Newsrooms are calling on the federal government to allow the unfettered resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States, even as clear majorities in the public and in Congress support adding additional certification requirements to background checks, and some want to stop the process altogether.
Fifty-three percent of Americans want to put a stop to the White House’s efforts to bring in more refugees, a Bloomberg Politics national poll released Wednesday found. A mere 28 percent of respondents in the same survey said they were happy with the system currently in place for accepting asylum seekers.
An NBC News/SurveyMonkey online poll found meanwhile that 56 of Americans say they oppose allowing Syrian refugees, many of who are fleeing civil war and the horrors of the Islamic State, into the United States. Only 41 percent of respondents in the same poll said they approve of the White House’s resettlement efforts.
In short, it’s not even close. Most Americans want to halt the flow of Middle East refugees into America.
That sentiment, spurred in large part by last week’s attacks in Paris that killed 129 and injured hundreds more, is also reflected in Congress. The House voted 289-137 Thursday to approve a bill that would block Syrian and Iraqi refugees from resettling in the United States without first passing a series of background checks done by various federal agencies.
The bill had near-unanimous support from GOP lawmakers, and 47 Democrats also voted for it.
Despite these majorities, many in the press think the most important thing right now is to resettle as many refugees as possible in the United States.
New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof said it would be a “stain on our conscience” to turn away refugees who have fled the Syrian Civil War and ISIS.
“[S]ecurity is critical,” he wrote, “but I’ve known people who have gone through the refugee vetting process, and it’s a painstaking ordeal that lasts two years or more. It’s incomparably more rigorous than other pathways to the United States.”
The Times, the Los Angles Times and the Washington Post have all made similar arguments in favor of accepting more displaced Syrians and Iraqis.
There are also countless op-eds approaching the White House’s resettlement efforts.
The disconnect between what the press thinks versus what Americans support would seem to prove other polls showing that trust in media is falling. Americans’ trust in the press remains at a historical low, according to the most recent polling data from Gallup, signaling that an increasing number of voters are likely disregarding entirely what they hear from newsrooms.
“Americans’ confidence in the media has slowly eroded from a high of 55 percent in 1998 and 1999,” the polling group reported in September. “Since 2007, the majority of Americans have had little or no trust in the mass media. Trust has typically dipped in election years, including 2004, 2008, 2012 and last year. However, 2015 is not a major election year.”
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This post has been updated for clarity.
