Europe’s refugee crisis and the horrifying images seem to be imprinted into the American people’s consciousness in a way that you do not often see.<\/p>\n
American citizens and politicians have begun to call for the US to do more. The White House response: We are looking into it.<\/p>\n
More specifically, the state department says it wants to increase the number of refugees, but it isn’t saying how many.<\/p>\n
I attended the White House briefing on Tuesday, and there seemed to be a lot of confusion about just how that would work.<\/p>\n
Even Josh Earnest, the press secretary,\u00a0said he was not sure if the president could accept more refugees without congress.<\/p>\n
One of the network reporters suggested the refugee ceiling cannot be changed without changing the laws. Here is the issue with that: it is not true.<\/p>\n
The White House staff and press corps should just look at the White House website.<\/p>\n
If they did, they would find this memo to congress from President Barack Obama:<\/p>\n
“In accordance with section 207 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (the “Act”) (8 U.S.C. 1157), and after appropriate consultations with the Congress, I hereby make the following determinations and authorise the following actions: The admission of up to 70,000 refugees to the United States during Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 is justified by humanitarian concerns …”<\/a><\/p>\n The president sets the ceiling as it is called, in consultation with congress. For the fiscal year 2015 the limit was set at 70,000 refugees. \u00a0http:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/blogs\/americas\/2015\/09\/step-syrian-refugee-crisis-challenge-150909161637525.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Europe’s refugee crisis and the horrifying images seem to be imprinted into the American people’s consciousness in a way that you do not often see. American citizens and politicians have begun to call for the US to do more. The White House response: We are looking into it. More specifically, the state department says it wants to increase the number… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":739,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735\/revisions\/739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}