According to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, in FY 2014, the U.S. accepted 1,445 Eritrean refugees, 1,307 Sundanese refugees, 758 Afghan refugees, and only 132 Syrian refugees. These are four of the countries contributing the most to the “European” migrant crisis—war-torn, despotically or ineffectually governed countries from which hundreds of thousands are risking the treacherous ocean crossing to Europe.
This is a test of our commitment to the sanctity and dignity of human life wherever that life happens to exist in the world, just like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. What we can do, now, is send U.S. Naval hospital ships and rescue ships to the Mediterranean. We must also drastically increase the numbers of refugees resettled in the U.S. from the affected countries.