Here They Come!

Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday announced that the United States would take in  85,000 refugees next year — up from 70,000 — and 100,000 in 2017.

Many of the additional refugees will come from Syria, where residents are fleeing civil war, and others will come from strife-torn areas of Africa, where ISIS and Muslim terrorists are thriving.

GOP lawmakers are not happy with the predictable announcement that thousands more refugees will be coming to America.

Republican lawmakers are not happy with the predictable announcement that thousands more refugees will be coming to America.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said in a statement that ISIS terrorists “have made it abundantly clear that they will use the refugee crisis to try to enter the United States. Now the Obama administration wants to bring in an additional 10,000 Syrians without a concrete and foolproof plan to ensure that terrorists won’t be able to enter the country.”

“The administration has essentially given the American people a ‘trust me.’ That isn’t good enough,” the lawmakers said.

The Obama administration recently committed to taking 10,000 more refugees from the war-torn region beginning Oct. 1, but many knew that the move would open the floodgates. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are flooding Europe, and President Obama has made clear that he will allow  the flow to come to the United States.

But the U.S. is already accepting more than its fair share of refugees. Information produced by a U.S. Senate subcommittee on Friday shows that even without accepting thousands more Syrian refugees, the country already resettles more migrants, provides more funding, and offers more benefits than any other nation in the world.

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The United States takes in 20 percent of the world’s migrants — despite having just 4.5 percent of the global population. No other country has accepted even a 20th of the world’s migrants.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who chairs the subcommittee, has been a vocal critic of the president’s plan. He has said Middle Eastern countries should take the lead in resettling refugees.

The contrast is particularly stark compared with other countries in the Western Hemisphere. For instance, the U.S. had almost 45.8 million migrants as of 2013, six times as many as all of Latin America combined, despite having just a little more than half of the overall population.

The United States would have more Muslims than any European country except for Russia and France.

Only 1 out of 40 migrants in the United States come from the Middles East or north Africa, but that population is growing rapidly. More than 10 percent of the legal immigrants to the United States in 2012 were Muslim.

The subcommittee cites a 2011 Pew Research Center report forecasting a more than doubling of the Muslim population in the U.S. during the next two decades, from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million by 2030, if current trends continue. That would give the United States more Muslims than any European country except for Russia and France.

“If current trends continue, about 130,000 Muslims are expected to be granted permanent residency in the United States annually by 2030,” the Pew report states.

That estimate does not include the much larger total annual migration, a figure that includes foreign students, guest workers and asylum-seekers — only those who are permanently resettled.