U.S. still not planning to take many more refugees

As tens of thousands of refugees continue to pour into Europe, the United States has signaled it will not be one of the countries accepting more people into its borders.

Countries such as Germany have taken hundreds of thousands of refugees in. Just 1,500 Syrian refugees have been admitted into the United States since 2011. In August, the US said it would accept up to 8,000 refugees in 2016. Humanitarian agencies such as the International Rescue Committee said that was not nearly enough.

On Monday, the Guardian reported that it had asked 22 Republican and Democratic contenders for the presidency whether they thought the US should take more refugees. This was the response the paper got:

[E]ven as presidential candidates offer foreign policy pitches through a lens of moral leadership, just one of 22 contenders – former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley – said unequivocally that the US should take in more refugees and put forward a specific number. In a statement issued on Thursday, the Democrat called on the government to accept 65,000 refugees from Syria over the next year.

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush were among the candidates to offer no reply at all to the Guardian‘s question. Others, such as Scott Walker, explicitly said that the US should not increase the number of refugees it accepts.
A recent New York Times article pointed to some of the political pitfalls surrounding the refugee debate. When a group of senators called for the US to take more Syrian refugees, the paper noted, they were dubbed the “jihad caucus” by some.Meanwhile, the flow of refugees into Europe shows no sign of stopping.