The White House on Friday released new details about President Obama’s plan to push for more global relief for refugees around the world at the United Nations annual meeting this September, which includes a call for a 30 percent increase in funding to help refugees.
National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power met this week with other nations involved in planning the Summit on Refugees, set to take place Sept. 20 on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly.
The co-hosts of the summit, which include officials from Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Jordan, Mexico and Sweden, as well as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, agreed to a concerted, collective push to boost refugee assistance and announce “concrete commitments” in the lead up to the summit.
In addition to the 30 percent increase in financing from countries around the world and international humanitarian organizations, the co-hosts of the summit want to double the number of resettled refugees and those “afforded other legal channels of admission.”
The U.S. and others involved in the effort also aim to increase the number of refugees worldwide in school by one million, and the number or refugees granted the legal right to work by one million.
“Reaching these ambitious goals will be challenging,” the White House acknowledged in a statement. “Yet, the level of need demands no less.”
“The Leader’s Summit will further [U.S.] leadership and address a level of displacement the world has not witnessed since World War II,” the White House said.
The new details of the summit released Friday did not single out Syrian refugees for special treatment.
Previous reports, however, have said Obama and Ban plan to make a concerted diplomatic push to encourage other countries to accept 480,000 Syrian refugees in the next few years. That’s just 10 percent of the refugees living in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and they already have pledges to resettle 178,000.
But recently, the White House has acknowledged some serious challenges to meeting Obama’s goal of taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees during the current fiscal year.
The State Department has resettled just 1,734 Syrian refugees through the end of April, less than one-fifth of the 10,000 that Obama promised to admit during the 2016 fiscal year that ends Oct. 1, according to government data.
Obama’s top spokesman, Josh Earnest, has acknowledged that the administration has “some work to do” to meet the 10,000 goal, but has stressed that the president is committed to reaching it without “cutting any corners” when it comes to security and the screening of refugees.
The administration will need to rapidly speed up the pace of Syrian refugee admissions if it hopes to be within reach of the goal at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in mid-September.
Earnest last month suggested that the State Department could still reach the goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees by Oct. 1 by increasing the staff devoted to their screening.
State and the Department of Homeland Security have worked together over the last few months to increase staff in Jordan to interview applicants for refugee resettlement in the United States, according to the State Department.
