The proposal to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees to come into the US has created bitter debates among politicians, but over ten times that amount of Syrian immigrants have entered the country over the course of the last three years since 2012, FoxNews.com claims.
102,213 Syrian immigrants have been allowed to come to the US either on student, work, or tourist US visas or as permanent residents from 2012 to August 2015, a figure that experts say shows the notion of terrorists entering the US posing as refugees is a danger dwarfed by the threat that could already be in the country.
“The sheer number of people arriving on all kinds of visas and with green cards, and possibly US citizenship, makes it impossible for our counterterrorism authorities to keep track of them all, much less prevent them from carrying out attacks or belatedly try to deport them,” claims the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jessica Vaughan.
US Customs and Border Protection figures show that 60,010 Syrians with US visas have arrived since 2012, with a further 42,303 being granted US citizenship or getting a green card in the same time period, according to a Congressional source.
The spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Ira Mehlman, claims that it is “highly unlikely” that effective vetting was carried out on so many people, though experts claim that those immigrants are less likely to be terrorists than simply those with the resources to be able to flee from the Syrian civil war