It is now fairly well-known that the percentage of Syrian refugees the United States has taken who are Christians is very small. And yet this is a group that ought logically to be first in line because members face the most obvious danger and persecution—not only in Syria, but in any Arab or Muslim country to which they might have fled, and also because Syrian Christians would have almost no chance of being terrorists, and would be less likely to espouse anti-liberty beliefs such as a desire for sharia law or a theocracy.

We already know how very little Obama has seemed to care about the plight of Christians in the Middle East today, both rhetorically and in terms of action. So it’s no stretch at all to imagine that this administration would deliberately exclude Christian refugees or discourage them in some way from coming here, rather than allowing them or encouraging them. However, at least some of the lack of Christians among the refugees to the US is a reflection of the way the system works vis-a-vis the UN, which does the initial vetting—a system that, by the way, desperately needs changing.

Here’s a comprehensive article about the way this works. We need to totally revamp our “farm it out to the UN” approach, but there’s virtually no chance that Obama would do that, because it suits him as is:

The gross underrepresentation of the non-Muslim communities in the numbers of Syrian refugees into the U.S. is reflected year after year in the State Department’s public records. They show, for example, that while Syria’s largest non-Muslim group ”” Christians of the various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions ”” constituted 10 percent of Syria’s population before the war, they are only 2.6 percent of the 2,003 Syrian refugees that the United States has accepted since then. Syria’s Christian population, which before the war numbered 2 million, has since 2011 been decimated in what Pope Francis described as religious “genocide.”…

Instead, minorities have difficulty getting to step one in the U.N. process. The religious terror that drove them from Syria blocks their registering. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is largely limited to collecting refugee applications and making resettlement referrals from its own camps and centers ”” the burden of feeding creates strong incentives for this practice. In an e-mail to me, Knox Thames, the State Department’s new special adviser for religious minorities, wrote that “many minorities have not entered the UN system because they are urban refugees.” That is, because they live far from the remote U.N. camps and aid centers, they lack the information and access to register. And, as is widely known, many non-Muslim refugees try hard to avoid these camps…

According to British media, a terrorist defector asserted that militants enter U.N. camps to assassinate and kidnap Christians. An American Christian aid group reported that the U.N. camps are “dangerous” places where ISIS, militias, and gangs traffic in women and threaten men who refuse to swear allegiance to the caliphate. Such intimidation is also reportedly evident in migrant camps in Europe, leading the German police union to recommend separate shelters for Christian and Muslim migrant groups…

…[M]any Christian refugees will “not be included in the [U.N.] camp referrals” because they have had to leave the camps after “cruelties inflicted upon them” there.

It’s very simple: by relying on the UN and its refugee camps to select and feed the refugees they house to us, the US practically guarantees that very few Christians will be among them. Unless the government changes that policy, and reaches out to seek Christian refugees from other sources, that will continue to be the case, which seems to suit Obama just fine.

[NOTE: A while back I came across a very lengthy article on the refugees from Syria. The author reported that in Turkey, where a huge number of Syrian refugees have fled, most of the Christians among them have been taken in by the Christian community in Turkey and resettled there (and the same for Lebanon, I seem to recall, although unfortunately I can’t find this article again to check it out). So although there had been many Christians fleeing Syria, there were not so many actively looking to come here.

This seems somewhat relevant to that issue, although it’s almost a year old. This supports it, but is rather old as well.]

[NOTE II: I’ve been trying to answer the question of when the UN and the UN refugee camps became the main source of refugees to the US, but it hasn’t been easy to find the information. I’m in somewhat of a hurry today, so I will leave the question unanswered for the moment except to note that a bill passed during the Carter administration and sponsored by Ted Kennedy started the ball rolling, although it didn’t seem to establish the system in the fuller form it later reached. At the time, most of the refugees were from Vietnam or Jews leaving Russia, and camps were not the issue, but this was the philosophy:

With [Ted Kennedy’s] proposal, he hoped to address the need for a reformed, non need-based policy that was not specifically designed for people from communist regimes in Eastern Europe or repressive governments in the Middle East, as it was in the past. At the time, there was an average of 200,000 refugees coming to the United States, most of which were Indochinese and Soviet Jews. The cost of resettlement was close to $4,000, but most refugees eventually paid this amount in federal income taxes. Many Americans feared a floodgate scenario with a large and sudden increase of the refugee population, but the 50,000 cap would only account for 10% of immigration flow to the U.S. and would allow one refugee for every 4,000 Americans, small numbers compared to those of countries like Canada, France and Australia. The bill was adopted by the Senate by a unanimous vote…]