by aeromill

So a few days ago my brother asked me via text what my thoughts on the refugee crisis was and the following was my response. I thought you guys might like to hear about possibly a different perspective. Let me know what you guys think:

This is how I view it: This is a Middle Eastern problem as most people would agree but there's a few caveats to that.

(1) We created the problem (ISIS) through the Iraq War;

(2) The Middle Eastern countries are already accepting millions of refugees, the remaining ones either (a) aren't being let in to the other countries or (b) can't go to the Middle Eastern countries that are accepting refugees because they can't deal with any more of them;

(3) This is a humanitarian crisis that all of humanity needs to deal with.

(4) If the West turned their backs on these people now then ISIS propaganda chiefs would have a field day using that bit of information to show people that "the west doesn't want you", creating an "us against them" mentality which makes people more prone to join their cause. I honestly think that was the entire intention behind the Paris attacks: to get Europe to close their borders

The fact that (3) seems to be abundantly clear implies something has to be done. The fact that (2) shows that the countries that really should be helping out (Saudia Arabia, Egypt, etc.) actually aren't and won't in the near future raises the question: "Who can help these people?" Well, the answer is clearly the West (EU + NA). That only raises the question: "Should we help?" I think so for two reasons:

(1) We helped cause the problem through destabilizing the region by removing Sadam and

(2) We have a moral responsibility to help our fellow man, EVEN THOUGH the Middle Eastern countries have more responsibility to take care of this than we do, the fact remains that they won't, and that we (the West) can and should. That summarizes (we helped cause it, we're their only option, ethical responsibility) why we should. But there's the obvious concern about security. The thing with security is that Islamic terrorism can come from anyone, domestic citizens or refugees (hell, just look at France; they were all EU citizens). The issue here is ideology which transcends whether you were born here or immigrated here. On top of that, our security has been impeccable since 9/11. While there's still risk to be had, it's minute relative to the 100,000 lives that we could not only return to stability, but promote to prosperity.