A man runs with child in arms as he tries to board a bus provided by Hungarian authorities for migrants and refugees at Keleti train station in Budapest, Hungary. Advocates and some legislators are now calling on the White House and the State Department to dramatically increase the number of refugees welcomed in the U.S. to 65, 000 by the end of 2016. Politics and concerns over national security, however, pose a hurdle for those asking the U.S. to accept more Syrian refugees within its borders.
More than 4 million people have fled war-torn Syria since 2011, but the United States has received only a tiny fraction of the refugees that have escaped civil war and sparked a humanitarian crisis as they flee to Europe.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres declared it the “biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation.”
But in the last five years since civil war erupted in Syria, the United States has resettled just 1,500 people, suggesting a sharp departure from past practice where the U.S. played a leading role in resettling refugees during a humanitarian crisis.
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