The American Refugee Crisis

Wars mean refugees. And when Americans find themselves fleeing for the safety of other nations, they may be shocked at the reception they face.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
You stand in line. Ahead of you, dozens of other
ragged figures stretch up to the horizon and the looming
edifice of the Canadian border station. You're cold, of course,
but so is everyone. You all shivered together. The sound
of chattering teeth is louder than the few muffled conversations
you hear around you. Almost no one is in any
mood to talk. Everything you own is stuffed into your backpack. Fleetingly,

(00:27):
you think about your old TV, your gaming consoles, the
comfy couch you used to relax on while watching Netflix. Netflix.
You almost tear up thinking about it. You can't remember
the last time you relaxed, the last beer you sipped,
the last good meal you enjoyed. A cold wind blows
across the line, and you feel it most acutely in
the bit of shrapnel that's been buried in your shoulder

(00:49):
for the last several months. Every twinge of pain it
brings you is rather ironically or reminder of how lucky
you are to have gotten out alive. There's been very
little news from home since you fled. The little bit
you've received during snippets of time when you've had both
power and electricity has been dire. Most of your friends
have gone dark. You try not to think about what

(01:09):
that means for them. It's taken three long, hungry, unshowered
weeks for you to reach the border. Your body is
at the edge of its endurance. For the last several days,
you've felt perpetually on the edge of collapse. But now
with the border in sight, you've been filled with a
peculiar new energy. You made it. You're going to survive.

(01:30):
You watches a van rolls up from the Canadian side
of the hastily thrown up border barricades. A film crew
steps out, a reporter begins chatting to some of the
people who've already made it through. You can't hear what
they say, but you can guess the questions well enough,
and makes you think back to times years ago when
you lazily flipped through ch V channels and caught footage
from some mainstream news station of a journalist talking to

(01:52):
Syrian refugees. You doubt you watch the story for more
than a few minutes. Now you wonder about all those
people where they are now, how many of them are
still alive. The line moves slowly, but cheerly, and in
time you're just a couple of people away from the
border guards. In front of you is a family of five.
The mother clutches the family Bible, holding on to it

(02:13):
as if for dear life. The father has a crucifix
hung around his neck. You think relatively little of this.
You grew up in America, after all, but the border
guards seemed to pick them out a suspicious Several of
them crowd around the family, hands wearily on holstered guns.
As you watch, their bags are unceremoniously emptied out and searched,
layers of clothing stripped off of even their bodies. You're

(02:35):
confused for a bit. The other families passing through hadn't
been subjected to that kind of treatment. And then you
think back to a few days ago, hanging out in
that bus station in Montana, the last time you'd been
able to charge up your phone and find some WiFi.
There'd been a terrible shooting in Vancouver. Half a dozen
Christian dominionists, terrorists from America had smuggled guns up, probably

(02:55):
from somewhere in Washington. They'd hit up a concert venue,
killing dozens dozens of people. For a moment, you're ashamed
that it took you so long to remember that attack,
you realize that it didn't really stand out to you
at the time. Your last few months have been filled
with violence so much more extreme and indiscriminate that the
news of this tragedy just sort of rolled over you

(03:17):
like morning fog. It didn't even stick in your head.
You notice now, though, that the Canadian soldiers and border
guards manning this crossing look conspicuously less friendly than you'd expected.
Friendly is, of course the first word that comes to
mind when you think about Canadians, but these men and
women seem anxious, jittery, and perhaps even a little bit angry.

(03:38):
After a long search, the family ahead of you was
walked through the border crossing. Border patrol men follow them in,
and they're led to a separate waiting area from the
other refugees. The lion moves up. You step forward, that
much closer to safety. You look up at one of
the guards. He glares back at you, and once again
you feel less certain about the future. What stereotypically is

(04:04):
an American. I've spent a lot of time traveling, and
I've made friends from all around the world, most notably Israel, Serbia, Germany, France, England,
and Iraq, So I hope you'll forgive my arrogance and
starting with my own opinions on stereotypes about Americans before
we get into a little bit of research. We Americans
are first and foremost seen as a loud people. Most

(04:25):
foreigners I know have emphasized that about US. Americans have
a reputation for being fun to great party goers, were
seen as passionate and of course fat. That's definitely another stereotype.
And we are obviously seen as a heavily armed people.
When I first started traveling and people would find out
that I came from Texas, many of them would ask

(04:46):
if I owned guns, which I did and do. I
can remember one particularly poignant conversation I had with the
Venezuelan man and a hostel in Belfast, Ireland. It was
three or four days after the Sandy Hook shooting in
late two thousand and twelve. Now, Venezuela has and had
plenty of problems with violence and a nightmarishly high murder rate,

(05:08):
but I'll always remember the confusion in this guy's voice
when he said to me, but nobody shoots up a school.
Nobody does that. So maybe add that to the list
of stereotypes about Americans. An awful lot of us are
willing to shoot up schools. I found a fun CBS
News article how Americans look to the rest of the world,

(05:28):
and I figured some of those anecdotes would be good
to pat out my own experience in the matter. I
want to read to one from an actor in Toronto
and another from a retired banker in Copenhagen. Quote. The
first word that comes to mind when I hear the
word America is arrogance. They are big and loud, and
they are in charge of everything. And the next capitalism,
money rules everything. Overweight people, Donald Trump elections shootings. Now.

