Topeka ? Kansas Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer spent another Thanksgiving holiday treating victims of the Syrian civil war at two refugee camps along the Jordanian border. This year, however, another high-profile physician accompanied him on the trip, Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson.

And both men returned from the trip with a message about how they think the U.S. should respond to the refugee crisis in the region: Send more refugee aid to Jordan and other countries in the region rather than bringing Syrian refugees to the United States.

“The real problem is helping Syrians in Syria,” Colyer said during an interview at the Statehouse shortly after returning from the Middle East. “The real problem is doing something about helping our allies. All of the Syrians that we talked to — and in fact all of the Syrians I’ve talked to over the years — they want to go home.”

Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, right, and Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson spent Thanksgiving weekend at the Za'atari refugee camp on the Syrian-Jordanian border. Colyer, a plastic surgeon, volunteers with International Medical Corps, a volunteer organization that provides health care in war zones and disaster areas around the world.

Colyer, a plastic surgeon in Johnson County, is a volunteer with the group International Medical Corps, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization that provides medical care in areas ravaged by war and natural disasters. He made a similar trip to refugee camps along the Syrian-Jordanian border last Thanksgiving.

In a series of appearances on Sunday morning talk shows this week, Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, made much the same argument.

“The facilities that have been offered to them [refugees] here in Jordan are very satisfactory. And when I asked them what Americans could do, they said, ‘If Americans could support those facilities to a greater degree,’ because they have much more capacity here in Jordan,” Carson said on NBC’s “Meet The Press” program Sunday.

Colyer said he first met Carson when the presidential candidate made a campaign stop in Topeka in September.

“We were visiting about a lot of different issues and talked about some of the work I’ve done abroad, and he asked if we could show him the Jordan-Syrian border over Thanksgiving,” Colyer said.

According to recent polls, Carson is currently running second behind Donald Trump in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, where national security has become a dominant issue in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris.

But it’s a message that has particular importance at home, where Gov. Sam Brownback recently issued an executive order barring the use of public funds to help any Syrian refugees resettle in Kansas.

Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer spent the Thanksgiving weekend on a medical mission treating patients at a refugee camp on the Syrian-Jordanian border. Colyer said most Syrians only want to return home, and he encouraged the U.S. to send more aid to Jordan and other countries housing refugees instead of bringing them to the U.S.

While the Obama administration has proposed raising the number of Syrian refugees who can be admitted to the U.S. by as many as 10,000 a year, Brownback and about 30 other governors, almost all of them Republican, have argued that an influx of Syrian refugees could pose a security threat.

Brownback and the other governors have drawn sharp criticism over those policies, and some legal experts have suggested they have no legal authority to discriminate in the use of federally funded refugee aid.

Colyer said he agrees with the security concerns, although he doesn’t necessarily think it’s the most important concern.

“The individuals that we met are not a direct security threat, as far as I can tell,” Colyer said. “What is clear is that ISIS (the so-called Islamic State in Syria) has said they want to send ISIS terrorists in with refugees. And they’ve made that clear. What the governor and I are supporting is that they have proper clearance.”

More importantly, though, Colyer said he believes providing direct humanitarian aid in Syria and to its neighbors would be the most effective way of dealing with the crisis.

“The point is this,” he said. “There are 4 million refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. There are another 4 million displaced people there. When you talk to the Syrians — to the real Syrian refugees — what they want is, they want to go home. They want the war over. And bringing 10,000 people out of 4 million is less than 1 percent. That’s not going to solve the problem or affect things.”

“The Jordanians have roughly 1.4 million Syrian refugees living in their country,” he continued. “The vast majority of them are not in camps, but in cities and homes and apartments. Jordan, for example, what they’ve had to do is have Syrian kids go to school in the morning, and in the afternoon Jordanian kids go to school. So they’re making tremendous sacrifices. And there has been a long appeal for resources to help people along the border, and they’re unfilled. We can do more to really help people. That’s what this is about.”