govern themselves and chart their own destiny. In sharia governance, the people are subjects not citizens, and they are powerless to question, much less to change, Allah's law. Sharia systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims...

Thus, since we are vetting for terrorism rather than sharia-adherence, and since we know a significant number of Muslims are sharia-adherent, we are missing the certainty that we are importing an ever-larger population hostile to our society and our Constitution - a population that has been encouraged by influential Islamist scholars and leaders to form Muslim enclaves throughout the West...

The question is not whether we are admitting Muslims who currently have ties to terrorist organizations; it is whether we are admitting Muslims who are apt to become violent jihadists after they settle here...

There will be no meaningful vetting of the Syrian migratory tide, as our own Homeland Security apparatus has admitted to Congress. In fact, we'll be lucky if the majority of them are Syrians. False claims of Syrian origin are the hottest ticket in Europe right now, backed up by a thriving black market in forged and stolen identity papers...

Even if we can at least limit ourselves to refugees who are of guaranteed Syrian origin, the notion of conducting elaborate background checks on them is absurd on its face. They come from a nation in the grip of a savage civil war that has been raging for years...

"It's clearly a population of concern,” the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nicholas Rasmussen, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, went further, saying it would be a “huge mistake” to bring refugees from the conflict to the U.S. – even as an estimated 4 million children, women and men have been forced to flee Syria and another 7 million have been displaced from their homes there, unable to leave...

McCaul and other leading Republicans, who recently penned a letter to National Security Advisor Susan Rice cautioning that the U.S. government's ability to screen refugees from Syria might not be sufficient.

“The continued civil war and destabilization in Syria undeniably make it more difficult to acquire the information needed to conduct reliable threat assessments on specific refugees,” they wrote in the letter two weeks ago.

With tens of thousands of Syrians joining groups in the region like the Islamic State, the U.S. government “cannot allow the refugee process to become a backdoor for jihadists,” they added...

Officials at the State Department were quick to report that overall the U.S. accepts more refugees than the rest of the world combined. Bartlett and others also say they expect the U.S. to steadily increase the number of Syrians it accepts as applications at the United Nations continue to pile up...

...DHS Secretary Johnson answered the vetting question by saying that every alleged refugee is interviewed, and that they complete an application. Smith responded saying that you are then essentially relying upon the refugee who is filling out the application, and “you can't go beyond that, so you are sorta having to take their word for it.”

During the hearing, Rep. Smith said another “red flag” was that the profile of these Syrian refugees does not meet the profile of the typical refugee family. He said these Syrian refugees are “young, single, males, as opposed to family members.”...

Smith added that both FBI Director Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Johnson admitted they do not currently have the ability to properly screen and conduct sufficient background checks on these refugees.

The GAO said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Executive Office of Immigration Review don't even have a sense for how big the risks of fraud are in the asylum programs they oversee, and officers are often forced to make decisions on whether to admit someone based purely on their own testimony...

... on Monday, President Obama dismissed the danger, doubling down on his plans to settle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees here. The White House insists Syrian refugees go through "extensive screening." That's a deadly lie.

Obama's own intelligence experts admit screening Syrian refugees is impossible, because the FBI and Homeland Security Department have no data on Syrians — no fingerprints, arrest records, travel data — to indicate what these people did in Syria, or even whether they are who they claim to be. “There won't be anything in our database,” FBI head James Comey cautioned Congress last month. “So I can't sit here and offer anybody an absolute assurance that — there's no risk associated with this.”

Worse, the interviewers — from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services — were ordered last May to relax standards. It's now OK if your spouse was part of a terrorist organization, provided you can convince the screener you didn't know you were sleeping with a terrorist. It's also OK to have a history of supporting a terrorist group yourself — as long as you felt slightly pressured (not even under “duress”) to do it..

What's missing here? How about local law enforcement, which is kept in the dark, along with mayors, schools boards and governors, about where these refugees are being placed.

It is entirely understandable that there is great consternation about the obvious national security issues created by admitting aliens who claim to be refugees from Syria into the United States. The vetting process of such aliens is fatally flawed because our officials do not have access to databases or other sources of reliable information to ascertain the true identities and backgrounds of these foreign nationals...

Title 8 U.S. Code § 1182 – Inadmissible aliens enumerates the grounds for excluding aliens from the United States and includes aliens infected with dangerous communicable diseases, suffer from extreme mental illness and are prone to violence, aliens who are criminals, human rights violators, war criminals, spies or terrorists. Finally that list also includes aliens who would likely become public charges or displace American workers. There is nothing in that list that relates to the race, religion or ethnicity of these aliens only our safety and wellbeing.

