Politifact Says Trump Is Right: Hillary Clinton Supports ‘500% Increase in Syrian Refugees’

Politifact, the left-of-center mainstream media “fact-checker,” has some bad news for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump was right when he said Hillary Clinton wants “a 500 percent increase in Syrians refugees” in his Manchester, New Hampshire speech on Monday:

Each year, the United States permanently admits more than 100,000 immigrants from the Middle East, and many more from Muslim countries outside the Middle East. Our government has been admitting ever-growing numbers, year after year, without any effective plan for our security.

In fact, Clinton’s State Department was in charge of the admissions process for people applying to enter from overseas.

Having learned nothing from these attacks, she now plans to massively increase admissions without a screening plan, including a 500% increase in Syrian refugees. (emphasis added)

This could be a better, bigger version of the legendary Trojan Horse.

We can’t let this happen.

Altogether, under the Clinton plan, you’d be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children.

The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system to screen who we are bringing in.

Politifact searched through some of Clinton’s previous statements on the issue and found this gem:

During a Sept. 20 appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation, Clinton was asked if President Barack Obama’s plan to increase the number allowed into the United States to 10,000 was enough. (The United States had accepted about 2,000 in 2015.)

“Look, we’re facing the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II, and I think the United States has to do more, and I would like to see us move from what is a good start with 10,000 to 65,000 and begin immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in,” Clinton said.

“A jump to 65,000 would be a 550 percent increase,” Politifact says.

Even the left-of-center Politifact was forced to rule that Trump’s statement was “mostly true.”

Our ruling

Trump said Clinton “plans to massively increase admissions (of Middle East refugees) … including a 500 percent increase in Syrian refugees coming into our country.”

Clinton has, in fact, said that in response to the refugee crisis she would raise Obama’s limit of 10,000 to 65,000. That’s 550 percent more, a bit higher than what Trump said. . .

Because the statement is mostly accurate but needs clarification or additional information, we rate it Mostly True.

Trump’s statement was entirely true, not merely “mostly true.”

But Politifact attempted to qualify Clinton’s claim.

“But Clinton has also made it clear that they would have to first be vetted by a screening process, an important detail in the context of Trump’s larger point that would-be terrorists have to be kept out of the country,” they wrote.

President Obama recently announced that he was accelerating the timeline for the vetting process of Syrian refugees from 18 months to three months in order to meet his target this year of 10,000 Syrian refugees resettled in the United States.

In the previous four years, slightly more than 2,300 Syrian refugees were admitted to the United States, almost all of them Muslims.

These refugees pose a public health risk as well as a security concern, and the current vetting process for both is questionable at best.

As Breitbart News reported previously, many of these refugees are arriving from Jordan, where recent medical studies have shown “[h]igh TB rates were found among Syrian refugees .”

The notion advanced by Politifact that Clinton’s caveat that these Syrian refugees “have to first be vetted by a screening process,” has no bearing on the validity of Trump’s assertion, since the current “screening process” already in place is being diminished, rather than improved by the Obama administration.

Increasing the number of Syrian refugees by another 550 percent next year, as Clinton proposes, will only make that vetting process even more of a sieve than it currently is.