In late spring, with the war in Syria grinding into its fifth year amid an ever-deepening humanitarian catastrophe for millions of refugees, 14 United States senators wrote a letter to President Obama urging that at least 65,000 of the displaced Syrians be allowed to resettle in the United States.

Critics denounced the idea, saying it would open the nation’s borders to potential terrorists, and some even branded the authors of the letter as the “jihadi caucus”, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

The criticism, which Obama administration officials say is baseless because of screening procedures asylum seekers undergo, was a powerful measure of the lack of political will and the practical obstacles that have hampered the United States’ ability to intervene more directly in what has become a full-blown migrant crisis in Europe.

Such obstacles, including an American public weary of overseas initiatives after more than a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, remain formidable, even as heart-wrenching photographs of dead children this week focused the American conscience on the Syrian crisis as never before and prompted renewed calls for more aid.

Pleas for more aggressive American-led rescue measures seem all the more futile given the failures to reach a consensus on the country’s own immigration problems, made vivid in the simmering debate over policing the border with Mexico and calls by a leading Republican presidential candidate to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Source: MENA