Updated 6:10pm
THE UNITED STATES will take in more refugees worldwide in the next two years, including 10,000 Syrian asylum-seekers in 2016, US Secretary of State John Kerry said today.
“We will now go up to 85,000 with at least 10,000 over the next year in Syria specifically. And in the next fiscal year we will target 100,000,” he said.
In the fiscal year ending September 2015, the world’s biggest economy took in 70,000 refugees.
Ireland committed earlier this month to taking in 4,000 people as part of its response to the current crisis.
Tragedy at sea
Meanwhile, at least 13 migrants including six children died off the coast of Turkey this morning after the inflatable dinghy carrying them to Greece collided with a ferry.
The children’s bodies were recovered by the Turkish coastguard with reports from Greece indicating that another two children may still be missing.
They were on a flimsy vessel taking at least 46 migrants from Turkey’s northwestern coast to the Greek holiday island of Lesbos when the accident happened, the private Dogan news agency reported.
Greece has seen over 300,000 refugees and migrants enter the country this year, most of them passing through to other European countries.
The continent’s biggest migratory flow since the end of World War II has dug a deep rift between western and eastern EU members over how to distribute the migrants fairly.
Several countries have imposed border controls, as recent figures have shown nearly half a million people have braved perilous trips across the Mediterranean to reach Europe so far this year, while the EU has received almost a quarter of a million asylum requests in the three months to June.
Hungary’s right-wing government has faced international criticism over violent clashes with migrants and a hastily-erected fence along its frontier with Serbia.
In a shift late on Friday, Hungarian authorities began transporting thousands of migrants straight to the border with Austria, an apparent bid to move them through and out of their territory as quickly as possible.
First published 8:25am
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