The US has historically resettled half or more of the world's refugees who end up living permanently in a third country. That's why advocacy groups, and O'Malley and Clinton, settled on 65,000 Syrian refugees as the target they wanted the Obama administration to hit.

…the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees has a clear goal for how many refugees they want to resettle permanently in other countries by the end of 2016: 130,000.

Bernie Sanders comes in for progressive upbraiding for maintaining that, while we should take in more invaders and colonizers, he maintained that there is “no magic number.”

Following the Dems’ Saturday night endorsement of more “Syrians” (in the sense of carrying Syrian documents – after ISIS has captured the equipment for manufacturing them and is able to make just about any Arabic speaker into a “Syrian refugee”), White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes went on Sunday talks shows, and in the words of Patrick Poole, “Spreads Lies About Vetting Syrian Refugees.” Poole’s piece should really be read in its entirety, but here is the gist:

Rhodes’ response that measures to properly vet the Syrian refugees are in place flatly contradicts the recent sworn congressional testimony of FBI officials. (snip)

JAKE TAPPER: ...Christiane Amanpour reporting this morning that at least one of the terrorists, according to French authorities, seems to have smuggled himself into Europe by embedding with refugees.

Ben, are you confident enough in our vetting process as the United States brings Syrian refugees into our country to pledge that this will never happen here?

RHODES: Well, first of all, Jake, the threat of foreign fighters has been front and center from the very beginning of this counter-ISIL campaign. We have made that a focus, so that we’re working with countries to share information, to improve their laws and authorities to be able to monitor and detain people.

And we’re going to continue to do that. That will be a focus of discussion here in Turkey. With respect to refugees, we have the most extensive security vetting that we have ever had to deal with Syrian refugees coming into the United States that involves not just the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, but also our intelligence community, the National Counterterrorism Center, so that anybody who comes to the United States, we are carefully vetting against all of our information.

And let’s not forget, Jake, that some of these people are people who have suffered the horrors of war. They’re women. They’re orphans. They’re children who have suffered at the hands of ISIL. We cannot close our doors to these people. We can focus on keeping terrorists out of the United States while having an open door to people who deserve a safe haven.

And when asked by Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press about whether the developments in Paris had given President Obama pause on admitting more Syrian refugees, Rhodes replied:

No, Chuck. We have very extensive screening procedures for all Syrian refugees who come to the United States. There is a very careful vetting process that including our terrorism community, our Department of Homeland Security. Let’s remember, Chuck, we’re also dealing with people who suffer the horrors of war. Women and children, orphans. We can’t just shut our doors to those people. We need to do our part to take refugees in need.

But as I reported here two weeks ago at PJ Media, FBI Director Robert Comey testified before the House Judiciary Committee that vetting Syrian refugees will be “challenging” when asked by Rep. Louie Gohmert about the quality of intelligence and information that exists on Syrians:

Gohmert: Well, without a good fingerprint database, without good identification, how can you be sure that anyone is who they say they are if they don’t have fingerprints to go against?

Comey: The only thing we can query is information that we have. So, if we have no information on someone, they’ve never crossed our radar screen, they’ve never been a ripple in the pond, there will be no record of them there and so it will be challenging.

Those concerns echo congressional testimony given earlier this year by FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach to the House Homeland Security Committee about the quality of information available on anyone coming out of Syria:

The concern in Syria is that we don’t have systems in places on the ground to collect information to vet…You’re talking about a country that is a failed state, that does not have any infrastructure, so to speak. So all of the dataset, the police, the intel services that normally you would go to to seek information doesn’t exist.