Many aliens who have entered the United States without inspections are citizens of countries from around the world including Syria and other countries associated with terrorism. These aliens often make their way to Mexico seeking to enter the United States without being vetted...

...after the State Department and USCIS officials said how effective their interviews of refugees were in exposing liars, Goodlatte asked that, if that were so, how come there are five million illegal aliens who were interviewed before they got their visas? They'd all promised to return home when their authorized time here expired, and obviously their lies were not exposed during their visa interviews. He didn't get a real answer.

If the vetting process is as robust as we are led to believe by the president, ignoring the contrary view of its likely effectiveness by the head of the FBI, we can concede that it will be, say 99% effective. Not bad for government work. That means that only 1% of the 10,000 entrants, or 100 applicants, will have slipped through the vetting net. It is estimated that the units that attacked France consisted of somewhere between eight and twenty Islamic terrorists. So even with a robust, almost-but-not-quite fool-proof vetting procedure, we will have admitted between five and eight terrorist units capable of doing to one of our cities what they have done to Paris. And of course the vetting procedure is unlikely to come close to 99% perfection.

... on Monday, President Obama dismissed the danger, doubling down on his plans to settle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees here. The White House insists Syrian refugees go through “extensive screening.” That's a deadly lie.

Obama's own intelligence experts admit screening Syrian refugees is impossible, because the FBI and Homeland Security Department have no data on Syrians — no fingerprints, arrest records, travel data — to indicate what these people did in Syria, or even whether they are who they claim to be. “There won't be anything in our database,” FBI head James Comey cautioned Congress last month. “So I can't sit here and offer anybody an absolute assurance that — there's no risk associated with this.”

Worse, the interviewers — from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services — were ordered last May to relax standards. It's now OK if your spouse was part of a terrorist organization, provided you can convince the screener you didn't know you were sleeping with a terrorist. It's also OK to have a history of supporting a terrorist group yourself — as long as you felt slightly pressured (not even under “duress”) to do it.

What's missing here? How about local law enforcement, which is kept in the dark, along with mayors, schools boards and governors, about where these refugees are being placed.

Do you agree with several U.S. governors who are seeking to bar Syrian refugees from resettling in their states in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris?

Total Votes = 2897.  Yes: 1752 Votes, or 60.47%.  No: 1145 Votes, or 39.52%.

Given limited funds, relocation to the U.S. may not be the most effective way to help.

Although we do not consider all costs, our best estimate is that in their first five years in the United States each refugee from the Middle East costs taxpayers $64,370 — 12 times what the UN estimates it costs to care for one refugee in neighboring Middle Eastern countries.

While only the federal government may decide who can enter the United States as a refugee, generally, federal law requires cooperation between federal, state, and local governments when it comes to the resettlement of refugees admitted to the United States. Federal law states that the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (which falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services "shall consult" with state and local governments and voluntary non-profit agencies -concerning the sponsorship process and the intended distribution of refugees among the states and localities BEFORE their placement... (See 8 U.S.C. § 1522(a)(2)(A))

Moreover, the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement must develop and implement, again, in consultation with state and local governments and voluntary non-profit agencies, "policies and strategies for the placement and resettlement of refugees..." Id. § 1522(a)(2)(B)

Consistent with these policies and strategies, the federal government shall take into account the recommendations of the state to the maximum extent possible. Id. § 1522(a)(2)(D)

Amendment 10 of the Constitution guarantees "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."... In respect to this umbrella of protection of the rights of the Individual States, the administration cannot coerce any of one of them to accept their administrative rulings, in this case regarding the forced placement of refugees that could be harboring enemies among their numbers.

In a situation such as this, federal jurisdiction ends at the bounds of any federally controlled property. The administration, that governs the military and immigration agents, cannot compel the states to allow free passage, let alone settlement, of individuals beyond the federal port of entry. A quiet challenge could ensue between state and county law enforcement (sheriffs) and federal agents, but the federal agents would recognize the limits of their jurisdiction and end up dealing with either having to house refugees at their point of entry or return them to their place of origin.

I recently introduced H.R. 3314, the Resettlement Accountability National Security Act, which would press the pause button on a program that grants permanent legal residency to nearly 70,000 new immigrants a year under a program coordinated through the United Nations (U.N.), known as the Refugee Resettlement Program.

