Jeb Bush: ‘I Don’t Think We Should Eliminate Our Support for Refugees’

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has come out in defense of Syrian refugees, though he remains cautious of the White House’s current plans for resettlement.

In an interview with Bloomberg Politics on Tuesday, Bush said that “the answer to this is not to ban people from coming” but “to lead, to resolve the problem in Syria.”

When Bloomberg reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann mentioned fellow Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz‘s bill that would ban Muslim refugees, Bush said that instituting and enforcing bans on specific groups was not the answer to what he saw as much larger problems. Many of these were, of course, President Barack Obama‘s fault.

“People are legitimately concerned about the efficiency, the competency of the Obama administration as it relates to screening processes,” he said, before adding: “But we have systems in place. If there’s any kind of concern, we shouldn’t allow people in.”

On Sunday, Bush told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union that “there are a lot of Christians in Syria that have no place now. They’ll be either executed or imprisoned, either by Assad or by ISIS. We should focus our efforts as it relates to the refugees for the Christians that are being slaughtered.”

To watch clips from the interview, head over to Bloomberg Politics.

[h/t The Hill]
[Image via screengrab]

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