By Scott Malone
BOSTON (Reuters) - A Massachusetts congressman, who took in a translator he worked with while fighting in the Iraq War, is hosting a meeting on Tuesday with Syrian refugees and law enforcement officials in an effort to cool tensions over refugees.
U.S. Representative Seth Moulton, a first-term Democrat, called the meeting in response to statements by more than 25 governors including Massachusetts' Charlie Baker, a Republican, that the United States should halt or slow its acceptance of refugees fleeing Syria's civil war following this month's deadly Paris attacks.
Opponents of the Obama administration's plan to take in 10,000 Syrians in the next year are concerned the vetting process used by the United States for Syrian refugees is not stringent enough and could allow extremists planning attacks into the country.
Refugee advocates contend the process, which requires that candidates be nominated by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees and can take up to two years, is sufficiently thorough.
The meeting called by Moulton is intended to assuage the public's concerns about the security risks of admitting Syrian refugees by educating people about the conditions refugees are fleeing and the vetting process they go through.
Moulton, in a column published in the Boston Globe, said that Islamic State, which also is known as ISIS and has claimed responsibility for the attacks in France this month that killed about 130 people, has focused on using social media to recruit people abroad, rather than exporting fighters.
He said the ethnic Chechen brothers who killed three people and injured 264 in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing attack had lived in the United States for a decade before developing militant Islamist views.
"Singling out Muslims or Syrians - the very victims of ISIS's reign of terror - or suggesting that American values apply to them only with caveats, gives ISIS a propaganda tool it can use to recruit more foot soldiers," Moulton wrote in the Globe.
Moulton served in the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq in 2003 through 2008 and later hosted an Iraqi translator in his home as the man applied for asylum.
Massachusetts took in 70 Syrian refugees, or 4 percent of the U.S. total, in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, according to State Department data.
The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday sued Indiana Governor Mike Pence over his refusal to allow refugees fleeing the nearly 5-year-old civil war to resettle in his state.