An Obama administration program is bringing refugees with a Muslim background to small towns throughout the United States. This is being met with opposition from many residents of these towns, such as one from Montana who said, “Our city is failing because of the refugees. We have 22 different languages spoken in our schools. We’ve got 42 languages being fielded by our 9-1-1 call centers, and crime is just through the roof. We need to exercise caution, especially for the sake of our children.”

Although it is not a wave of hundreds of thousands of refugees such as is being encountered in Europe, the statistics are showing that crime rates are increasing along with the number of refugees. This year alone, thousands of new refugees are expected to spread throughout the country. Obama himself has pledged to admit 10,000 from Syria alone. Fortunately, there has been some resistance to that, so it has been halted at least temporarily.

As some will correctly point out, not all of the refugees are criminals. I do not disagree. But with so many of them tied directly to the rise in crime, at what point is it not worth accepting a small minority of them who behave? One solution would be to perform more thorough background checks on the refugees to vet them, but we are all aware how impractical that task is. There are simply too many ways for refugees to obtain legal documentation that says they are someone else, making a background check pointless.

The other part to the problem is that many Americans are too afraid to speak out against the refugee program because they do not want to be labeled “anti-Muslim” or hateful toward them. It is a problem that is only going to get worse unless our government can recognize the threat, and either improve their methods or put an end to the program. The government may have rejected 30 refugees in the past year or so, but they’ve still admitted 2,000 others.

At what point will our country say the risk is greater than the reward? And at what point will they offer up a more viable solution for everyone? It does not appear that things will be improving in 2016.