AMMAN, Jordan -- The U.S. will reach its target today of taking in 10,000 Syrian war refugees in a year-old resettlement program, the U.S. ambassador to Jordan said Sunday after meeting families headed to California and Virginia.
The resettlement program has emerged as an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, with Republican nominee Donald Trump alleging displaced Syrians pose a potential security threat.
Alice Wells, the U.S. ambassador to Jordan, said Sunday that keeping Americans safe and taking in some of the world's most vulnerable people are not mutually exclusive.
"Refugees are the most thoroughly screened category of travelers to the United States, and Syrian refugees are subject to even greater scrutiny," she said.
Wells said the target of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S. in fiscal 2016 will be reached today as several hundred Syrians depart from Jordan over 24 hours.
The Jouriyeh family, which attended Sunday's short ceremony, is headed to San Diego.
Nadim Fawzi Jouriyeh, 49, a former construction worker from the war-ravaged Syrian city of Homs, said he feels "fear and joy -- fear of the unknown and our new lives, but great joy for our children's lives and future."
Jouriyeh, who suffers from heart problems, will be traveling with his wife, Rajaa, 42, and their four children. Their oldest son, 14-year-old Mohammed, said he is eager to sign up for school in San Diego and hopes to study medicine one day.
The resettlement program focuses on the most vulnerable refugees, including those who were subjected to violence or torture or those who are sick.
Wells said the U.S. has taken in more refugees from around the world over the years than all other nations combined.
Close to 5 million Syrians have fled the civil war since 2011. Most struggle to survive in tough conditions in neighboring countries, including Jordan, which hosts close to 660,000 Syrian refugees.
Only a small percentage of Syrian refugees has been resettled in countries outside the region. Instead, donor countries are trying to invest more in job creation and education for refugees in regional host countries to encourage refugees to stay there instead of moving onward, including to Europe.
Faced with more than 1 million migrants flooding across the Mediterranean Sea last year, European nations tightened border controls, set up naval patrols to stop smugglers, negotiated an agreement with Turkey to limit the numbers crossing, shut the Balkan route used by hundreds of thousands, and tried to speed up deportations of rejected asylum seekers.
Yet many issues remain.
Overall, 2,901 people died or disappeared crossing the Mediterranean in the first six months of 2016, most along the dangerous central route to Italy -- a 37 percent increase over last year's first half, according to the International Organization for Migration.
About 70,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean into Italy from January to June this year, similar to the same period last year. But with routes northward now restricted, there's nowhere for them to go and, as smugglers resort to more dangerous practices, more migrants are dying en route.
Turkey is hosting about 3 million refugees, including more than 2.7 million Syrians. Most refugees there don't get government support, but the agreement with the European Union calls for the bloc to provide up to $6.8 billion to help Syrian refugees in Turkey.
The deal also provides for one Syrian refugee from Turkey to be relocated to EU countries for each Syrian who arrives illegally in Greece and is sent back. So far, only 1,152 people have been resettled under the program -- more than half of them to Germany and Sweden.
The numbers of migrants arriving in Greece have dropped since the March agreement with Turkey, but several thousand a month still make the journey, and 160,000 arrived in the first half of this year.
Arrivals have increased since the July 15 attempted coup in Turkey, topping 2,300 in the first three weeks of August. This is straining resources on the eastern Aegean Sea islands, and the Greek government has promised to build more housing on the mainland.
European nations continue to disagree about whether, and how, to share the newcomers between them.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday slammed those countries in Europe that say they won't take in Muslim refugees, a position that several eastern European governments have taken in response to the influx of migrants from the Islamic world.
Merkel said she was hopeful that EU members would reach an agreement on outstanding questions arising from the migrant crisis, one of which is how to fairly distribute asylum seekers among all the bloc's 28 member states.
She told German public broadcaster ARD that "everybody has to do their bit" and didn't rule out the possibility of letting some countries take in fewer migrants if they contribute more financially instead.
"How the individual components are weighted will have to be seen," Merkel said.
But she reiterated her stance that blocking refugees based on their religion was misguided.
"What I continue to think is wrong is that some say 'we generally don't want Muslims in our country, regardless of whether there's a humanitarian need or not,'" she said. "We're going to have to keep discussing that."
Merkel's comments came almost a year after her decision to allow the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants stuck in other European countries.
That move prompted a further wave of migration through the Balkans that culminated in the daily arrival of more than 10,000 asylum seekers at German borders.
Officials have spoken of more than 1 million arrivals in 2015, but Germany's top migration official said the actual figure was likely lower once duplicate registrations and people who traveled on to other countries are excluded.
Frank-Juergen Weise, the head of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, said in an interview in the German weekly Bild am Sonntag that he expects a sharp drop in numbers in 2016 compared with last year.
Weise told the weekly that his agency is planning for between 250,000 and 300,000 arrivals this year.
A spate of violent attacks in Germany in July, including two by asylum seekers, that left 13 people dead unsettled the public and sparked renewed criticism of Merkel's migration policies, including from some within her Christian Democratic Union party.
With national elections just over a year away, Merkel has yet to declare whether she will run for another four-year term as chancellor. Her next electoral challenges come in September, when two German states hold regional votes. The northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Merkel has her electoral district, goes to the polls next Sunday. Berlin, which is a city-state, votes Sept. 18.
Information for this article was contributed by Karin Laub, Frank Jordans, Geir Moulson, Nicole Winfield, Nicholas Paphitis, Dusan Stojanovic, Pablo Gorondi, Elaine Ganley, George Jahn and David Rising of The Associated Press; and by Chad Thomas of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 08/29/2016