The United States has pledged to take 10,000 Syrian refugees in fiscal year 2016 — five times the number the country has resettled since 2011, when the Syrian civil war began.

So needless to say, there are questions of whether the US will actually be able to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year.

But to get a sense of how many refugees this actually is, it's helpful to look at how many refugees the US admitted in the past. And when you do that, you start to see that in historical context, 10,000 Syrian refugees isn't a very big influx at all.

The US used to admit way more refugees

The Refugee Processing Center at the State Department publishes information on how many refugees have arrived in the US, so I took the past 40 years of data to make the chart above.

And what you see is 3.25 million refugees arriving in the United States since 1975.

The first thing you probably notice is that the US used to admit more refugees in the past. The two big spikes in the past 40 years came from Indochinese refugees after the Vietnam War and Soviet Jews after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The other thing you might notice is the big dip after 9/11. In fiscal year 2001, the US accepted nearly 70,000 refugees. The next year, that number plummeted to 27,000.

The US now admits more refugees from the Near East and South Asia than any other region

Refugees from the Near East and South Asia now outnumber refugees from any other region, but this is a relatively new thing.

In the past 10 years, refugees from the Near East and South Asia (where Syria is located) have arrived at a much faster pace than they used to. The United States only allowed a tiny number of refugees from that region before 2008.

Refugee spikes almost always correlate with geopolitical tumult

The United States has a history of accepting refugees, and the significant spikes almost always signify some geopolitical event that caused people to flee their home country. It’s not hard to see that on the chart.