H.R. 3314 temporarily suspends the program until the Government Accountability Office (GAO) completes a thorough examination of its costs on local governments, states and American taxpayers.

The Refugee Resettlement Program has been running on autopilot for far too long with little regard to economic, social and national security implications.

...Federal law, found at 8 U.S.C. § 1157(a)(1), authorizes any president to admit whatever number of refugees he believes “is justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.” The sections and subsection of the United States Code following that provision continue to lay out broad presidential powers, granting him all the authority he needs to bring in Syrian refugees.

But governors command state offices that are an integral part of this refugee-resettlement process. Governors can order their state personnel not to lift a finger to help the Obama administration, or to spend a single dollar of state money on the project. Obama would have to assign federal agents to bring these refugees to America, fly them to their new state, drive them to their new house (which the federal government would have to obtain for them), and take care of the all the logistical and physical needs that normally state and local staffs would handle or assist....

Obama can't make the governors cooperate. In the 1997 case United States v. Printz, the Supreme Court declared that the Tenth Amendment's limits on federal power include that no branch of the federal government—Congress, the Supreme Court, or the president—can require state or local officers to implement or assist any federal law or program. This anti-commandeering principle is a cornerstone of the constitutional system...

But Congress can stop Obama. Congress has plenary power over immigration, including admitting refugees. Congress can change federal law at any time. Congress can also refuse to renew funding for Obama to resettle refugees and insert explicit language into annual appropriations laws forbidding the various agencies of the federal government from spending a single dollar of federal money or assigning a single federal agent to carry out Obama's resettlement efforts...

Given limited funds, relocation to the U.S. may not be the most effective way to help

Although we do not consider all costs, our best estimate is that in their first five years in the United States each refugee from the Middle East costs taxpayers $64,370 — 12 times what the UN estimates it costs to care for one refugee in neighboring Middle Eastern countries.

On average, each Middle Eastern refugee resettled in the United States costs an estimated $64,370 in the first five years, or $257,481 per household...

...there are very good reasons to apply a religious test to Syrian refugees. The first is that some religious groups–Yazidis and Christian Arabs in particular–have been singled out for slaughter, slavery, and expulsion. Unlike Sunni and Shia Muslims, who theoretically have support from neighboring states, the Yazidis and Christians have no one to save them and nowhere to go.

As others have pointed out, U.S. law already asks applicants to prove they are victims of religious persecution. The appropriate solution for other people fleeing war-torn countries is to provide temporary shelter and humanitarian relief until the war is over.

But the Constitution does not prohibit a religious test for refugees–and, indeed, without it our policy would be less compassionate...

A religious test for refugees is not bigotry–and saying so merely poisons public debate, as President Obama, sadly, does so often.

A Mclean, Virginia-based defense think-tank has published a prescient white-paper on the Islamic State terror group...

The Threat Knowledge Group (TKG), headed by Katherine C. Gorka, its President, and Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the Chair of Military Theory at Marine Corps University and a Breitbart Contributor, released a comprehensive study Monday titled “ISIS: The Threat to the United States.”

TKG warns that the United States must steel itself for the “difficult times ahead” and be ready to counter the threats posed by ISIS inside of the United States. They recommend that U.S. officials follow five steps in countering the current threat environment.

1. “Stop downplaying the seriousness of the threat.”
2. “Recognize that ISIS is targeting youth, and do more to protect youth from radicalization.”
3. “Target the ideologues.”
4. “Better utilize open-source intelligence.”
5. “Screen refugees.”

Read the TKG Report: The ISIS Threat.

...While there is a link in Arabic between salam, a word often translated ‘peace’, and Islam, the real connection is found in the idea of safety.

The word Islam is based upon a military metaphor. Derived from aslama ‘surrender’ its primary meaning is to make oneself safe (salama) through surrender. In its original meaning, a muslim was someone who surrendered in warfare.

Thus Islam did not stand for the absence of war, but for one of its intended outcomes: surrender leading to the ‘safety’ of captivity...

...The idea of reforming Islam is not entirely new.  But Islam cannot be reformed the way Christianity was... In the mind of millions of Muslims, Islam is carved in granite, just the way it is. No change. Allah's book is sealed...

Islam is not reformable for the following primary reasons:

* At the heart of the problem is the Qur'an, Islam's sacred book, considered as literally perfect and the immutable words of Allah...
* Islam is a perfect religion...
* Violence is part and parcel of Islam...
* Islam is a super-religion...