WASHINGTON -- The United States is making plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in the coming budget year, a significant increase from the 1,500 people who have been cleared to resettle in the U.S. since civil war broke out in the Middle Eastern country more than four years ago, the White House said Thursday.
The news comes as thousands of refugees brave torrential rain waiting to cross the Greek-Macedonian border. At the same time, the Hungarian army was conducting exercises near the border with Serbia on Thursday, a possible prelude to a more active role as thousands of migrants continued to pour into the country overnight.
The White House has been under heavy pressure to do more than just provide money to help meet the humanitarian crisis in Europe, which has seen tens of thousands of people arrive from the Middle East and Africa, many refugees from war-torn countries seeking asylum in the West.
The refugees from Syria, however, would be people who are already in the pipeline and waiting to be let into the United States, not the thousands working their way through eastern Europe and landing in Greece. It was not immediately clear how admitting a larger number of Syrian refugees who are in the processing pipeline would help alleviate the crisis that European countries are grappling with.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said about $4 billion that the administration has provided to relief agencies and others is the most effective way for the U.S. to help shoulder the crisis, but that President Barack Obama has decided that admitting more Syrian refugees in the budget year, which begins Oct. 1, would also help boost the U.S. response.
About 17,000 Syrians have been referred over the last few years to the U.S. for resettlement by the U.N. refugee agency. About 1,500 are in the U.S., with another 300 scheduled to be allowed in this month. That leaves more than 15,000 Syrians waiting for the clearance process to conclude, according to the State Department.
Obama would like to admit 10,000 of those, according to Earnest's announcement.
State Department spokesman John Kirby also said the 10,000 Syrians will come from the pool of 17,000 people referred to the U.S. by the U.N. agency.
Earnest said earlier this week that the administration has been looking at a "range of approaches" for assisting U.S. allies with 340,000 people freshly arrived from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Many are fleeing parts of Iraq that are under the Islamic State group's control. The 1,500 Syrians who are resettling in the U.S. represent a small percentage of the 11.6 million people who have been chased out of the country or uprooted from their homes due to the civil war in Syria.
Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers Wednesday that the U.S. will increase its worldwide quota for resettling refugees by 5,000, from 70,000 to 75,000 next year -- and the number could still rise, according to two officials and a congressional aide who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting.
Kerry himself said after meeting with Senate Judiciary Committee members that the U.S. would increase the number of refugees it is willing to accept. He did not provide a specific number.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Thursday that the U.S. should increase the number of refugees it resettles next year by more than the 5,000 figure to help European countries, saying the figure suggested by Kerry "is far too low." Pelosi said the U.S. accepted far more refugees after the Vietnam War and could do so again.
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, sounded alarms about the potential for Islamic State militants to use the refugee situation to sneak operatives into the West. He also said the U.S. doesn't have the manpower to adequately investigate the background of every Syrian who wants to come to the U.S.
Earnest said the safety and security of the U.S. and its citizens would be a top consideration when deciding which refugees are let into the country.
Autumn rains
Along the Balkans route from Greece to Hungary -- the main gateway to western Europe for more than 160,000 asylum seekers already this year -- the onset of autumn has taken tens of thousands by surprise.
Torrential rains poured as 7,000 people crossed the Greek border into Macedonia on Thursday past rows of police officers. People struggled to find anything -- plastic sheets, garbage bags, even a beach umbrella -- to shield themselves from the deluge.
As recently as last week, those making the journey, much of it on foot, were baking in a regionwide heat wave and free to sleep under the stars. Now they're without shelter and struggling to keep campfires burning.
With Hungary and other nations providing few facilities on their borders, travelers have packed into the few tents erected by relief workers trying to compensate for the lack of government support.
"The medical tent is full of people -- people who aren't actually sick, by the way, but just want a warm place to sit down. We can't get rid of them," said Gabor Gyurko, a volunteer for the Catholic charity Caritas, which is providing medical care at a police-supervised collection point. Medics gave first aid to several mothers and their children and covered them with thermal blankets.
"The situation here is really a big disaster because a lot of refugees are coming every hour from the border from Serbia to Hungary, to Roszke, and we don't have real infrastructure here," said Kathrin Niedermoser, whose Austrian charity for asylum seekers provided what food it could keep from getting wet. "We have small tents, now it's raining, and all the things are getting wet."
She said Hungary should deploy "big tents where people can come, sleep and have a rest. We don't even have electricity, which means we don't have warm water during the whole day."
Conditions improved farther north on the route. Austrian police said more than 6,000 people crossed Thursday from Hungary, chiefly near the town of Nickelsdorf, where authorities struggled to find enough buses, trains and emergency shelter. Most went to nearby towns, but more than 1,000 stayed in huge halls filled with beds near the border.