(05:54):
One thing that's interesting to me about this article is
that while positive opinions did outnumber negative ones, people fromation,
is generally considered culturally closer to the United States were
more likely to refer to US as arrogant or violent.
Here's a representative opinion on Americans from a twenty six
year old in New Delhi. Has a very liberal culture,
great people in a country that drives innovation. Another interviewee

(06:17):
from the Philippines said America welcomes all different races. That's
what she believed about us. It's interesting food for thought.
At least, why am I talking about all this? What
does it have to do with the Second American Civil War? Well,
what are some stereotypes you know about iraqis Afghan people, Syrians?

(06:37):
We don't wars mean refugees. It is one commonality that
literally every conflict in modern history shares. If there is
shooting in American cities, if there are bombings in the

(06:58):
hills and on the highways, there will be people who flee.
Many of them will become internally displaced within the country,
fleeing bombed out neighborhoods and unsafe chunks of the country
ahead of growing militias and insurgent groups. Now, you probably
don't know much about Syria in two thousand ten, the
year before the Arab Spring. That's fine. Until pretty recently,

(07:18):
I didn't either. That year, Syria was one of the
fastest growing, lower middle income countries in the world. It
was host to a huge amount of tourism and agriculture,
decent industry, healthcare and college were free. It had a dictator,
Bashar al Assad, but he was widely seen as at
least a mild reformer. Things seemed to be slowly opening
up when I was eighteen. In my first year of college,

(07:41):
I took two semesters of Arabic from a Syrian professor
named Yasser. Yaser hailed from Aleppo, and he was deeply
proud of his city. He taught us about how it
gave birth to the alphabet. He spoke lovingly and at
length about its beauty, about the wonderful food. He introduced
me to Arabic coffee and thoroughly convinced me that Syrian
were better at brewing the drink than anyone else on

(08:02):
this planet. I've traveled through a decent chunk of the
Middle East now, and I still believe that the war
began in two thousand eleven, five years after my classes
with Yasar. By two thousand fifteen, more than three million
Syrians had fled the fighting for neighboring countries like Lebanon,
which is considered by me and only me, to be serious.
Canada two thousand fifteen was the first year my journalism

(08:24):
intersected with the Syrians civil war. A few days after
my trip to report on the war in Ukraine, I
found myself crossing the Hungarian Serbian border on foot. One
million Syrian refugees made it over to Europe that year,
and the bulk of them traveled on foot from Greece
up through the Balkans and into Western Europe. We spent
a couple of days on the refugee trail, watching endless,

(08:45):
unbroken lines of refugees trudged closer and closer to their
ultimate goal, usually Germany or somewhere in Scandinavia. A huge
number of these people spoke English. They were just normal people,
like anyone you'd meet on the street. Many of them
had smart phones, which they used to show me pictures
of Bashar al Assad's war crimes. Some of them were
young men, fresh college graduates, who saw no future in

(09:08):
their home country and hoped Europe could use their skills
in medicine, engineering, or whatever. Other young men were fleeing
the draft issued by the government. I met one man
who had been a pilot for the Syrian Air Force.
He'd grown tired of bombing his countrymen. I don't think
I've ever met a man with older eyes. I wrote
an article about the things these refugees told me for
Crack to the Side I worked for at the time.

(09:29):
Been Shapiro of The Daily Wire wrote an article too.
His article was titled the Left keeps saying all Syrian
refugees are Western friendly, they should learn to read. The
crux of his argument was that Syrian refugees were not
compatible with Western society since only seventy of them were
totally negative on isis quote from Ben So what does

(09:51):
this all mean. It means that the evidenceless picture all
of all Syrian refugees is Western friendly doesn't hold water.
But don't look for the media or the international left
to pay attention to such facts. After all, these are
the same people who keep stating, without evidence that only
a tiny minority of Muslims hold extreme views. When fact
conflicts with pretty fiction, the left chooses its own pretty
fictions every time, which just means that more Westerners will die.

