The White House announced on Thursday that the administration will prepare to accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next fiscal year.
"We know the scale of this problem. It's significant," said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. "And there are millions of people who have been driven from their homes because of this violence. We know that it certainly is not feasible for millions of Syrians to come to this country. But what we can do is make sure that we are doing everything we can to try to provide for their basic needs."
The announcement comes after religious groups and lawmakers have publicly pushed the Obama administration to accept more Syrian refugees in the midst of the crisis that is taking place in Europe. The U.S. has taken in about 1,500 refugees this fiscal year, which the religious groups, humanitarian organizations, and some lawmakers criticized.
Some said even the 10,000 was an inadequate number in comparison to other countries' efforts. Germany recently announced it would accept up to 800,000 refugees, and the UK said it would take in some 20,000. Australia and Canada also announced they would take in more refugees. Australia said it would accept up to 12,000, while Canada plans to accept an additional 11,700 by 2017 on top of the 2,500 refugees they have resettled so far.
"Ten thousand is just an embarrassingly low number given the scale of this crisis and that the U.S. has long been a global leader in resettlement," Eleanor Acer, the director of the refugee protection program at Human Rights First, told the New York Times.
Earnest said that the administration decided on the number to "make sure that [the U.S.] can provide basic medical care, basic shelter, basic food and water, and even some other things like internationally run schools in these refugee camps to try to provide for he basic needs of those Syrians that have been forced from their homes."
The U.S. is also the largest bilateral donor of humanitarian assistance in the world, Earnest emphasized, by giving $4 billion in financial assistance to relief agencies and humanitarian efforts.
"The United States has continued to be the largest donor of humanitarian assistance," Earnest said. "We've offered that assistance to organizations that are serving the needs of Syrians inside of Syria who have bee displaced. We're also providing financial assistance to organizations that have set up refugee camps in places like Turkey and Lebanon and in Jordan."
"Ultimately, this situation will not be resolved until we can resolve the political crisis inside of Syria right now," he added.
Hilary Weaver, a professor of social work at the University at Buffalo, told USA Today that the willingness to accept a certain amount of refugees must be supported with infrastructure.
"Who meets them at the airport, who gets their apartments ready, who helps them enroll in school and teaches them about the school system," she posed as examples. "We cannot accept more without the infrastructure. It is kind of like which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Of course we need to accept them and we need to accept them now, but unless the proper infrastructure is built up to help them when they arrive, this is not going to be successful."
Some lawmakers opposed the announcement to accept more refugees with security concerns that Islamic State militants may be mixed in with the influx of refugees.
"Our enemy now is Islamic terrorism, and these people are coming from a country filled with Islamic terrorists," said Representative Peter T. King (R-New York) told the New York Times. "We don't want another Boston Marathon bombing situation."
Earnest said that refugees undergo "the most robust security process of anybody who's contemplating to travel to the United States," and that the process of their resettlement takes 12 to 18 months.
