On August 29th, the White House released an official statement that the United States had fulfilled its refugee quota of 10,000 before the end of the current fiscal year, which ended on September 30. Government officials said that they expected to keep accepting applications in the following months, despite the early fulfillment.

The question now is not, “Are we accepting too many Syrian refugees?” But instead, “Are we accepting too few?” With approximately five million Syrian refugees worldwide and 1.1 million of them already in Europe, our own goal of 10,000 refugees every fiscal year is far too conservative. Measured against the refugee programs of countries such as Lebanon (1.14 million refugees), Turkey (815,000 refugees), Germany (140,910 refugees), and Britain (13,905 refugees), the United States pales in comparison. In fact, Canada has a population barely a tenth of the size of the United States  but has resettled three times more Syrian refugees since last fall. As a solution, Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley remarked that if the United States, a country of 320 million, accepted 65,000 Syrian refugees, it would be statistically equivalent to adding 6.5 people to a baseball stadium holding 32,000. And we are only taking in 10,000.

Various politicians have attempted to portray refugees as a security risk and have called for a halt to resettlement programs. Anti-refugee rhetoric has been based more in xenophobia and a general fear of terrorist attacks than any specific threat posed by Syrian asylum-seekers. While it is  impossible to be certain that no refugees are security risks, either currently or in the future, the current refugee vetting process is highly stringent. Moreover, asylum-seekers have been subjected to security procedures including face-to-face interviews with U.S. officials and thorough investigations of social media accounts, along with other practices.

Immigrants such as the Irish and Vietnamese had been vilified for generations, yet despite the discrimination, they have worked to become productive members of American society. Syrian refugees are the next wave of immigrants, and if we already know that the end products of their immigration are likely to be positive contributions to the United States, why insist on continuing with xenophobic practices? We should instead embrace those fleeing war torn countries and integrate them into our social structure, ultimately benefiting both those refugees and the country they settled in.