(10:15):
And this brings me back to the point I started
this episode with, what are the rest of the world
stereotypes about Americans? And how will those stereotypes evolve after
several years of escalating violence in surgeon attacks and terrorist murder.
Once insurgents start bombing highways, shooting cops and assassinating politicians,
once separatists start fighting against the government and whole cities

(10:37):
are beyond the reach of the law, Once the Second
American Civil War really gets going, the violence will not
stay contained to our shores. In June of two thousand fourteen,
the forces of the Islamic State captured Mosel, the second
largest city in Iraq. Isis is generally portrayed in Western
media as having sort of come out of nowhere, but

(10:57):
that is not the truth. In Iraq, it evolved out
of long standing hardline, sunny dominionist movements. They framed themselves
as resistance against both the growing secular aspects of Iraqi
society and their long standing religious nimessies. The Shia in
Portland and in Dallas. In Cleveland and northern California, I
have seen angry, heavily armed men preached their desire for

(11:20):
a Christian dominated United States. The crosses tattooed on their
arms and sewn on to their body armor were just
as prominent as their three percent tattoos and Confederate flags.
Right now, an American traveling abroad might face uncomfortable questions
about Donald Trump. Imagine what an American fleeing from Texas
might face as he tried to enter the EU or

(11:41):
Canada in the wake of a series of brutal Christian
nationalist pograms against LGBT Americans. If you remember, Omar Matinees
ISIS credited mass shooting at a gay night club was
used as justification by the Trump campaign for why Syrian
refugees should not be accepted into the United States. A
few months after my time on the refugee trail, in

(12:03):
November of two thousand fifteen, a handful of ISIS commandos
carried out a brutal attack on Paris, killing more than
a hundred and thirty people, most of whom were concert
glowers at the Bottaklan Theater. According to ISIS, the attack
was retaliation for French air strikes and Syria and Iraq. Now,
as imaginative as I can be, I have a hard
time seeing France or Canada or any other country carrying

(12:26):
out air strikes on the United States. We have nukes,
for one thing, and that's really the only thing that
matters when it comes to discouraging air strikes. But I
can imagine other countries providing financial aid to the struggling
federal government as it battles to maintain control. I can
imagine them sending in peacekeepers and humanitarian aid to try
and save gay people and people of color and areas
threatened by white nationalist or dominionist violence. And I can

(12:49):
imagine Christian terrorists striking back at them with attacks similar
to the ones launched by ISIS. And if that happens,
millions of American refugees might find themselves judged by the
actions of a few of their most violent countrymen, just
as the Syrian and Afghan refugees I met in two
thousand fifteen were judged by the actions of a handful
of terrorists, most of whom were not even from Syria

(13:12):
or Afghanistan. By two thousand fifteen, after four years of
civil war, nearly five million Syrians had been forced to
flee their homeland. Syria's pre war population was just twenty
three million. If our imagined second American Civil War grew
to anything approaching that kind of intensity and a proportionate
number of Americans were forced to flee the fighting, we

(13:33):
could see as many as eighty million of our countrymen
and women made refugees. Now, most of these people would
stay within the bounds of the United States, becoming internally
displaced persons. In Iraq, the acronym I d P was
used for the folks who had fled from the fighting
and Mosle and other areas captured by ISIS. Most I
d p s were herded into vast, tense cities, living

(13:54):
in canvas and provided for by the UN Humanitarian Crisis
Relief Organization and eating food provided by the Qatari Red Crescent.
They brought what they could carry and nothing more. We
don't In the event of a second American civil war,

(14:19):
the government would do its best to take care of
millions of displaced citizens. But in the midst of a
war and a failing economy, I do not think these
camps would be overwhelmingly pleasant places. My mind is drawn
to the treatment of the homeless and modern America, we
as a culture sort of suck assid taking care of
our needy in good times. A government prosecuting a brutal

(14:40):
internesting war probably wouldn't win any awards for cleanest, best
fed refugee camps. Stories of these miserable places would spread
as millions of other Americans watched anxiously and considered whether
or not they ought to flee themselves. Increasing numbers of
US would seek shelter in Canada or northern Mexico. The
rich would flee first, of course, probably to Europe. They

(15:02):
would have the resources to pay their way into visas
and replant their lives and cities like Berlin. The first
wave of vulnerable refugees, Activists, people of color, gay and
trans individuals would also probably have a relatively simple time
earning refugee visas and places like Europe. But as the
number of fleeing Americans increased from thousands to tens and

(15:22):
hundreds of thousands, and eventually to millions, the world's patients
with US would wear out. Stories of terrorist attacks by
American extremists would color world opinion of US. Canada is
the world's seventh most peaceful society, Iceland is the world's
most peaceful society. Most European nations are fairly high on
that list. The United States, however, is currently number ninety four.

