Why Europe’s Migrant Crisis Also Belongs to America

There is also the fact that global warming has contributed to droughts that caused food shortages in the region, and the U.S. is responsible for much of global warming.

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By Patrick Smith
September 7, 2015

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No one seems eager to talk about it, but the roots of this crisis lie in a long succession of bad Western policies in the Middle East and other regions now hemorrhaging their people. This, in a single sentence, takes care of causality and responsibility.

The European powers shaped oil states a century ago that have since done little for their populations. More immediately, operative, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and now the campaign to oust the Assad regime in Syria have shattered the region such that it now suffers what may be an unprecedented degree of lawlessness and violence.

However, one may analyze the Iraqi and Syrian disasters, the U.S. plainly shares responsibility for the migrants now flooding into Europe. Two statistics will tell you how deeply this thought sinks in: Of the four million Syrians who have fled the civil war against Assad, the U.S. has accepted 1,500.

Utterly lacking in historical perspective. Parenthetically, so is the prevailing American view of the immigration problem it faces: Few of us seem to grasp the extent to which many decades of bad American policy helped shape a continent ridden with poverty and violence.

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Others in Europe now assert that the U.N.’s 65-year-old definition of a refugee has to be revised to answer this crisis effectively. After World War II, “a well-founded fear of persecution” was fundamental to getting refugee status. Too narrow, lawyers and advocates say. If your home is bombed, there is no work, no schools, and your children are hungry, you may not be persecuted but you are a refugee in the world as we have made it.

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