TUESDAY, JULY 05, 2016 Illinois Review
ILLINOIS AMONG TOP 10 LOCATIONS FOR TAKING IN SYRIAN REFUGEES
Recently, the Immigration Reform Law Institute filed a FOIA request about how Syrian refugees were settling among the states. The statistics showed Illinois had taken in 236, the fifth highest location among the top 10 most open-arm states.
A table provided by the Refugee Processing Center lists the number of Syrian refugees placed in Illinois from FY 2014 through April 20, 2016:
Michigan leads the nation in taking in the Syrians.
Top government national security experts, including the directors of the FBI and National Intelligence, have testified that effectively screening Syrian refugees is virtually impossible. ISIS has also said that they intend to infiltrate terrorists into the United States posing as refugees.
“None of these dire warnings have deterred the Obama administration, which has vowed to resettle at least 10,000 Syrians in the current fiscal year and has slashed the vetting process from the usual 18-24 months to just three,” the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) commented.
Obviously Americans everywhere should be concerned about the administration’s reckless disregard for the warnings of its own top security officials and a terrorist network that has already demonstrated its determination and ability to strike the West.
But FAIR wanted to find out where in the U.S. Syrian refugees are being settled.
The Obama administration has been less than forthcoming with this information, so the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a FOIA request on behalf of FAIR. They found that between FY 2014 and FY 2016 (through April 20), the top resettlement states for Syrian refugees were:
- Michigan: 367
- California: 364
- Texas: 284
- Pennsylvania: 263
- Illinois: 236
- Arizona: 215
- Florida: 184
- Ohio: 134
- North Carolina: 125
- New Jersey: 120
“While the numbers of refugees may not seem large, they are merely the tip of the iceberg. The administration is rapidly accelerating the pace during its final year in office,” FAIR said. “The vast majority of refugees do not pose a security threat, but it doesn’t take a lot of terrorists to inflict a lot of damage. It took only 19 people to slaughter some 3,000 innocent people on 9/11. In recent months, small cells (or even so-called lone wolves) have perpetrated deadly attacks in the U.S., Europe, Africa and the Middle East.”