(15:46):
We will not rise higher during a second American Civil war.
One of the people interviewed in that CBS article about
world stereotypes of Americans was a thirty nine year old
from Toronto. He said, what identifies an America in loudness?
All of the Trump stuff in the US has been depressing.
You would like to think people are smarter than that,
but definitely surprising and depressing to see how much support

(16:08):
he has and how much support his ideas have. Imagine
how this guy's opinion of us would harden after stories
of gay people being gunned down or burned alive by
Christian nationalists, after terrorists bombings from eco fascist cadres, after
right wing militias and leftist guerrillas shoot up home neighborhoods.
How long will it take that guy and millions of
Canadians like him to go from Americans are loud and

(16:30):
kind of annoying too. We need to shut down all
American immigration until we figure out what's going on now.
That might have been a good note to end this
episode on, but the unofficial motto of this show is
it can always get darker, and it's about to because
human beings will not be the only people displaced by
the Second American Civil War. There are currently roughly one

(16:54):
hundred and eighty million cats and dogs living in the
United States. Their numbers are actually close to eve and
cats out numbered dogs by around five million or so.
Both species are capable of surviving on their own, or
at least certain members of both species are, but they
seem to vastly prefer life with human beings to life without.
If you're listening to this, the odds are pretty good

(17:15):
that you have a pet, a cat or a dog,
or both, or possibly several of both, and you certainly
love them as much as they love you. Right now,
it may be impossible for you to imagine abandoning them.
Perhaps you would try to take them with you as
the mortars started falling on your neighborhood, as the death
squads broke through to your street, as the government helicopters
began reigning hell fire down around you, But most of

(17:38):
you would leave them. I know that, because I know
the citizens of Abdifka, Ukraine, loved their cats and dogs
as well as you do. But when the Russian backed
separatists started pounding the town with a hundred and fifty
five millimeter howitzer shells and grad rockets, the ones who
could leave, the young and the moneyed left, and many
of them left their beloved pets behind. There was simply

(18:00):
no other option. War does not stop for your sentiments,
and so has the town of ev Dievka, emptied of
human beings, it filled with abandoned animals. Cats and dogs
hid at first in the abandoned homes of their masters,
but once it got too cold, they began to congregate
around the heating pipes that ran from building to building,
providing the central heating necessary in Ukraine's unbelievably harsh winters.

(18:24):
The junction boxes, where several of these pipes met, were
particularly popular, and the remaining denizens of Abdivka, mostly older people,
started setting out food and building small shelters for the
abandoned animals. It was not lost on me when I
visited in two thousand fifteen that while human beings murdered
each other a mile away, cats and dogs had learned
to get along and share the same home and food.

(18:47):
One optimistic thing I can tell you is that for
all the violence and of bloodshed a second American Civil
War would bring, I suspect there would be numerous figures
on every side, leaders of right and left wing militias alike,
who would take time out from the fighting to care
for abandoned animals. In two thousand thirteen, I read a
fantastic article on the conflict journalism website war is Boring

(19:09):
about a Syrian rebel commander named Jamal. I'm going to
quote from that now. He commands rebel forces in the
ruins of an ancient mountaintop village in northern Syria. He
daily dodges bombs and rockets from regime warplanes and silent,
invisible bullets from enemy sharpshooters. He leads his men in
battle unarmed, equipped only with a walkie talkie for issuing orders.
He also rescues abandoned cats, hundreds of them hiding out

(19:31):
in the ruins of Adaha, one of the most important
battlegrounds of the three year old Syrian Civil War. Jamal
was a farmer in his mid fifties when the war started.
He was just a normal man with a love of
animals who found himself thrust into vicious fighting. And when
he wasn't fighting, he fed and cared for countless kittie
cats left behind by their owners. Quote. The felines are everywhere,

(19:53):
sleeping into rebel bunkers, to mew at officers conferring over radios,
rolling in the sun baked dirt between mounds of rubble,
lounging under tree sheared of their branches by gunfire and artillery.
An accurate count is impossible, but during our day long
visit in early October, we saw scores of them in
just one small section of the village. Jamal loves cats.
Who doesn't, he says. Indeed, his family, his wife, two sons,

(20:14):
and two daughters have two cats of their own at
their home in southern Isleb. When his forces occupied the
mountain village, they found almost no people but countless hungry kitties.
The rebels in Araja survive on cantuna, sardines and processed meat,
and now so do the cats. As I write this episode,
Russian and Syrian war planes are currently pounding id Lib
Jamal's home with indiscriminate bombs from above. Jamal is almost

(20:39):
certainly dead now, along with most of the courageous men
and women who dared to defy Bashar al Assad. But
we will see his like again if a second civil
war comes to this land and forces hundreds of thousands
of men and women to fight a war they never
thought would come. All friends, you can can you get

(21:09):
me home? Can you tell the two with so much
friends a fence? Perhaps the birds? That is pretty intensive
because it wants I'm Robert Evans and I'm just exhausted
from reading all of that. You can find me on
Twitter at I right, Okay, you can find this show

(21:30):
on Twitter at happen here Pod, and you can find
the show online at it could happen here pod dot com.
Our music, as always, is from four Fists