Q  I work for the Indiana News Student at Indiana University. My question is about the Syrian refugees.

THE PRESIDENT: I thought you were going to ask about basketball wins. (Laughter.) 

Q  We can do that if you want. (Laughter.) 

THE PRESIDENT: No, go ahead.

Q  As the deadline for your pledge to let in 10,000 Syrian refugees gets kind of closer, starting to creep up on us, it looks kind of iffy whether that’s going to be made. Do you have any plans to speed up that flow or encourage more Syrian refugees coming into the country?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we’re going to keep on pushing. And part of what has made this challenging is that we want to make sure that we can, as much as possible, provide the American people an assurance that everybody here has been vetted at a very high standard. 

As you will recall, there was a lot of emotions around our initial announcement that we should be admitting some Syrian refugees, and people making claims that somehow this would be letting potential terrorists onto our shores. The truth of the matter is, is that the refugee process generally is much more rigorous in its screening and its vetting than the average tourist who comes in here. These are people who themselves have been victims of terrorism, and victims of incredible violence and suffering at the hands of the Assad regime in Syria.

It is the right thing to do. Our closest friends and allies, like Canada, like Germany and other European countries, as well as countries bordering Syria like Turkey and Jordan, have taken on an enormous burden. And as the most powerful nation on Earth, it’s important for us to do our duty as well here, our humanitarian obligation. And it’s important for us to send a signal around the world that we care about these folks.

So administratively, I think now we have the process to speed it up. There may be efforts on the part of Congress to try to block us, but our goal is to continue to try to make the case to Congress and to the American people this is the right thing to do. And we believe that we can hit those marks before the end of the year.

More broadly, one of the things we’re going to be doing is, at the United Nations we’re going to convene at the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, which takes place in September every year. We’re going to try to make sure that we have an international conference around how we can deal with much larger refugee flows generally. Some of them, as a consequence of conflict, in some cases because of drought or other natural disasters -- there are about 60 million displaced people around the world. And I’ve met with some of them, not just those who are fleeing areas like Syria, but also in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa. A lot of these folks are your age or younger, have the same hopes, dreams, aspirations, and have just been dealt a very bad hand.