Over 100K Syrians Immigrated to US Since 2012; Cosmic No. Makes Terrorist Screening Doubtable

A proposal to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States has ignited a bitter debate in Washington, but it has now been revealed that more than 10 times that number of people from the embattled country have quietly come to America since 2012, the Fox News website reports today (December 16, 2015).

Some 102,313 Syrians were granted admission to the U.S. as legal permanent residents or through programs including work, study, and tourist visas from 2012 through August 2015 -- a period which roughly coincides with the devastating civil war that still engulfs that Middle Eastern country.

"The sheer number of people arriving [from Syria] on all kinds of visas and with green cards, and possibly U.S. citizenship, makes it impossible for our counter-terrorism authorities to keep track of them all, much less prevent them from carrying out attacks or belatedly try to deport them," said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies.

President Obama's proposal to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. raised concerns that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use forged documents to sneak some of its terrorists into the U.S. as "refugees." White House assurances that refugees from Syria would be carefully screened met with much skepticism, after it was revealed that the two radical Islamic terrorists -- who recently murdered 14 innocent people in San Bernardino, California -- were nowhere to be found on any FBI or intelligence agents' listings of suspected terrorists.