ICC Note: Church leadership have stated that Christians are being unfairly treated in the application for resettlement in the United States. While many are urging their people to stay, the data cited by the Archbishops, one from Iraq and the other from Syria, indicates that just a fraction of those accepted to the U.S. are Christians.
09/16/2015 Middle East (The New American) – Two archbishops from the Middle East have complained that the United States unfairly discriminates against Christians from their region when they apply for U.S. visas.
Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq, and Melkite Archbishop Jean-Clément Jeanbart of Aleppo, Syria, aired their grievances at an August 4 press conference at the 2015 Knights of Columbus Convention in Philadelphia.
The archbishops cited federal data indicating that, since October 2014, 906 Muslim refugees from Syria were granted U.S. visas, while only 28 of Syria’s estimated 700,000 Christian refugees were provided with visas. They said that even considering that Christians account for just 10 percent of the population of Syria, the number of visas granted to Christians seems widely disproportional.
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