Marco Rubio photo

Rubio Campaign Press Release - We Won't Be Able To Take More Refugees

November 15, 2015

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Marco discusses Syrian refugee crisis on ABC's This Week.

The problem is not the background checks. The problem is we can't background check them. You can't pick up the phone and call Syria. And that's one of the reasons why I said we won't be able to take more refugees. It's not that we don't want to, it's that we can't. Because there's no way to background check someone that's coming from Syria. Who do you call and do a background check on them?

The bottom line is that this is not just a threat coming from abroad. What we need to open up to and realize is that we have a threat here at home — home-grown violent extremists. Individuals who perhaps have not even traveled abroad, who had been radicalized online. This has become a multi-faceted threat. In the case of what's happening in Europe, this is a swarm of refugees, and as I've said repeatedly over the last few months, you can have 1,000 people come in, and 999 of them are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence, but one of them is an ISIS fighter. If that's the case, you have a problem, and there is no way to vet that out. There is no background check system in the world that allows us to find that out, because who do you call in Syria to background check them?

Marco Rubio, Rubio Campaign Press Release - We Won't Be Able To Take More Refugees Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/326206

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