"My husband is waiting for me in Vienna. I cannot wait to see him," said Nuha al-Gumaa, a native of Aleppo, Syria, who was traveling with two brothers and her four children, including daughters Gaber, 3, and Nadine, 4. "We were on the border [with Serbia] a day ago, but reached here by walking and by bus. We slept in a garden last night. We all want so badly for this journey to be done."
International aid workers said Hungary has failed to provide sufficient shelter at migrant bottlenecks on the border. The country instead is investing in a new security regime, supposed to begin Tuesday, designed to close its border with Serbia backed by more than 3,000 troops, many of whom conducted drills Thursday in cooperation with Serbian colleagues.
The involvement of the army in policing the border, where a 110-mile fence with razor wire is being constructed to keep migrants out, is subject to the approval of a bill in Hungary's parliament this month.
The military exercises came a day after Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, proposed that the 28-nation bloc accept and distribute 160,000 migrants across its member-states.
Juncker's plea appeared to have been embraced by Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz of Poland, who was quoted by Reuters as saying that she had heard and understood his message. Responding to comments by the opposition that Poland should not heed the European Union's calls, she said, "Calls for Polish solidarity is no blackmail."
"Acting jointly and efficiently in the EU is in our interest," she said. "Let's be decent. President Juncker has reminded us that, once, we were also refugees."
But resistance was evident in the Netherlands, where the far-right politician Geert Wilders called the influx of migrants to Europe an "Islamic invasion" in a parliamentary debate Thursday, Reuters reported, underlining that country's struggle over how to respond to the crisis.
As in many European countries, there has been a fierce debate in the Netherlands about the challenges of immigration, and Wilders and his Party for Freedom have been citing the crisis to argue that the country risks being overcome by Muslim migrants who do not subscribe to the Netherlands' liberal values.
"Masses of young men in their 20s with beards singing 'Allahu akbar' across Europe. It's an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity," he said, according to Reuters.
Plan to end smuggling
Much of the debate on migrants has been fueled by reports of human smugglers employing dangerous, even deadly, methods of trafficking migrants across land and sea. United Nations diplomats said Thursday that European members are pushing for a Security Council resolution to allow their military forces to apprehend human-smuggling vessels in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
The draft resolution is to be circulated among council members in the coming days.
It would authorize military action on a specific route on the high seas from the coast of Libya north to Italy. The proposal is a significant step down from what the European leaders originally wanted: The Council's blessing to conduct military operations along the Libyan coast, on land and water, to seize and disrupt the smugglers. They dropped those plans when they failed to secure Libyan consent.
Libyan authorities recognized by the West said they did not control the coastline from which most of the smugglers depart. Much of the coast is controlled by a rival group, and peace talks have yet to yield a unity government.
According to one Security Council diplomat, the resolution would allow for boats to be seized and for the people on board to be taken to Italy, where authorities would determine who among them may be eligible for asylum.
"It's our moral and legal duty to take those people to safety, which means north not south," added the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the proposal before it was put before the Council. "It would be for the Italians to work out which of them were refugees and which were not."
People suspected of being smugglers would be prosecuted in Italy, the diplomat said, with the aim of smashing what he called "their smuggling model."
Council diplomats said they hoped the draft resolution would be adopted by the end of the month, when world leaders will gather at the United Nations for the annual meeting of the General Assembly.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is to host a special session on confronting the migrant crisis. Pope Francis is expected to touch on the subject in an address before the General Assembly gets underway.
The International Organization for Migration reported Thursday that 432,761 people have entered via Mediterranean routes, either from Libya to Italy or from Turkey to Greece, so far this year, exceeding forecasts that such traffic might reach 400,000 by the end of 2015.
In other news, the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad made a rare comment on the migration crisis, saying Europeans only had themselves to blame for backing rebel groups fighting the government for the past four years.
Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi said people are mostly fleeing from areas held by rivals of Assad's government, including the Islamic State.
His remarks, carried by state media, say European countries, "which sent terrorists" to Syria and imposed economic sanctions on the Syrian people, must take responsibility for their anti-Syria policies.
Syria is not forcing anyone out, al-Zoubi said. "Any Syrian abroad can return to his country anytime he wants," he added.
Information for this article was contributed by Darlene Superville, Bradley Klapper, Matthew Daly, Shawn Pogatchnik, Costas Kantouris, Alexander Kuli, Balint Szlanko, Philipp-Moritz Jenne, Pablo Gorondi, Jan Olsen, Jamey Keaten and Albert Aji of The Associated Press and by Palko Karasz, Dan Bilefsky and Somini Sengupta of The New York Times.
A Section on 09/11/2015