President Donald Trump has already cut Obama’s 110,000 refugee target by more than half and has started to accept many Christian refugees, unlike Obama who brought in mostly Muslim refugees while Christians were being slaughtered in the Middle East simply for their faith.
President Trump has also cut the rate of Syrian refugees being admitted to the U.S. by more than 80 percent, and Christians have overtaken Muslims in the total number of refugees resettled. Syrians made up 15 percent of all refugees under Obama, that number dropped to just 8 percent under Trump.
Under Trump, the number of Muslims resettled in the U.S. dropped from half of refugees under Obama to slightly more than a third. Also, Christians resettled in the U.S. went up from 43 percent of refugees to 53 percent under Trump.
As of Tuesday, with four days left in the fiscal year, the U.S. government had admitted slightly over 53,000 refugees, which is less than half of Obama’s goal but slightly more refugees than Trump said he wanted to take in.
Courts stopped President Trump from setting the overall cap of refugees to 50,000, ruling that Trump couldn’t stop the arrival of refugees who had “close ties” to Americans. Those with “close ties” were exempted from his 50,000 cap, meaning the total number of refugees resettled in the U.S. will probably only be a few thousand over his proposed cap.
The Washington Times reports:
The Trump changes have reverberated around the globe, with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees drastically cutting the number of refugee candidates it submits to the U.S. After recommending nearly 35,000 refugee candidates last year, the UNHCR submitted just 3,591 applications from January to July.
The previous president called for up to 110,000 refugees to be admitted to the U.S. in 2017 and indicated that he wanted Syrians to be a large part of that, with the country on pace for more than 15,000 resettlements this year. But Mr. Trump, as part of his first “extreme vetting” travel ban executive order, changed all that. He called for cutting the refugee cap from 110,000 to 50,000 and placed a four-month pause on the refugee program and a more lasting ban on Syrians.
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