Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported Monday that the White House is expected to announce it will accept about 40,000 refugees in fiscal year 2018—a dramatic drop from the 110,000 refugees President Obama authorized for 2017, and a substantial reduction from the 50,000 quota Trump set in an executive order earlier this year.
With fiscal 2017 ending on Sept. 31, the White House is nearly out of time to set its annual cap for refugee admissions, as required by the Refugee Act of 1980. The issue has sparked a heated fight within the White House between career officials who are incensed by the prospect of slashing admissions and advisers like Stephen Miller who want to push numbers as low as 20,000 a year.
According to one source, the consensus view within the White House is that the best way to help refugees from the Syrian civil war is to invest in settlement near Iraq and Syria. “It isn’t about making American the permanent destination; it’s about helping to stabilize those places on the ground,” the source told Axios. “You can’t stabilize a community by moving to Albany.”
Swan writes:
