LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): At one point you were reported to say that on the refugee question, you'd like between zero and one refugees coming into the country. Now, the president said 45,000 refugees. Traditionally it's been about 20,000 a year.
Overwhelmingly from the Middle East, they're Islamic, very few Christians still coming in. What's happening there and why that number is so large given what you advocated and what the -- President Trump campaigned on?
JOHN KELLY: I don't ever remember – I read that, actually my wife told me –
INGRAHAM: Oh your wife did? She’s always right by the way.
KELLY: Yea, I don’t ever remember saying between zero and one. My time at DHS was definitely -- we should not take refugees into the country unless we know who they are and consequently we have improved the vetting process.
The vetting process to date, although it's lengthy, two years, the vast majority of it is a two-year wait to come into the country. The point is that we are down from 110, 45,000. One of the things that always does astound me about the refugee question is there is about 65 million people who are, I think by U.N. numbers, a large number anyways, that are technically refugees.
And only a tiny fraction of that can be brought to the United States or to Western Europe or Australia. It just seems to me, and most people I think that are – if they think about the refugee issue it's theoretically a temporarily problem. Best thing to do is to house them as close to their countries as possible and to help solve the problems inside the country, like we have, say, in Syria.
INGRAHAM: So you are satisfied with the 45,000? That's a good number?
KELLY: Yeah, that's a good number. But I don't know where this zero to one came from.
